by Jane Stain
“But even if I didn’t have Tam to worry about, I’m glad I can stay down here with you now anyway. The company is nice, and those stairs are pretty scary without Peadar around to help me. I haven’t seen my feet since Christmas.”
Aideen rubbed Vange’s shoulders.
“It is letting you have the bed now, I am.”
Vange dropped the spoon in the soup as she tried to turn in her chair to face the old cook.
“Oh no, Aideen. I can’t take your bed.”
Aideen held Vange firmly in the chair, not letting her try anymore to turn.
“You can and you will, Vange. And it is hurting yourself you will be, if you try anymore to turn in your seat.”
“But—”
Aideen put her hands on her hips and leaned over to smile at Vange.
“It is helping you get up off the floor we will not be doing.”
Uh, yeah. Now that she thought about it, how on Earth did she think she would get down there onto her pallet on the floor, let alone get up from it?
Vange smiled back at Aideen.
“Thank you. Thank you for everything.”
Aideen hugged her, and then Nora and Isleen joined in.
So Vange stayed in the kitchen night and day, only going out in the courtyard in the mornings to empty her chamber pot. Whenever she wanted to wash herself, she had one of the children bring a bucket of water and a rag into Aideen’s room.
The wives of the non-noble soldiers, relieved of their winter meal-serving duties, were now washing all the soiled bed linens that had been piled up in storerooms over the winter. They also washed clothing: the children’s, the noble women’s, their own, and that of Tam and the few other men still about the castle. They did the wash in the castle courtyard during the warmest part of the day, employing several large washtubs in these efforts, big enough that four women could gather around them and scrub clothing clean on washboards.
While Vange watched them through the half-open courtyard door from the kitchen one day, she considered her situation. Right now, she was hugely pregnant, and so she and Peadar couldn’t travel even though spring was in full bloom. But soon she would have a baby, and so they wouldn’t be able to travel for another year, at least.
And if she wasn’t careful, there would be another baby.
And another.
So that’s what Emily meant when she said I would be stuck here if I married Peadar here.
Vange had studied birth control in school, of course. At the time, it had been unbearably embarrassing. She and Emily had a male health teacher.
But now Vange was glad for the knowledge.
Once she got over being angry at herself for being impulsive and getting pregnant this first time, knowledge of birth control gave her the feeling she was now in charge of her situation, in this one little very important matter.
She felt sorry for all the other women in the castle, but she didn’t quite dare tell all of them what she knew. For one thing, that would expose her to Tam. No, she only felt OK about telling Isleen, Cara, and Nora. Something told her Aideen already knew.
Vange made plans for herself.
She would breastfeed of course—for as long as possible, as she knew her breast milk would give the baby her immunities—and that should work as birth control so long as the baby was only drinking her milk and not eating any food. Here in this backward time of no vaccinations, she planned to stretch that out to a year.
But her schooling told her she needed to use at least two birth-control methods.
She’d heard some of her middle-school classmates snickering that ‘back in the olden days, they used animal guts for condoms.’ And right now, animal guts were something Vange had a ready source of, unlike in her real life.
But how did one broach the subject of using animal guts as contraceptives?
In the privacy of the kitchen with only women around, that was how.
Vange was always the one seated now, stirring the pots and shaking the pans.
“Aideen?”
Today, the cook was the one kneading the bread dough.
“Hm?”
“I find I’m quite happy now with the baby coming, but I want to wait awhile before the next one, you know?”
“Oh, yes and I do.”
“So … I was thinking …”
“Hm heh heh.”
“What’s so funny?”
Nora poked Vange in the side, causing her to giggle.
“Tis thinking you often are, Vange.”
Isleen came over and mopped Vange’s hot face with a damp towel.
“You will bring all the monks down on us from all the monasteries you will, with all that thinking you do.”
“Uh, huh?”
As she often did, Aideen came over and rubbed the sore spot right at the base of Vange’s back. How did she find it every time, anyway?
“Pay them no mind, lassie. Pray tell us what it was you were thinking.”
Vange decided the only way to ask this was bluntly, so she just blurted it out.
“After I have the baby, I want all the big animal guts you get.”
“Ah, fancy some tripe, do you?”
“Ew. No. I want them raw and cleaned, to use as a marital aid.”
The other young wives stood and blinked at Vange.
But when Aideen answered her, Vange could tell that the old cook knew exactly what she had in mind.
“Very well, you shall have them, Vange.”
A few weeks later, Vange’s water broke right there in her chair by the huge kitchen fireplace. It was a while after supper, so she was only piling the glowing coals up into the far corner for the night so that they didn’t go out while she and the other kitchen workers slept.
Aideen served as Vange’s midwife, of course. The old Irish woman had all kinds of weird but effective ideas about how to manage Vange’s pain.
When Vange’s water broke, Aideen gestured, and Isleen and Nora came over and supported Vange by the arms while she got up.
“Walk her slowly around the room. Do keep her moving.”
The women obliged.
For a while, Vange was glad just to have company and something to do.
