The Midwife's Apprentice: Chapters 14–17

“Alyce, you have not forgot me,” he would cry, throwing his arms about her waist. “Have you come to take me away? I pray you have, for I am desolate here without you and as well am starving and beaten and forced to sleep outside in the snow and no one cares for me.”

She went first to the barn, where the men were sharpening hoes and sickles in preparation for the summer hay cutting.

Alyce left the barn and went next to the smithy, where the manor blacksmith and his apprentices were hammering lumps of iron into shoes for horses.

“You not be twins?” she asked Alyce, peering closer. “I cannot abide twins.”

“No, ma’am, not twins,” answered Alyce again, wondering why twin cows such as Baldred and Billfrith should be such a joy and a boon while twin babies were ill-starred and unlucky.

He told her of the silken-robed lords and ladies who came for feasts and rode out to hunt and danced like autumn leaves in the candlelit great hall, of the visiting knights who clanked their swords against each other as they practiced in the school yard, of the masons who slapped mortar and bricks together to build a great new tower at the corner of the hall that looked to stretch near all the way to heaven.

He told her of the silken-robed lords and ladies who came for feasts and rode out to hunt and danced like autumn leaves in the candlelit great hall, of the visiting knights who clanked their swords against each other as they practiced in the school yard, of the masons who slapped mortar and bricks together to build a great new tower at the corner of the hall that looked to stretch near all the way to heaven.

Just then a party of riders rode into the inn yard—a prosperous-looking man wearing too much jewelry, a stout lady in some obvious discomfort, and their attendants, a man and woman sullen and none too bright looking.

So for a time the inn resounded with the rumble of the thunder, the cries of the laboring mother, and the useless clucking of the woman’s husband.

His mother shouted from inside, “Stomach worm, bah! In truth I thought a dragon was eating my innards. Give the lout to me, I will teach him to give such trouble and pain to his mother.”

The stupefied father took the baby to his mother, who commenced scolding and berating the little fellow, all the while smoothing his black hair and caressing his little hands, until her scolding turned to cooing and his loud cries to gurgles, and mother and child fell asleep there on the inn table.

The stupefied father took the baby to his mother, who commenced scolding and berating the little fellow, all the while smoothing his black hair and caressing his little hands, until her scolding turned to cooing and his loud cries to gurgles, and mother and child fell asleep there on the inn table.

June burst into bloom—daisies, larkspur, meadowsweet and thyme, foxglove and thimbleberry, purple thistle flowers, and yellow whorls of blooming fennel.

From someone who had no place in the world, she had suddenly become someone with a surfeit of places.

Not too long after this the inn, which had been known simply as John Dark’s place, came to be called The Cat and Cheese, marked by a great hanging sign of an orange cat with a morsel of cheese in his paw.