The Lady and the Poet (18 page)

‘On his way back from Lincolnshire.’ My sister Mary appeared from the suffocating darkness. She seemed but a shadow of her usual commanding self. ‘We have sent a groom to hasten him.’

‘There is no time for a doctor, my lady.’ The midwife was wringing her hands and I could see the sweat running from her face into the runnel between her breasts.

‘Send for one all the same! Now!’

Bett screamed again, yet this time it was the scream of an animal caught in a trap.

‘Have you given her Mother’s Caudle?’ asked a lady of middle years, dressed in great finery but with a look of fear in her eyes, the fear I could feel spreading through the room like a canker. I recognized her as Sir John’s mother, whom I had met at Bett’s nuptials. ‘Will it not help her keep up her strength?’

Another cry split the air.

‘The eagle stone? Where is the eagle stone?’ demanded Mary, ever more at home in parlour or Great Hall than sick room. ‘That will help attract the babe from out of the womb, surely?’

All hunted around until a piece of rock, about four inches long and the colour of rust, was found. As it was passed to the midwife I heard it rattle and saw that it was hollow.

The stone was placed on Bett’s heaving stomach yet stayed there but a second or two before she bucked again in pain.

‘You must tie it on,’ counselled Margaret, removing her girdle to try and attach the stone to the outer side of Bett’s thigh.

‘My son!’ Bett seemed to be almost delirious. ‘Where is my son!’

I sat next to her and took her hand. ‘Pray God he will arrive soon,’ I soothed, stroking her poor head. ‘Midwife,’ I shouted, getting ever the more desperate. ‘Is there any sign of the baby’s head?’

The midwife reached out a hand and felt inside Bett’s private places. ‘He is sideways on, my lady, like a cartload of hay that cannot fit through a twitten.’

‘God’s blood, woman, is there nothing you can do for my sister?’

‘Yes,’ she said as she made a sign of the cross, then looked round to see if we had noted the blasphemy. ‘Hope and pray to our Lord and Saviour.’

‘Ann,’ Bett asked in a brief moment of peace, ‘where is my lord? I wish him here when our son is born.’

‘Soon. Soon. He will be here as soon as ever he can.’

The room was so dark and so hot that even I began to feel faint and ill and had to sharply discipline myself. It was then I noticed how overheated Bett had become, like a horseshoe glowing on the anvil. She was wearing both shift and overdress. ‘A shift will be more than enough,’ I insisted to the midwife. ‘Help me to take off the dress at once.’

The midwife looked at me askance but agreed to assist. We had just helped Bett to her feet and removed the heavy dress, apparently worn for modesty’s sake, when Bett began to scream again and this time threw herself to the ground where she knelt, with her head thrown back, howling like a dog.

‘Stop her! Stop her!’ cried Sir John’s mother faintly. ‘This is the Devil’s work! She must surely be possessed by some demon.’

I was so angry I turned my back on her. ‘This is no Devil’s work. Do you not recall what God Almighty said in Genesis? “In sorrow shall you bring forth children.” Perhaps you have forgotten the pain of childbirth, my lady?’

‘Saucy girl who has not even given birth herself!’

‘Ann, Ann,’ Bett gasped, her eyes wide with fear and her body arched in a spasm of terrible pain. ‘I cannot endure this! I cannot!’

‘Can you not twist the baby round like the cowman does with the calf? I have seen him doing so at my grandfather’s when the calf is stuck inside the mother.’

Five pairs of eyes watched me in horror as if I had suggested some evil ritual.

‘I have done all I can, mistress, but the babe will not shift.’

Bett screamed again, and her whole body bucked as if she would surely split in two.

‘Is there nothing else, for pity’s sake, woman? My sister is dying of the pain.’ I turned to Margaret but my gentle, kind sister stared at Bett as if she were already a ghost.

‘Mary, sister, you ever know what must be done in a crisis.’

Mary reached out her hand, as if to push away the pain that stalked our sister. ‘In the hall and kitchen, yes. But a layingin is different. Childbed holds naught but fear to me.’

I saw I was alone.

