The Midwife's Apprentice (6 page)

J
ennet 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.

J
ust before the road from the inn turns and makes for the village, there is a hidden path to the manor. Visitors use the main manor road, crossing through the gatehouse and past the apple trees and the stable. Some of the villagers know about the path, but few use it, for it passes too close to the dark woods. Alyce, in her comings and goings through the village, had come upon the path, although she had never before had need to follow it all the way up to the manor. Until one afternoon, when golden-yellow blossoms first appeared on the laburnum trees and Girtle the cow gave birth to her first calf, a sweet and sticky thing Alyce thought to call Rosebud, for she was as red as the hedgeroses near the village church.

As she watched Girtle nuzzle and suckle Rosebud and tuck her against her warm body to give the calf her warmth, Alyce was filled with a sudden longing to go to the boy Edward at the manor and see for herself that he was there, fed and dry and content. Mayhap he was unhappy and longing for her and she would bring him back to the inn and take care of him as Girtle did Rosebud. For days she thought about this, and the more she thought, the righter it seemed.

She imagined Edward’s first sight of her at the manor. “Alyce, you have not forgot me,” he would cry, throwing his arms about her waist. “Have you come to take me away? I pray you have, for I am desolate here without you and as well am starving and beaten and forced to sleep outside in the snow and no one cares for me.” She would scoop the boy up in her arms and they would go together back to the inn and Alyce would take care of Edward and this would make her heart content.

All she needed was Edward and all would be well. She was certain of it. So one day when Jennet had gone to the market fair at Edenwick to buy a copper pot, a young pig, and a bit of lace for her best kirtle, and no guests but Magister Reese cluttered the table, Alyce put the cat in the stable so that he would not follow her and, the sun warming her wintry spirit, climbed to the manor on its gray-green hill.

Passing the village fields, she saw Roger Mustard and Thomas the Stutterer swinging their weed hooks and felt the familiar feelings in her chest and her throat, but turned her eyes away so she would not have to think about what she had had and what she had lost.

The manor was bustling in the sunshine. She went first to the barn, where the men were sharpening hoes and sickles in preparation for the summer hay cutting. “The boy Edward?” she asked a tall, red-nosed man. “The small boy who arrived after harvest to help with the threshing, is he still here?”

The man turned and looked at Alyce. “Forget this Edward, curly top. My name is Mat and I am six times the man he is. Climb up here on this hay bale and give me a warm, sticky kiss.”

“My hair may be frizzled but my wits are not,” Alyce responded. “Save your sticky kisses for your wife or your cow.”

Alyce left the barn and went next to the smithy, where the manor blacksmith and his apprentices were hammering lumps of iron into shoes for horses. “The boy Edward?” she asked again. Her answer was rude remarks, laughter, and kissing sounds from men too ill-tempered or too busy or too tired to care about the questions of a strange girl.

“The boy Edward?” Alyce asked the kitchen maid skinning a pig in the manor yard, the laundress boiling great kettles of goose fat for soap, the carpenters fashioning a coffin for Old Ned, who had died that morning. None answered. “Corpus bones!” said Alyce. “I might as well be asking the fence.”

Finally she found her way to the shed that served as the manor kitchen and there found a cook who, judging from the words pouring forth from her mouth with none to listen, would not be reluctant to talk to Alyce.

“Please, ma’am,” said Alyce, who had learned that
ma’ams
and
sirs
served her well even with cooks and stableboys when asking favors. “Please, ma’am, the boy Edward who came after harvest to help with the threshing, is he still here? Have you seen aught of him?”

“Ah, the lamb,” the cook cooed, waving her ladle at Alyce, “the little lamb. He be here. But too small he is to be swinging that great heavy flail about or wrestling with the oxen and ploughs and the taunting of the men, so I try to watch over him, the wee duckling, and find him simple tasks to do, suited for a small boy.” The cook sat down, her face red from the heat and emotion and the boiling and stewing going on about her, took off one great leather shoe, and used it to fan her face. She peered closely at Alyce. “Surely then you be the sister he talks about, for you look just like him and could pass for twins.” The cook muttered and crossed herself. “You not be twins?” she asked Alyce, peering closer. “I cannot abide twins.”

“No, ma’am. We be not even brother and sister.”

“Ah, never say that, sweet pudding, for you are as alike as two peas. Just so you are not twins.”

“No, ma’am, not twins,” answered Alyce again, wondering why twin cows such as Baldred and Billfrith should be such a joy and a boon while twin babies were ill-starred and unlucky.

