The Midwife's Apprentice

• Newbery Award 1996
  
• American Library Association's Best Books Lists 1996
  
• Best Books for Young Adults 1996
  
• ISBN:9781402523205
  
• Perfection Learning
  

Clarion Books

a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint

215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003

Text copyright © 1995 by Karen Cushman

The text is set in 12/15-point Joanna

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

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Printed in the USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cushman, Karen. The midwife’s apprentice / by Karen Cushman.

p. cm.

Summary: In medieval England, a nameless, homeless girl is taken in by a sharp-tempered midwife and, in spite of obstacles and hardship, eventually gains the three things she most wants: a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world.

ISBN 0-395-69229-6

[1. Middle Ages—Fiction. 2. Midwives—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.C962Mi 1995

[Fic]—dc20 94-13792

CIP

AC

W
hen animal droppings and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat. Usually no one gets close enough to notice because of the stench. But the girl noticed and, on that frosty night, burrowed deep into the warm, rotting muck, heedless of the smell. In any event, the dung heap probably smelled little worse than everything else in her life—the food scraps scavenged from kitchen yards, the stables and sties she slept in when she could, and her own unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely body.

How old she was was hard to say. She was small and pale, with the frightened air of an ill-used child, but her scrawny, underfed body did give off a hint of woman, so perhaps she was twelve or thirteen. No one knew for sure, least of all the girl herself, who knew no home and no mother and no name but Brat and never had. Someone, she assumed, must have borne her and cared for her lest she toddle into the pond and changed her diapers when they reeked, but as long as she could remember, Brat had lived on her own by what means she could—stealing an onion here or helping with the harvest there in exchange for a night on the stable floor. She took what she could from a village and moved on before the villagers, with their rakes and sticks, drove her away. Snug cottages and warm bread and mothers who hugged their babes were beyond her imagining, but dearly would she have loved to eat a turnip without the mud of the field still on it or sleep in a barn fragrant with new hay and not the rank smell of pigs who fart when they eat too much.

Tonight she settled for the warm rotting of a dung heap, where she dreamed of nothing, for she hoped for nothing and expected nothing. It was as cold and dark inside her as out in the frosty night.

Morning brought rain to ease the cold, and the kick of a boot in Brat’s belly. Hunger. Brat hated the hunger most. Or was it the cold? She knew only that hunger and cold cursed her life and kept her waking and walking and working for no other reason than to stop the pain.

“Dung beetle! Dung beetle! Smelly old dung beetle sleeping in the dung.”

Boys. In every village there were boys, teasing, taunting, pinching, kicking. Always they were the scrawniest or the ugliest or the dirtiest or the stupidest boys, picked on by everyone else, with no one left uglier or stupider than they but her. And so they taunted and tormented her. In every village. Always. She closed her eyes.

“Hey, boys, have off. You’re mucking up the path and my new Spanish leather shoes. Away!

“And you, girl. Are you alive or dead?”

Brat opened one eye. A woman was there, a woman neither old nor young but in between. Neither fat nor thin but in between. An important-looking woman, with a sharp nose and a sharp glance and a wimple starched into sharp pleats.

“Good,” said the woman. “You’re not dead. No need to call the bailiff to cart you off. Now out of that heap and away.”

The fierce pain in her stomach made Brat bold. “Please, may I have some’ut to eat first?”

“No beggars in this village. Away.”

“Please, mistress, a little to eat?”

“Those who don’t work don’t eat.”

Brat opened her other eye to show her eagerness and energy. “I will work, mistress. I am stronger and smarter than I seem.”

“Smart enough to use the heat from the dung heap, I see. What can you do?”

“Anything, mistress. And I don’t eat much.”

The woman’s sharp nose smelled hunger, which she could use to her own greedy purpose. “Get up, then, girl. You do put me in mind of a dung beetle burrowing in that heap. Get up, Beetle, and I may yet find something for you to do.”

So Brat, newly christened Beetle, got up, and the sharp lady found some work for her to do and rewarded her with dry bread and half a mug of sour ale, which tasted so sweet to the girl that she slept in the dung heap another night, hoping for more work and more bread on the morrow. And there was more work, sweeping the lady’s dirt floor and washing her linen in the stream and carrying her bundles to those cottages where a new baby was expected, for the sharp lady was a midwife. Beetle soon acquired a new name, the midwife’s apprentice, and a place to sleep that smelled much better than the dung heap, though it was much less warm.

B
eetle liked to watch the cat stretching in the sunshine, combing his belly with his tongue, chewing the burrs and stubble out from between his toes. She never dared get close, for she was afraid, but even from a distance could tell that there was a gleaming patch of white in the dusty orange of his fur, right below his chin; that one ear had a great bite taken out of it; and that his whiskers were cockeyed, going up on one side and down on the other, giving him a frisky, cheerful look.

