The Midwife's Apprentice

  Edward shook his head and grabbed a piece of her skirt in his fist, but she put him off. So he straightened his tunic and went, looking back once to throw a brave, shaky grin at Alyce.

  The returning midwife, angry at Alyce for ignoring her earlier, set her to do all the least pleasant chores: roasting frogs’ livers, boiling snails into jelly, stripping the thorns from dogberry roses.

  But Alyce minded little, for she thought not of her tasks but of Edward’s face and the abundance of bread and cheese up at the manor looking for a hungry boy’s belly to fill.

  11

  The Leaving

  ALYCE WAS SITTING BY THE FIRE one cool November morning, tying up birch twigs for a broom, when a pounding came at the door. Jane opened the door to Matthew Blunt, whose mother was about to have another baby and wanted Alyce to come and help.

  “By the bones of Saint Polycarp, who is Alyce?” bellowed the midwife.

  The boy jerked his head towards Alyce. “Her. Yer apprentice. My mum said Alyce helped her sister Joan, the bailiff's wife, when no one else could, and so she will have no one but Alyce.”

  “Her? The dung beetle?” The midwife quivered in disbelief. “You are asking for her, who knows nothing and fears to try and does only what little I bid her and that none too well?” She cracked Alyce on the cheek.

  My mum will have no other,” repeated the boy.

  The midwife looked a bit like a mad dog as she spat and spluttered and tried to get words out past all the anger in her mouth. “Go then, ‘Alyce.’ Such treachery! Such thievery! Eating my bread and stealing my mothers! Go!”

  When she began to throw cooking pots their way, Alyce and the boy lit out and ran all the way to Adam Blunt’s cottage. Alyce stood outside for a minute, surprised at having been asked for and not knowing whether to be pleased, until the boy nudged and pushed her to the door. She wiped her hair from her eyes, licked her lips, and went in.

  The cottage was warm and Emma Blunt even warmer, what with her efforts to have this baby and be done with it. Alyce rubbed and crooned and fussed, as she had with the bailiffs wife. She fed Emma on raspberry leaf tea and comfrey wine. She built up the fire, closed all the windows, and three times called the baby forth. Then she sent Matthew to search for birthwort root, put out the fire, and opened all the windows. But the baby would not come, as if he were holding tight to his mother, reluctant to be separate and alone, and Alyce, although able to ease a willing baby into the world, had no idea how to encourage a reluctant one.

  So as the day passed from morning to midday and Emma tossed on her tumbled linen and still there was no sign of a baby, Alyce, doubtful and uncertain without the midwife or at least Will Russet to tell her what to do and unwilling to get herself or Emma into trouble, stood back from the bed and said, “I cannot do it.”

  She washed Emma’s face, smoothed her wet hair, took a deep breath, and sent Matthew back to the cottage for the midwife.

  Emma and the unborn baby rested from the morning’s struggle, so all was quiet until the midwife roared in, like wind before rain, blasting everyone out of her way as she set about attending to mother and babe.

  She insulted and encouraged, pushed and poked, brewed and stewed and remedied. Anointing her hands with cornmeal and oil, she rubbed and kneaded, pulled and tugged, and turned that baby from both the inside and the outside until finally he was in a position to come out. Then she slapped Emma’s great bulge of a belly, lifted her from behind by her shoulders, and gave her a good shake.

  All was chaos, noise and heat and blood, until finally over the tumult Alyce could hear the cries of a baby, the moans of a tired mother, and the laughter of the triumphant midwife.

  Alyce backed out of the cottage, then turned and ran up the path to the road, she didn’t know why or where. Behind her in that cottage was disappointment and failure. The midwife had used no magic. She had delivered that baby with work and skill, not magic spells, and Alyce should have been able to do it but could not. She had failed. Strange sensations tickled her throat, but she did not cry, for she did not know how, and a heavy weight sat in her chest, but she did not moan or wail, for she had never learned to give voice to what was inside her. She knew only to run away.

