The Midwife's Apprentice Read online

  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.

  4

  The Miller’s Wife

  SUDDENLY IT WAS SUMMER and leaves erupted on every tree and bush in the village, and you could see flowers blooming by the road, in the churchyard, and in the hair of the young girls as they swung down the path to the village square. And just as the world burst into flowers, the midwife’s cottage burst forth into bread—soft wheat bread for dinner and crunchy brown oat bread for supper and crusty rolls to dip into cool ale on a warm summer morning. Even Beetle shared in the sudden blooming of bread and didn’t care to ask why until, her stomach finally full, she found her mind empty and casting about for something to figure out. She hit upon the mystery of the sudden abundance of bread. Where from? And how? And why?

  And as she thought and watched and listened, Beetle noted that the midwife had taken to mysterious errands.

  “Beetle, I must to the miller to have my oats ground to flour. Crush the bitter milkwort and boil the wormwood syrup while I am gone.” And off the midwife would go. Without the oats.

  Or, “Beetle, I am taking the comfrey tonic to Joan At-the-Bridge. See you finish boiling the goose grease for ointments.” And off the midwife would go. With no comfrey tonic.

  Or, “Beetle, I am going to feed the hens. Strain the nettle tea and pour it into clean flasks.” And off the midwife would go, although Beetle knew the last hen had made soup weeks before and the hen house lay empty except for an occasional hopeful hungry dog.

  Curious about this unusual behavior, Beetle began to follow the midwife when she went on these errands, creeping behind trees and under fences, careful to keep out of sight, and the cat stalked along behind her, so they looked like a Corpus Christi Day procession on its way to the churchyard—the midwife, the girl, and the cat. Each time, the midwife made for a field near the Old North Road, and each time, Beetle feared to creep closer lest she be caught, so she could not discover what was happening in the field and whether it had anything to do with the bread.

  One bright morning three days before Saint John’s Eve, Beetle said, “Mistress, Meg from the manor dairy has asked for some of your goose grease ointment, for her legs ache from child carrying and she says nothing soothes like your goose grease ointment. She will pay you four eggs and a tot of butter.”

  The midwife, pleased both to be praised and to be paid, sent Beetle on her way, without telling her to return straightaway or setting chores for her to do after.

  Beetle raced to the dairy, thrust the greasy ointment at Meg, grabbed the eggs and the butter, tied them in her skirt, and ran by her secret hidden way to the field by the Old North Road. She put the butter and eggs carefully in a hollow log and climbed a tree from which she could see the whole of the field. In no time there came Jane Sharp from the village and, from the other path, with a basket of bread steaming and warm, came the baker. Jane Sharp an
d the baker fell to such furious hugging and kissing, and him with a wife and thirteen children in their cottage behind the ovens, that the startled Beetle fell right out of that tree.

  The baker caught her by her hair, and the midwife began shouting about how apprentices with nothing to do but spy needed a beating and more work. Then Jane hissed, “And don’t you be telling anyone, Beetle, or I’ll turn you out in the cold again and break both your knees before I do.”

  “And who would I be telling, then?” Beetle responded. “I don’t talk to no one but the cat. And he don’t care who you are kissin’.”

  With that, which had taken all her courage, Beetle gathered up the butter and the eggs, only one of which had broken, and marched away. The cat marching behind her heard Beetle mumbling, “You do not want to hear of this, for it is not mysterious at all, and was not an adventure, and there are no butterflies in it, or rats or mice or cream or moths, which is all you really care about.”

  Beetle muttered to the cat all the way back to the cottage, where she sat in the yard throwing green apples at the cow and waited for the midwife to return and give her a beating and more work.

  When the sun was high in the sky, there came the miller running into the yard.

  “We need the midwife!”

  “She is not here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I cannot say.” And Beetle could not, for she had promised she would not.

  The miller grabbed Beetle’s arm—“Then you, Dung Beetle, will have to do”—and off he dragged her by the arm to his cottage.

