Tidelands Read online

  “She’s not a heifer waiting to calve!” Mrs. Grace objected.

  “If I have to help the baby out, it’s better,” Alinor said quietly.

  “She’ll catch her death!” the woman warned.

  The young woman was growing uneasy, her moans of pain coming more quickly. “Is it now?” she asked Alinor.

  “It’s soon,” Alinor confirmed. “Do you want to kneel up on the bed?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know . . .”

  “You see where you feel best,” Alinor advised her, and watched the girl move around, now leaning over the bed, now lying down. Finally, she settled on the wooden floor, her back against the bed, and the older women gave her a peeled wand of wood to bite and offered her a rope to heave on during the birth. Alinor stood back until they started to speak of the ordeal that was coming and that it might last for hours, even days, and how they had suffered. Then she stepped forward.

  “The baby is coming,” she told the young woman. “Just let it come. There’s no need for pulling on a rope. All the work is in your belly.”

  Wide-eyed, the girl saw Alinor’s face shining with calm conviction. “This is the best day’s work we will ever do,” Alinor said. “Let the baby come.”

  The girl squatted, holding to the post of the bed, her belly standing up, every muscle rigid, and she groaned. Alinor knelt before her, watching her frightened face, calming her with a hand on her shoulder. She could see her belly standing up in a spasm, and urged her to push and then rest.

  “I can feel! I can feel it . . .”

  The women wailed in a wordless chorus with her. “That’s right,” Alinor said, intently watching the young woman. Then finally she said: “Wait, wait, I can see the head!”

  There was a gasp of pleasure and excitement in the room, and everyone crowded closer. “Here you are,” said Alinor, her voice filled with joy as she gently took hold of the baby’s head and slippery shoulders and, moving with the mother’s rhythm, swaying with her, brought the baby into the world. Skillfully she held it by its feet, like a writhing mackerel, and slapped it gently on the back to clear the breath, and then bent her head and sucked the baby’s nose and mouth and spat the liquor and blood on the floor. There was a brief silence, a waiting silence, and they all heard the muffled cough and then the wail as the newborn baby breathed air for the first time.

  “A girl,” Alinor said. “A girl.” The cord still pulsed, and the baby opened her mouth and cried. Alinor looked at the perfect hands, the wrinkled skin smeared with white wax and blood, the dark hair plastered on the tiny head, and the small flushed protesting face. She felt the tears rush to her eyes and bit her lip to prevent herself from weeping for pity and joy. “A girl,” she said again. “A precious girl, a gift from God Himself.”

  “Mrs. Reekie, are you all right yourself?” someone asked, and Alinor, recalled to her work, turned to the mother and with her hand still on the pulsing birth cord, delivered the afterbirth. Mrs. Grace held out the shawl that she had kept for her grandchild, and Alinor wrapped the tiny baby closely and handed her to the grandmother, as the young mother climbed onto the bed and Alinor sponged her parts and bound them with moss, her hands moving with their skill while her head was dizzy with the realization that this baby was a precious gift of life, that every baby was precious beyond imagining, that no baby should be lost if they could be saved, if they could have a life where they were loved and cherished.

  All the women crowded around, passing the baby from one to another, admiring her and cooing over her. When the baby came back to Alinor, she tied off the cord, snipped it neatly, and handed the baby to the mother. “Here,” she said. “Your little girl.”

  It was as if the baby had come to Alinor’s hands to bring her a message, like the robin might sing in her hedge or the seagulls cry over her cottage. “God bless her, and make her well and strong,” Alinor said, watching the tiny little head and the way that the dark blue eyes blinked open to see the world for the very first time.

  Young Lisa Auster was flushed and proud, leaning back on the heaped bedding, her neighbors crowding round to see the baby and kiss her.

  “Let’s put her to the breast,” Alinor suggested, and waited while the young mother and the baby fumbled towards each other, putting one gentle hand on Mrs. Grace’s arm to stop her from interfering.

  “Is that right?” the young mother asked. “I don’t know if that’s right.” Then she grimaced as the baby latched on.

