The Midwife's Apprentice: Chapters 6–9

The midwife had lost another tooth, and was hobbling about on her broken ankle, throwing copper pots and cooking spoons about the cottage in her anger at age and teeth and life.

And as she punctuated each name with another pot thrown in the girl’s direction, Beetle thought to go out.

“Gone completely daft, have you, Beetle?” said the miller as he passed.

While Beetle and Purr walked in the sunshine, waiting for the midwife’s temper to cool enough for them to beg bread and cheese and an onion or two, the villagers brought in the last sheaves from the field and, hay harvest over, sat down to eat and drink and give thanks the rain had held off.

But the water pulled Will under for a moment and the boys, grown sober and scared, knocked one another aside in their attempts to get out of there to a place they could claim they had never left when poor Will’s drowned body was found.

Fully half the villagers ran away from the manor road, but the other half ran toward it, making sure the priest and the holy water preceded them.

The priest decided that Wat’s gluttony and deceit were the fault of the Devil and not of the boy, so Wat’s face was not branded, but William Reeve’s bad-tempered pigs were in his care from that day on.

“Are you demon or redheaded lout?” she called.

She took a handful of nuts, the biggest and hardest and heaviest in her basket, and heaved them at the boys.

It was fortunate that the boys never tested Alyce’s magic, for the bottle she shook so fiercely at them was naught but blackberry cordial she was to deliver to Old Anna on her way home from nutting in the woods, and although it would have made the boys purple and sticky, no harm would have befallen them and never would they have been able to give birth like a woman.

It was fortunate that the boys never tested Alyce’s magic, for the bottle she shook so fiercely at them was naught but blackberry cordial she was to deliver to Old Anna on her way home from nutting in the woods, and although it would have made the boys purple and sticky, no harm would have befallen them and never would they have been able to give birth like a woman.

She couldn’t see the figure on the bed at first for all the smoke, and then realized that the writhing mound was Joan, the bailiff's proud wife who washed her linen each week and never let herself be seen without shoes even in summer, and there she was, a moaning, mewling mound on a straw bed.

The moaning, mewling mound spoke, not, as Alyce expected, frantically or madly, but calmly and reasonably, asking for death.

“Don’t sham me, Beetle. I know this babe is stuck and will never be born and we will both die soon and why not now? Surely the midwife has something in her basket to help us along?”

Then, as the hot pains invaded her body, she shouted and thrashed and flailed, shrieking and kicking.