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.