  “That’s right!” Alinor said, beaming with a sense of inexplicable joy. “And it will hurt more, before it hurts less, but you will feel the foremilk come down and you can see the baby is sucking.”

  She watched the two of them for a moment and then she realized that she was standing, smiling in silence, as if she had realized something of great importance at this poor fishwife’s bedside that she had never known before.

  “It is a gift,” she whispered. “Life. Precious.”

  “I hoped it would have a caul,” Mrs. Grace said. “All of us fishwives would like our babies born with a caul, to protect against drowning.”

  Alinor nodded. “I know.”

  “If you have a caul or even a part of one, I would buy it from you?”

  “No, I don’t trade in such things.”

  “I thought you were a wisewoman with herbs and secret things?”

  “Just herbs,” Alinor said levelly. “No secret things.”

  “Not faerie gold? I heard you had faerie gold.”

  “I pick up little tokens and pretty shells when I see them. Nothing more than that. Just keepsakes, nothing with any meaning.”

  “I thought a woman might come to you for all sorts of needs?”

  “I’ve got a need. You could give my old man a potion!” someone interrupted, to bawdy laughter.

  Alinor smiled as if she thought it was funny, though she was tired of the question. “I’m sorry, but I only have herbs for illnesses. I sell herbs and attend births, and sometimes I do nursing. I have to take care, Mrs. Grace. You will understand. I have to take care of my good name.”

  The woman nodded, disbelieving. “But they say you can do all sorts of things. They say you speak to the other world. And they help you.”

  Alinor shook her head. “I can do nothing better than this,” she insisted, looking once again at the girl lying back exhausted in the bed, her face alight with joy, and the baby suckling at her breast. “I think there is nothing finer than this in the whole world. This world—I know nothing about any other.”

  “Is she well?” Lisa asked. “She’s feeding well, isn’t she?”

  Alinor smiled at her. “She’s very well, and when your husband comes home, he will love you both. And now . . .” Alinor started to collect up the bottles of oil and the box of dried moss, and pack them in her sack. “Now I’ll go home to my cottage. And if you wish, I’ll come back tomorrow to see how you do.”

  “Jem can go with you with a lantern,” Mrs. Grace offered, producing a sixpence. “And I will pay you another shilling when you come tomorrow. I am grateful, Mrs. Reekie. We both are. I hope we have your goodwill? I hope the baby has your good wishes?”

  “It is my joy. Praise God,” Alinor said, hardly hearing the odd question. She said good night to the other women, hefted her sack, pulled her cape around her and put her hood over her head, and followed Jem’s wavering light up the narrow lanes of East Beach.

  It was too dark to go across the harbor with the tide coming in, so they went the long way, up the Chichester road, north till they saw the light from the window of Ferry-house. Jem went all the way ahead of her, lantern held high at his side to light her path, as if he was afraid to walk abreast with a wisewoman. He only paused when they got to the brink of the rife and the reflection of the moon, silver on the water, made his lantern seem yellow and weak.

  “I’m safe from here,” Alinor said. “I know the way, even in the dark. You can go home.”

  He ducked his head and though she held out half a penny
to him, he turned away.

  “Here,” she said. “This is for you. Thank you for bringing me to Mrs. Auster and home again.”

  “I don’t dare to take it,” he said, stepping back, whipping his hands behind his back.

  “What d’you mean?” Still, she held out the coin.

  “It’s faerie gold, I know it!” he burst out. “I’m glad you were pleased with my service, your ladyship. I’ll go now, if you will release me.” He looked ready to run.

  “What did you call me? Boy—Jem—you know that I’m nothing but the widow of the fisherman Zachary Reekie,” Alinor said. “You know I work as a midwife. I don’t do anything else. I have no faerie gold. There’s no call to name me ladyship!”

  He was walking backwards, without taking his fearful eyes off her, his face ghastly in the lantern light, hurrying to get away from her. “They told me,” he whispered, “that you know things that no mortal woman knows. That your boy lives like a lord at the Priory, and your daughter is to marry the richest farmer in Sussex.”

