The Midwife's Apprentice (3 page)

T
he 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. “Get out of my sight, Dung Beetle, before I squash you.”

“Alyce.”

“What did you call me?”

“Not you, me. Alyce. My name is Alyce.”

“Alyce!” The midwife snorted like Walter Smith’s great black horse, Toby. “Alyce! You look more like a Toad or a Weasel or a Mudhen than an Alyce.” And as she punctuated each name with another pot thrown in the girl’s direction, Beetle thought to go out.

Out was no punishment. Out was where there were no kettles to stir, no bottles to fill, no smoky cooking fire. Out was where the air was cool, this summer morning, although the sun was warm. Out was where Beetle had spent most of her life.

Out was where the cat was. She wanted to tell him about her new name. Alyce. She had not dared yet say it aloud, but now that she had said it to the midwife, she wanted to tell everyone. “Alyce,” she said to the cat, who rubbed and purred against her ankle. “I have a name now, cat, and you must also, so I can call you to breakfast on cold, foggy mornings. I will say some names, and you tell me when I have found the right one.”

Beetle sat on the dusty ground, legs crossed. The cat sat and stared at her. “Willow?” she asked. “Purslane? Gypsy Moth? Lentil?” The cat just stared.

Beetle stood and walked toward the river, one hand across her belly, the other stuck in her mouth. Beetle was thinking. “Bryony? Millstone? Fleecy?”

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

“Alyce,” said Beetle.

“Alyce who? Who Alyce?”

“I am Alyce,” Beetle said. “Not Brat or Dung Beetle or Beetle. Alyce.”

“Bah,” said the miller. “May as well call a rock Alyce. Or a sheep. Alyce. Bah.”

“Earth Pine?” continued Beetle to the cat. “Dartmoor? Cheesemaker? Holly? Pork?”

“Who you callin’ Pork, you whiffle-brained dung beetle?” This from the blacksmith’s lardy daughter, Grommet.

“The cat,” Beetle said, “and I am Alyce.”

“You are nitwit,” Grommet Smith replied, and laughed as she waddled away.

Beetle sighed. This business of having a name was harder than it seemed. A name was of little use if no one would call you by it.

The cat wound himself around Beetle’s ankle and purred. “Columbine? Cuttlefish?”

“Purr,” the cat responded.

“Clotweed? Shrovetide? Wimble?”

“Purr,” the cat responded.

“Horsera—”

“Purr,” the cat demanded.

“Purr?” Beetle asked.

“Purr,” the cat responded. And that was that.

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. Several of the village boys, with too much ale and too few wits, left the celebration looking for trouble to cause. And they found Beetle.

“Dung Beetle, give me a kiss,” called the boy with red hair.

“Alyce,” whispered Beetle, surrounded by boys and abandoned by the cat.

“She calls you Alyce, Will. Thinks you’re a girl or a fine lady down from the manor. You friends with the dung beetle, Lady Alyce?” The boy with the broken teeth took another pull from his mug of ale and spat at Will.

Beetle took advantage of Will’s distraction to duck beneath his arm, loop her skirts between her legs, and take off down the road to the river. The boys were faster, but they were drunk, and Beetle reached the river before they did. She looked for safety. An open field lay to her right. They could catch her there; they were not that drunk. Straight ahead was the river, but she could not swim. No one could. Water was for horses to drink and an occasional quick bath before weddings and such.

A sudden breeze rustled the leaves of a willow, as if it were calling to Beetle. Up she climbed into the branches, treed like a fox, waiting for what would happen next.

Pushing and shoving each other, the boys encircled the tree. “Dung beetle, dung beetle, you must be afeared, so far from your dung,” they chanted. “Come down and we will take you home and lay you softly into the dung heap, deep, deep, deep into the dung heap.”

More ale swigging and chanting and pushing and shoving. Suddenly the boy with red hair lost his footing on the slippery bank and tumbled into the churning river.

“Gorm, Will, get out of there,” said snaggle-toothed Jack.

