The Popish Midwife

by Annelisa Christensen

  With my lips pressed together and resting the pole on the floor, I knocked one last time at the door. Then I held up the pole and waved my red cloak as a peace flag so they might see it. There were not many folk on the street, or I would have feared that I drew attention to myself. I should not risk being caught with one so late released from the plot.

  My arm ached trying to balance the pole, so I rested it on the ground. It was bitter cold and I had begun to shiver. I should put on my cloak again. My efforts were fruitless and of no use. The signal had not worked and no one had come to the door. They were likely in too much fear to come out of hiding. At the very least, I had tried. What more could I do!

  I leaned the pole against the wall, and put the outer garment back on, immediately warm and of my own character once more. I should go home and see if any had called on me. One last look at the window confirmed the stillness inside, no hint that they had seen me. I took the pole from where it leaned against the wall, turned and retraced my steps along the road from whence I came.

  I had gone not more than ten paces when I heard a call.

  ‘Midwife! Midwife! I beg you come back!’

  I turned to see a woman stood on the threshold of the house that had looked deserted shortly before. She held a youngster close in her arms, pressed to her chest to keep him quiet. Without a word, I turned and walked back to the house and introduced myself to her.

  ‘I am Mrs Cellier, an honest midwife. I come to see your husband and offer my assistance to him, and to let him know there are some of us that would dearly see him proven innocent, as we know him to be.

  ‘Can you dress wounds?’ she said, shaking and jittery. I have need of a doctor, but dare not call one.’

  ‘I am able. Is it your husband?’

  She merely nodded. The tightness in her face told me she held back a great deal of feeling and was in need of some calm conversation.

  ‘I visit the prison and there heard talk of your husband and the wrongs that have been done him. They said he was released today, and I came to offer him and his family assistance.’

  ‘You are the one they call The Popish Midwife.’

  It was a statement rather than a question. Mrs Corral did not react to my nod, but to stand back from the entrance and let me pass. She did not hold my name against me. Once in, she passed by me and led me to the living room at the back of the house.

  I was accustomed to the differing smells of homes, but here I was made to work hard not to retch at the smell of fetid meat. Curled under some bedding on the floor was a skeleton bare-covered with living flesh and labouring to breathe. This man was closer to death than life. Though I did not need to ask, in my shock I asked anyway.

  ‘Mr Corral?’

  Again, a nod from the wife sufficed.

  Two more children, girls of about eight and five years of age, appeared from wherever they were hiding. They held their mother’s skirt and warily regarded the blanket as if the man bent like a hairpin was not their father, but a sleeping monster that might wake and devour them at any time. He was covered with a wool blanket, so I could not see any injury and did not want to disturb him any more than necessary.

  ‘Where does he need dressing?’ I said.

  ‘‘Tis his legs.’ She bent down and shook the skinny shoulder. ‘Francis. Francis. Here is someone come to dress your wounds. I will let her see.’

  Francis stirred, and murmured, ‘What use is it. I am already dead.’ His voice crackled scarcely above a whisper.

  ‘Do not talk that way, Francis! You are far from dead. Now you are come from that place you will recover. You must. Our need of you is beyond what you imagine! I will take care of you and you will be up and driving your horses in no time.’

  Mrs Corral moved the blanket back and I gasped. The rotting flesh of his legs hung away in places, and stank the more for not having a cover of any sort. I clenched my teeth as, with his wife’s help, we slowly moved him onto the side of his back. We could not move him entirely on his back, because his body was set in the way he had formerly lain, his legs at an awkward angle. If he had turned fully over, I surmised, his legs would point into the air over his body.

  ‘What dreadful thing has caused this?’ I cried. I had only ever seen such a cruel thing in old and bed-ridden people. It was a terrible disfigurement in a young, strong man.

  ‘They did this to him! They chained him that way so long he cannot stand,’ Mrs Corral did not attempt to conceal her anger. ‘Thirteen weeks! Thirteen weeks he was cooped up in that foul, foul place, and he an innocent man! How do they dare do such atrocious thing to any man, let alone an innocent one? How, I ask you!’

  She knelt next to her husband and tried to hold him, but could not, for he lay in that awkward position. Instead, with her apron strings high in the air, she lay her cheek against his and wet his face with her tears. From there, she looked up at me and begged me bandage his legs and aid him as well as I could.

  Not every family could spare a fire in every room, nor even had more than one room. The door to the wooden box bed on the other side was open, and the bedding moved here on the floor to be close to the warmth of possibly the only fire in the house. I was thankful he was not inside the bed, for the bad air around him would surely have killed him in such closed space.

  I had to get down on my knees to be close enough to examine his legs, as if he had not been ‘examined’ enough, so I hitched my skirts and lowered myself carefully down next to him. The stench this close turned my stomach so I wanted to retch more than ever, I that was used to the prison.

  I could barely look, but forced myself to look anyway. I was glad for the grey of the day. I could already see more than I wished to see. Where hard shackles had gripped the legs, beneath a thin layer of ragged bleeding flesh, I saw white bone. The flaps of skin hanging from the wound were already decayed and that, I surmised, was what smelled so putrid.