“Well, then, my little turnip. Go find your brother in the hen house behind the barn, where I sent him to gather eggs for a parsley omelet. And bring yourselves back here for a dinner of bread and bacon.” The cook wiped her wet red face on her skirt, picked a struggling fly from the great pot of soup she was stirring, and began a new conversation with herself, for she found such talk interesting and hardly ever disagreed with what was said.

T
he manor was growing quiet, preparing for evening and supper and bed. Alyce passed men coming back from the fields, weed hooks and hoes and rakes on their tired shoulders; dairymaids washing out the churns, stopping every now and then to lick the sweet butter off their fingers; shepherds bringing in the sheep for tomorrow’s washing and shearing, the music of their pipes rising to the wide blue sky and disappearing into the silence.

Around the barn in the hen house she found Edward, egg basket still empty, kneeling before the chickens. “So then,” he said to the largest and most bad-tempered, “you be the king and you”—he pointed to a small hen with speckled feathers—“be the queen, for you look motherly and kind, and the rest of us will be knights and we will pretend we are about to have a great battle with the Scots but we don’t mind for we are sure to be victorious.”

At that, Edward looked up and saw Alyce watching him. “Alyce,” he cried, leaping to his feet, the better to throw his arms about her waist. “Alyce, you have not forgot me.” Alyce remembered her imaginings as the boy hugged her, and she smiled. It would be well.

“Come, Alyce, you can be a knight, too, and we will march north to the stable.”

“Edward, I sent you here to work so you’d have food and warmth and a place to belong, and instead you’re playing knights with the chickens. What be you thinking?” She tweaked Edward’s nose and pulled a speckled feather from his hair. “Come, I’ll help you find enough eggs to satisfy the cook, and then we will talk together.”

“Alyce, what you be doing at the manor?”

“I came to see how you be, and good thing I did, for it seems you have not the wits of an oat. Your sister, indeed. What are these lies you have been telling the cook?”

“Not really lies, Alyce. I just wanted a sister, for all Cook’s other children have brothers and sisters. Have you come to take me away?”

Before Alyce could reassure him that she was there to rescue him and all would be well, he continued, “You haven’t, have you, Alyce? For I am sore content here and mostly have enough to eat, and when Cook is cross with me I sleep with the chickens and pretend. No one chases me away and even Lord Arnulf knows my name.”

So Alyce learned about the sometimes mighty distance between what one imagines and what is. She would not be bringing Edward back with her to make her heart content, but she knew she had not failed him, and she breathed a heavy sigh of sadness, disappointment, and relief. It felt so good that she did it again and again until her sighs turned to sobs and she cried her first crying right there in the hen house with Edward arming the chickens for battle. Edward patted her shoulders and hands and comforted her as well as a small boy could and cheered her by wiggling his loose front tooth.

On the way back to the kitchen Edward began a campaign to convince Alyce to stay the night and she agreed, though she knew Jennet would scold her for her absence, for she was not ready yet to completely abandon Edward and her rosy imaginings. While they ate their bread-and-bacon supper, while Alyce helped Edward mound up straw in a corner of the kitchen, while she sat by watching for him to go to sleep, all the while Edward talked of life on the manor. He told her of the silken-robed lords and ladies who came for feasts and rode out to hunt and danced like autumn leaves in the candlelit great hall, of the visiting knights who clanked their swords against each other as they practiced in the school yard, of the masons who slapped mortar and bricks together to build a great new tower at the corner of the hall that looked to stretch near all the way to heaven. He described the excitement of buying and selling at the great autumn horse fair, the nervous preparations accompanying the arrival of some velvet-shod bishop or priest, and the thrill of watching the baron’s men ride out to confront a huge maddened boar who had roamed too close to the village. And he complained at his lot, doing all the smallest tasks, not being allowed to help with the threshing and ploughing, being teased for being so little and frail and tied to Cook’s skirts and fit for nothing but gathering eggs. Finally as his eyes looked near to closing, he said, “Tell me a story, Alyce.”

“I don’t know any stories.”

“For sure you do. Everyone does.”

“Well, Jennet told me that one night a visiting mayor fell out of bed, hit his head, and thought he was a cat, so he slept all night on the floor watching the mouseholes.”

“That is no story, Alyce. Cook tells me stories. A story should have a hero and brave deeds.”

“Well then, once there was a boy who for all he was so small and puny was brave enough to do what he must although he didn’t like it and was sometimes teased. Is that a story?”