“Is it really necessary for them to hold me up, Aideen? I learned to walk a long time ago, you know.”
The other young wives laughed at this and several other jokes Vange cracked for a while as they walked around and around the kitchen.
And then …
“Vange, your breathing has grown weak,” said Aideen. “That be the sign your babes are nigh on ready to appear. Breathe shallowly but often, such as this: Huh. Huh. Huh.”
Vange tried that. Huh. Huh. Huh. Wouldn’t you know it helped, but it kept her from telling any more jokes.
Her friends seemed too tense to lead any conversation. Their tenseness was rubbing off on her. They really needed to lighten up.
To pass the time now, Vange silently counted how many circles they walked her around the kitchen. She got up to 468 before she got bored with that.
Huh. Come on, people. Huh. Say something. Huh. Entertain me. Huh.
Seeming to understand Vange’s state of mind, Aideen started humming a strange song.
Vange found it was soothing, but at the same time seemed to make her more alert. In the back of her mind she found that odd, but the soothing sensation was so pleasant and helpful that in the moment, she welcomed Aideen’s song.
After the contractions sped up a certain amount, Aideen spoke some Gaelic words into the washroom and some non-noble wives brought one of their large washtubs into the kitchen and filled it with heated water.
“Get in and be comfortable, lassie. Isleen and Nora will help you.”
Puffing for breath by now, Vange eyed the water doubtfully.
“Huh. Won’t the baby drown? Huh.”
Aideen laughed merrily.
“It is water that broke out of you earlier, and to water they be accustomed.”
(Huh. Huh. Huh.) Of all
her weird ideas, this has to be the weirdest—wait a minute.
“They?”
“There be two inside you, lassie.”
“Twins.”
Vange’s shock soon gave way to outright anger. Between puffy breaths, she gave the old cook a piece of her mind.
“Huh. How long Huh. have you known Huh. I was having twins Huh. Aideen, and why Huh. didn’t you tell me? Huh.”
“I have always known—”
“What do you Huh. mean, Huh. always?”
But Aideen seemed not to have heard that question. At least she answered Vange’s other question in her sing-song Irish lilt.
“And I could not be telling you, Vange, the reason being you could not do a thing to change it. Only worry could you, and that is not good for the wee ones.”
Puffing her breaths even faster, Vange waited for an apology, but when she got none, she slowly realized the truth in what the old cook had just said. Their mother’s worry probably would have a bad effect on her babies. After a bit, Vange surrendered to the relaxing warmth of the tub water.
The two women didn’t talk for a while.
Every minute or so, Aideen wiped the sweat off Vange’s forehead with a damp cloth and smoothed the stray strands of Vange’s hair out of her eyes.
Huh. Huh. Huh.
From her health classes, Vange intellectually knew terrible pain lurked just a moment away, but the warm water seemed to be helping. She felt the odd sensation of her pelvic bones and her cervix opening, and of her womb contracting. While all that inner activity did make it impossible for her to breathe deeply, it didn’t hurt, exactly.
Every time the tub water cooled below a relaxing warmth, Aideen would rap on the door to the washroom.
A girl would come in with a pan of hot water and slowly pour it into the tub far enough away from Vange that it didn’t hurt her.
Vange marveled that the girls didn’t stare.
“How Huh. often do you do this, Aideen? Huh.”
“A few dozen babes enter the world in this castle every year.”
“Huh. Where are they, Huh. all the other babes?”
“It is in their mothers’ rooms with them they be.”
Oh. Of course. Not all the wives stayed in the kitchen with Aideen…
“Oh. Huh. I think mine are Huh. here, Aideen.”
Sure enough, they popped right out into the warm water, and Aideen had time to lift each one up out of the water before he tried to breathe air.
Peadar had been right, only doubly so. Two boys.
Vange named them Michael and Gabriel, because they seemed like two little angels to her.
Aideen pulled some strings and set Vange and her family up in a larger room on the bottom floor of the castle, right across the staircase from the kitchen. She produced from storage a large cradle where they both could sleep, though they seldom slept at the same time. That was fine. There were always at least two women in the kitchen who would hold them and rock them and sing to them. Often they had three women doting on them, and sometimes four.
Aideen also produced from storage everything else the new family required: baby clothes, cloth diapers, gourd rattles, hand-carved wooden toy swords, and baby blankets.
Vange was content to watch her boys grow into toddlerhood there, but she was determined to get them back to her time before they got so big they would be expected to work. She wanted them to go to school and have much brighter futures and easier lives than they ever could in the 16th century.
Vange smiled at how obviously delighted Peadar was to meet his sons. They were three months old, and she held one in each arm inside their private room across the stairs from the kitchen.
“This is Michael, and this is Gabriel.”
Having just arrived home, Peadar still wore his battle-bloodied saffron leine. He unloaded all his weapons on the floor, first the claymore and then the large bow and quiver of arrows. The fierce appearance all of this paraphernalia gave him contrasted with the soft loving look on his face as he stepped up to her to coo at his sons.
“Heh ha ha ha ha. Och lad, that does tickle, it does.”
