“Well, here is something different! Do you see your brother often?”
I felt suddenly so sad. “Never,” I said. “I have lost him, and don’t know where he is. I’ve lost everyone that was mine, except for the people in this house.”
“That makes sense. Did you lose them before the vision?” He sounded brusque and professional now.
“Yes, of course,” I answered him.
“Hmmm. I think there is a name for your gift. It’s Latin, so you wouldn’t understand it. Did you feel, after the vision, that you had a joining with the universe?”
“I think that’s how it felt. Is it bad?”
“Generally speaking, it’s good. But it’s rare and much sought after through the arts of contemplation. I myself am somewhat envious. I wanted it myself. But God withheld it. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be a woman, and ignorant, to acquire it! Be careful, Margaret, for if you do more than cure poor people, you’ll arouse envy. Great envy in high places, and that’s unhealthful. Well, I must go now.”
He got up to leave but still limped slightly.
“I’ll do the knee for you again in another week, if you’d like.”
“I’d like, I think. I’ll be back. Besides, you brew good ale in this house.”
“I should. My mother was a brewer.”
“A brewer? Ha! A brewer. Of course. Why not?” And he walked out the door and down the alley, humming something odd.
A few days later a little page in rich livery came to the door. His mistress needed treatment for a skin condition, and she had thought she’d try me, for physicians had failed her. I thought she must have heard of me through Father Edmund, for I do not travel in such grand circles. The lady was a foreigner, and I did not understand her speech, but one of her attendants, who was a beautiful, exquisitely dressed dark girl, told me what was wrong. Madame had withdrawn from the world and covered her face with a veil, rather than be seen. Her face was a mass of running sores and pustules. She had been bled, cupped, and taken rare medicines made with beaten gold and mercury. Nothing had made it better. Her exasperated physician had finally told her that only prayer would help, so she had called for a priest from St. Paul’s Cathedral.
I was shown into a room of greater luxury than I had thought possible, this side of heaven. It was beautifully warm, but no smoke from the fire marred the place. The fire was in the wall, and its smoke drawn off by a cleverly designed chimney that rose above a richly carved mantel. The walls, above the carved paneling, were a sheet of tapestries, woven with silk and golden threads. The windows let in great columns of light, without admitting freezing air, for they were made of little clear circles of glass, nearly as beautiful as you see in church, set together with lead, in the window frame. She rested on the bed, a great gilded thing draped in brocade, with the veil drawn over her face. Beside the bed, near a round table covered with a richly woven damask cloth, another foreign waiting woman, dressed more beautifully than a queen, sat and read to her from a Book of Hours. Oh, what a wonderful book! It was bound with jewels and filled with curious colored pictures and gilding. Women who could read! With all my heart I wanted to touch the book and examine its lovely pages.
On the table was a brass bowl of early spring blossoms, and beside it a censer that burned something that smelled even better than the incense in church. But I have not told you the best thing about the room. To soften and warm the hard stone floor, there was no matted covering of dirty rushes. Instead, on a floor swept meticulously clean, there lay a huge, thick carpet, woven with designs of fabulous monsters and plants. If I were rich, I thought to myself, I’d never have rushes—just carpets like that one.
But I must tell you of the lady. Her physician stood by her, a foreign man in a long, dark gown, and odd black cap, with black hair and a bristling black mustache and beard. Wordlessly she peeled back the veil. The lady’s dark eyes were pretty, but nothing else was. The face could have belonged to a street beggar with leprosy. I started back slightly.
“Is it leprosy?” I asked her physician.
“No, it is not leprosy, but something else.” He answered with a heavy accent. Then he spoke Latin. They all do. I called for hot water and made a fomentation with sweet-scented herbs, and applied it to her face with a cloth. Then I silently set my mind and placed my hands on the cloth. Maybe it would work more quickly without the cloth, but I have told you I am a coward and don’t like touching nasty things when I can avoid it. We pulled back the cloth. The pustules were draining, and the skin not so angry looking. The lady said it was not so painful. Her attendant held a polished bronze mirror up to her face. She looked wan but pleased. The attendant said, “She says it looks improved. Can you try it again?”