Sometimes she left bits of her bread or cheese near the fence post by the river where she first saw him, but not very often, for the midwife was generous only with the work she gave Beetle and stingy with rewards, and the girl was never overfed.

Once she found a nest of baby mice who had frozen in the cold, and she left them by the fence post for the cat. But her heart ached when she thought of the tiny hairless bodies in those strong jaws, so she buried them deep in the dung heap and left the cat to do his own hunting.

The taunting, pinching village boys bedeviled the cat as they did her, but he, quicker and smarter than they, always escaped. She did not, and suffered their pinching and poking and spitting in silence, lest her resistance inspire them to greater torments. Mostly she avoided them and everyone else, hiding when she could, scurrying along hidden, secret paths around the village, her head down and shoulders hunched.

One sunny morning, with stolen bread in her pocket for dinner and a bit of old cheese to share with the cat, Beetle started for the fence post. The boys were already there, holding the cat aloft by his tail. His hissing and screeching sounded like demons to Beetle, and she covered her ears.

“Into the sack with him, Jack,” cried one boy. “We will see whether a cat can best an eel.”

And the sack with eel and cat was tossed into the pond.

Beetle stayed hidden, more afraid to attract the taunts and torments of the boys than to lose the cat.

After a time the tumbling sack sank into the reedy water, and all was still.

“Ah, Jack, you was right. The eel took that cat right down.” And the boy with the runny nose gave two apples to the boy with the broken teeth and they all went back to the fields.

Beetle waited a long time before she came out of hiding and waded into the muddy pond. With a stick broken from a nearby willow she searched through the reedy water, poking around and around the spot where the bag had gone down, working in bigger and bigger circles. Finally, near the edge of the pond, half out of the water, she found the bag, now soggy and still.

She dragged it out of the water, sat back on her heels, and watched. No movement. She poked it with her stick. Nothing.

“Cat,” she asked, “are you drownt? I’d open the sack and let you out, but I be sore afraid of the eel. Cat?”

She kicked the bag with her dirty bare foot. Nothing. She left the bag and started back to the village. Came back. Left again. Came back again.

“The devil take you, cat,” she cried. “I be sore afraid to open that sack, but I can’t just let you be.”

Taking a sharp stone, she slit the bag and ran behind a tree. Looking like the Devil himself, a shiny brown eel slithered out and made for the pond. And the bag was still again.

Beetle watched it. Nothing. She crept closer. Nothing. A sudden movement sent her scurrying back to the tree. And then nothing again. She crept up to the bag and found the scrawny, scruffy orange cat tangled in the soggy sack. Carefully she untangled his limp body and lifted him out of the bag by his front legs. “By cock and pie, cat, I would have you live.”

Ripping a piece from the rag she called her skirt, she wrapped him tightly and ran her secret hidden route back to the village. She scooped a hole in the dung heap and laid the cat in it.

If Beetle had known any prayers, she might have prayed for the cat. If she had known about soft sweet songs, she might have sung to him. If she had known of gentle words and cooing, she would have spoken gently to him. But all she knew was cursing: “Damn you, cat, breathe and live, you flea-bitten sod, or I’ll kill you myself.”

All day the cat lay still in his cave in the dung heap. Beetle stole time from her chores and came often to see him, wrap her skirt more tightly around him, and make sure he still breathed. Twice she left little bits of cheese, but they were not eaten.

When she checked again after supper, as the sun was setting and the mist rising, he was gone and the cheese with him. Nothing in the cave in the dung heap but her bit of raggedy dress and a few threads from the sack, which he must have carefully combed from his fur before setting forth into the night.

And two days later (a holiday for the village, it being Lady Day, but not for Beetle, for the midwife would not feed those who did not work, even on Lady Day) there was the cat sitting on the fence post, licking his white patch to make it whiter still, waiting for Beetle and a bit of cheese. Finally Beetle came and they sat and ate their cheese together, to celebrate Lady Day. And Beetle told him what she could remember of her life before they found each other, and they fell asleep in the sun.

H
er name was Jane. She was known in the village as Jane the Midwife. Because of her sharp nose and sharp glance, Beetle always thought of her as Jane Sharp. Jane Sharp became a midwife because she had given birth to six children (although none of them lived), went Sundays to Mass, and had strong hands and clean fingernails. She did her job with energy and some skill, but without care, compassion, or joy. She was the only midwife in the village. Taking Beetle gave her cheap labor and an apprentice too stupid and scared to be any competition. This suited the midwife.

