The Midwife's Tale(13)

I nodded and turned to tell Martha to bring me the birthing stool so I could show her how the parts fit together. To my surprise, I found it sitting next to the bed, fully assembled. I looked for Martha and saw her across the room, pointing at the half-empty bottles of wine and giving instructions to one of the servants. She turned around and scanned the chamber, apparently looking for anything else that might be amiss.

Elizabeth looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “She is new to your household, isn’t she? Has she done this before?” she asked.

I shook my head as I led her over to the bed and eased her onto her back. “She is full of surprises. If I told you what else she can do, you wouldn’t believe me.” I oiled my hand and checked the child. His head was down, praise God, but his mother was right in saying he would not enter the world for some time.

“Martha,” I called out. She came over immediately, carrying herself more like the midwife in charge of the proceedings than a servant in an unfamiliar situation. I could not help seeing some of myself in her ability to take control of the delivery room and wondered if God had sent me a deputy as well as a maidservant. “Have the servants bring Mrs. Asquith some chicken and a poached egg. Then fetch her a glass of wine.”

“Yes, my lady,” she said, and slipped out of the room.

“Your new servant is holding up well, then?” Elizabeth asked. “At least you haven’t scared her off like the last girl you hired.”

The image of Martha stripping a soldier of his knife and then killing him with it sprang to mind. “She doesn’t frighten easily. You should have seen the dressing-down she gave a grocer’s apprentice in the market. He was nearly in tears.” We laughed at the thought.

I helped Elizabeth back to her feet, and we resumed the merry business of gossiping. As usual, the chief topic of discussion was the lives of our neighbors. We discussed Anna Thompson’s husband, who had been seen pawing a serving-wench at an alehouse. It wasn’t the first time he’d behaved so badly, and the anger toward him was palpable. A few days later, I heard that one of Anna’s neighbors had “accidentally” emptied a chamber pot on his head as he walked down Coneystreet, and I imagine that another in our company had some hard words for the serving-wench. When husbands could not be trusted, respectable women turned to their gossips.

As morning approached, Elizabeth’s pains came closer together. Elizabeth preferred the birthing stool, so Martha and I helped her there, and I applied oil of lilies and a beaten egg to her privy passage to smooth the child’s journey.

I checked the child and found his head was entering the neck of her womb. “The next time he pushes,” I reminded Elizabeth, “you must hold your breath.” She nodded. On that day God blessed Elizabeth with a strong bairn, who entered the world just a few minutes later. I told Martha to look in my valise for my commonplace book that contained recipes useful to laboring women and new mothers.

“Near the back is my recipe for caudle. If the kitchen has a red wine, use that instead of the ale. If they have cinnamon, make sure to add that as well.”

She nodded, found the book, and dashed off to the kitchen. A few minutes later, she reappeared with the mixture of spiced wine and havermeal. I washed and swaddled the baby, and as Elizabeth sipped the caudle, I helped myself to a cup of sack. I was about to direct Martha to clean and disassemble the birthing stool when Faith Bray burst into the room.

“Stephen Cooper is dead!” she announced. The women began to chatter, but Faith recaptured their attention when she added, “They say he was murdered.”





Chapter 4


With that, Faith became the center of our attention. Despite her fatigue, Elizabeth waved Faith to her bedside so she could join in the questioning. The child was asleep and we all knew Esther—we could hardly ignore the murder of her husband. It soon became clear that these few words had largely exhausted Faith’s knowledge on the subject. She didn’t know when he had died or where his body had been found. How he had died remained a mystery, as did the question of whether anyone had been arrested. The group became exasperated with Faith’s inability to offer more detail, so the women began to fill it in on their own. Esther was distraught, or at least everyone imagined she must be. Did anyone else think that he must have been killed by a business rival? Or had the siege so disrupted his trade that he took his own life? Soon the theories became so fantastical that I could not bear to hear another, so I packed my valise while Martha disassembled my birthing stool. We said our good-byes, wished Elizabeth well, and started for home.