  “Well, no—” Alinor started.

  “Missis, did you whistle up a storm that blew your husband away?”

  Alinor tried to laugh, but his fear was infectious. “This is nonsense,” she said, her voice unsteady. “And Mrs. Grace knows it’s nonsense, for she sent you for a good honest midwife and I came.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “Not her. They were afraid to send for anyone else in case you ill-wished us. So I fetched you with my fingers crossed, and then you came to her on horseback like a queen, and you sent Sir William’s own son to do your bidding. Good night, Mrs. Reekie, your honor. Good night.”

  Alinor let him go, too shaken to press the coin on him, too frightened by his wide-eyed fear to laugh him into common sense. When Zachary had accused her of being in league with powers beyond this earth, she had taken it as the exaggerated language of courtship when he first saw her, and part of his hatred, as the marriage soured. That he should sow such dangerous slander to his drinking companions and that it should flower into these envious fantasies was something she had never dreamed.

  Of course, people would wonder at Rob’s good fortune and Alys’s betrothal, but she had not thought that people would weave Zachary’s superstitious hatred and her survival together into a faerie story of Zachary’s doom and her revenge. It was a dark note at the end of a day that had started with thoughts of drowning and dark water. She trudged along the bank, the mud crunching with frost beneath her worn boots, opened the door, and went in.

  The cottage was in darkness, the fire under the cover, the candles snuffed out. Alys was asleep on her side of the bed and Alinor felt nothing but relief that she need not speak another word until the morning.

  DOUAI, FRANCE, OCTOBER 1648

  James spent a week in penitent silence, sleepless with the conflicting sense of guilt and desire. Every day he met with his confessor and step-by-step they went through his first encounter with Alinor, that she had saved him and without her he would have been lost on the unmapped tidelands. She had been a savior to him.

  “But she is not your savior,” Father Paul said quietly as they knelt side by side in the chapel and looked up at the altar where the crucified Christ looked down on them, his painted face downcast. “She is no angel. She is an earthly woman and naturally disposed to sin.”

  James bowed his head. He could not deny that she was disposed to sin. He spoke of the afternoon in the boat, he spoke of her desire. He spoke of the color of her hair and how a curl escaped from her cap and blew against her face. He spoke of her scarred hands and her rough linen.

  “She was born into poverty, set in her place by God. It is not for you to defy God and rescue her. Did she ask to be baptized into the true faith?”

  “No,” James said quietly.

  “You have nothing else to offer her.”

  His voice low and ashamed, James spoke of the feel of her mouth under his, of the strength of her body under the bulky clothes. He spoke of her smile and her little indrawn breath of desire. He said that when he touched her hand, her waist, her breast, he felt that he was, for the first time, a man. That he became himself, in loving her.

  “A woman cannot bring insight,” Father Paul corrected him. “You do not know yourself by knowing her. All she taught you is carnal knowledge, that is all she knows.”

  “But that was everything!” James said simply. He did not speak of the loft over the stable, nor of her beauty in the morning light when she had been as naked as Eve and as innocent as Paradise. “I love her, Father. Sin or not.”

  “It is sin,” the priest steadily replied. “Don’t call it ‘sin or not,’ as if you had not received instruction, as if God had not given you reason. It is sin and you must put it from you.”

  James sat back on his heels, his face pale. “To abandon her would break my word. I have asked her to be my wife.”

  “You are not free to ask her.”

  “And she was not free to consent,” James conceded. “They speak against her . . .”

  “What do they say?”

  “Nothing, superstitious nonsense, malice, all malice. Her own husband said she was whore to the faeries,” James tried to laugh. “Ignorant nonsense, that foolish countrypeople—”

  His confessor did not laugh with him. “My son, you and I, far away from them, don’t know what they are speaking of. You can’t say that it is nonsense, you don’t know what she has done. We would have to inquire. A witchfinder would have to visit and ask questions. This is very serious. Does she have marks upon her?”

