The Invention of Fire. Bruce Holsinger
wrist. ‘Should straighten itself out in time, though, with the right charms. Let me see what we have here.’
She dug through her bag and came up with a much-thumbed little book. Hawisia had seen it before, heard its bootless charms wheeze out through Rose Lipton’s wide lips. ‘Have you straightened your husband’s girdle, as I asked?’
‘Just there,’ said Hawisia, pointing to the delicate metal chain dangling from a bedpost. Wrought pewter, a gift from Robert on their wedding day, though crafted by Stephen Marsh, his chief apprentice then. Rose lifted it from the post and draped it across Hawisia’s waist.
‘It is a husband’s charm, you know. Shame Robert’s not here to sing it himself. I’ll lip it out for you though,’ she said helpfully.
‘I thank you for it,’ said Hawisia, tightening her jaw.
Rose fixed the clasp before Hawisia’s nether way. Hawisia could do nothing but lie there, propped up on her bed, as Rose recited the familiar words by rote. ‘I bound, as so shall I also unloose. I bound, as so shall I also unloose. I bound …’ The midwife murmured the girdle charm ten times, not reading from the book, simply thumbing the page containing the words and the rubrics for their use.
When Rose had finished she tucked the book away, followed it with the poultice, and helped Hawisia dress and sit up on the edge of her bed.
Hawisia, unable to stop herself, asked, ‘All seems well, then, aside from the babe’s position?’
Rose waggled a hand, shot out her lower lip. ‘You are well past where you’ve got to before, Hawisia, I’ll give you that,’ she said, but then shook her head. ‘Yet that means little when it comes to the birthing. How many is it you’ve lost to the flux since Robert Stone took you to wife? Two is it, or three?’
‘Four,’ said Hawisia, remembering them all. The first three gone in rushes of blood that could have been her menses if she hadn’t known better and cramped so badly. The last one was stillborn early, an unchristened lump pushed out into a world it would never see or know.
‘And Eleanor, she gave him two, aye? Sweet one, that Eleanor.’
‘Two. Yes,’ said Hawisia flatly. ‘Both girls.’ Eleanor Stone, Robert’s first wife, had been dead these eight years. The daughters were departed from the foundry as well, one recently married off to a wine merchant of Cripplegate Ward, the other gone to fever in her childhood. Robert would often speak of his late wife with a certain longing skidding through his voice, and though he never said so she could feel the contrast between his wives working on his desires.
Eleanor, fertile and fecund. Hawisia, barren and fruitless. Robert, wanting a son.
‘So your evil fortune weren’t from his seed, then, was it?’ said Rose with her brow raised, an inquisitive tilt to her head.
‘I suppose not,’ Hawisia said.
‘Good then.’ She nodded. ‘But don’t give in to despair, Mistress Stone. For the babe’s quick in there now, I can feel him shifting about, and who can say? Could be that Lady Fortune will turn the thing out alive.’ She wagged a finger. ‘Though don’t let your hope spring too fresh, Hawisia. Not with your luck.’
No fear of that, Hawisia thought, feeling her hopes pushed and pulled by the midwife’s shifting wisdom.
‘Dead birth can be a fearful thing though, can’t it?’ said Rose. ‘I well recall it with my third. John, it was.’ She sat back plumply on her stool and folded her arms. ‘We thought he was a choked one too, all grey in the skin, not a twitch from his toes to his nose. But my old gossip Grace, she thwacked the little thing on the arse she did, and out comes his screamin’ breath, loud and full as you’d like!’ She laughed merrily at the memory, which Hawisia had now heard at least ten times.
Rose packed her remaining things, then pushed the stool back beneath the bed and smoothed her dress as Hawisia shoved herself to standing. ‘So you see, Hawisia, y’must trust in the grace of God to sort wheat from chaff. Some of us be fecund, bursting with bairns, like my eight. Others are chosen to be virgins in a house a nuns. Others to be barren, such as yourself. But better to be barren than rotting off in a grave, aye?’
Hawisia walked the midwife down the outer stairs and through the house door to the showroom. Stephen Marsh was there, watching the shop in Hawisia’s absence.
‘Why good morn to you, Stephen Marsh,’ said Rose, beaming widely at him.
Stephen gave the midwife a nod. ‘Mistress Lipton. And Mistress Stone.’ He showed one of his too easy smiles, brushed away a dangling lock from his brow, and pondered them with those wide-spaced eyes, a soft doey brown. In the parish there were wives and widows alike who giggled and gossiped on those eyes. Not Hawisia. She sniffed and turned away.
Rose, though, paused in the doorway like a mud-stuck log. ‘How is the work, Stephen? Bells shining bright this autumn?’
‘As bright as ever, Mistress Lipton,’ he said. They spoke for a few minutes of newborn infants in the ward, and of Rose’s two unbetrothed daughters, fresh as new buds on an elm, each as lovely as a daisy, the midwife claimed.
Hawisia could sense Stephen’s awkwardness. She watched his eye shift toward the rear of the shop and the foundry yard. Stephen hated being trapped up front, she knew, just a hundred feet from his natural home amid the forge and metals yet in his mind a sea’s width away. He was like a penned bear up here, never truly content unless he was at his work – and Hawisia wanted him at his work. For with Robert’s sudden passing Stephen Marsh’s needful craft was all that stood between pounds and penury for the foundry.
How different it had been while her husband lived, when what she desired most keenly was prestige and the awed respect of the guild wives. If she could not have children of her own she would have the richest, finest foundry and smithy in the city of London, and it was up to Robert and his workers to make it so. More commissions, more customers, an ever-growing share of the city’s metalling trades.
And it was this nagging want, this thoughtless avarice that killed Robert Stone, despite Stephen Marsh’s hand in the accident. This she knew, and felt the weight of it every day, though it was easier in her mind to blame Stephen – and have him blame himself. Now all she wanted was to survive the birth of this only child, with enough coin for their bread and this roof. Her ambition had diminished with her future.
‘Allow me to walk you through to Fenchurch Street, Mistress Lipton,’ Stephen was saying. Rose, delighted, took his arm, and together they left the shop.
Hawisia went to the door and watched them walk down Bellyeter Lane and past the Fullers’ Hall, Rose chatting gaily, her free hand flying wildly back and forth before her loud and prattling mouth, Stephen nodding, yessing, feigning a youthful interest in the midwife’s wisdom and wit.
Hawisia closed the street door, flattened her back against it, felt the rough board against her palms. Grey and old already, even with a babe stewing in her belly. She wondered how it would be, to live in that world of green life and vitality it seemed everyone inhabited but she.
London’s most shadowed church sat nestled against the northernmost span of the wall, which rose behind it to block the morning sun and cast that corner of the parish in an eternal dusk. In those months the outer ward, like the other neighbourhoods ringing the city beyond the walls, lived in a state of violent transition, as tenement holders and shopkeepers fought back the royal army with bribes, pleas, and threats, all desperate to hold on to their small scraps of ground in the face of the great events unfolding around them.
For it was the soldiers’ mission to clear buildings, trees, and brush from the city’s outer circumference, a mission they took quite seriously. With