‘It is in God’s hands now, mistress,’ the midwife intoned piously, rubbing her nose with her dirty hand. ‘I attended a lady yesterday whom God chose to gather, together with her babe also.’

I wanted to scream and strike her. ‘Well, He is not taking my beloved Bett.’

At that Bett sat up, the pain loosening its iron hands for a moment. Her hair hung in rat’s tails and her skin was as pale as chalk, yet her eyes of a sudden were fierce and clear. ‘Goodwife, I care more for my son than myself. Is there no way you can save him, even if I must die in the process?’

At that she fainted away from the effort of speech.

The midwife shrugged and called me quietly to her side. ‘There is only one hope.’

She opened the bag she had brought and my stomach lurched inside me as she showed me three sharp hooks. ‘But, surely, those would kill both mother and baby.’

‘The baby, aye. But the mother might yet survive.’

Her grudging, narrow eyes were fixed upon me knowing that this
went against God’s holy teaching and that only I in all this room would consider such a course.

I wished I could fall to my knees and ask His assistance, and yet I knew the ruling. The baby must be saved at the cost of the mother.

In desperation I turned to Sir John’s mother. ‘This manor has a farm has it not, my lady?’

She nodded as if I had lost sight of my senses.

‘Then I am going myself to find your cowman.’ I ran from the room and out into the darkness of the night, passing a servant on the stairs and Margaret going to the Great Hall to wait up for Sir John.

‘There is no sign yet of his return?’

‘None.’

I had to try three hovels at the manor gates, each so poor they were almost bare of warmth or furniture, before I found where the cowman lived. He was sitting by the fire with a small child on his knee, feeding it with sippets of bread soaked in water. A tall young man with fair hair and a ready smile.

‘I am sorry to pull you from your home, but could you help with birthing a baby instead of a calf, a baby that is stuck on his side and the midwife cannot move him?’

The young man looked shaken. ‘My lady, I know not…’

I remembered that in the purse tied round my waist was the last of my grandmother’s egg money. ‘I could pay a little.’

‘Is it for the lord’s wife, mistress? I heard she was birthing early.’

I nodded. His wife put her hand on his arm. ‘Jonathan, tis a great matter. Mayhap it would be better…’

‘To let it pass. Aye. No doubt you are right, like the cock crowed while Simon Peter thrice denied the Lord. But I cannot.’

I thanked him for his generosity, seeing what he had at stake if aught went wrong with Bett, his master’s young wife, then pulled him onto the back of my own horse and we galloped up to the house. There was still no sign of its owner as we ran upstairs to the bedchamber.

By now Bett was white as a shroud. Instead of bucking with pain she moved hardly at all.

‘Can you help her, Jonathan?’ I asked him.

The midwife looked at us as if we had some contagious disease. And perhaps we did. Hope.

Bett was lying on her back and, talking to her softly, as if she were indeed one of his cows, he persuaded her slowly onto her knees. ‘Aye. Tis what in cattle we call a footling breech.’

‘Can you turn it?’

He began to press gently up into Bett’s stomach while the room fell so silent that the only sound was the crackle of the logs and Bett’s panting gasps. Disapproval hung in the air like acrid smoke.

In those few moments I prayed harder than in my whole life before.

Once or twice he glanced at me again, or shrugged, biting his lip until it seemed as bloodless as a corpse’s. And then I heard a cry of relief as the babe’s head slipped out, then one shoulder and the other, and, with one last shuddering effort, the legs. Jonathan held the babe by its ankles and slapped it until a small mewling cry started up. ‘A son, my lady.’

‘This is the Devil’s work,’ murmured the midwife. ‘Such a birth is not possible.’

‘It is God’s work,’ I heard my own voice ring out, strong and commending though I knew not from whence it came. ‘Brought about by the power of prayer, in which I trust each in this room had a part.’ I slipped to my knees. ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for saving this innocent life tonight.’

And all the others said, ‘Amen,’ save the midwife, who shot me a look of such naked hatred that I turned my back.

‘How pleased Sir John will be,’ I murmured, ‘to find you have given him a son and heir.’

‘He will, will he not?’ Bett smiled wanly back and closed her eyes. ‘Stay with me, Ann.’

