“This is not the end of motherhood for you though. You’re young and strong. We’ll help get you through this. And you’ll most likely have other children. They won’t heal this wound, but you’ll have them. And you will always think of this babe with a deep and boundless affection. It is not lost to you in spirit.” Magda looked up from the woman to the servants. “The two of you need to bring me the coldest water you can pump from whatever wells the lord has,” she said to the servants. “Off with you, if you please. Thank you.”
After the two women left, she instructed me to bar the door. Then she turned back to the lady and said, “I worry for your life. We can hurry the delivery with a medicinal and then we will need to remove the afterbirth with my tools. You’ll have a better chance of recovery that way. You’ve bled a lot without the babe’s delivery. How long has it been?”
Gayla whimpered that she could not remember but she had begun to bleed in the morning.
“They’ve let you be like this for far too long. Do you want what I can offer, or do you want to keep waiting? Either way, a savvy crone like me knows. It is too early and the babe is gone. Your choice, my girl.”
“It’s not a sin as the child is already gone?”
“It’s no sin, girl. What god would want you to suffer so?”
Magda talked the woman through her work tenderly.
Ignoring the knocking on the door, we held the woman betweenus afterward and clumsily bathed her with cloths and the lukewarm water left over in a jug at her bedside. We helped her dress in fresh clothing. We gave her yarrow and linens to staunch her blood and some lightleaf for the pain. We sat with her, and Magda distracted her with talk of how strong she was, how she was in good health and this could happen with a woman’s first quickening.
The lady-in-waiting was utterly exhausted, and though she was not asleep, she was drowsy and closed her eyes.
My mentor looked down at her patient, stroking the woman’s cheek with the back of her hand. Then Magda got a faraway, ruminating look on her face, as if she might cry, and I grew afraid for she never had any expression other than wryness or contempt. She blinked, turned to me, and said, “Are you ready for your mantle, daughter?”
“Mantle?”
“For it begins now. You will take it up tonight, or tomorrow if they drag it out,” she replied. “Clean off the tools for the act of care and put them inside your stays. Make sure they are secure.”
With her gaze on me, I did so.
Raising her voice, still looking at me, she called out, “Robbie, see to the door! They’ve been trying to get in all this time, girl!”
Perturbed, as she had told me to ignore the knocking, I lifted the bar.
Starling, Torm and Bertram Sheridan, and six guards burst into the room, stepping past me with little to no regard.
“What is this?” thundered the priest. He looked around, and there was something too practiced in his manner, like he had rehearsed his outrage. “Why so much blood on these clothes? Where is the babe? There are no cries. There is no happy mother.”
The lady-in-waiting gasped, eyes flying open, and drew her bedding around her neck, though her fresh nightgown reached her chin and showed nothing of her body.
“What is this business, Magda?” Torm asked.
The men circled the chair where the midwife sat at the bedside.
“The hag has killed the babe!” exclaimed Bertram. “It is as you said it would be, Father.”
“I knew it was a trap the moment I saw the woman,” Magda laughed. “And you knew I wouldn’t abandon her. You must havethrilled, Starling, at this lady’s misery and misfortune. You found yourself an opportunity. You have caught me out. What will it be? A death in the keep prison? A hanging?”
“’Twill be no hanging, madam,” answered one of the guards.
I heard the clip of his accent. He was Perpatanian.
“I think you know, foul creature,” Starling answered, and he could not keep the vindication from his manner.
“What is going on?” I sputtered.
The rest of them spared me but a glance as Father Starling began to list a litany of scriptures as to why Magda had committed a crime, but Torm Sheridan turned and looked me up and down.
I and the lord faced each other for a breath. There was a brief fragility in his features that I could not understand, but just as I glimpsed it, it disappeared. And we were both distracted by the tumult going on at the bedside of the now-shivering lady-in-waiting.
“Is it a sin to relieve a woman of suffering and also likely save her life?” the midwife asked, almost casual in her query.
“I know not of what you speak! I know only what the scriptures say, and they say that no one, no mortal soul, should interfere with?—”
