The Innocent (19 page)

leaving the old man inside as she locked the door. She’d have to explain to Maître Gilles later; right now she needed to ignore Corpus as he cursed her for a whore and devil spawn, and finish the task at hand.

In the birthing room, Margaret was fast running out of ways to help Aveline, and Jassy had tried everything she knew as well. Hot cloths and cold cloths had been applied to the heaving belly alternately to help ease the contractions. They’d dripped good mutton broth into her mouth to give her some strength but she had vomited it up. Red flannel had been hung all around the bed in an extra effort to ward off infection and defeat any cold air from the outside, and one by one, the women had each tried gentle massage of the back and the belly. But nothing seemed to help. With Father Bartolph’s permission, they’d even cast beads of incense onto the fire to help bring God, the Virgin, and Saint Anne, her mother, to the aid of the laboring girl on the bed.

The contractions were coming very fast now but Jassy and Margaret both saw that the child had not shifted down—the birth canal had not opened as it should. Jassy looked at Margaret hopelessly.

Perhaps this ill-begotten but now much-wanted child would not be born.

Margaret despaired at that moment. Perhaps this was God’s will after all, perhaps he did not want this child to see his light. If the mother and the baby died, Piers would have had his wish granted—freedom from this marriage he so clearly did not want. One thing was certain; if mother and child did not survive, she would not permit Piers to go on living under the roof of Blessing House. What he had done to his wife had weakened her terribly. Her body did not have the strength it needed to give birth to this child and her agony was doubled by the broken ribs Margaret suspected Piers’s last beating had given her.

As she pushed open the door, the smell of blood and incense hit Anne like a blow. Briefly, she felt nauseated, but she had to ignore it. “Mistress, I have it. Please let me give some to Aveline. It will help her, I promise you.”

“Well,” said Margaret grimly, “there’s nothing else to be tried, short of cutting the babe out.” Jassy and she looked at each other—would they truly think of such a thing? Perhaps they would, soon, though it would mean Aveline’s death.

Aveline looked as close to a corpse as a living woman could. Chalk white, she lay groaning, body convulsing with each contraction, eyes open in a dull stare. Anne sat by her head and wiped her brow then, talking as one would to a frightened young horse, gently asked Aveline to open her mouth.

Aveline did as she was told, coming out of the dementia of her pain long enough to cooperate.

The women in the birthing chamber had no faith that Anne’s remedy would make a difference, sure that Aveline was dying, breath by screaming breath. But then a strange thing happened.

As Aveline took tiny sips from the pot that Anne put to her lips, her anguished face and body changed.

The rigid arms and legs relaxed and then it seemed the girl was sliding into sleep. Her eyelids sank down, veiling the staring eyes, and as she continued to swallow she sighed once and breathed deeply, then again. She was asleep, deeply, though her body continued to contract in shuddering spasms. This was miraculous—how could a woman sleep while her body still labored?

Anne spoke urgently. “Mistress, I need your help. There is no time to lose…”

Jassy and Margaret were to hold Aveline’s legs open, while Anne pushed a pessary, made from the remains of the honey not used in the simple, into the girl. There was only a tiny amount and she prayed she would have enough to do the work. If Saint Anne was with them, the drug that had put Aveline to sleep would relax the muscles of the neck of the womb so that the child could be born.

Aveline moaned in her deep narcotic sleep as Anne slipped the honey-based paste up into her vagina, but she did not wake. Surreptitiously, one or two of the women crossed themselves. Was it not ordained in the Bible that women must bring forth in agony as a punishment for leading Adam astray in the garden? None of them had enjoyed watching Aveline’s torment, but was it not God’s will? If Anne succeeded in saving mother and child it would be a miracle surely, but perhaps the means was a blasphemy?

