A Vision of Light (43 page)

“We’ve saved money, and it’s very small, the thing we need. It’s just that it must be made perfectly—light and strong and smooth. Brother Malachi said we should try an armorer, the best armorer there is. He said that was you.”

“That rascally humbug, the so-called Brother Malachi, is back in town? After what he did to my brother? By God’s bones, it’s too much!”

Oh, dear. Hilde and I looked at each other.

“I can see by your looks, you two, that you know his tricks.”

“Was it very bad, what he did?” I asked.

“Bad or good, it depends upon how you look at it. But it was disgraceful, as far as I’m concerned. My brother was sick, and that damned quack sold him a piece of St. Dunstan’s knucklebone. My brother got well. ‘Praise to the holy relic,’ he shouted. ‘Let me see that,’ I say. ‘Why, it’s nothing but a pig’s knucklebone.’ ‘No such thing,’ shouts my brother, and he lays a clout beside my ear. To this day he wears that pig bone around his neck and hardly speaks to me. ‘Brother’ Malachi, ha!” snorted John, and he spat into the fire in disgust.

“Then Brother Malachi is wrong?” I ventured.

“Wrong about what? Pig’s knuckles?” he roared.

“Wrong that you’re the best armorer in London.”

“Best in
London
? Yes, he’s wrong! I’m the best in
England
!”

“Then we can’t afford it, Margaret, dear. Let’s go. I’m so embarrassed in this place.” Hilde turned to go.

“First you come, then you go. You interrupt good work. You waste my time. You infuriate me with the name of that outrageous fraud. Now you walk off without an explanation? Women! Ugh!” John folded his large arms.

“Let’s go, then,” I said. “He’s not capable of making it. It’s too different.”

“You stop there, little woman,” he growled, and he put his huge foot in front of mine. “There’s
nothing
I’m not capable of making.”

“Battle-axes and horse armor you can make, and very well too—but
this
requires work too fine. I’ll just go elsewhere,” I sniffed.

“Too fine, you say? Too fine? Listen, I could armor a mouse, if I wanted to; I could armor a gnat—and chase every piece in gold leaf as well,” he roared.

“I don’t know if you could do this; it’s women’s stuff.”

“I’ve made three chastity belts, solid steel, all tooled and jeweled, and none of them ever left a bruise.”

“How disgusting. This is entirely different.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a tool. No one has one. It’s for lifting baby’s heads from the womb. Do you know that sometimes the head is too big? Then it gets, well, sort of—”

“Stuck?” he asked. “Is that what happens?”

“Yes, that’s it. And then the mother dies. And the baby too.”

“With this tool we could pull the baby, you see,” added Hilde.

“What should it look like, do you think?” he asked, with some interest.

“Sort of like this,” I said, as I took out the tongs. “But it must join in another way, a way that can be adjusted. And the lifting part must be different. Flat and curved, to fit a baby’s head.” I shaped my hands. “When I thought of it, I thought of steel fingers, perhaps with a band about them, like this.”

“Oh, that will never do,” he said. “The shape’s all wrong. Too small, I think.”

“Too small? Oh, no. A baby’s head is no bigger than a large apple when it’s born. But the head is soft, more like a baked apple, and you mustn’t bruise it. Parts of the bone are soft and could be smashed, you see.”

“Then the shape’s all wrong. I’ve armored many a head, and I’ve held many a pair of tongs. You’ve got it too complicated to make well. You need a smoother shape, like this.” He picked up a stick and drew on the packed dirt of the armory floor.

“I see what you mean. But shouldn’t it curve, this way?” I drew too.

“Why, for the shape of the head?”

“No, for the pulling—it must go at this angle, and has to hold firm.”

He redrew the shape. Now it was simple, an arching curve that met a curved, flat blade at a right angle.

“That looks just right. You should have been a man. You’d have made a good armorer.” He looked intently at me.

“This will save lives, you say?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Then I’ll do this work for the love of Our Savior. Much of my work takes lives, and very little saves them. I’m in need of a good deed to be counted in heaven.” Then he picked up my hand.