Michael and Gabriel were putting everything in their mouths these days, including all ten of Peadar’s fingers. Between that, they wrinkled their little brows and stared up at this man whose hands were tough but whose voice and manner were gentle with them.
Peadar reached out his arms for them.
“Give them to me, lass. I wish to hold my sons.”
She did. Ever so slowly, she moved in close to Peadar and passed both babies to him, helping him cradle both of them in his arms.
“Do you need help holding them?” she asked.
But she could already see that he didn’t.
He only had eyes for his sons when he spoke to confirm this.
“Nay. I was taken by the English young, but not too young to have been holding babes for five years already.”
Not having anything she needed to run off and do—her kitchen duties were voluntary and unneeded with her husband home to keep Tam at bay—Vange found herself just watching her sons and her husband get acquainted. It was the kind of thing she would have taken a picture of in her ‘real life’: the first time something happened in her children’s lives.
Peadar looked content simply to hold them and coo at them and let them gum his fingers.
And Vange sighed with contentment at watching all three of them.
Until Michael was hungry…
For the most part, Vange was elated to be done with her pregnancy. Everything from walking to climbing stairs to using the chamber pot to getting up from her seat was much easier.
Nursing the babies was a vacation by comparison. And it was a time for her to bond with them. Truly, with so many women anxious to hold them and coo over them, she rarely got that chance.
But she was glad to see their father relishing the chance to hold his sons. That did her a world of good. It was nice having Peadar home.
And it was wonderful being able to leave the babies with Isleen and a now-pregnant Cara for a few hours that night and play castle with Peadar. Even after being here a year, the greater castle outside of the kitchen felt like a playhouse to Vange: never quite real.
But now that she had lost the baby weight, and with Peadar around, Tam took an interest in her again. And Peadar appeared to be right: Tam was only showing interest in his wife in order to make Peadar angry.
Gradually, Tam was succeeding. Each time he had to defend Vange, Peadar showed a tiny bit less restraint and patience with his superior officer.
And this was always when they were all dressed in their finery.
With breakable things nearby.
Tam would move in whenever Vange left Peadar’s side for even a moment, such as that night, when she stopped to admire a vase in the great hall.
Daring to put his hand on the small of her back, Tam also put his mouth near her ear and whispered.
“Very fine work I see you know it is.”
Vange tensed to run away and retorted as loudly as she could, hoping to attract attention from some of the other people milling about in the great hall.
“Leave me alone.”
But the other people must have feared Tam. They must have heard her, but they all made a show of pretending not to have.
Tam grabbed her by the waist. He squeezed her hard, unlike when her husband squeezed her waist, and Tam continued whispering in her ear.
“Oh, but there is much too much amusement to be had of you, my dear.”
Wow, he knows what he’s doing. He does this often, and he gets away with it.
Fortunately for Vange, she had read articles in Cosmopolitan magazine about what to do when some creeper tried to make it look like you were just being crabby and he was your husband or father.
She yelled for help at the top of her lungs.
“Peadar. Help me.”
“Ha. He’s gone down into the courtyard by now and can’t hear you, pretty thing. You’l
l have plenty to tell him about just as soon as I get you into that room over there. Won’t that ruin him. Ha ha.”
Vange was moving to push the vase off its pedestal to draw a crowd when she heard Tam grunt.
“Ulp.”
Tam’s hand came loose from Vange’s waist instantly.
Vange ran from the room straight into the kitchen without stopping to see what transpired. Only half an hour later did she hear it from Nora, who came running in through the kitchen door with her face red and her breath huffing as if she’d just run there from the farthest corner of the fortress.
“Vange. Your man is the talk of the castle, he is.”
Vange dropped the knife she’d been trying to use for cutting up veggies, but which she’d merely been playing with while Aideen burped Michael and Isleen burped Gabriel after the hasty feeding Aideen had insisted Vange give them.
“Where is he? I expected him to come get me by now.”
Nora looked surprised.
“Do you not know?”
“Know what?”
Nora shook her head quickly in apparent agitation.
“There was a fight, Vange. Peadar struck the O’Neill’s man Tam in the face. In the O’Neill’s study they both are, telling the tale.”
Vange was halfway to the door when she was grabbed from behind. She struggled, but she couldn’t get free.
“Let me go. I’m going up there as a witness. Peadar was just protecting me. Tam started it.”
Aideen’s voice came out as strong as her arms felt.
“It is staying here you will be, near your babes. Need you they do, Vange. A mother must put her children first, even before her husband.”
Vange tried to shrug Aideen off, but to no effect.
“I’m not going to fight and die, just to testify. Let me go.”
Aideen held her even tighter.
“Vange, I do not know how these matters be settled on your home island, and hearing how fair it seems to be, I truly do wish betimes that we all lived there. But here—”
Vange’s adrenaline was all used up.
How in the world did an old woman overpower a young one in the middle of an adrenaline rush? Aideen’s strong hold on her was beginning to calm her anger so that doubt and fear could set in. But she wasn’t quite done struggling. Not yet.