Miracle or blasphemy, something was working, for before the candles had burned down another finger-width Margaret, massaging Aveline’s belly, felt the child shift down as a great wave of contractions seized the sleeping woman. Indeed, suddenly Jassy said she could feel the crown of the child’s head between its mother’s legs. And in another moment there was the little blue face—closed eyes, waxy skin—and with the gentlest of tugs, the shoulders slipped through and the boy was born. There were anxious moments as they rubbed him with oil and salt and he did not breathe, but then, suddenly, he opened his mouth and yelled. He was alive, rapidly flushing from white to red as he expressed his displeasure at being so rudely brought into the world.

When the afterbirth came down, they cut the cord with a sharp knife, and Jassy hurried the baby over to the fire tightly wrapped in linen and red flannel. His mother slept on, the stress melting from her face.

Margaret hugged Anne and kissed her and then sent her to tell Piers and Mathew that the child had been born, safely, at last. She was also to find Father Bartolph. The child must be christened as soon as it could be arranged, for while he seemed robust, against all the odds, he must have the Devil driven out of him as quickly as possible. To die unchristened would send his new soul straight to Hell. Time after that to consider the future for them all.

May Day was over and the house was still partly empty. Some of the older members of the household had returned from the bonfires, but most of the younger people would straggle home some time after dawn. It was the same each year and the tongue-lashing from Father Bartolph was a small price to pay for the memories they had to last them until next May Day.

Anne found Mathew in his study, pretending to work, though in truth he’d given up trying to concentrate hours ago. He’d asked for reports and from time to time Margaret had slipped out to bring him news. The last conversation had made grim hearing. He fully expected that Aveline and the child would die.

So it was a very troubled man that Anne found in his workroom. The knock on the door called him back from a painful audit of all his faults as a man and a father—an unaccustomed task. “Enter.”

“Master, the child is born. A boy.”

“A boy…” He looked up, haggard, wanting to ask the question but frightened of what he would hear.

Her confident, strong employer suddenly looked old and frightened, and Anne learned in that moment that men suffered too, something she had never understood. They, too, needed comfort when the world was too much—and today, she could give that comfort. Quickly, she went to him and laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Sir, the child lives. And so does Aveline.”

He had tears in his eyes as he looked up at her and, for a moment, covered her hand with his. And it took him a moment to remember who he was—the master of Blessing House. “So, a live child, and a son for them both. This is good news indeed.” Abruptly, he stood up and crossed over to the window that looked down into his chapel, his back to Anne. “Please convey my hearty best wishes to Mistress Aveline. When Lady Margaret can be spared, perhaps she could be asked to join me in a prayer of thanksgiving. I shall be in the chapel.”

Anne curtsied to the back of the silent figure and left to find Father Bartolph.

Mathew heard the door close and then breathed deeply. Life had been given, death had been kept at bay.

It would be his task to preserve this child—he felt it was God’s will.

Chapter Thirteen

It was high summer now—late June—and the city lay sweltering under a pall of filthy, stinking air that did not move. Even the winds of Heaven were exhausted by the heat.

Mathew Cuttifer and John Lambert were walking together in the pleasure garden that stretched down to the river’s edge under the grim old walls of Blessing House. The pleasaunce had been another of Lady Margaret’s innovations, an attempt to make the semi-fortified old building feel more modern.

With a French gardener—a monstrous expense that Mathew had grumbled about at the time—Margaret had designed gently sloping walks with gracious wide steps radiating out from a central bed where low hedges had been planted in the shape of a large heraldic rose. Inside the hedges, an actual rose garden had been planted, and there were espaliered fruit trees on the warm brick walls that divided their garden off from their neighbors’.

Everywhere, young trees had been planted, and as time passed, each had been shaped, cut, and bound into witty, even fantastic designs: griffins and a castle, even an eagle in flight. Each year the shapes had become clearer and the design of the garden an unfolding delight.

Of course, when Margaret had first planned the garden, Mathew had allowed her to follow her fancy, but later he had complained vigorously about good land being wasted and the extra expense the pleasaunce had put him to. Formerly, goods coming to Blessing House had been landed by his water gate at the bottom of his land and hauled up the incline from the water. Now the pleasure garden took up all the available space and thus barred access to the storerooms under the house. To remedy this he’d had to buy a strip of land running down his boundary to the river and make it into a separate way to and from the river.

