HER NAME WAS JANE. She was known in the village as Jane the Midwife.
Because of her sharp nose and sharp glance, Beetle always thought of her as Jane Sharp. Jane Sharp became a midwife because she had given birth to six children (although none of them lived), went Sundays to Mass, and had strong hands and clean fingernails. She did her job with energy and some skill, but without care, compassion, or joy. She was the only midwife in the village. Taking Beetle gave her cheap labor and an apprentice too stupid and scared to be any competition. This suited the midwife.
Beetle slept on the cottage floor and ate two meals a day of onions, turnips, dried apples, cheese, bread, and occasional bits of bacon. This suited Beetle.
And so Beetle remained the midwife’s apprentice as spring drew near and new green shoots appeared on the bare branches of shrubs and trees, and the villagers began ploughing the muddy fields for the summer crops. Beetle
sometimes feared Jane Sharp was a witch, for she mumbled to herself and once a pail of milk curdled as she passed, but mostly she knew Jane was just what she first appeared, a woman neither young nor old, neither fat nor thin, with a sharp nose and a sharp glance and a wimple starched into sharp pleats.
Each morning Beetle started the fire, blowing on the night’s embers to encourage them to light the new day’s scraps. She swept the cottage’s dirt floor, sprinkled it with water, and stamped it to keep it hard packed. She roasted the bacon and washed up the mugs and knives and sprinkled
fleabane about to keep the fleas down. She dusted the shelves packed with jugs and flasks and leather bottles of dragon dung and mouse ears, frog liver and ashes of toad, snail jelly, borage leaves, nettle juice, and the powdered bark of the black alder tree.
In the afternoon Beetle left the village for the woods, where she gathered honey, trapped birds, and collected herbs, leeches, and spiders’ webs. And the cat went with her.
When they were called, she accompanied the midwife to any cottage
where a woman labored to birth her baby, provided that woman could pay a
silver penny or a length of newly woven cloth or the best layer in the hen house. Beetle carried the basket with the clean linen, ragwort and
columbine seeds to speed the birth, cobwebs for stanching blood, bryony and woolly nightshade to cleanse and comfort the mother, goat’s beard to bring forth her milk and sage tea for too much, jasper stone as a charm against misfortune, and mistletoe and elder leaves against witches.
Beetle waited outside while the midwife did her magic within. The first time they were called to a cottage, Beetle tried to go in, but Jane slapped her, calling her clodpole and shallow-brained whiffler, and made her stay outside where she wouldn’t get in the way.
Often she called Beetle in when it was over to clean out the soiled straw bed and wash the linen while Jane Sharp and the new mother sipped
feverfew and nutmeg brewed in hot ale, and once she sent the girl back to
the cottage to brew some black currant syrup to fight a new mother’s fever. Beetle began to think perhaps she was kept out not because she was stupid, but to keep her in ignorance of the midwife’s skills and spells. And she was right.
As the weather warmed and the villagers began digging long furrows in the field to take the seed, Beetle found herself doing more and more of the collecting and stewing and brewing, while Jane Sharp spent her time haggling over her fees. Twice the midwife refused to come to laboring
mothers who had nothing to pay, and so the unfortunate women had to bring forth their babies with none but a neighbor to help.
The midwife’s greed angered the villagers, but they needed her and so took out their anger not on Jane Sharp but on her apprentice, needed by no one. Beetle endured their anger and their taunts in silence and complained only to the cat, who listened and sometimes rubbed his head on her legs in sympathy.
When spring arrived with soft breezes and meadows grown green, the
villagers began sowing early peas and barley, followed by the village boys who threw stones at the hungry birds trying to eat the seed. Jack and Wat
threw stones too at Beetle and the cat who followed her, which made the
villagers laugh. Beetle was only the midwife’s stupid apprentice and no care to them.
One morning not too long before Mayday, Kate the weaver’s daughter lay down in the field and declared her baby was coming right there and right then. Her father, Robert Weaver, and her husband, Thomas the
Stutterer, tried to carry her back to their cottage, but she screamed and
threw her arms about, so there was nothing to do but mound up some clean straw for a bed and bring the midwife out to the field.
Jane Sharp looked at the girl, settled the fee with Thomas, and rolled up her sleeves. She sent Beetle back to the cottage to pack a basket of necessaries. “And don’t drop or forget anything, you with the brains of a chicken. And don’t dawdle.”
Beetle grabbed bottles off the shelf and bunches of dried herbs from the ceiling beams, surprised at how much she knew, how she could recognize the syrups and powders and ointments and herbs from their look and their smell, since the midwife could not write to make labels and Beetle would not have been able to read them even if she could.
Kate was laboring in the field, not at ploughing or sowing or weeding but at making a way for her baby into the world. As Beetle watched, Jane moved Kate up onto her knees and shouted, “Push, you cow. If an animal can do it, you can do it.” And Kate pushed, as Jane the Midwife eased the child out of his mother and into her hands. It put Beetle in mind of the time she got the cat out of the bag. And she temporarily forgave the midwife her sharpness for the magic of her spells and the miracle of her skills.
After that Beetle took to watching through the windows when the
midwife was called. In that way she learned that midwifery was as much about hard work and good sense and comfrey tonic as spells and magic.