“Tell her once more today, and then again next week. It needs time to rest and heal. She must leave the veil off, so the air can touch it, and she must wash it once a day—once only!—with rose water on a clean linen cloth.” The lady nodded. The physician cocked his head on one side.
“You use only herbs? No metals?”
“I am a simple woman, sir, and use simple things. I believe that if God wanted us to eat metals, He’d have given us a smelter instead of a stomach.”
“Spoken like a man! Are you a peasant woman?”
“No, I’m a freeborn woman, and I think for myself.”
“That is evident, I think.” He fell silent, his dark eyes watching me like a cat’s, as I repeated the process. The face was much improved. The pores were shrinking, and here and there a patch of white skin glistened.
The physician inspected her skin, and looked at me with a sort of grudging admiration.
“I see you, too, are a true physician,” he said with his heavy accent. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Dottore Matteo di Bologna. And you are—?” His sharp, foreign manners agitated me in some secret way, and made me wonder if he were dangerous. Hadn’t Father Edmund warned me about arousing envy? But it was too late. I couldn’t be rude: it would only look suspicious.
“I am Margaret of Ashbury,” I answered simply, and went on working.
Suddenly the woman stared at me, and her eyes opened wide. She spoke all at once, and I saw she was staring at the cross which shone on my breast.
“Madame says no wonder you have the power to heal her. You wear the Burning Cross.” That again! Well, who am I to turn away belief?
“She says, she’d wondered where it had gone. Her uncle had had it, and it had burned him to the bone. After that, he’d got rid of it. He’d palmed it off on some little tradesman, who was pestering him over a debt.”
What a world this is! Sometimes too many things happen at once.
“Madame says here is your payment. She gives you gold instead of silver, for she wants you to pray for her. Come again next week.”
As I was shown to the door, the foreign doctor followed me.
“What you say, and what you do, do not lack sense. I had a master at Bologna, once, who had studied the medicine of the Saracens. He said things like that too. Have you much success with these methods?”
“When I try them, yes. But I usually do not treat illness. I am a midwife.”
“A midwife! Ah, yes! Some of them are not so stupid.” He looked relieved and left me to walk out onto the street alone.
As I entered our front door, I called, “Hilde, Hilde! Are you home? We’re rich!”
“Well, I’m glad we’re rich, for I haven’t earned a thing today. A man came to the house asking for something to make his mistress lose her baby. ‘We don’t sell remedies like that,’ I said, ‘for it is contrary to the law of Holy Church.’ ‘But you know of such things?’ he asked, and showed me the gold in his purse. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve never heard of such things.’ ‘Then you’re a bad midwife,’ he said. ‘No,’ said I, ‘I’m a good midwife, I deliver live babies.’ Then he left. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know, but let’s think of supper. Is Sim about? He can go for something.” Sim was playing, but not to
o far away to call, and he willingly dashed off to the bakeshop.
Just then we heard someone at the door and opened it to find an old woman in tears standing there. She had on a rusty gown, and a countrywoman’s plain gray surcoat, cut like a big apron, and coarse white kerchief. She looked like a harmless old thing, but there was something about her I didn’t like.
“Mercy, what’s wrong?” said Mother Hilde. “Do come in and sit down.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” wept the old woman, “my sweet daughter is pregnant and her lover won’t marry her.”
“That’s very sad. Will she be needing a midwife?” Mother Hilde asked gently.
“Not so soon. What she needs is a wedding. You sell medicines. Can’t you make her a love potion, so that her heartless lover will propose marriage?”
“Oh, dear lady,” I explained patiently, “that’s a black art, for dabblers in magic. We don’t know how to do that. We make teas for sore throats.”
