The Midwife's Apprentice

by Karen Cushman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedications

  An Introduction

  The Dung Heap

  The Cat

  The Midwife

  The Miller’s Wife

  The Merchant

  The Naming

  The Devil

  The Twins

  The Bailiff’s Wife’s Baby

  The Boy

  The Leaving

  The Inn

  Visitors

  The Manor

  Edward

  The Baby

  The Midwife’s Apprentice

  Author’s Note

  Sample Chapter from WILL SPARROW'S ROAD

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Text copyright © 1995 by Karen Cushman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Sandpiper, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Originally published in hard-cover in the United States by Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company 1995.

  SANDPIPER and the SANDPIPER logo are trademarks of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Cushman, Karen.

  The midwife’s apprentice/by Karen Cushman.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In medieval England, a nameless, homeless girl is taken in by a sharp-tempered midwife and, in spite of obstacles and hardship, eventually gains the three things she most wants: a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in the world.

  [1. Middle Ages—Fiction. 2. Midwives—Fiction.] I. Title.

  Pz7.c962Mi 1995

  [Fic]—dc20 94-13792

  CIP

  AC

  ISBN: 978-0-395-69229-5 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-547-72217-7 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-547-35000-4

  v2.1213

  For Philip and Dinah,

  Alyce’s midwives

  An Introduction

  The Midwife’s Apprentice: the title was in my head for a long time. I liked it, speaking as it did of birth and learning, but I didn't know what the story was about. The title was all I had. I wrote it on a card, put it in a folder marked “The Midwife's Apprentice,” and filed it away, but I had no words to accompany it, and I despaired: Would it forever be an empty folder? Would I never know what I wanted to say? I sat at the computer and stared at the blank page. And then one day I saw an image of a homeless child sleeping on a dung heap, longing for a name, a full belly, and a place in the world, and the words flowed from my fingers. I finished a draft in record time and sent it to my editor, Dinah Stevenson, with a note saying, “I don't know if this is a novel or a writing exercise.” Dinah thought it was indeed a novel, and The Midwife’s Apprentice was published by Clarion Books in 1995.

  Alyce, the midwife's apprentice, is alone and unsure but also courageous, compassionate, and resilient—a determined young woman in medieval England who finds her way in a world that's often brutal. But she is not feisty and outgoing like Birdy in Catherine, Called Birdy, and people love Birdy. Alyce is like the younger sister of the prom queen—would people appreciate her quieter charms?

  I needn't have worried. The Midwife’s Apprentice won the Newbery Medal in 1996, and my life has never been the same.

  My husband once suggested that my third book, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, told my own story of moving to California when I was ten. Matilda Bone; The Loud Silence of Francine Green; Rodzina, about a Polish girl from Chicago, like me; and Alchemy and Meggy Swann, with Meggy's wabbling and pain, are all my own stories. I cannot seem to write a book that isn't in some way about me. I told this to a group of seventh-graders while we were discussing The Midwife’s Apprentice, and one boy, his grin full of glee, asked, “Does that mean you sleep on a dung heap?” No, I responded, but I, like Alyce, like all of us, was born longing for a name, a full belly, and place in the world. That didn't really satisfy him. He was hoping for the dung heap.

  My novels often reflect the desire to be wanted or included, the need to find a place to belong. I am not surprised. Like Alyce and Meggy, Francine and Matilda, I was a bit of an outsider growing up, often lonely and confused, but stubborn and independent, trying to figure out the world and my place in it. I think we are all intrigued by the idea of who we are as individuals separate from our families and our homes. What would we do if we were on our own? How would we survive? Would we be resourceful and courageous, or helpless? Would we be the same people we are now, or would we grow to be different? What kind of family might we create for ourselves?

  I wrote The Midwife’s Apprentice in part because I wondered about these things, about courage and persistence, identity and responsibility, compassion and kindness and belonging. How could I know them if I didn't write about them?

  Many reviewers have mentioned my “gutsy girls.” I was not a “gutsy girl” growing up, and I never found models of such girls in the books available to me. But as we are what we eat and hear and experience, so too we are what we read. This, too, is why I write what I do, about gutsy girls—strong young women who in one way or another take responsibility for their own lives; about tolerance, thoughtfulness, and caring; about choosing what is life-affirming and generous; about the certainty of failure and the need for perseverance.

  Of all my books, The Midwife’s Apprentice has made most clear the important part readers as well as writers play in the creation of a book. Readers have asked me about the womb symbols, the numerous birth metaphors, and the significance of the number three in the book. What? Where? I am confounded—I did not consciously include any symbols or metaphors, but readers found them, and if I go back and reread, there they are. Once again, writer and reader are, as has been said, each on one side of the pencil.

  At a signing, a five-year-old girl approached me. Her mother had just read the book to her and her two older sisters. “The book is all about a cat,” the girl said. She told me what the cat did and said in this book, to her not about a midwife or her apprentice, but about a cat. And I told her that Lobelia, my own orange cat, sat on my lap while I wrote about Alyce and Purr, and sometimes she walked across the keyboard, adding her own words to mine.