  ‘Call a surgeon,’ I said. ‘This is no job for a midwife.’

  ‘No! I will not have any man in the house,’ she cried. ‘How could I trust a man? Just see what they did to my husband!’

  I understood her. Who might a person trust? When the finger pointed any which way, at both guilty and innocent, without reason, distrust became widespread. And who was I to tell her to place her trust in one that might as easily turn a person in for a few coins, when I myself had come to distrust all but a few! This family had suffered too much already.

  ‘The wound must be cleaned or he will lose his legs. Bring me some boiling water, a knife, a candle and some garment or sheet I can tear for bandages.’ I could lose my midwife licence for doing this, but what else in God’s name could I do?

  Gladly, I watched the woman get off her knees, move to the fireplace and hang the kettle on a hook; it was best she was kept useful. Then she bustled over to the linen cupboard and took a sheet from a meagre pile of bed wear. When she handed it to me, I knew it was her best. There were few worn patches and the edges were not frayed like the one her husband lay on and they had probably shared at night.

  It took a while for the kettle to boil. In that time, we tore the sheet into strips – she did not flinch the slightest at destroying her good sheet – and talked quietly.

  ‘I took him bread and milk. He would not let me give it to him.’

  ‘Who would not?’

  ‘The wicked one at the door. He threw the milk on the floor right in front of my poor Francis. Right in front of him, when he was dying for want of a drink! I tell you, the soul of that one is already in the hands of Satan!’

  ‘What was his countenance, that I might know him?’

  ‘Ugly as the Devil’s own. I cannot say how he looked, only how ungodly and wicked he was!’ Mrs Corral tore a strip of cotton with the roughness of one avenging herself on the man in her thoughts. Thrice she ripped the sheet from end to end and dust filled the air. ‘But I wi
ll say that I never wish to see him again.’

  ‘Was he distinguished by any mark?’

  ‘He had a hard hand,’ she said, touching her own hand to her cheek.

  ‘He hit you?’

  ‘Divers times. Once for my audacity in giving my husband bread…’

  ‘Oh wicked! So wicked! What kind of man was he, that he would not allow simple fare as that to a starving man!’ I could not help but exclaim, though I knew it to be commonplace.

  ‘That was not the end of it,’ she said. ‘He most cruelly denied me to see my husband when I came to the door of the cell. He made me look to the floor and told me that if I looked upon my husband he would make sure Francis would not see his children for a long time.’ We both knew what he meant by that. ‘That was when he threw the milk in there. He would not let me enter the door. My poor man was in a sorry state even then! Though I was denied sight of him, I heard him groan and cry in pain.’

  If the poor woman was outraged at the horror of this, I was just as so. It was inhuman!

  ‘Then he sent me away without my ever setting eyes on my poor husband. Could a man be so cruel?’ She echoed my own thoughts.

  ‘If you did not see your husband, are you certain it was he?’

  ‘As certain as he now lies here before us. It was his voice. And here is proof of their work. What will become of us now?’

  ‘Believe me, I will discover who did this to Mr Corral. They must not be allowed such barbaric freedom!’ It was as if the man that lay before me was the source of those screams, three weeks earlier, that dreadful noise that still lived in my head. It was beyond belief such brutal things continued even in this enlightened time, and they happened with the blessing of those who had the power to stop them.

  ‘We must give all attention to these wounds now, but I will find out what I can, and I will return to check on your husband tomorrow,’ I said.

  Before I left, I took out my purse and gave Mrs Corral coins enough to buy food, for the children looked as if they would otherwise take after their father and waste to the bone. Sense and hunger had long outweighed pride in her and she took it gratefully, curtseying as if I were a lady of high society.

  ‘Be sure to eat something of it,’ I added. If I did not say so, it was likely she would not. A mother would oft feed her children and have none for herself.

  5

  3rd day of March, 1679

  Over the next days and weeks, I became known at Corral’s household and was often greeted on arrival by the children, whose faces showed less fear of losing their father as Father Time ushered Death out the door. Sometimes I brought them sweet cake, and they would run to sit by their father to eat it whilst their mother and I dressed his wounds.

  Two days after my first visit, I noted Corral had little more colour in his cheeks and was set to die. The holes in his legs did not heal, and so I insisted Mrs Corral call on a surgeon to clean them properly. I could do no more than put salve on it and bandage it, and the rot was spreading.

  At first, the good woman argued against me, but soon conceded she would lose her husband if something more were not done and so agreed to send for someone. She would not have a surgeon, she said. A surgeon might tell the authorities, who might believe her husband was delivered home already dead, and they might not be happy to find he still lived.

  Finally, she allowed that perhaps the apothecary husband of my daughter, Rachel, by the name of Henry Blasedale, might have more skill than I in medicine and would be acceptable. This decided, we sat and drunk ale together.

  As fortune would have it, Henry was able to discover that the only way to properly clean a wound such as this was to wrap it with worms. This he did, while explaining they would eat only the rotting flesh and leave the living. It was an effective treatment that I would never have thought of.