“Oh, you must be able to, I need it so desperately. See? I’ve brought my life savings.” She opened a purse that glistened with gold. How very odd for a poor old woman, I thought.
“Well, my dears,” she said, wiping her eyes, “if you’re quite sure—oh, my, where is your necessary place? I’m so old, my bladder’s failing.”
“Gladly I’ll show you,” I said, and I took her through the back room to the little room at the back of the house, which drained into a pit in the garden. As we passed through Brother Malachi’s room of smells, she eyed everything carefully. It looked like an ordinary room.
“Oh, what’s in that jar there?” she asked with an innocent-sounding voice.
“Honey drops for children’s coughs. They hate bad-tasting things, you know.”
“May I have one?” While I got her the drop, she looked in the other jars and smelled them. Then she popped the drop in her mouth and did her errand. I waited in Brother Malachi’s room for her and escorted her to the door.
“Another one!” exclaimed Hilde. “First they want abortion powder, and then love potions! Next they’ll be asking for candles made of human fat and unbaptized babies’ hands! What does it all mean? I hope we’re not getting a bad reputation! Imagine, someone must think we do black magic here.”
I thought very, very hard. It all seemed to make a pattern.
“Hilde, I think it’s very bad. Someone is trying to gather evidence against us. Evidence of witchcraft.”
But the days passed and nothing happened, so I ceased to worry. Business was better and better. Besides babies, since I’d treated the rich lady, I’d acquired a reputation among the fashionable. Now I had several wealthy clients who needed healing sessions. But of course, one is never satisfied with good fortune. I grumbled to Hilde, “Oh, Hilde, it’s all very well to get these high fees from old, ugly people, but I’d rather have it for delivering beautiful babies that look just like roses.”
“Never speak ill of good fortune, Margaret, dear,” said the old woman, never looking up from her mending. “You might make it go away.”
Good fortune showed no signs of leaving. Instead it increased even more when a well-dressed little apprentice boy came to request that I treat his master in his great house by the river. That brought me, as a regular client, an old merchant so rich that his payments alone could support the entire household. He was one of those complainers whom the doctors love, for they never get well and never die—just swallow up treatments. This one had gout. The attacks nearly crippled him, but he would not do the most commonsense things to make them cease. Instead he’d call for me to stop the pain and then go back to his bad habits. There he would lie like a frog, propped up on pillows on his big, curtained bed, with his wretched, swollen foot elevated on an embroidered cushion.
“Don’t you see, if you quit stuffing yourself with all this rich food and wine, the attacks would go away?” I would say.
“Quit? I worked hard to get rich, so I could buy all of these nice things. Why, I went to bed hungry many times when I was young, and I’ll never do it again.”
“But at the very least, Master Kendall,” I complained, “you should not be eating and drinking while I lay my hands on your foot.”
“What? Not eat and drink? Just put your pretty little hand right there, my dear”—and he gestured with a mutton chop—“right there, where the pain is worst.”
Delivering babies is much easier than delivering stubborn old men of their vices!
So we went along in this way for some time, Master Kendall being my worst failure as a healer, until Fortune, who had been biding her time, sent me a shattering blow.
It was the most beautiful of mornings, not so long after Pentecost, when I walked home after sitting up all night with a woman in Watling Street. The sky was all pink and fragrant, and I was as happy as a bird as I stepped up to the front door, for my work was well done and there was a fee in the purse at my waist. How surprising to see Father Edmund, at this strange hour, standing there like a black shadow, knocking at the door!
“Father Edmund, what are you doing here?” He turned startled and guilty looking.
“Oh, Margaret, there you are! I can’t rouse up anyone in the house.”
“That’s because no one’s there to rouse, Father Edmund, but here I am.”
“It’s you I must see, Margaret. I’ve come to warn you.” Again he looked furtively out the alley into the street.
“Warn me? Of what?” I asked in alarm.
“Come inside,” he said, inviting me into my own house. As we sat by the banked fire, he said something very odd.