  The next year I received a letter from a high school English as a Second Language class, seniors from other countries—some homeless—who had read The Midwife’s Apprentice and related to the story of a girl searching for a place in the world. They sent me a class photo. There they were, seventeen years old: girls with teased hair and eye makeup, six-foot-tall boys with mustaches, all holding up their copies of Alyce's story and smiling. They are all Alyce, seeking their name, their way, their place in this world so new to them.

  How do I feel about The Midwife’s Apprentice now, nearly twenty years later? I am proud of its simplicity and its wisdom. I often cite it as my favorite of my books because its creation gave me less trouble than my other titles. I love the character of Alyce—skinny, big-eyed, and hopeful—and the smart, independent, but tender Purr, an amalgam of all my beloved cats. And I still love what the book says about being in the world. My first draft ended with a despondent Alyce, having failed in a difficult delivery, leaving the midwife and the village to make a new life somewhere else. It soon became obvious that Alyce had to return to the village to confront her failure, to try again until she succeeds with courage, tenacity, and hope—as we all must. For Alyce's story is also my story, and
your story, despite our not sleeping on a dung heap. I hope you enjoy it.

  —Karen Cushman

  1

  The Dung Heap

  WHEN ANIMAL DROPPINGS and garbage and spoiled straw are piled up in a great heap, the rotting and moiling give forth heat. Usually no one gets close enough to notice because of the stench. But the girl noticed and, on that frosty night, burrowed deep into the warm, rotting muck, heedless of the smell. In any event, the dung heap probably smelled little worse than everything else in her life—the food scraps scavenged from kitchen yards, the stables and sties she slept in when she could, and her own unwashed, unnourished, unloved, and unlovely body.

  How old she was was hard to say. She was small and pale, with the frightened air of an ill-used child, but her scrawny, underfed body did give off a hint of woman, so perhaps she was twelve or thirteen. No one knew for sure, least of all the girl herself, who knew no home and no mother and no name but Brat and never had. Someone, she assumed, must have borne her and cared for her lest she toddle into the pond and changed her diapers when they reeked, but as long as she could remember, Brat had lived on her own by what means she could—stealing an onion here or helping with the harvest there in exchange for a night on the stable floor. She took what she could from a village and moved on before the villagers, with their rakes and sticks, drove her away. Snug cottages and warm bread and mothers who hugged their babes were beyond her imagining, but dearly would she have loved to eat a turnip without the mud of the field still on it or sleep in a barn fragrant with new hay and not the rank smell of pigs who fart when they eat too much.

  Tonight she settled for the warm rotting of a dung heap, where she dreamed of nothing, for she hoped for nothing and expected nothing. It was as cold and dark inside her as out in the frosty night.

  Morning brought rain to ease the cold, and the kick of a boot in Brat’s belly. Hunger. Brat hated the hunger most. Or was it the cold? She knew only that hunger and cold cursed her life and kept her waking and walking and working for no other reason than to stop the pain.

  “Dung beetle! Dung beetle! Smelly old dung beetle sleeping in the dung.”

  Boys. In every village there were boys, teasing, taunting, pinching, kicking. Always they were the scrawniest or the ugliest or the dirtiest or the stupidest boys, picked on by everyone else, with no one left uglier or stupider than they but her. And so they taunted and tormented her. In every village. Always. She closed her eyes.

  “Hey, boys, have off. You’re mucking up the path and my new Spanish leather shoes. Away!

  “And you, girl. Are you alive or dead?”

  Brat opened one eye. A woman was there, a woman neither old nor young but in between. Neither fat nor thin but in between. An important-looking woman, with a sharp nose and a sharp glance and a wimple starched into sharp pleats.

  “Good,” said the woman. “You’re not dead. No need to call the bailiff to cart you off. Now out of that heap and away.”

  The fierce pain in her stomach made Brat bold. “Please, may I have some’ut to eat first?”

  “No beggars in this village. Away.”

  “Please, mistress, a little to eat?”

  “Those who don’t work don’t eat.”

  Brat opened her other eye to show her eagerness and energy. “I will work, mistress. I am stronger and smarter than I seem.”

  “Smart enough to use the heat from the dung heap, I see. What can you do?”

  “Anything, mistress. And I don’t eat much.”

  The woman’s sharp nose smelled hunger, which she could use to her own greedy purpose. “Get up, then, girl. You do put me in mind of a dung beetle burrowing in that heap. Get up, Beetle, and I may yet find something for you to do.”

  So Brat, newly christened Beetle, got up, and the sharp lady found some work for her to do and rewarded her with dry bread and half a mug of sour ale, which tasted so sweet to the girl that she slept in the dung heap another night, hoping for more work and more bread on the morrow. And there was more work, sweeping the lady’s dirt floor and washing her linen in the stream and carrying her bundles to those cottages where a new baby was expected, for the sharp lady was a midwife. Beetle soon acquired a new name, the midwife's apprentice, and a place to sleep that smelled much better than the dung heap, though it was much less warm.