  So it was that on a crisp, sunny Martinmas afternoon, while the villagers slaughtered their cattle and pigs for winter meat, while Meggy Miller stirred a sheep’s blood pudding for supper, while Will Russet and Dick gathered beech and oak and ash and chestnut for winter fires, while Alnoth the Saxon cleaned the manor privies and cursed God for making him a peasant and not a lord, while the boy Edward ate a bowl of herring soup and thought of the warm corner of the manor kitchen that was to be his, while Emma, the bailiffs wife's sister, kissed her new son on his tiny red nose and fell asleep with him at her breast, while the life of the village went on, Alyce turned her back on all that she knew and that had come to be dear to her and headed up the road from the village to she knew not where. And the cat went with her.

  12

  The Inn

  THE CAT WAS HUNGRY. He pushed at the lumpish weight that was holding him down, spitting and scratching until Alyce shifted and he could crawl out to see what creatures there were about that were both good to eat and easy to catch. His exertions woke Alyce and she sat up and looked about her.

  At first she made to stretch and smile and face a fine new day; then she remembered. It was afternoon, she was a failure, and she had run away. It was beginning to rain and she faced a night outside alone in the wet. She curled up again into a wet soggy ball.

  “I am nothing,” she whispered to herself. “I have nothing, I can do nothing and learn nothing. I belong no place. I am too stupid to be a midwife’s apprentice and too tired to wander again. I should just lie here in the rain until I die.” And she fell again into a dreamless sleep.

  But the next morning her young body, now used to a roof and warm food on cold mornings, pricked and pained her until she awoke. It was still raining and she was still a homeless failure. She stood up, picked some of the leaves from her hair, wiped her drippy nose on her sleeve, and looked around.

  She knew where she was. Behind her were the village, Emma, the midwife, and failure—she could not go back there. She could not stay here in the rain waiting to die, for she was too cold and hungry and uncomfortable and alive. So she went on ahead. The cat stalked behind, stomach empty and feet wet, but unwilling to let Alyce go on without him.

  An hour’s walk brought them to the crossroads where the road from the village met the road to the sea, and there Alyce could see, through the wet November dawn, a light.

  It was an inn. Alyce had never been in such a place, where anyone could find a bed or dinner provided he had the coins. Alyce did not have the coins, but she had two strong hands and an empty belly to fill, and she was soon at work in the kitchen, trading her labor for bread and a bed out of the rain. Purr made himself useful keeping mice from the barley and tasting everyone’s cheese.

  The inn was really no more than a large stone cottage with a room over the big kitchen, a loft above the stable, and tables in the hall good for sleeping on or under. The innkeeper was called John Dark, for he was nearly sightless, but none so blind that he could not find an untended mug of ale anywhere on the table or pinch a plump cheek as it passed. Most work about the inn was done by his wife, the round and rosy Jennet, who could carve a fowl with one hand, turn cream into butter with the other, and still have one left over to hoist a noisy guest by his shirt front and chuck him out the door.

  “Oskins, boskins, chickadee,” Jennet said next day to Alyce. “You are such a help to me that I would you would stay on awhile.” Alyce had nowhere to go, so she stayed, grateful that she had found work she was not too stupid to do, even if it was only scouring the tables with river sand or skinning an eel for a pie.

  Alyce worked hard and lived mostly on beans, bread, and Jennet’s bad beer. Each week the autumn grew colder and wetter, and the inn, although dirty and drafty, was much cozier than a
ny barn or dung heap to be found outside, so she remained, empty of heart. She would not think about her months in the village or Will Russet or the bailiff's Joan or the midwife, for such thinking brought the tickling to her throat again, but sometimes the smell of garbage or of apples baking would make the village so alive in her mind that she would look up quickly, certain she had been magically taken back there again, and her eyes would blink in hope and dread. Sometimes too she thought of the boy she had sent to the manor and wondered how he fared and if she had at least done that right.

