The Serpent's Tale Read online

  “Push, Ma,” said the fetus’s eldest sister helpfully from the sidelines.

  “Don’t you be telling her that,” Adelia said in East Anglian. “Her can’t push til the time comes.” At this stage, the poor woman had little control over the matter.

  And neither do I, she thought in desperation. I don’t know what to do.

  It was going badly; labor had been protracted to the point where the mother, an uncomplaining fenwoman, was becoming exhausted.

  Outside, on the grass, watched by Adelia’s dog, Mansur was singing nursery rhymes from his homeland to amuse the other children—all of whom had been delivered easily with the aid of a neighbor and a bread knife—and it was a measure of Adelia’s desperation that at this moment she relished neither his voice nor the strangeness of hearing a castrato’s angelic soprano wafting minor-key Arabic over an English fenland. She could only wonder at the endurance of the suffering woman on the bed, who managed to gasp, “Tha’s pretty.”

  The woman’s husband remained uncharmed. He was hiding himself and his concern for his wife in the hut’s undercroft with his cow. His voice came up the wooden flight of stairs to the stage—part hayloft, part living quarters—where the women battled. “Her never had this to-do when Goody Baines delivered ’em.”

  Good for Goody Baines, Adelia thought. But those babies had come without trouble, and there had been too many of them. Later, she would have to point out that Mistress Reed had given birth to nine in twelve years; another would probably kill her, even if this one did not.

  However, now was not the moment. It was necessary to keep up confidence, especially that of the laboring mother, so she called brightly, “You be thankful you got me now, bor, so you just keep that old water bilin’.”

  Me, she thought, an anatomist, and a foreigner to boot. My speciality is corpses. You have a right to be worried. If you were aware of how little experience I have with any parturition other than my own, you’d be frantic.

  The unknown Goody Baines might have known what to do; so might Gyltha, Adelia’s companion and nursemaid to her child, but both women were independently paying a visit to Cambridge Fair and would not be back for a day or two, their departure having coincided with the onset of Mistress Reed’s labor. Only Adelia in this isolated part of fenland was known to have medical knowledge and had, therefore, been called to the emergency.

  And if the woman in the bed had broken her bones or contracted any form of disease, Adelia could indeed have helped her, for Adelia was a doctor—not just wise in the use of herbs and the pragmatism handed down from woman to woman through generations, and not, like so many men parading as physicians, a charlatan who bamboozled his patients with disgusting medicines for high prices. No, Adelia was a graduate of the great and liberal, forward-thinking, internationally admired School of Medicine in Salerno, which defied the Church by enrolling women into its studies if they were clever enough.

  Finding Adelia’s brain on a par with, even excelling, that of the cleverest male student, her professors had given her a masculine education, which, later, she had completed by joining her Jewish foster father in his department of autopsy.

  A unique education, then, but of no use to her now, because in its wisdom—and it was wisdom— Salerno’s School of Medicine had seen that midwifery was better left to midwives. Adelia could have cured Mistress Reed’s baby, she could have performed a postmortem on it were it dead and revealed what it died of—but she couldn’t birth it.

  She handed over a basin of water and cloth to the woman’s daughter, crossed the room, and picked up her own baby from its wicker basket, sat down on a hay bale, undid her laces, and began to feed it.

  She had a theory about breast-feeding, as she had for practically everything: It should be accompanied by calm, happy thoughts. Usually, when she nursed the child, she sat in the doorway of her own little reed-thatched house at Waterbeach and allowed her eyes and mind to wander over the Cam fenland. At first its flat greenness had fared badly against the remembered Mediterranean panorama of her birth, with its jagged drama set against a turquoise sea. But flatness, too, has its beauty, and gradually she had come to appreciate the immense skies over infinite shades of willow and alder that the natives called carr, and the richness of fish and wildlife teeming in the hidden rivers.

  “Mountains?” Gyltha had said once. “Don’t hold with mountains. They buggers do get in the way.”

  Besides, this was now the homeland of the child in her arms, and therefore infinitely beloved.

  But today, Adelia dared not indulge either her eyes or her mind for her baby’s sake. There was another child to be saved, and be damned if she was going to let it die through her own ignorance. Or the mother, either.

  Silently apologizing to the little thing in her arms, Adelia set herself to envisaging the corpses she’d dissected of mothers who’d died with their fetuses yet undelivered.

  Such pitiable cadavers, yet when they were laid out on the marble table of the great autopsy hall in Salerno, she’d withheld compassion from them, as she’d learned to do with all the dead in order to serve them better. Emotion had no place in the art of dissection, only clear, trained, investigative reasoning.

  Now, here, in a whiskery little hut on the edge of the civilized world, she did it again, blanking from her mind the suffering of the woman on the bed and replacing it with a map of interior organs, positions, pressures, displacements. “Hmm.”

  Hardly aware she was doing it, Adelia withdrew her baby from her left, now empty, breast and transferred it to the other, still calculating stresses on brain and navel cord, why and when suffocation occurred, blood loss, putrefaction ... “Hmm.”

  “Here, missis. Summat’s coming.” The daughter was guiding her mother’s hands toward the bridle that had been tied to the bed head.

  Adelia laid her child back in its basket, covered herself up, and went to the bottom of the bed.

  Something was indeed emerging from the mother’s body, but it wasn’t a baby’s head, it was a baby’s backside.

  Goddamn. A breech birth. She’d suspected it but, by the time she’d been brought in, engagement in the uterus had taken place and it was too late to insert her hand and revolve the fetus, even if she’d had the knowledge and daring.

  “Ain’t you going to tug it out?” the daughter asked.

  “Not yet.” She’d seen the irreparable damage caused by pulling at this stage. Instead, she addressed the mother. “Now you push. Whether you want to or not, push.”