  2

  The Cat

  BEETLE LIKED TO WATCH the cat stretching in the sunshine, combing his belly with his tongue, chewing the burrs and stubble out from between his toes. She never dared get close, for she was afraid, but even from a distance could tell that there was a gleaming patch of white in the dusty orange of his fur, right below his chin; that one ear had a great bite taken out of it; and that his whiskers were cockeyed, going up on one side and down on the other, giving him a frisky, cheerful look.

  Sometimes she left bits of her bread or cheese near the fence post by the river where she first saw him, but not very often, for the midwife was generous only with the work she gave Beetle and stingy with rewards, and the girl was never overfed.

  Once she found a nest of baby mice who had frozen in the cold, and she left them by the fence post for the cat. But her heart ached when she thought of the tiny hairless bodies in those strong jaws, so she buried them deep in the dung heap and left the cat to do his own hunting.

  The taunting, pinching village boys bedeviled the cat as they did her, but he, quicker and smarter than they, always escaped. She did not, and suffered their pinching and poking and spitting in silence, lest her resistance inspire them to greater torments. Mostly she avoided them and everyone else, hiding when she could, scurrying along hidden, secret paths around the village, her head down and shoulders hunched.

  One sunny morning, with stolen bread in her pocket for dinner and a bit of old cheese to share with the cat, Beetle started for the fence post. The boys were already there, holding the cat aloft by his tail. His hissing and screeching sounded like demons to Beetle, and she covered her ears.

  “Into the sack with him, Jack,” cried one boy. “We will see whether a cat can best an eel.”

  And the sack with eel and cat was tossed into the pond.

  Beetle stayed hidden, more afraid to attract the taunts and torments of the boys than to lose the cat.

  After a time the tumbling sack sank into the reedy water, and all was still.

  “Ah, Jack, you was right. The eel took that cat right down.” And the boy with the runny nose gave two apples to the boy with the broken teeth and they all went back to the fields.

  Beetle waited a long time before she came out of hiding and waded into the muddy pond. With a stick broken from a nearby willow she searched through the reedy water, poking around and around the spot where the bag had gone down, working in bigger and bigger circles. Finally, near the edge of the pond, half out of the water, she found the bag, now soggy and still.

  She dragged it out of the water, sat back on her heels, and watched. No movement. She poked it with her stick. Nothing.

  “Cat,” she asked, “are you drownt? I’d open the sack and let you out, but I be sore afraid of the eel. Cat?”

  She kicked the bag with her dirty bare foot. Nothing. She left the bag and started back to the village. Came back. Left again. Came back again.

  The devil take you, cat, she cried. “I be sore afraid to open that sack, but I can’t just let you be.” Taking a sharp stone, she slit the bag and ran behind a tree. Looking like the Devil himself, a shiny brown eel slithered out and made for the pond. And the bag was still again.

  Beetle watched it. Nothing. She crept closer. Nothing. A sudden movement sent her scurrying back to the tree. And then nothing again. She crept up to the bag and found the scrawny, scruffy orange cat tangled in the soggy sack. Carefully she untangled his limp body and lifted him out of the bag by his front legs. “By cock and pie, cat, I would have you live.”

  Ripping a piece from the rag she called her skirt, she wrapped him tightly and ran her secret hidden route back to the vi
llage. She scooped a hole in the dung heap and laid the cat in it.

  If Beetle had known any prayers, she might have prayed for the cat. If she had known about soft sweet songs, she might have sung to him. If she had known of gentle words and cooing, she would have spoken gently to him. But all she knew was cursing: “Damn you, cat, breathe and live, you flea-bitten sod, or I’ll kill you myself.”

  All day the cat lay still in his cave in the dung heap. Beetle stole time from her chores and came often to see him, wrap her skirt more tightly around him, and make sure he still breathed. Twice she left little bits of cheese, but they were not eaten.

  When she checked again after supper, as the sun was setting and the mist rising, he was gone and the cheese with him. Nothing in the cave in the dung heap but her bit of raggedy dress and a few threads from the sack, which he must have carefully combed from his fur before setting forth into the night.

  And two days later (a holiday for the village, it being Lady Day, but not for Beetle, for the midwife would not feed those who did not work, even on Lady Day) there was the cat sitting on the fence post, licking his white patch to make it whiter still, waiting for Beetle and a bit of cheese. Finally Beetle came and they sat and ate their cheese together, to celebrate Lady Day. And Beetle told him what she could remember of her life before they found each other, and they fell asleep in the sun.

  3

  The Midwife

  HER NAME WAS JANE. She was known in the village as Jane the Midwife. Because of her sharp nose and sharp glance, Beetle always thought of her as Jane Sharp. Jane Sharp became a midwife because she had given birth to six children (although none of them lived), went Sundays to Mass, and had strong hands and clean fingernails. She did her job with energy and some skill, but without care, compassion, or joy. She was the only midwife in the village. Taking Beetle gave her cheap labor and an apprentice too stupid and scared to be any competition. This suited the midwife.