“Close enough, Alyce.” And he closed his eyes.

When the moon shone through the misty clouds and two owls hooted in the manor yard, Edward and Alyce slept, each comforted by knowing the other was safe and warm and sheltered and not too very far away.

The next day being the day the woolly black-faced sheep were washed before shearing, Alyce and Edward ate their bread-and-beer breakfast down by the river to watch the great event.

Edward finished his breakfast first. “I’m still hungry, Alyce, and there is nothing about here to eat but grass. Do you know if grass is good for people to eat?”

“Try it.”

He did. “It be good for exercising my teeth and making my mouth taste better, but it tastes like… grass, I would say.”

“Then do not eat it.”

“What is the best thing you ever ate, Alyce?”

“Hot soup on a cold day, I think.”

“Once long ago a monk gave me a fig. It was a wonderful thing, Alyce, soft and sweet. After that I had nothing to eat for three days but the smell of the fig on my fingers. Are you ever going to finish that bread, Alyce?”

And Alyce gave him her bread, which is what Edward wanted and Alyce intended all along.

Part of the river had been dammed to form a washing pool. Men stood in the waist-deep water while the hairy shepherds, looking much like sheep themselves, drove the woolly beasts into the water to have their loose fleeces pulled off and then be scrubbed with the strong yellow soap. The river was noisy with the barking of dogs, the bleating of sheep, the calling and cursing of men, and the furious bawling of those lambs separated from their mothers. Edward soon took on the job of matching mothers and babies. He snatched up the bawling lambs and ran from mother to mother until he made up the right pair, whereupon they would knock him out of the way in their hurry to nuzzle each other.

As the day grew hotter the river looked cooler, and finally Alyce tucked her skirt up into her belt and waded in. The weary men were glad of another pair of hands and soon had Alyce helping. First she held the woolly black faces while they were scrubbed, but one old ewe took offense at Alyce’s handling and, standing up with her front feet on Alyce’s chest, pushed the girl into the water. Alyce, coughing and sputtering, traded jobs with the man who was lathering their backs. Fleeces clean, the sheep swam to the bank and scrambled out of the water, nimble as goats and hungry as pigs.

By midafternoon they were finished. While Edward and the shepherds drove the sheep to their pens across the field, Alyce stretched and wiped her wet hands on her wet skirt. What a wonder, she thought, looking at her hands. How white they were and how soft. The hours of strong soap and sudsy fleece had accomplished what years of cold water never had—her hands were really clean. There was no dirt between her fingers, around her nails, or ground into the lines on her palms. She sat back against a tree, held her hands up before her, and admired them. How clean they were. How white.

Suddenly she sat forward. Was the rest of her then that white and clean under all the dirt? Was her face white and clean? Was Will Russet right— was she even
pretty
under the dirt? There never had been one pretty thing about her, just skinny arms and big feet and dirt, but lately she had been told her hair was black and curly and her eyes big and sad and she was mayhap even pretty.

Alyce looked about. The washing was done and the sheep driven to the barn to dry off for tomorrow’s shearing. The river was empty but for great chunks of the greasy yellow soap floating here and there. Alyce found a spot a bit upriver from the befouled washing pool, pulled off her clothes, and waded in. She rubbed her body with the yellow soap and a handful of sandy gravel until she tingled. Squatting down until the water reached her chin, she washed her hair and watched it float about her until she grew chilled.

Alyce stood up in the shallow water and looked at herself. Much cleaner, although a bit pink and wrinkled from her long soak. And pretty? Mayhap even that, for she had all her teeth and all her limbs, a face unmarked by pox or witchcraft, and perhaps, now, more of happiness and hope than of sadness in those big eyes that even the midwife had remarked on.

She washed her clothes, pulled them on still wet and drippy, and ran for the kitchen to dry a bit before the fire.

Too soon it was time to bid Edward good-bye. “Be assured I will not be far from here, and I promise to come back for Christmas and Easter and your saint’s day. And to see when that front tooth grows in again.” Edward grinned. He had enjoyed the day, done a man’s job, and been carried home on the shoulders of a giant of a shepherd called Hal. He was satisfied with his place at the manor, the devotion of the cook, and the friendship of Alyce. He suddenly felt not so small.

Alyce gave him a hug and a smack and felt that tickling in her throat and stinging in her eyes that meant she might cry again, now she knew how to do it. She went down the path from the manor, stopping every few steps to turn and wave until finally the path curved and Edward was lost from sight and all she could see was the way ahead.