  “No!” James was horrified.

  “Does she fear the word of God in church, or the works of God, like deep water or high cliffs?”

  James hesitated, thinking of her horror of water.

  “Does she have a familiar, an animal that communes with her?”

  He thought of the hens that clucked around her feet and slept in the corner of the little cottage, of Red the dog, of the bees, of the robin in her garden: “But this is her life . . .”

  “Is her husband not likely to know better than you, who has been seduced by her? What if she is beautiful because Satan has thrown a glamour on her? What if she makes spells as well as physic? You told me that she expected to speak with the dead? What if this is not a helpless poor woman but an evil one?”

  TIDELANDS, OCTOBER, 1648

  Alys woke to the familiar sound of the small ale being poured from the jug and the scrape of the wooden spoon in the bottom of the iron pot of gruel. She got up from the bed and pushed her tumbled hair out of her eyes, pulling on her shirt over her head, and stepping into her skirt, haphazard, without looking.

  Alinor pulled up her stool at the table and bowed her head in grace as Alys sat down at the other side and said: “Amen.”

  They ate in silence and then Alys got to her feet and fetched the comb for her hair. Without speaking she handed it to her mother and sat at her feet as if she were a little girl again. Alinor gently unbraided her daughter’s long fair hair and combed it, gently teasing out every tangle and picking out the occasional twig or piece of straw.

  “What on earth have you been doing?” she asked as she tossed a leaf into the fire.

  “Picking sloes,” Alys replied. “Since Mrs. Miller learned that Richard and I are to be married, she sends me out over the fields. As if she can stop us seeing each other! As if she gets any gain by putting me to humble work.”

  Alinor combed the golden sweep of hair, watching the light fall on the thick waves, and then started to plait, starting from the front, so that it coiled around Alys’s pretty head.

  “Have you decided?” Alys asked quietly, looking up trustingly into her mother’s face. “I came home early to help you, and Uncle told me you’d been called to East Beach. But I’ve told Mrs. Miller I was ill. She won’t expect me today. I can stay home today and help you be rid of this.”

  “I have decided what to do.” Alinor drew a breath and told her. “It came to me yesterday almost
like a vision, Alys, when I delivered Lisa Auster’s baby. I held her in my arms. She was no bigger than a kitten, and I saw how precious she was, such a miracle. Everything about her was perfect; she was a tiny person, her little eyelashes and her nails as small as the smallest shells on Wittering beach, and her eyes were dark blue, like yours were when you were born. I could see the light of the world in her. I can’t destroy such a perfect thing, Alys. It would be like breaking a blackbird’s egg. I understood what is sacred, for the first time in my life. This baby has come to me when I thought I would never have another. And I won’t kill it.”

  “But you do know how?” Alys persisted.

  “I know how, yes,” Alinor said quietly.

  “Did your mother ever do it?”

  “Yes, she did. When she judged it was best for the mother, or best for the child, poor thing, misconceived, miscarried, miserable. She would do it to spare suffering. I would do it, to spare another’s suffering. I believe it is right to do it—to spare pain. If I had my way a woman would be able to choose—whether to conceive, whether to labor, whether or not to bear a child. Men should not rule this, it is a woman’s own life and that of her child. But I won’t do it to my baby. I would rather have the pain than lose the baby.”

  “Is it herbs?”

  “Herbs first, and if the baby does not come away, then you take a spindle or a tanner’s needle, a long thin knife or a bodkin, and you pass it up inside the woman to stab the baby as it lies, curled inside,” Alinor said steadily as Alys listened horrified, her hands over her mouth.

  “Six times you push the needle up, and you don’t know whether you are piercing the baby’s head, going through an eye or an ear or a mouth, or stabbing right through into the woman’s body. It is as savage as butchering a calf. Worse. You’re completely blind: you don’t know what you’re doing. The woman can bleed to death inside, or the baby can die but not come away and rot inside her. Or she seems to miscarry, but dies in fever. It is death for the baby and sometimes death for the mother. Do you wish that on me?”