“I’ll make the handles small, to fit a little hand,” he said. “Pray for my work, will you, little midwife?”

“That I will, and for your health and happiness as well.”

When we returned at the week’s end, the thing was ready. I came with Sim to pick it up and blessed and thanked the armorer as best I could. But he only wanted to know how it worked.

“Send me word when you have used it successfully, for I like to know how my work fares in the world,” he said. And I promised. How the promise was redeemed, you soon shall know.

Hilde was shy of using the new tool, for fear of doing harm, but she had the utmost confidence that my dream had shown me everything. It hadn’t, but I thought nightly about the best way to try the thing, and we took it with us when we went together to birthings, for we knew that sooner or later a hard case would come up. Then we would be prepared and try the thing. Soon enough it did, and to the accompaniment of a woman’s screams I opened my basket and reached for the steel fingers, where they lay gleaming in the bottom. It was carefully, so carefully, that I fitted the pieces in around the head and joined them together so that they held the firm place across the cheekbones in their steely grasp. The handles fitted my hand precisely. A careful, gingerly pull, and then another, a bit harder, in rhythm with the contraction. And then, in place of a tragedy was the joyful event that reminds me always of Our Savior’s blessed birth. We swaddled a living baby that day, instead of shrouding a dead one. On returning home I cleaned the wonderful tool in Brother Malachi’s spirits of wine and then oiled it carefully. I wanted no rust to ever eat away its glittering surface. Then I fulfilled my promise.

“Sim,” I called, “go to John of Leicestershire’s and tell him that the little midwife says to him that he has saved two lives this day.” And Sim went off with a whoop, for he was tired of blowing the bellows in the room of foul smells.

But the story is not done yet. The night of Epiphany, when the alleys were choked with snow, and the streets were slick with trampled ice, all in our household were deep asleep behind sealed shutters when there sounded a terrible crashing at the door. I could hear Brother Malachi groaning as Mother Hilde undid the shutters and put her head out the window.

“Is this the house of the midwives? Waken the little midwife and tell her that John of Leicestershire has urgent work for her.”

I rubbed sleep from my eyes, dressing so quickly that there was barely time to tie a kerchief over my braids for decency, and hurried downstairs to the door. Two tall young men stood before the door, beneath the overhang, heavily armed and bearing lanthorns. One of them was holding two good horses. I could see the dark glitter of their helmets and the breastplates beneath their half-open cloaks in the dim light that flickered from behind the horn, and their breath made little puffs of mist as they spoke.

“You are the little midwife? John of Leicestershire has great need of you this hour. He says, bring the weapon against death that he has forged for you. We have come to take you to his house.”

“I come as he requests. Let me get the things required.” I gathered up my basket, which lay always ready packed. I checked it over: balms for massage, sweet scents for revival, the little casket of the terrifying dark powder that can restart labor or bring death, and, at the bottom, wrapped in a fine linen napkin, John of Leicestershire’s mighty weapon.

I wrapped myself in my great warm cloak that had come from Lady Blanche and stepped out to meet the armed men. I recognized one of John of Leicestershire’s journeymen. Who would be well armed, if not an armorer? He lifted me onto the pillion seat of the second horse with a single movement. He was immensely strong, as are all who work at the forge. His face was grim. His partner mounted, and we left the alley and moved down Cornhill, across the dark and icy Cheap toward Aldersgate Street as quickly as was possible on the packed, slick snow in the streets.

Several times our horses stumbled, and I clutched hard at the rider in front of me. Aldersgate was locked tight for the night, but John’s riders were equipped with the mayor’s pass. We dismounted, and the second rider pounded on the gatekeeper’s door, to wake him and get him to open the wicket in the great gate, through which one can only pass on foot. As we stood there, I asked the man on whose horse I had ridden what the matter was, for I wanted to have as much information as possible before I arrived. The journeyman looked down at me, and the muscles along his jaw twitched and knotted.