Though I was dog-lired with the worry and the hunt for the cowman, I tried to keep awake for my sister. Yet it was no good. Before long I too closed my eyes and slept.

In the midst of my sleep I had a strange dream where a wolf did indeed come down on a fold full of sheep and begin to tear them apart, and continued until I could wake up and stop it.

When I sat up at last, remembering where I was, I shivered a little.
Hours must have passed since I fell asleep and the chamber was cold. I roused myself and put some logs onto the fire, watching the sparks fly up and dance as I blew on the ashes.

A sudden sound from the bed made me turn and I saw that Bett had a strange look about her, and that while her hands and feet were as cold as ice, yet her forehead burned like a furnace. Not trusting to the midwife I woke the steward and sent again for the doctor while I bathed her fiery forehead with a cloth dipped in cool water.

The doctor arrived as the dawn broke on one of the clearest and most beautiful mornings I had ever seen. All around us the fields glowed as if they had been dipped in gold, mocking our misery. Mist hung high on the trees, giving the world a dreamlike vision, yet I knew we would soon enough wake up to harsh reality.

The doctor knelt at Bett’s side, feeling her head and looking into her distant, faraway eyes. ‘It is the childbed fever. It follows straightway from the birth. How is the babe?’

‘Sleeping with the wet nurse. He thrives.’

The doctor sighed, his eyes filled with helpless sadness. ‘She will be glad of that, at least. And Sir John?’

‘Returning from a hunt in Lincolnshire.’

‘I hope he hastes.’

My heart felt pierced by thorns. ‘Is there nothing you can do?’

He shook his head. ‘Naught but what you have been doing before. I will call again at midday.’

When I returned to the bed, Bett’s eyes were open. ‘How fares my son?’

‘Well,’ I smiled.

‘I am glad. It is better this way, that he lives. And tell me not that I could have had another. I could not have borne the loss. Come here, Ann. Pull the curtains round the bed as we did when we were maids.’

I drew the heavy drapes until we were enclosed inside the great bed as we had been so many times before.

‘Our own little world,’ she whispered into the darkness. Her sigh chipped away at my poor heart. ‘Sir John is a good man. Not clever or gay but a solid gentleman. He will look after our son.’ She took my hand. ‘First our mother, now myself. A pity the menfolk in our family live forever and the women wither on the vine.’

I wanted to protest, to say she also would live forever, but I could hear her breath starting to rattle and had heard from my grandmother what this foretold. The hand in mine gripped hard as if it were holding on to me as to life itself, then it lay still as the grave. The sob I heard was my own. My tears fell down so fast they soaked Bett’s pillow. Forgetting all else I kissed her sweet brow and held her lifeless form against my breast.

Down in the Great Hall I heard a sudden commotion and ran to the top of the stairs.

Sir John stood at the foot. Around his shoulders, like the sacrifice for some cruel and ancient ritual, a white hart was slung, marked only by a small red patch where the arrow must have entered it. ‘Where is Bett? How doth my lovely wife?’

Margaret appeared at my side, roused from her bed, a shawl around her shift. I looked at her helplessly then shook my head and glanced away. A sob escaped me.

‘You have a son, sir. A healthy son to carry on your line.’ Tears began to blind my eyes and I had to hold fast to the banister to keep from falling.

‘Steward!’ he called, smiling and stamping his feet against the cold as he dropped the white hart to the floor. ‘Take away this beast to the pantry. And bring some wine. We need a toast to my wife and son!’

His sister had appeared now and stood silent on the landing, staring down, and Sir John’s mother behind her. Slowly, as if my every step were dragged through quicksand, I made my way down the stairs, the eyes of all the others upon me for they expected me to tell Sir John the terrible news, yet my throat pained so fiercely that no words came.

I SAT IN
the family chapel, waiting for Bett’s burial, feeling as if never would I be warm again, thinking of that cold white body which should be feeling the sharp pull of a babe at its breast, and the joy of mothering. Instead, Bett, who had run and jumped and laughed at my side, would be interred in this dark cold place, forever hidden from the light of the sun.