“Can’t,” said Will, spitting water and floundering. “Throw me somethin’ to grab.”

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. So that, when Will surfaced again, still spitting and floundering, no one was there but Beetle in the tree, looking down at him with her eyes great in her white face.

“Beetle, help me. Throw me somethin’.”

Beetle shook her head. “I be too scared.”

He disappeared again, and Beetle crept carefully out on an overhanging branch to see where he had gone. Sputtering, up he came, too full of water to call her name or beg for help, only looking at her as his arms slapped the water around him.

Beetle crept farther out on her branch. It dipped toward the river. Very slowly, inch by inch, as the boy struggled not to sink, she crept out until the tip of the branch nearly touched the water.

“Grab it, Will,” she said. And he grabbed it. Slowly, slowly he pulled himself along the branch until, from his pulling and Beetle’s weight, it cracked, and they both fell onto the riverbank.

Will lay there while Beetle watched to see was he alive or was he dead. Then he spat river water all over her skirt and she knew he lived to bedevil her again.

“You didn’t run with the others,” he said. “That were brave, Beetle.”

“Naw, I be not brave,” she said. “I near pissed myself. I did it for else you’d have drowned and gone to Hell, a drunken loudmouth bully like you, and I would have helped send you there and I could not have that, now, could I?”

“You have pluck, Beetle.”

“Alyce.”

“You have pluck, Alyce.”

They looked at each other, pretended they hadn’t, and went home. That night Beetle had a dream. The pope came to the village and called her Alyce and the king married the midwife and the cat laughed.

I
f the world were sweet and fair, Alyce (she must be called Alyce now) and Will would become friends and the village applaud her for her bravery and the midwife be more generous with her cheese and onions. Since this is not so, and the world is just as it is and no more, nothing changed. Most of the villagers still paid no attention to Alyce at all. Some were mean, like Grommet Smith, near as big as a dozen Alyces, who would sit on top of the girl so Jack and Wat could rub chicken manure into her hair, or the miller, who pinched her rump when she brought grain to the mill to be ground. And some were kind, or nearly so, like the baker’s wife, who always asked Alyce how she fared on this fine day, and the redheaded Will, who threw fewer stones at her since her saving of him and sometimes stopped the taunting altogether, saying, “Aw, this wag grows boresome. Dick’s granny is hanging out the wash. Let’s go tie knots in his breeches.” And that is the way it was until the day the Devil walked about.

It started with the two-headed calf born to Roger Mustard’s cow, Molly. And then a magpie landed on the miller’s barn and would not be chased away. Suddenly the whole village saw witches and devils everywhere, and fear lived in every cottage.

Alyce, who had slept alone outside in the dark for most of her years, even at fearful times like All Hallows’ Eve and Walpurgis Night, had never yet seen the Devil and had nothing to fear from the night. It was she, then, who was sent to fetch and carry and deliver messages after dark, while the villagers stayed in their smoky cottages. So it was that she saw much of what went on in the village and how people lived their lives and spent their time.

It was so quiet for a few days, with all the villagers inside and idle, that Alyce even had a little time to herself, to wander and think and plan, to watch and learn from old Gilbert Gray-Head about the carving and polishing of wood, and to ask questions of the priest about sin and evil and the Devil, humming to herself all the while.

Then, one damp autumn morning, Robert Weaver found strange footprints, which wound about the village and stopped suddenly at the door of the church. He called Thomas At-the-Bridge, who knew the ways of the woods and the tracks of the animals, to help him discover what sort of beast had been prowling about while they slept.

“Were it a weasel, Thomas?”

“No, that is a hoof. A weasel has toes.”

“A goat, Thomas?”

“No, those prints are much too big for a goat.”

“A pig?”

“No pig has dewclaws like that.”

“A boar, Thomas?”

“With that delicate arch? Never a boar, Robert.”

“What then, Thomas? What has hooves, is larger than a goat, and more delicate than a boar, and walks our village by night but stops outside the door of the church?”