“Mistress midwife, John has a daughter, wedded only last year, who carries his first grandchild. She lies now at his house, where she came to be assisted by her mother in her hour of need. She has lain in labor all of yesterday and the night before. The midwives gave her up this evening, and the learned foreign physician he called said that it was beyond his powers. The priest has already anointed her for death, but somehow she lives on still. Then my master said to me, ‘There is one thing more. I once forged, for the love of Christ, a weapon against death. Call the little midwife who lives on Thieves’ Alley and have her bring it here.’

“It is a hard moment for my master. We all knew Isabel. It was not so long ago, she was a pretty baby, playing at the forge fire. He loved her more than was proper, in this wicked world. Children only live to be mown down like grass, and we should never love them too dearly!”

He sighed deeply and looked at me. I could not help but answer, “Still, is it not better to love and risk sorrow than to freeze at the heart?”

“Not when sorrow is certain, that I think,” he answered.

But now the gatekeeper had come down, all wrapped up and gloved against the cold, to open the wicket with his huge key. He was annoyed at being wakened and fussed considerably, but one cannot ignore the mayor’s pass. It was fortunate, I thought, that Master John was so celebrated and well connected, or he could not have sent his men to get such a document on short notice. With an icy rattle the wicket opened, and we led the horses through on foot, remounting on the other side to resume our journey. The air was deathly still, and the only sound was the thud of hooves and the jingle of horse harness, as they moved forward at a walk on the slippery road. In the dim light cast by the lanthorns we could see only a few feet ahead of us in the dark—a bit of rutted street, the cloud made by the horses’ breath and our own. The trip seemed longer than I had ever imagined. I was frozen through by the time we reached his house.

The house was both above and beside the great armory, as if it had been stuck on as an afterthought. The lower story was part of the stone structure of the armory, as a safeguard against fire and a sign of its master’s prosperity, but wood and stone were mingled in the second story, beneath the high, tiled roof. They formed a dim pattern of shadow above the heavy carved wooden door of the establishment. We could see light through the cracks of every shutter in the dwelling part of the house, as we climbed the outer stairway to the second floor. The door was unbarred to the men’s knock, and they blew out the candles in their lanthorns, as we entered together into a scene of woe. A woman I took to be the mother was fainting with grief, assisted by the midwife. The physician sat by the fire, with the armorer, explaining something with Latin words—or maybe French—I didn’t know.

The girl was already laid out like a corpse in a bed set into a niche in the wall of the far side of the room. The blankets were drawn up over her swollen belly to her neck, and candles were burning on a little table by the head of the bed. The priest held the dying girl’s hand, which was bluish and still, even though I thought I could see a faint breath still stirring the covers. Her young husband crouched beside her, with his head buried in the bedclothes by her side. Master John got up slowly and limply extended his big hand to me.

“This is my only treasure,” he said simply. No one else seemed to care that I had come; they were too preoccupied with their own thoughts. I shooed the men gently away from the bed to the far side of the big room; then I turned back the bedclothes, and felt and looked. The head had never come forth; the mouth of the womb did not seem sufficiently opened.

“Another midwife?” The husband had turned back to stare at me with red-rimmed eyes as I worked. “I’ve had enough of midwives, and talk of babies. If I’d never touched her, I’d have her still,” he said as the priest pulled him away by the elbow.

“Accept God’s will,” said the priest, not unkindly.

Again I motioned them away for decency’s sake, for I still don’t think it’s proper for men to witness a birthing. Then I opened my basket and laid the weapon, folded in fine linen, on the bed. Gently I uncovered it and carefully, oh, so very carefully, fitted its jaws about the head. This was far deeper than I’d ever used it, and I was afraid to cause damage. I was very cautious as I fitted the handles into my hand. Only John turned his head briefly to inspect my work—or rather, his work—for before he averted his eyes, I saw a tiny nod of professional approval when he saw how perfectly the tool fit my grasp. I pulled—and the head began to emerge. Soon the shoulders were on the point of birth, and I let go the jaws to use my hands for the rest. The torso—it was a little girl—and then the feet came forth. I could feel eyes looking at me now, but I paid no notice.