The Midwife's Tale(12)

“Never mind that,” I said. “We need to think before we find ourselves in even more trouble.” The shock of the attack had worn off, and I took a deep breath and examined our circumstances just as I would a perilous birth. From a practical perspective, the problem was not that my maidservant had just slashed a soldier’s throat—from ear to ear, by the look of her dress—but that she was walking through the center of York covered in blood. In that light, the solution was obvious. We had to get her off the street and into a new set of clothes.

“Martha, we’ve got to go home.” I stopped. “Do you have the knife?” I asked.

“I’m no fool. I left it by the body.”

“Good. Let’s see what we can do about your clothes until we get home.” I pulled her into a doorway, untied her apron, and rolled it into a ball. It wouldn’t do to simply drop it—naturally, the authorities would suspect a man had done the killing and I saw no reason to dispel that illusion. I then turned her cloak inside out, hiding the worst of the blood. “This way,” I said. I led her down a small side street. The overhanging buildings made the street darker and thus more dangerous, but it also meant that anyone we met would be less likely to notice the blood on Martha’s clothing. For the time being, the trained bands were as much a threat as another brigand.

We wound our way back toward St. Helen’s, avoiding the larger streets when we could, and arrived without incident at the stables behind my house where I kept my horses. Before the siege, Hannah and I rode them to births in the suburbs or to visit friends in the country, but with the city closed they were trapped and restless. The smell of blood unnerved them all the more—they began to nicker and neigh loudly enough that I feared they might rouse my neighbors. I quickly gave them a measure of grain each, which quieted them. I helped Martha strip down to her shift, and then we looked up at my house. All the windows were dark, and while the back door would be padlocked, Hannah had left the kitchen window open a few inches. The hard part would be reaching the window, for it was six feet above ground level.

I can only imagine how the scene that followed would have appeared to my neighbors, had they cared to open their shutters and peer into my yard. Martha and I tried to keep to the shadows as we slunk across the yard to my window. She wore nothing but her shift, while I carried her blood-soaked skirts wrapped in her equally bloody cloak. Martha crouched below the window and helped me up so that I could clamber through. I stood quietly in the kitchen, hoping that Hannah would not burst in and start screaming for the local watch. When she didn’t, I retrieved the key to the padlock and opened the door for Martha. She stepped into the kitchen and slipped into the shadows. Without a word I opened the oven door and stoked the fire that Hannah had banked a few hours earlier. I added a few coals and followed them with Martha’s bloody clothes. I gestured for Martha to wait there and slipped into the buttery, where I knew we had stored some older clothes. Since Martha could not parade through York dressed like a gentlewoman, I had to choose carefully, but with a little digging I found clothes appropriate to her station. It was possible that Hannah would recognize the pieces, but it was not her place to ask questions. I went out the back door, and Martha locked it behind me. With surprising grace, she perched on the windowsill, closed the window behind her, and dropped to the ground. Once back in the stable she dressed quickly, and we departed once again for Elizabeth Asquith’s house, giving the scene of our earlier adventure as wide a birth as possible.

“Won’t they wonder where we’ve been?” Martha asked as we walked.

“They’ll wonder, and they may talk among themselves, but they’re unlikely to say anything.” I smiled faintly. “It’s one of the benefits of rank.” You can get away with murder, I thought to myself.

Mercifully, we arrived at Elizabeth Asquith’s home without further incident. A servant met us at the door and ushered us into Elizabeth’s chamber. The room glowed with the light of beeswax candles, and a half dozen women from the neighborhood surrounded Elizabeth. Many of them were my clients, and they offered Martha and me a warm welcome. Some women sipped small cups of wine, and Elizabeth’s servants had laid out a plate of bread and cheese on a table near the door. I made my way over to Elizabeth.

“How is your labor?” I asked. This was her sixth child, and she had attended the deliveries of many of her friends, so by this time she would know the signs if the birth was close.

“Tolerably well,” she said. “The child is beginning to push his way down, but there is time yet.”