The Midwife's Apprentice: Chapters 10–13

She discovered that an eggshell full of the juice of leeks and mallows will make a labor quicker, that rubbing the mother’s belly with the blood of a crane can make it easier, that birth wort roots and flowers can strengthen contractions in a reluctant mother...

"Such treachery! Such thievery! Eating my bread and stealing my mothers! Go!”

Alyce rubbed and crooned and fussed, as she had with the bailiff’s wife.

Anointing her hands with cornmeal and oil, she rubbed and kneaded, pulled and tugged, and turned that baby from both the inside and the outside until finally he was in a position to come out.

All was chaos, noise and heat and blood, until finally over the tumult Alyce could hear the cries of a baby, the moans of a tired mother, and the laughter of the triumphant midwife.

...while Alnoth the Saxon cleaned the manor privies and cursed God for making him a peasant and not a lord...

Soon it was Christmas and the inn teemed with folk going away or coming home.

Magister Reese, it was said, was a renowned scholar.

“This, puss,” he said, shifting the sleeping animal off the page he was writing, “is my masterwork, an encyclopaedic compendium I call ‘The Great Mirror of the Universe Wherein You Can Find Reflected All of the World’s Knowledge, Collected by Myself, Magister Richard Reese, M.A., and Dedicated to His Ampleness the Bishop of Chester,’ so called for he is ample in all the world’s virtues.”

Or “See how I can make the ink blacker by mixing soot with the boiled oak galls.”

Q was by far the most beautiful, she thought, even if it could not stand alone and must be accompanied everywhere by the compliant U.

When one day he threw away a page he had ruined with an inkblot, Alyce snatched it up and stuffed the stiff vellum into her bodice.

The girl didn’t steal food, sneak ale, or dally with the guests.

As spring burst into May and the trees were all flowers and Magister Reese decided to stay for one more season, there came to the inn a comely young man who acted so lordly Alyce thought he must be a knight or a mayor but proved to be the carpenter’s assistant from the manor.

Alyce’s face grew hot and then as cold as bare feet in January; her throat tickled and her eyes stung as she imagined the midwife telling Magister Reese of the girl’s stupidity, her incompetence, and her failure.