By dinnertime all the village was talking of the strange animal that even Thomas At-the-Bridge could not identify. It only took a few incautious words and fearful whispers to convince them that the Devil had found their village and was looking for souls to lead into sin.

The next day, the strange delicate hoofprints were found walking around Dick’s granny’s cottage and through the barley field. Robert and Thomas and the priest, whispering paternosters, followed the prints all the way to the mill where, crossing themselves, they unlatched the door. The startled miller looked up, caught in the act of putting some of Dick’s granny’s grain into his own sacks.

“The Devil has indeed been here,” cried the priest, “and he has tempted our miller into theft! But let us deal with this thief mercifully, for which of us could withstand the Devil?”

The villagers agreed, and so the miller who had listened to the Devil did not have his hands chopped off, but only stood one day in the rain with his millstone tied about his neck.

The next day all was quiet and it was hoped that the Devil had moved on to tempt another village, but as day passed into evening, Kate the weaver’s daughter ran to the priest with her tale of seeing the Devil’s prints leading to Walter Smith’s barn. The priest and a brave band of villagers armed with rakes and pitchforks and sticks tied into crosses hurried to the barn. The priest sprinkled the door with holy water and threw it open. There, cuddled in the haymow, were Grommet, the smith’s lardy daughter, and the pockmarked pig boy from the manor. The boy gathered his breeches and flung himself out the barn window. Grommet, being larger, moved more slowly and was caught.

For listening to the Devil, Grommet was made to spend the night in prayer and fasting. She wept, though for loss of pride or loss of supper none could say.

As the villagers sat down to their dinners the next day, Wat with the runny nose hurried down the road, calling, “I have seen him, a hairy demon with horns and claws and a great thrashing tail. He is on the road to the manor, looking for souls to take to Hell.” 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.

There was no sign of the Devil on the manor road or in the woods on either side. Finally the villagers started home, and there near Roger Mustard’s cottage were the Devil’s prints, marching down the road, past Dick’s granny’s cottage, around Walter Smith’s barn, and up to the door of William the Reeve’s cottage. Again the villagers flung open the door and again found the Devil had been at work, for there was Wat finishing off William Reeve’s leg-of-mutton dinner.

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.

The next morning it was a larger group of villagers who followed the hoofprints to the woods where the broken-toothed Jack and his friends were clearing brush from Roger Mustard’s field. Likely the Devil had tricked the boys into laziness, for they were found asleep and given a sound beating.

Two days went by with no sign of the Devil. The villagers grew calmer, thinking themselves fortunate not to have been tempted by the Devil and then found out in so public a fashion.

Then, on a misty morning, the Devil walked the village again. By this time no one expected to catch him, but they were eager to see whom they would find in what sin, so all the village followed the prints, except for the midwife, who was called to the manor at the last minute, and Alyce, who was elsewhere.

The parade of villagers laughed and gossiped out of the village and along the Old North Road. As they followed the prints through a field, they grew quiet. The prints stopped near a large tree and so did the villagers. From behind the tree came the call, “Is that you, Jane, my dove?” and out leaped the baker, holding a bunch of Michaelmas daisies and a basket of bread before him.

All was quiet. The baker’s wife stepped forward and took the flowers as the villagers turned and walked away, leaving her to sort out what was the Devil’s work and what the baker’s.

After the departing villagers passed the river, at a spot where the water ran swift and deep, Alyce stepped out of the woods. She took something from under her skirt, threw it into the river, and followed the crowd home. And so it was that all (except the fortunate midwife) who had taunted or tormented Alyce were punished for their secret sins. After this, the Devil was never seen in the village again, and no one but Alyce knew why.

Several days later, in a village where the river meets the sea, there washed up on the banks two blocks of wood carved in the shape of the hooves of some unknown beast. No one could figure what they were or where they had come from, so eventually Annie Broadbeam threw them into her cooking fire and enjoyed a hot rabbit stew on a cool autumn night.