The Serpent's Tale (2 page)

T
he woman on the bed had lost the capacity to scream. Apart from the drumming of her feet and the thump of her fists against the sheets, her gyrations were silent, as if she were miming agony.

The three nuns, too, kneeling at either side, might have been aping intercession; their mouths moved soundlessly, because any noise, even the sibilance of a whispered prayer, set off another convulsion in the patient. They had their eyes closed so as not to see her suffering. Only the woman standing at the end of the bed watched it, showing no expression.

On the walls, Adam and Eve skipped in innocent tapestried health among the flora and fauna of the Garden while the Serpent, in a tree, and God, on a cloud, looked on with amiability. It was a circular room, its beauty now mocking the ghastliness of its owner: the fair hair that had turned black and straggled with sweat, the corded veins in the once-white neck, lips stretched in the terrible grin.

What could be done had been done. Candles and burning incense holders heated a room where the lattices and shutters had been stuffed closed so as not to rattle.

Mother Edyve had stripped Godstow, her convent, of its reliquaries in order to send the saints’ aid to this stricken woman. Too old to come herself, she had told Sister Havis, Godstow’s prioress, what to do. Accordingly, the tibia of Saint Scholastica had been tied to the flailing arm, droplets from the phial containing Saint Mary’s milk poured on the poor head, and a splinter of the True Cross placed into the woman’s hand, though it had been jerked across the room during a spasm.

Carefully, so as not to make a noise, Sister Havis got up and left the room. The woman who had been standing at the end of the bed followed her. “Where you going?”

“To fetch Father Pol. I sent for him; he’s waiting in the kitchen.”

“No.”

Like the stern but well-born Christian she was, Havis showed patience to the afflicted, though this particular female always made her flesh creep. She said, “It is time, Dakers. She must receive the viaticum.”

“I’ll kill you. She ain’t going to die. I’ll kill the priest if he comes upstairs.”

It was spoken without force or apparent emotion, but the prioress believed it of this woman; every servant in the place had already run away for fear of what she might do if their mistress died.

“Dakers, Dakers,” she said—always name the mad when speaking to them so as to remind them of themselves—“we cannot deny the rite of holy unction’s comfort to a soul about to begin its journey. Look…” She caught hold of the housekeeper’s arm and turned her so that both women faced into the room where their muttered voices had caused the body on the bed to arch again. Only its heels and the top of its head rested on the bed, forming a tortured bridge.

“No human frame can withstand such torment,” Sister Havis said. “She is dying.” With that, she began to go down the stairs.

Footsteps followed her, causing her to hold fast to the banister in case she received a push in the back. She kept on, but it was a relief to gain the ground and go into white-cold fresh air as she crossed to the kitchen that had been modeled on that of Fontevrault, with its chimneys, and stood like a giant pepper pot some yards away from the tower.

The flames in one of the fireplaces were the only light and sent leaps of red reflection on the drying sheets that hung from hooks normally reserved for herbs and flitches of bacon.

Father Pol, a mousy little man, and mousier than ever tonight, crouched on a stool, cradling a fat black cat as if he needed its comfort in this place.

His eyes met the nun’s and then rolled in inquiry toward the figure of the housekeeper.

“We are ready for you now, Father,” the prioress told him.

The priest nodded in relief. He stood up, carefully placed the cat on the stool, gave it a last pat, picked up the chrismatory at his feet, and scuttled out. Sister Havis waited a moment to see if the housekeeper would come with them, saw that she would not, and followed Father Pol.

Left alone, Dakers stared into the fire.

The blessing by the bishop who had been called to her mistress two days ago had done nothing. Neither had the all the convent’s trumpery. The Christian god had failed.

Very well.

She began to move briskly. Items were taken from the cupboard in the tiny room that was her domain next to the kitchen. When she came back, she was muttering. She put a leather-bound book with a lock on the chopping block. On it was placed a crystal that, in the firelight, sent little green lights from its facets wobbling around the room.

One by one, she lit seven candles and dripped the wax of each onto the block to make a stand. They formed a circle round the book and crystal, giving light as steady as the ones upstairs, though emitting a less pleasant smell than beeswax.

The cauldron hanging from a jack over the fire was full and boiling, and had been kept so as to provide water for the washing of the sickroom sheets. So many sheets.

The woman bent over it to make sure that the surface of the water bubbled. She looked around for the cauldron’s lid, a large, neatly holed circle of wood with an iron handle arched over its center, found it, and leaned it carefully on the floor at her feet. From the various fire irons by the side of the hearth, dogs, spits, etc., she picked out a long poker and laid that, too, on the floor by the lid.

“Igzy-bidzy,” she was muttering, “sishnu shishnu, adonymanooey, eelam-peelam…” The ignorant might have thought the repetition to be that of a child’s skipping rhyme; others would have recognized the deliberately garbled, many-faithed versions of the holy names of God.

Dodging the sheets, Dame Dakers crossed to where Father Pol had been sitting and picked up the cat, cradling and petting it as he had done. It was a good cat, a famous ratter, the only one she allowed in the place.

Taking it to the hearth, she gave it a last stroke with one hand and reached for the cauldron lid with the other.

Still chanting, she dropped the cat into the boiling water, swiftly popping the lid in place over it and forcing it down. The poker was slid through the handle so that it overlapped the edges.

For a second the lid rattled against the poker and a steaming shriek whistled through the lid’s holes. Dame Dakers knelt on the hearth’s edge, commending the sacrifice to her master.

If God had failed, it was time to petition the Devil.

E
ighty-odd miles to the east as the crow flew, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar was delivering a baby for the first time—or trying to deliver it.