Beetle slept on the cottage floor and ate two meals a day of onions, turnips, dried apples, cheese, bread, and occasional bits of bacon. This suited Beetle.

And so Beetle remained the midwife’s apprentice as spring drew near and new green shoots appeared on the bare branches of shrubs and trees, and the villagers began ploughing the muddy fields for the summer crops. Beetle sometimes feared Jane Sharp was a witch, for she mumbled to herself and once a pail of milk curdled as she passed, but mostly she knew Jane was just what she first appeared, a woman neither young nor old, neither fat nor thin, with a sharp nose and a sharp glance and a wimple starched into sharp pleats.

Each morning Beetle started the fire, blowing on the night’s embers to encourage them to light the new day’s scraps. She swept the cottage’s dirt floor, sprinkled it with water, and stamped it to keep it hard packed. She roasted the bacon and washed up the mugs and knives and sprinkled fleabane about to keep the fleas down. She dusted the shelves packed with jugs and flasks and leather bottles of dragon dung and mouse ears, frog liver and ashes of toad, snail jelly, borage leaves, nettle juice, and the powdered bark of the black alder tree.

In the afternoon Beetle left the village for the woods, where she gathered honey, trapped birds, and collected herbs, leeches, and spiders’ webs. And the cat went with her.

When they were called, she accompanied the midwife to any cottage where a woman labored to birth her baby, provided that woman could pay a silver penny or a length of newly woven cloth or the best layer in the hen house. Beetle carried the basket with the clean linen, ragwort and columbine seeds to speed the birth, cobwebs for stanching blood, bryony and woolly nightshade to cleanse and comfort the mother, goat’s beard to bring forth her milk and sage tea for too much, jasper stone as a charm against misfortune, and mistletoe and elder leaves against witches.

Beetle waited outside while the midwife did her magic within. The first time they were called to a cottage, Beetle tried to go in, but Jane slapped her, calling her clodpole and shallow-brained whiffler, and made her stay outside where she wouldn’t get in the way.

Often she called Beetle in when it was over to clean out the soiled straw bed and wash the linen while Jane Sharp and the new mother sipped feverfew and nutmeg brewed in hot ale, and once she sent the girl back to the cottage to brew some black currant syrup to fight a new mother’s fever. Beetle began to think perhaps she was kept out not because she was stupid, but to keep her in ignorance of the midwife’s skills and spells. And she was right.

As the weather warmed and the villagers began digging long furrows in the field to take the seed, Beetle found herself doing more and more of the collecting and stewing and brewing, while Jane Sharp spent her time haggling over her fees. Twice the midwife refused to come to laboring mothers who had nothing to pay, and so the unfortunate women had to bring forth their babies with none but a neighbor to help.

The midwife’s greed angered the villagers, but they needed her and so took out their anger not on Jane Sharp but on her apprentice, needed by no one. Beetle endured their anger and their taunts in silence and complained only to the cat, who listened and sometimes rubbed his head on her legs in sympathy.

When spring arrived with soft breezes and meadows grown green, the villagers began sowing early peas and barley, followed by the village boys who threw stones at the hungry birds trying to eat the seed. Jack and Wat threw stones too at Beetle and the cat who followed her, which made the villagers laugh. Beetle was only the midwife’s stupid apprentice and no care to them.

One morning not too long before Mayday, Kate the weaver’s daughter lay down in the field and declared her baby was coming right there and right then. Her father, Robert Weaver, and her husband, Thomas the Stutterer, tried to carry her back to their cottage, but she screamed and threw her arms about, so there was nothing to do but mound up some clean straw for a bed and bring the midwife out to the field.

Jane Sharp looked at the girl, settled the fee with Thomas, and rolled up her sleeves. She sent Beetle back to the cottage to pack a basket of necessaries. “And don’t drop or forget anything, you with the brains of a chicken. And don’t dawdle.”

Beetle grabbed bottles off the shelf and bunches of dried herbs from the ceiling beams, surprised at how much she knew, how she could recognize the syrups and powders and ointments and herbs from their look and their smell, since the midwife could not write to make labels and Beetle would not have been able to read them even if she could.

Kate was laboring in the field, not at ploughing or sowing or weeding but at making a “way for her baby into the world. As Beetle watched, Jane moved Kate up onto her knees and shouted, ”Push, you cow. If an animal can do it, you can do it.“ And Kate pushed, as Jane the Midwife eased the child out of his mother and into her hands. It put Beetle in mind of the time she got the cat out of the bag. And she temporarily forgave the midwife her sharpness for the magic of her spells and the miracle of her skills.

After that Beetle took to watching through the windows when the midwife was called. In that way she learned that midwifery was as much about hard work and good sense and comfrey tonic as spells and magic.