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PART 2: Whispers in the town were one thing, but the secrets women kept were another. For every suspicion voiced over the fence, there was a truth written hidden away, hidden from the light. The first of these truths came from the diary of Sarah Dilling, the town midwife. She was a quiet, discreet woman who had delivered half the children in the county. Decades after her death, a single folded page was found in an old medical textbook. The entry, written in a hasty but clear hand, detailed the night she was summoned to the Vancraftoft farm.
It was a secret birth. Ellis was the mother, but Sarah’s notes focused on the father, Joseph. He was present in the room, a presence described as too close, too watchful. The grandfather might have been concerned, but this was different. He was a guardian. The midwife’s most poignant observation concerned the baby itself, a fragile, silent infant. She wrote that “it wasn’t right in the eyes,” a vague but deeply disturbing description, suggesting an abnormality deeper than simple illness.
Sarah Dilling never went to court. Her fears were twofold. She feared Joseph’s temper—a cold, silent anger that foreshadowed consequences. But she also feared the church and the city itself. In a later, quiet conversation with a neighbor, she admitted what she sincerely believed: that Joseph Vancraftoft himself had fathered the child. But to say such a thing aloud was to bring misfortune upon him. Therefore, her diary entry remained hidden, and the silence endured.