“Push, Ma,” said the fetus’s eldest sister helpfully from the sidelines.

“Don’t you be telling her that,” Adelia said in East Anglian. “Her can’t push til the time comes.” At this stage, the poor woman had little control over the matter.

And neither do I,
she thought in desperation.
I don’t know what to do.

It was going badly; labor had been protracted to the point where the mother, an uncomplaining fenwoman, was becoming exhausted.

Outside, on the grass, watched by Adelia’s dog, Mansur was singing nursery rhymes from his homeland to amuse the other children—all of whom had been delivered easily with the aid of a neighbor and a bread knife—and it was a measure of Adelia’s desperation that at this moment she relished neither his voice nor the strangeness of hearing a castrato’s angelic soprano wafting minor-key Arabic over an English fenland. She could only wonder at the endurance of the suffering woman on the bed, who managed to gasp, “Tha’s pretty.”

The woman’s husband remained uncharmed. He was hiding himself and his concern for his wife in the hut’s undercroft with his cow. His voice came up the wooden flight of stairs to the stage—part hayloft, part living quarters—where the women battled. “Her never had this to-do when Goody Baines delivered ’em.”

Good for Goody Baines,
Adelia thought. But those babies had come without trouble, and there had been too many of them. Later, she would have to point out that Mistress Reed had given birth to nine in twelve years; another would probably kill her, even if this one did not.

However, now was not the moment. It was necessary to keep up confidence, especially that of the laboring mother, so she called brightly, “You be thankful you got me now, bor, so you just keep that old water bilin.’”

Me,
she thought,
an anatomist, and a foreigner to boot. My speciality is corpses. You have a right to be worried. If you were aware of how little experience I have with any parturition other than my own, you’d be frantic.

The unknown Goody Baines might have known what to do; so might Gyltha, Adelia’s companion and nursemaid to her child, but both women were independently paying a visit to Cambridge Fair and would not be back for a day or two, their departure having coincided with the onset of Mistress Reed’s labor. Only Adelia in this isolated part of fenland was known to have medical knowledge and had, therefore, been called to the emergency.

And if the woman in the bed had broken her bones or contracted any form of disease, Adelia could indeed have helped her, for Adelia was a doctor—not just wise in the use of herbs and the pragmatism handed down from woman to woman through generations, and not, like so many men parading as physicians, a charlatan who bamboozled his patients with disgusting medicines for high prices. No, Adelia was a graduate of the great and liberal, forward-thinking, internationally admired School of Medicine in Salerno, which defied the Church by enrolling women into its studies if they were clever enough.

Finding Adelia’s brain on a par with, even excelling, that of the cleverest male student, her professors had given her a masculine education, which, later, she had completed by joining her Jewish foster father in his department of autopsy.

A unique education, then, but of no use to her now, because in its wisdom—and it
was
wisdom—Salerno’s School of Medicine had seen that midwifery was better left to midwives. Adelia could have cured Mistress Reed’s baby, she could have performed a postmortem on it were it dead and revealed what it died of—but she couldn’t birth it.

She handed over a basin of water and cloth to the woman’s daughter, crossed the room, and picked up her own baby from its wicker basket, sat down on a hay bale, undid her laces, and began to feed it.

She had a theory about breast-feeding, as she had for practically everything: It should be accompanied by calm, happy thoughts. Usually, when she nursed the child, she sat in the doorway of her own little reed-thatched house at Waterbeach and allowed her eyes and mind to wander over the Cam fenland. At first its flat greenness had fared badly against the remembered Mediterranean panorama of her birth, with its jagged drama set against a turquoise sea. But flatness, too, has its beauty, and gradually she had come to appreciate the immense skies over infinite shades of willow and alder that the natives called carr, and the richness of fish and wildlife teeming in the hidden rivers.

“Mountains?” Gyltha had said once. “Don’t hold with mountains. They buggers do get in the way.”

Besides, this was now the homeland of the child in her arms, and therefore infinitely beloved.

But today, Adelia dared not indulge either her eyes or her mind for her baby’s sake. There was another child to be saved, and be damned if she was going to let it die through her own ignorance. Or the mother, either.

Silently apologizing to the little thing in her arms, Adelia set herself to envisaging the corpses she’d dissected of mothers who’d died with their fetuses yet undelivered.

Such pitiable cadavers, yet when they were laid out on the marble table of the great autopsy hall in Salerno, she’d withheld compassion from them, as she’d learned to do with all the dead in order to serve them better. Emotion had no place in the art of dissection, only clear, trained, investigative reasoning.

Now, here, in a whiskery little hut on the edge of the civilized world, she did it again, blanking from her mind the suffering of the woman on the bed and replacing it with a map of interior organs, positions, pressures, displacements.
“Hmm.”

Hardly aware she was doing it, Adelia withdrew her baby from her left, now empty, breast and transferred it to the other, still calculating stresses on brain and navel cord, why and when suffocation occurred, blood loss, putrefaction…
“Hmm.”

“Here, missis. Summat’s coming.” The daughter was guiding her mother’s hands toward the bridle that had been tied to the bed head.

Adelia laid her child back in its basket, covered herself up, and went to the bottom of the bed.

Something was indeed emerging from the mother’s body, but it wasn’t a baby’s head, it was a baby’s backside.

Goddamn. A breech birth. She’d suspected it but, by the time she’d been brought in, engagement in the uterus had taken place and it was too late to insert her hand and revolve the fetus, even if she’d had the knowledge and daring.

“Ain’t you going to tug it out?” the daughter asked.

“Not yet.” She’d seen the irreparable damage caused by pulling at this stage. Instead, she addressed the mother. “
Now
you push. Whether you want to or not,
push.
”