“Margaret, what do you know of your catechism?”
“Why, what others know, that God made heaven and earth—”
“No, no, I mean about the sacraments.”
“Why, through the words of the priest, the host is changed into the True Body of Christ—”
“That’s good enough—but what about the worthiness of the priest?”
“No matter whether the priest is worthy or unworthy, if the words be said right—”
“That’s good too.” And he went on and on, correcting and questioning, with a desperate look in his eyes.
“What on earth is wrong, Father Edmund? I am a good Christian,” I said anxiously.
“Of that I have no doubt, Margaret, but others do. You have aroused the envy of which I spoke, and someone, I do not know who, has denounced you to the bishop. In only one thing are you fortunate. The king has not allowed the Inquisition to function freely in England.”
“Inquisition? What is this?”
“I can’t explain more. I have said too much already. I have risked everything. When next you see me, pretend you don’t know me, for the love of God.” He grabbed my hands and looked at me intently. “I’ll see you saved, if it is God’s will. I know you are a Christian woman, and maybe more than that.” He slipped furtively out the door and hurried away by another route, that he might not be seen.
I was very puzzled and troubled. I’d harmed no one. I was only doing good, and speaking truth. Why should that set Father Edmund all frantic like this? I had not long to worry, for scarcely had I built up the fire and put the kettle upon it, when there was a knock on the door. It’s odd about knocks. Some are joyful. Some are frightened. This one was sinister. I wished that someone else—very strong, maybe a giant with a huge club—were standing behind me to help me when I opened the door. My stomach turned over with fear when I undid the latch. There, in the morning light before the door, stood a summoner and two catchpolls. They did not look friendly.
“Are you the woman who calls herself Margaret of Ashbury, or Margaret the Midwife?” I knew what they must be there for. My knees started to shake. If I could, I would have vomited. My mouth was all dry when I tried to speak.
“I am she.”
“Then you’re wanted. Come along.” They grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me roughly from the door. I was trembling violently as they put manacles on my wrists.
“I—I’m not
going to run away. Y-you don’t have to do that,” I stammered.
“You’re a dangerous woman. They might try to take you. We’ve been warned, and you can’t deceive us.” One of the catchpolls tapped the hilt of the short sword he wore.
I could hardly look up for shame as they led me away. The door was left ajar. We had not gone two feet when Sim came bouncing along with Lion and cried, “Hey, they’re taking away our Margaret!”
“Taking Margaret?” A head popped out of the window. We’re early risers on Thieves’ Alley. Several men came running after us.
“Hey, where are you taking Margaret? We need her here.”
“Stand back or you’re dead men,” said the summoner. “She’s the bishop’s now.” The catchpolls drew their weapons menacingly as the summoner grabbed my arm. My neighbors stood back. I couldn’t turn around, but I could sense that behind me more of them had come, a great crowd of men and women, to stand silently and stare.
“God be with you, little midwife!” I heard a woman cry. I could not see for tears as they led me away like a blind thing.
It was a long walk, the longest in my life, perhaps, before we reached our destination: the chapter house of the cathedral. This is a building not usually seen by people like me, unless they are very unlucky. It is where the dean and canons meet for business, and it is convenient for other things as well. Situated in the corner between the nave and the south transept of the cathedral, it is an eight-sided building that stands in the center of a two-storied cloister. Thinking back on it, if I had been a little criminal, an old woman who sang a few silly jingles or bought a love potion, I’d probably just have been fined or jailed for a few days. If I had been a powerful, heretic theologian, who had written works that defied God, I might have been tried with great pomp in the cathedral itself, so that the mighty would tremble at the ceremony of condemnation and the stake. Instead they didn’t know quite what I was. That made sense: since I didn’t know myself, why should they? And such was the temper of the times that they feared some upheaval from the mob if they did not keep the proceedings closed, for I was well known by now in all the poorer sections.
A Vision of Light Page 36