Now, on this hot day, sweltering in his thick velvet houppelande and heavy flat hat, he was glad he’d given in to Margaret’s determination. The arbors were shady as the trees were all in thick summer leaf, and there was a breeze lifting off the water. It pleased him to invite his guest to sit on one of the handsome marble benches he’d had brought from Venice to surprise his wife one year for her name day. Perhaps she was right; after all, he worked very hard, God would not disapprove of his taking some small amount of delight in the work of his wife’s hands. Not when what she had created was so pleasing to the eye and gave such ease to the heart.

The two men were waiting for the moment they would be called to go with the members of the family and close friends, to Aveline’s churching after the birth of her child. As a special mark of favor from the king, it would take place in the Lady Chapel of the Abbey, and since the child had been christened Edward, the churching had been planned to take place on June 20, the feast day of another Edward, a long-dead, sanctified Saxon king.

As they sat in the brooding heat their talk turned to the king and Warwick once more. As an alderman of the city of London, John Lambert had even closer connections to the court than Mathew, but lately all sorts of disturbing rumors had reached both men.

It was said that the king had taken up his old ways with women again. The queen was close to term with the first royal baby and surely, for some time, even she would not have allowed the king into her bed—it had been a great scandal at court that the king had lingered in his wife’s bed long after the pregnancy was officially known. To John Lambert’s mind, any right-thinking woman would not have tolerated sexual relations with her husband once she knew she was with child. But then, perhaps the queen was not like other women. It was said they lusted equally for each other, and that, knowing Edward, meant mightily indeed.

So the king had turned his attentions to other women—several of them, if the gossip were true—while he waited for his child to be born. The whole kingdom was praying for a male child to secure succession to the throne, and therefore, stability for the country. Mathew sent a brief wish to Heaven that their prayers might be granted.

Perhaps, after all, it was better for the country that the king occupied himself with women rather than fighting Warwick. Mathew felt a twinge of sympathy for his sovereign. If his wife was pious, a man remembered her pregnancies as a sexual desert. The church said sexual relations were only for the conception of children, and once that work was done, a faithful husband should bend his thoughts to serving God as a way to slake the rage of lust. Mathew had remained chaste for the entire time that Piers had been in the womb—much good that had done! Yes, he understood why Edward should want solace when he could no longer go to his wife, but he did not approve. He heaved a deep sigh. No discipline, this younger generation, no discipline at all.

Meanwhile, he listened to John Lambert recount his fears about what would be unleashed once this child was born. His chief concerns were the queen’s relations.

“It’s all of them, Mathew—the whole pack of the Wydeville family. Every day there are more and more of them at court: sisters, brothers, uncles. And rapacious! You have no idea. The mother is the worst of them all, milks the queen’s grace for every favor she can wrench out of her. I tell you, it worries me. Do you know that Duchess Jacquetta even petitioned her daughter, the queen, to allow her to acquire the goods of Joshua-within-the-Walls after he died? Yes, he was a Jew, but did that give her the right to despoil his family before the poor man was cold? I’m told she marched right to their door with armed men at her back and broke it down. Arras, gold, plate, furniture—they took it all. Said the family’d be paid later and flourished a warrant from the queen! I tell you, Mathew, I’ll not be able to keep order in the city if this goes on much more. And the king does nothing!”

Mathew frowned. If the king’s child was a boy, Elizabeth’s power base would be greatly strengthened.

A male heir for the king and the kingdom would entrench her family in an unassailable position, something Warwick would not tolerate.

He was brought out of his reverie by Anne curtsying to them both. “Yes, child?”

“Master, the Lady Margaret and Mistress Aveline ask if you and your guest would join them, please?”

As usual, Anne made a pleasing picture. Today her hair was bound back under a low-crowned, neat cap from which trailed a fine veil. She was Lady Margaret’s chief servitor now, and her status in the household had increased. After the birth of Aveline’s child, Mathew had paid for a new set of good clothing for her as a thank-gift for the part she had played in saving the child and the mother.