There was an old shop in the town square with a house behind it and a garden in the back. It had once been an apothecary’s, but the family had moved to Eccleston. Torm Sheridan had bought the building from the family before they left but not bothered to have the position filled. A Perpatanian physician had been installed at the keep and given rooms for an infirmary, but he seemed to only treat the keep residents, staff, and guards. No one had sought him out for midwifery.
Instead, though they would not admit to it in daylight, as they had in winters past, the women and even sometimes the men of Sheridan still mounted a horse and rode out to Magda Geist’s littlefarm from which one could see, through her grove of pear and peach trees, the border of Nyossa.
Magda Geist was both a trained midwife and allegedly once a priestess from the earth temples of Tintar. She was viewed upon as a blight and a necessary evil. She had saved too many women from death whilst they delivered their babes. No one wanted to admit they needed “the hag,” but no one wanted to do without her.
Cooped in by the rain of an early autumn day, dreary and morose over the end of our heyday in Nyossa, Rowena and I sat in our mother’s kitchen shelling peas, ears cocked towards the front of the mill house where we heard her speaking with someone, our father interjecting every so often.
“Who is out there?” my twin asked.
I shrugged. I could not recognize the voice nor ascertain whether it was a man’s or a woman’s. The men who worked in the mill had gone home for the day. My mother was seeing to my father’s comfort as he sat by the fire and waited for his dinner. Occasionally another elder or Father Starling might visit, but their voices carried more.
“I think it’s a woman,” I said eventually.
“Sounds like,” agreed Rowena, and then she jumped on her stool a little when the door swung open and our mother told us to come out to the front room.
When we did, we found a woman somewhere between sixty and seventy, sturdy in her stature if slightly stooped, standing in front of the front fireplace where my father sat in his chair, a gold coin in his hands.
I was unsure where to look first, at the coin cast in a metal I had never seen before, or at the woman whom I had seen but never spoken to.
“Magda,” said my mother, her hand on Rowena’s shoulder, “this is Rowena and Roberta. Girls, this is Madam Geist. The midwife.”
We both gave her polite nods.
Her shrewd, bark-brown eyes raked over us. “Yes, they’ll do.”
“I haven’t accepted your offer, woman,” my father grumbled, but his eyes stayed on the gold in his hands.
“We’ll do for what?” I asked without thinking.
Both my mother and Rowena looked to me and then to my father, expecting a reprimand.
He was still fixated on the coin and had not noticed my impertinence. “Tell me your terms again.”
Magda Geist had noticed my outburst and spoke her reply to me. “Both girls will apprentice under me until they reach their majority. They’ll train under me in midwifery and herbalism. And once they come of age, I will recommend to the lord which one should run the apothecary for him.”
“You pit us against each other?” I said.
Magda was smiling at me.
My father replied as if I had not spoken. “And what will the other girl do?”
The older woman smacked her tongue against the inside of her teeth. “Marry, of course. They’re both pretty. Very pretty. Or there’s always foraging work to be done.”
“And,” my mother added, “the more women that know how to deliver a babe, the better. As you well know, my dear.” She said the last part softly to my father.
There was a pause when he remembered that she had nearly lost her life delivering us. Then my father said, “Explain the gold. I thought parents paid to have their children take an apprenticeship. How will you cover the cost of two more mouths to feed now?”
Excitement leapt in my breast. Everyone knew that the one person who did not have to attend church and was not fined for missing it was Magda Geist. Lord Torm and also Father Starling had claimed her presence was too great a risk, that she could curse the township with her attendance and so she was exempt from paying a fine for not attending. Would we also be exempt should we be apprenticed to her? Would we live on her little farm? The idea of living so near Nyossa delighted me.
Rowena’s eyes were wide but more so with confusion.
“Well,” Magda Geist was saying. “I rob your wife of not one but two daughters. I would assume she may need to hire a little help now. Take the gold and the ease it will bring.”
My father scowled at her. “Bold of you, hag, to suggest how I spend the gold I’ve yet to accept from you. And why the two of them?” he asked. “Why not pick one and teach her?”
The midwife lifted a shoulder. “Some girls don’t have the stomach for this work. I’ll hope that at least one of them does.”
My mother had stepped next to my father and was bending over him, speaking in a low voice while he returned to turning the coin over in his hand.