  Soon it was Christmas and the inn teemed with folk going away or coming home. Alyce hung holly and ivy from the charred beams in the hall. Musicians with their rebecs and gitterns and sackbuts came to drink and stayed to play. Ducks and geese on great skewers were turned in the roaring fire until they were golden and juicy and so fragrant that the cat and the mice came in from the stables hoping for a bite or two. It was all colorful and warm, but Alyce enjoyed none of it. Her heart heavy, her eyes blank, and her mouth as tight as a hazelnut, she went about the business of Christmas as if she were mucking out a stable, muttering over and over to herself, “I am nothing, have nothing, belong nowhere.”

  January dawned frosty and gray and stayed that way, and Alyce stayed, too. Just before gray January turned into black February, she noted a thin, brown-coated back hunched over a table close to the fire and realized she had seen that same brown-coated back for weeks now, hunched in the same way over the same table before the same fire.

  Alyce began to watch the man, not knowing he had long watched her and wondered what could so blight a person so young. He was long and skinny as a heron, with black eyes in a face that looked sad, kindly, hungry, and cold. She thought at first he had the pox, for his long face, long nose, and long yellow teeth were all spotted, but it proved to be only ink, splattered as he pushed his quill pen furiously along. Corpus bones, she thought. He is writing! That is a man who can write! She kept her eyes down as she served him his bread and ale, barely daring even to breathe the same air, she who was too stupid to be a midwife’s apprentice.

  While they watched the big sow drop seven piglets one dark afternoon, Jennet told Alyce about the brown-coated man. Magister Reese, it was said, was a renowned scholar. Staying at the inn for the winter, he was working off his room and board by keeping accounts and penning letters for guests while he finished writing what was rumored to be a great and holy book.

  Alyce studied the man. She noted that John Dark liked to sit near him, for he was careless of his ale; that Jennet made sure to give him the smallest portion or the toughest meat, for he ate what he was given and never complained; that he never scolded Tam the kitchen boy, who had been kicked by a horse and was not right in the head, even when Tam spilled beer or bacon fat on his papers; and that only the geese seemed awed by him, scattering hurry-scurry when he entered the inn yard lest another tail feather go for a quill pen.

  Alyce took to sweeping that corner of the floor more carefully and scrubbing that end of the table more frequently, hoping to see what he was writing and what it might look like, for her curiosity overcame at last even her bleak despair. After a while he tried to speak to her, but she would only clutch tighter to her broom and sweep furiously in silence, so instead he took to talking to the cat.

  “This, puss,” he said, shifting the sleeping animal off the page he was writing, “is my masterwork, an encyclopaedic compendium I call ‘The Great Mirror of the Universe Wherein You Can Find Reflected All of the World’s Knowledge, Collected by Myself, Magister Richard Reese, M.A., and Dedicated to His Ampleness the Bishop of Chester,’ so called for he is ample in all the world’s virtues.” Or “See how I can make the ink blacker by mixing soot with the boiled oak galls.” Or “This, cat, is a P, as in puss or pork or plum pudding.” Or “The letter'S must be made just so, never thick or wiggly or with an extra curve at the end, but just so.”

  The cat listened carefully, although sometimes he lost patience with the tutoring and began to bite at the tantalizingly moving pen. And Alyce, too, listened, so that she learned some letters as the cat learned. She liked best the O, the D, and the G, for they looked friendly. Z seemed mean, X wicked; and W always made her yawn. Q was by far the most beautiful, she thought, even if it could not stand alone and must be accompanied everywhere by the compliant U.

  Sometimes at night, when the cat’s belly was full and he had no need to prowl about looking for supper, he let Alyce cuddle him against her as they went to sleep and tell him more about what she had learned that day: how A began Alyce and apple and ark, when to put a tail on the S, and what letters might be made to spell Purr, even though he must, she thought, know these things as well as she. During the day, when not boiling or sweeping or chopping or skinning, she wrote letters in the frost on the woodpile with a twig, scraped them into the soot of the chimney wall with the handle of the broom, and stuck her finger in the mutton soup and wrote them on the table in the kitchen. At night she found them written out in stars in the clear cold sky.

