The Midwife's Apprentice by Karen Cushman

Author:Karen Cushman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11

The Leaving

ALYCE WAS SITTING BY THE FIRE one cool November morning, tying up birch twigs for a broom, when a pounding came at the door. Jane opened the door to Matthew Blunt, whose mother was about to have another baby and wanted Alyce to come and help.

“By the bones of Saint Polycarp, who is Alyce?” bellowed the midwife.

The boy jerked his head towards Alyce. “Her. Yer apprentice. My mum said Alyce helped her sister Joan, the bailiff's wife, when no one else could, and so she will have no one but Alyce.”

“Her? The dung beetle?” The midwife quivered in disbelief. “You are asking for her, who knows nothing and fears to try and does only what little I bid her and that none too well?” She cracked Alyce on the cheek.

My mum will have no other,” repeated the boy.

The midwife looked a bit like a mad dog as she spat and spluttered and tried to get words out past all the anger in her mouth. “Go then, ‘Alyce.’ Such treachery! Such thievery! Eating my bread and stealing my mothers! Go!”

When she began to throw cooking pots their way, Alyce and the boy lit out and ran all the way to Adam Blunt’s cottage. Alyce stood outside for a minute, surprised at having been asked for and not knowing whether to be pleased, until the boy nudged and pushed her to the door. She wiped her hair from her eyes, licked her lips, and went in.

The cottage was warm and Emma Blunt even warmer, what with her efforts to have this baby and be done with it. Alyce rubbed and crooned and fussed, as she had with the bailiffs wife. She fed Emma on raspberry leaf tea and comfrey wine. She built up the fire, closed all the windows, and three times called the baby forth. Then she sent Matthew to search for birthwort root, put out the fire, and opened all the windows. But the baby would not come, as if he were holding tight to his mother, reluctant to be separate and alone, and Alyce, although able to ease a willing baby into the world, had no idea how to encourage a reluctant one.

So as the day passed from morning to midday and Emma tossed on her tumbled linen and still there was no sign of a baby, Alyce, doubtful and uncertain without the midwife or at least Will Russet to tell her what to do and unwilling to get herself or Emma into trouble, stood back from the bed and said, “I cannot do it.”

She washed Emma’s face, smoothed her wet hair, took a deep breath, and sent Matthew back to the cottage for the midwife.

Emma and the unborn baby rested from the morning’s struggle, so all was quiet until the midwife roared in, like wind before rain, blasting everyone out of her way as she set about attending to mother and babe.

She insulted and encouraged, pushed and poked, brewed and stewed and remedied. Anointing her hands with

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