  “I cannot,” she said. “I am afraid. I do not know what to do. I cannot.”

  But he continued grabbing and dragging and soon Beetle was inside the miller’s cottage. At any other time she would have enjoyed the visit, for never had she been in such a luxurious dwelling, with two rooms downstairs and a loft above and a high soft bed all enclosed by curtains such as the king or the pope must sleep in.

  But this was now and not any other time, and on the high soft bed lay a large, pale woman, waiting for the midwife and getting Beetle instead. The miller thrust Beetle toward the bed. “The midwife’s apprentice is here to help you, my dear. Things will go easier now.” And he was gone.

  The miller’s wife lay uneasy in her great bed. She grabbed Beetle’s arm and cried, “I no longer want this child. It was a mistake. Make it stop. I will do this no longer.”

  “I cannot,” said Beetle. “I am sore afraid.”

  At that the miller’s wife’s cries increased in frequency and volume. Beetle tried to think what the midwife had said at moments like this. “Two eggs and a laying hen” and “Push, you cow” were the words that occurred to her, but when Beetle spoke them they did not have the same effect as when the midwife did.

  “By the bones of Saint Cuthbert, they have sent me a nitwit! You lackwit! No brain! You think to touch me!” Screeching still, the miller’s wife let go of Beetle’s arm and began to throw at the girl whatever she could reach from her bed—a jug of warm ale, half a loaf of bread, a sausage, the brimming chamber pot. The terrified Beetle huddled in the corner as the woman rose from her bed to find more weaponry. Side of bacon. Bowl of stew. Walking stick. Soft felt hat and someone’s breeches.

  Half the village, it seemed, then pushed into the chamber to see the cause of the turmoil. The summer sun, the press of the curious crowd, and the exertions of the reluctant mother-to-be warmed the room to the point that Beetle felt she was in Hell, being attacked by demons, and her screams joined the rest.

  Suddenly the door flew open and there stood the midwife, steam rising from her skin in the heat of the room. A pea-and-onion pudding landed at her feet. She was not smiling. “Out,” she shouted. “Out!” she screamed. “Out!” she bellowed, and the room fell empty.

  The midwife grabbed the miller’s screeching wife and slapped her—once, twice, three and four times. Beetle lost count. Finally both the screaming and the slapping stopped. The midwife led the miller’s wife back to the high soft bed and, holding her bruised face in her hands, poured a mug of wormwood tea down her throat.

  When all was quiet, the miller’s wife began her labors again, and finally, as Beetle told the cat later, “There come a baby.”

  It was then the midwife spied Beetle in her corner. “Idiot,” she shouted. “Clodpole!” she screamed. “Nincompoop!” she bellowed. And she dragged Beetle out of the room, across the yard, and back to her cottage, by the very arm the miller had used to drag her away.

  Beetle did not mind so very much. She was just grateful to be out of that room.

  For weeks after, the midwife called her not Beetle but Brainless Brat and Clodpole and Good-for-Nothing, and Beetle worked twice as hard and talked only half as much, for she feared being turned cold and hungry out of the midwife's cottage.

  5

  The Merchant

  NOW IT WAS HIGH SUMMER, with the hay drying in the fields and all the village praying for the rain to hold off until the grain was safely cut and stored away for winter.

  The midwife, needing to replenish her stores of leather flasks, nutmeg, pepper, and the water in which a murderer had washed his hands, made plans to attend the Saint Swithin’s Day Fair at Gobnet-Under-Green. Beetle had been to fairs, but only to beg a turnip or some pig bones for a stew, and never had her belly been full enough for her to lift her head and look around. She dearly longed to accompany the midwife, but still being Brainless Brat, she was afraid to ask. And so, the day before the midwife’s departure, Jane set Beetle a score of tasks to accomplish in her absence and made ready to leave without the girl.

  Beetle knew this was an important journey, for the midwife soaked herself in the millpond, dried her hair in the sun, and sharpened the pleats in her best wimple.

