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 overheard 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.
“Will! Will Russet! It’s me, Alyce.”
“Alyce,” he called. “We was wondering where you had got to and were you all right. What be you doing here?”
The sunshine faded from Alyce’s face. “Skinning rabbits and sweeping floors and mucking out the privy. I am the inn girl.”
“And a prettier inn girl the world never saw,” said Will, “or you would be if you ever got that flour and dirt off yer face. Come talk to me while I unload the cart.”
Alyce spat on her fingers and rubbed her face, but succeeded only in making both face and hands equally dirty. So she gave it up and followed Will to the woodpile, where she sat and listened to his news of the village: Alyce Little was fat and bonny and had three teeth; the baker’s wife kept her husband tied on a short rein to his ovens; Grommet Smith had married Aldon Figtree, understeward at the manor, a timid little man who called her “Mistress Figtree, my dear” and stayed mostly out of her way for fear of being swatted like a fly.
“How you be, Alyce?” Will asked when he had run out of gossip. “Why did you run?”
Alyce thought of what she might say—“That village did not suit me” or “The midwife was stingy and greedy and harsh” or “I found I did not care for babies”—but when her mouth opened, out came the story of her failure with Emma Blunt and how she discovered she was too stupid to be the midwife’s apprentice.
“Bah, Alyce. I seen you with Tansy. You got guts and common sense. Just because you don’t know everything don’t mean you know nothing. Even Jane Midwife herself don’t know everything, though she think she do,” Will said, winking at her with an eye as green as new grass and as
friendly as a summer sky. Suddenly shy, Alyce ran back into the inn and the
visit was over, though she remembered it again and again during the weeks that followed.
Before the month was out, another familiar face showed at the inn. One day when Alyce returned from gathering wood sorrel to make a sauce, there at the table was Jane Sharp, the midwife herself, in her starched wimple and second-best gown, deep in earnest conversation with Magister Reese.
Alyce’s face grew hot and then as cold as bare feet in January; her throat tickled and her eyes stung as she imagined the midwife telling Magister
Reese of the girl’s stupidity, her incompetence, and her failure. Run away, she said to herself. Run away. But her shame was less than her curiosity— that and her desire not to leave Magister Reese hearing only the worst of her—so she stayed, hiding in the shadows of the room to listen without being seen.
Jennet pinched her and thrust a jug into her hands, so she began to move toward the table as slowly and silently as she could until she was close enough to hear: And I brewed her some of my sage tea, unequaled for a woman likely to miscarry due to the slipperiness of her womb.”
Jane Sharp was not then talking of Alyce but of herself—Alyce should have known—and Magister Reese was writing it all down in his great encyclopaedia, while the cat nibbled his cheese and bread.
Jane continued. “I myself use a tea of black alder bark and smut rye to stop excessive bleeding, but I have heard that rubies, either worn on the body or ground to a powder and taken in warm wine, do even better, if the woman is lucky enough to own rubies and rich enough to let them be ground into . . .”
She never even noticed Alyce as the girl refilled her mug. Alyce returned to the shadows. “Will Russet,” she heard the midwife say to Magister Reese, “a boy from the village, tells me my apprentice is here at the inn. My former apprentice, might I say, for she ran away. You seen her here? Skinny girl with black curls and big sad eyes, afraid to say boo.”
Before Magister Reese could say nay or yea, the midwife went on. “She was not as stupid as some I have had, and better company, but still perhaps her going was for the best. She was not what I needed.”
“Because I failed,” whispered Alyce in the shadows.
“Because she gave up,” continued the midwife. “I need an apprentice who can do what I tell her, take what I give her, who can try and risk and fail and try again and not give up. Babies don’t stop their borning because
the midwife gives up.” She landed her sharp glance on Magister Reese for a moment, drank off her ale in one long swig, and was gone.
