Free The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman Page B

the woman pulled herself up again and commenced bellowing. Her husband gave her his ruby ring to hold. Jennet gave her ale. The manservant gave her a black look and went outside to join John Dark in the rain.
    As night deepened, the woman’s cries grew louder and louder. Jennet hustled and bustled, but she knew about brewing and baking and not babies, and all her bustle could not help. Magister Reese went out and returned, went out and returned, unable to help but reluctant to leave. Alyce stood watching from a place under the stairs, unwilling to be part of the scene, for the sounds and smells were all too familiar and spoke of her failure with Emma Blunt. She was kept from leaving altogether by her sympathy and compassion, and by a certain curiosity that compelled her to know what was happening and to what end and what might be done to finish or hasten or ease.
    As the wails of the companions grew near as loud as those of the mother, Jennet threw them all outside—the woman attendant who shrieked more than she attended, the wailing husband, and Magister Reese, who then stood at the shuttered window, frantically paging through his Great Work looking for something to help and every now and then calling, “Jennet, you must find the bulb of a white lily” or “Virgins’ hair and ant eggs!” or “An eagle-stone! Who has an eaglestone?”
    Finally Jennet covered the moaning woman with her cloak, and, whispering “I can do no more. This baby will not come,” slipped from the room.
    Lightning lit up the room, empty but for Alyce under the stairs and the woman, in tears, in pain, in labor, and none to help. Alyce trembled. I should, she said to herself, but I cannot. I tried before and failed. You must, said herself back to her. None so stupid, said Magister Reese. You are nitwit, said Grommet Smith. Guts and common sense, said Will Russet. You gave up, said the midwife. “Help me,” cried the woman on the table. “Keep still, all of you, and let me try,” said Alyce, coming out from behind the ladder.
    She got the woman to her feet and walked her around the room, stopping every now and then to pour some ale into her. She rubbed and oiled and pushed. She bade the woman sit and stand, kneel and lie down. She called on all those saints known to watch over mothers—Saint Margaret and Saint Giles and Saint Felicitas, and even Saint Loy, who protects horses, and Saint Anthony, who does the same for pigs, for she believed it would do no harm. She did every single thing she had seen the midwife do and even invented some of her own. As the thunderstorm passed and night prepared to yield to dawn, on a scarred wooden table that had seen more of pork pies and beer than babies, Alyce delivered a baby boy, with the black hair of his father and the red face of his mother.
    Alyce had no basket of clean linen and ointments and herbs, so she tore a coarse thread from the hem of the woman’s dress, tied the baby’s cord, and cut it with a carving knife borrowed from the kitchen. Having no cumin or cecily for sealing the cord, she spat on her hand and rubbed the cut end.
    Alyce then opened the door. “Here, sir,” Alyce said, handing the baby to his father, “no stomach worm, but a loud and lusty boy.”
    His mother shouted from inside, “Stomach worm, bah! In truth I thought a dragon was eating my innards. Give the lout to me, I will teach him to give such trouble and pain to his mother.” The stupefied father took the baby to his mother, who commenced scolding and berating the little fellow, all the while smoothing his black hair and caressing his little hands, until her scolding turned to cooing and his loud cries to gurgles, and mother and child fell asleep there on the inn table.
    Alyce saw the man and his servants staring at her in awe. “It be a miracle,” they whispered. “We have seen barren woman give birth, stomach worm transformed to innocent babe, dragon defeated by a girl who appeared from nowhere!”
    The man