  She sang to herself as she worked, a tuneless tune that Beetle supposed a witch’s spell until she recognized it as “Summer Is A-coming In” sung by someone who lacked the practice and the heart and the sweetness to sing.

  On her way back to the cottage, laden with newly washed clothes to spread in the sun, the midwife tripped over Walter the Blacksmith’s second-best pig and fell, left leg twisted beneath her. Her furious oaths made Beetle truly fear she was a witch, for only someone who had truck with the devil could know such words.

  Although bellowing that Beetle was stupid as a woodchuck and clumsy as a donkey in a dress, the midwife allowed the girl to help her into the cottage and onto her straw bed.

  “Broken, by God’s whiskers. Broken,” she moaned, feeling her ankle, and she set about telling Beetle how to pack the boneset herbs and wrap the rags about the limb. Beetle feared this meant that because the midwife could not walk, she could not work, and thus would need Beetle’s help no longer. Actually it meant that Beetle was to go to the Saint Swithin’s Day Fair in the midwife’s place. The joy in Beetle’s heart warmed her insides and lit her face, even through the midwife’s ranting about lack of wit and the dire consequences if she were to lose the silver pennies or spend too much or come home with the wrong things.

  The blazing sun of Saint Swithin’s morning dried the hay, gladdened the villagers, and saw Beetle on her way to Gobnet-Under-Green with four silver pennies, an onion and a hunk of bread, and a cheerful heart.

  To get to Gobnet-Under-Green, Beetle took the road north that followed the river, passed the mill, turned east at Steven the Fletcher’s cottage, cut across the abbey fields ablaze with the violet-blue flowers of the flax, turned north again at Barry-on-the-Birkenhead, then meandered easterly and northerly until it ended in the glory that was the Saint Swithin’s Day Fair in the market square of Gobnet-Under-Green.

  Beetle was too excited to eat along the way, so she gave her bread and onion to a hungry goat that then followed her near all the way to Gobnet. When she arrived at the fair, she did not know whether her lightheadedness was from hunger in the sun or the thrill of being in the midst of such gaiety and color, and she did not care.

  She passed through the fores
t of bright booths with flags and pennants flying, offering for sale every manner of wondrous thing—copper kettles, rubies and pearls, ivory tusks from mysterious animals, cinnamon and ginger from faraway lands, tin from Cornwall, and bright-green woollen cloth from Lincoln. She laughed at the puppets, wondered at the soothsayers, applauded the singers, and cheered for the racing horses. Her nostrils quivered at the smells of roasting meats and fresh hot bread and pies stuffed with pork and raisins, but her guts still trembled with excitement, and she was content just to smell.

  As forenoon gave way to midday, Beetle wandered the fairgrounds. As midday turned to late afternoon, she remembered why she was there. She sniffed all the spices for free before buying nutmeg and pepper. The hangman was doing a brisk trade in murderer’s wash water, but Beetle was at last able to secure a bottle. At the end of the Street of the Cup Makers, Beetle was told, just before the Church of Saints Dingad and Vigor, she could find the best prices on leather flasks. And so she did.

  The merchant’s booth was also filled with sundry other wares for wondering at: shiny brass needles, ribbons of red and lavender, copper spoons and bronze knives, boots of fine red leather with embroidery on the toes, and combs of polished wood and ivory. Beetle had never used more than her fingers to comb the burrs and thistles from her hair and probably could have lived her life so doing, but on one of the combs, between the two rows of teeth, was carved a sleeping cat. He looked so much like the cat Beetle knew that she ached to own it.

  For long minutes she held the comb, looked at it this way and that, smelled the fragrant wood, and admired the sleeping cat. Then with a great sigh she put it down and turned to bargain with the merchant for the flasks. Although, or perhaps because, she was new at the bargaining game, Beetle handled it with such charming solemnity that the merchant took a fancy to the skinny young thing and, with a broad wink, threw the comb with the cat into the pack with the flasks. “Comb those long curls till they shine, girl, and sure you’ll have a lover before nightfall.” Another wink and the merchant turned to his next customer.