  Once Alyce knew all the letters and a number of combinations, Magister Reese began teaching the cat words, reading aloud bits of wisdom from his great encyclopaedia. As a result Alyce heard about the heavenly planets circling the earth in hollow transparent spheres, about the great empire of the Romans that once stretched all the way to Britain, about the faraway island of giant ants who walk upright and mine for gold. She learned about the four humors that govern the body, how to plant corn by moonlight, and where the Antipodes are. And still he had not said a word to her.

  When one day he threw away a page he had ruined with an inkblot, Alyce snatched it up and stuffed the stiff vellum into her bodice. Each night before she blew out the last candle, she would labor over the page, picking out letters and sometimes even words that were familiar to her.

  One showery afternoon when raindrops sparkled like fairy dew on the new green leaves, Magister Reese sat dreaming over his mug of Jennet’s thin, bitter ale. Winter was nearly over and his book far from finished. What was he to do next? Should he stay or go? “What do I want to do?” he asked himself. Spying Alyce sweeping her way toward him, he asked her, “What do I want?” And then, pointedly, “And what, inn girl, do you want?”

  Alyce stopped still. She thought just to sweep away, but the shock of his addressing her directly was lost in that intriguing question. What did she want? No one had ever asked her that and she took it most seriously. What do I, Alyce the inn girl, want?

  She chewed on a lock of her hair to help her think. What did people want? Blackberry pie? New shoes? A snug cottage and a bit of land?

  She thought all that wet afternoon and finally, as she served Magister Reese his cold-beef-and-bread supper, she cleared her throat a time or two and then softly answered: “I know what I want. A full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world.”

  Magister Reese looked up at her in surprise. “You ask a lot for an inn girl. I thought you’d say a sweetheart or a yellow ribbon for your black hair.”

  “No, this is what I want, but it is my misfortune instead to be hungry, out of humor, and too stupid to be a midwife’s apprentice.”

  “None so stupid,” he said. “You can read as well as the cat.”

  Alyce smiled. And so winter turned to spring.

  13

  Visitors

  JENNET WAS WELL CONTENT WITH ALYCE. The girl didn’t steal food, sneak ale, or dally with the guests. She was strong, willing, undemanding; and she had enough common sense to do what she was bid and ask no questions. So Alyce laid fires and swept floors and carried water all that spring.

  She was learning also to overyeast the bread and weight the mugs, so that much of what she served was merely air or iron. She stirred who-knows-what poor wild thing into the stew and called it beef or rabbit. When important-looking guests arrived and Jennet called to Alyce in a loud voice to put clean sheets on the big bed, Alyce knew she was to do no such thing, but the important-looking guests overhea
rd and were comforted by the thought.

  “Thundering toads,” Jennet would say, “I am but a poor woman with this wretched inn and a blind man to care for. I am sure God does not begrudge me my little economies.”

  And she got by with it because she was so round and rosy and merry and, with it all, so fair, in that she cheated everyone the same.

  As spring burst into May and the trees were all flowers and Magister Reese decided to stay for one more season, there came to the inn a comely young man who acted so lordly Alyce thought he must be a knight or a mayor but proved to be the carpenter’s assistant from the manor. She watched and listened to him, and finally while serving his mutton pie was bold enough to ask, “The boy Edward, who arrived at the manor for the threshing. Do you know him? How does he fare?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “A little boy, near seven, although small and puny for his age.”

  “Never seen him. Mayhap he run off or died or got eaten by a goat.” The carpenter’s assistant grinned at this with mutton stuck between his lordly white teeth.

  Alyce’s heart thumped. Was she too stupid then even to have helped Edward? Was he not safe at the manor as she thought but somewhere unknown and unsafe and unfit? Or did the lordly young man just not bother to notice small boys?

  Then on a day so like summer that the apple trees were tricked into fruit, there came another visitor. Alyce had just finished watering the beer and was kneading sawdust into the pie crust when she heard the rumble of a cart on the inn path. A load of wood had come for the kitchen, and walking behind the wagon was the redheaded boy from the village, Will Russet.

  Alyce forgot for a moment that she was no longer the midwife’s apprentice but now a failure and, wiping her floury hands on her skirt, ran outside.