  Thinking of those three men – Green, Berry and Hill – tried for the murder of the magistrate, Sir Edmund-bury Godfrey, I thought how it was surely a shame there were no such creatures that could do the same for London and rid the city of rot, leaving only the good. There was not a wit of proof against those men that stood the test of court, yet still they hung.

  Three weeks later, Francis felt well enough to talk a little. I did not expect him to say much about his ordeals in that dark and icy cell. He started by saying he was indebted to me for saving him and for my loyalty. Later, when he recovered more, he told me the things I wanted to know. I asked about the holes in his legs and he described heavy irons called shears that were so far apart they made it impossible to walk.

  ‘I could scarce move but a few inches, and that took all my strength,’ he whispered a little louder than the first day he spoke. ‘My legs were shackled by irons weighing forty full pounds or more, though the limit of the law is half that!’

  They tried to have him confess to carrying the body of Sir Godfrey away after his murder, and the more he denied all knowledge of it, the more they beat him and pulled his hair. They threatened to run him through with a sword, then put him in a thing like an animal trough, where he was cruelly bolted in and squeezed until he fainted. Not only did the gaolers overlook his torment, but a minister added to it.

  ‘Then, when they could not make me own what I did not do, they offered me a large sum of gold – five hundred pounds, they told me – to name the one who employed me to move the poor man’s body. I would not do it. I would not belie another for my own gain! Nay, I must live with myself or die.’ I nodded my agreement. I had a growing respect for this man.

  ‘When they discovered I was no dog to be trained to do tricks, they chained me in the cell like a wild beast, so I could not move more than a yard in any direction. I was left to die without food or drink.’

  ‘How did you survive so long?’ I could not fathom the horror of it all. Perhaps every day I met the men that did this, that did not have a soul, but I did not know what such a man looked like.

  Corral looked away to the children, and blinked a few times, before turning his head back and saying in a low voice I could barely hear, ‘I was forced to sip my own water to wet my mouth for want of any other drink. The only time I saw victuals were when my brave wife dared bring some – the milk cast on the floor soured out of reach, and the keeper made me watch him eat my bread.’

  ‘Wicked! Wicked, wicked, wicked! How is it that one in the Devil’s service lives on this Earth and not where flames sear his beard?’

  ‘It is not only those in prison that are bad. There are some in high places and some in low, I cannot tell who they are, that would point a finger at any they would have taken down.’

  ‘Tortured until you confess, then tortured more to accuse others so they also confess. ‘I say, ‘tis a witch-hunt!’ I said.

  ‘Aye, that’s exactly what it is,’ agreed Corral. Only this time there is no line drawn between men and women; all are equal marks for gaol.’

  As I sat there, I was overcome by the size of this. It was bigger than him, bigger than me, and bigger than each and any part of the whole could do a thing about. There was little for a person to do but keep his head low and watch it play out; but so many innocents would die before it did, as so many had already done.

  But why should I only discover the truth of it! I put it to Mr and Mrs Corral, ‘What if I should petition the king and ask him to look to his gaols? What if I should tell those that can stop it? They could demand proof, and I would give it to them.’

  Warmth grew in me as I told Corral and his wife my idea of why I desired to collect all the details of his awful time. I became excited by the difference I might make.

  ‘And what if every man and woman on the streets, and in all coffee houses, were told what happened in those places…could not that make a difference?’ To discover it, they had only to go to the gaols and see for themselves, or attend the courts and hear for themselves.

  Sitting next to this man, brok
en by the law of the land that should protect him, gave me strength to stand up for the truth.

  ‘Will you let me tell your story, of what happened to you in the cells? What they did to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said warily.

  ‘I must tell the truth to all people. If they know, I am certain they will stop it!’

  ‘And maybe they would use it against you, and you will find your self in my stead.’

  I raised my head, and said, ‘I am a respected citizen. They will not harm me.’

  ‘They would throw into gaol any that stand in their way. Do not believe they would not have you as well as any man, because they would.’

  ‘It maybe so,’ I thought about it, ‘but I must try.’

  ‘And I must protest! You have done so much for me, I would not see you put your very life in danger like this!’

  Despite his words, I saw hope in his eyes. He wanted people to know what happened to him. If his story was not told, he would merely be another silent, tortured soul amongst many; and his story would be of interest to the rest of London. They would not care unless they understood it was innocent folk such as themselves that were in gaol and hanged for acts they did not commit. Only then might this atrocity be stopped.

  ‘I will do it. People must know.’

  His wife piped in, ‘I have been in the city, Mrs Cellier. I know what they say about the one called The Popish Midwife. If you do this, it would be all the reason they would need or want to hang you from the rafters, or rip you limb from limb if they had half a chance. You must not give them that chance…stay low and live quietly, is what I say.’

  ‘I have lived my life persecuted for my beliefs, Mrs Corral, for my parents being Protestant royalist when I was a child, and for being Catholic now. There need be no more reason than my living to find cause against me, but living should not be reason to hide my beliefs, or the truth. If I do not stand up and speak out, they will only find another reason to persecute me. I may as well stand.’