  Mistress Reed nodded, put part of the bridle in her mouth, clamped her teeth on it, and began pushing. Adelia gestured to the girl to help her drag the mother’s body farther down the bed so that her buttocks hung over the edge and gravity could play its part.

  “Hold her legs straight. By the ankles, behind me, behind me, that’s right. Well done, mistress. Keep pushing.” She herself was on her knees, a good position for delivering—and praying.

  Help us, Lord.

  Even so, she waited until a navel appeared with its attached cord. She touched the cord gently—a strong pulse. Good, good.

  Now for it.

  Moving quickly but with care, she entered her hand into the mother’s cavity and released one leg, then the other, flexing the tiny knees.

  “Push. Push, will you.”

  Oh, beautiful, sliding out by themselves without having to be pulled were two arms and a torso up to the nape of the neck. Supporting the body with one hand, Adelia laid the other on the little back and felt the tremor of a pulse.

  Crucial now. Only minutes before suffocation set in. God, whichever god you are, be with us now.

  He wasn’t. Mistress Reed had lost strength, and the baby’s head was still inside.

  “Pass over that pack, that pack.” In seconds, Adelia had extracted her dissection knife, always kept clean.

  “Now.” She placed the daughter’s hand on Mistress Reed’s pubic region. “Press.” Still supporting the little torso, she made a cut in the mot
her’s perineum. There was a slither and, because the knife was still in her fingers, she had to catch the baby in the crook of her elbows.

  The daughter was shouting, “That’s out, Dadda.”

  Master Reed appeared at the head of the ladder in a smell of cow dung. “Gor dang, what is it?”

  Stupid with relief, Adelia said, “It’s a baby.” Ugly, bloodied, soapy, froglike, with its feet tending toward its head as they had in the womb, but undamaged, breathing, and, when tapped on its back, objecting to life in general and its emergence into it in particular—to Adelia, as beautiful a sight and sound as the world was capable of producing.

  “That’s as may be, but what is it?”

  “Oh.” Adelia put down the knife and turned the miracle over. It was male, quite definitely male. She gathered herself. “I believe the scrotum swelling to be caused by bruising and will subside.”

  “He’s a’going to be popular if it don’t, ain’t he?” Master Reed said.

  The cord was severed, Mistress Reed was stitched and made decent for visitors, and the baby was wrapped in a fleece and put into his mother’s arms.

  “Here, missis, you got a name as we can call him after?” her husband wanted to know.

  “Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar,” Adelia said apologetically.

  There was silence.

  “What about him?” Master Reed pointed at the tall figure of Mansur, who had come up with the siblings to view the miracle.

  “Mansur bin Fayîî bin Nasab Al-Masaari Khayoun of Al Amarah.”

  More silence.

  Mansur, whose alliance with Gyltha was enabling him to understand English even if it gave him little chance to speak it, said in Arabic, “The prior comes, I saw his boat. Let them call the boy Geoffrey.”

  “Prior Geoffrey’s here?” Adelia was down the ladder in a trice and running to the tiny wooden platform that served as a quay—all homes in the fenland had access to one of its innumerable rivers, its children learning to maneuver a coracle as soon as they could walk.

  Clambering out of his barge with the help of a liveried oarsman was one of Adelia’s favorite people. “How are you here?” she said, hugging him. “Why are you here? How is Ulf?”

  “A handful, but a clever handful. He thrives.” Gyltha’s grandson, and, so it was said, the prior’s as well, had been set to serious study at the priory school and would not be allowed to leave it until the spring sowing.

  “I am so pleased to see you.”

  “And I you. They told me at Waterbeach where you were gone. It appears that the mountain must come to Mohammed.”

  “It’s still too mountainous,” Adelia said, standing back to look at him. The prior of Saint Augustine’s great canonry in Cambridge had been her first patient and, subsequently, her first friend in England; she worried about him. “You have not been keeping to my diet.”

  “Dum vivimus, vivamus,” he said. “Let us live while we live. I subscribe to the Epicureans.”

  “Do you know the mortality rate among Epicureans?”

  They spoke in fast and classical Latin because it was natural to them, though it caused the men in the prior’s barge to wonder why their lord was concealing from them what he was saying to a woman and, even more wondrous, how a woman could understand it.

  “Oh, but you are well come,” Adelia said, “just in time to baptize my first delivery. It will comfort his parents, though he is a healthy, glorious child.” Adelia did not subscribe to the theory of Christian infant baptism, just as she didn’t subscribe to any of what she regarded as barbarous tenets held by the world’s three major faiths. A god who would not allow that baby upstairs into the Kingdom of Heaven if it died before being sprinkled with certain words and water was not a god she wanted anything to do with.

  But his parents regarded the ceremony as vital, if only to ensure the boy a Christian burial should the worst happen. Master Reed had been about to send for the shabby, peripatetic priest who served the area.

  The Reed family watched in silence as bejewelled fingers wetted their son’s forehead and a voice as velvety-rich as its owner’s vestments welcomed him into the faith, promising him life eternal and pronouncing him “Geoffrey in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.”

  “Fen people never say thank you,” Adelia apologized, as, carrying her baby, she joined the prior in his barge, the dog called Ward scrambling in with her, leaving Mansur to follow in their rowing boat. “But they never forget, either. They were grateful but amazed. You were too much for them, as if archangel Gabriel had come down in a shaft of gold.”

  “Non angeli, sed angli, I fear,” Prior Geoffrey said, and such was his fondness for Adelia that he, who had lived in Cambridgeshire for thirty years, remained complacent at being instructed in the ways of the fens by this woman from southern Italy.

  Look at her, he thought, dressed like a scarecrow, accompanied by a dog that will necessitate fumigation of the bench it sits on, the finest mind of her generation hugging her bastard for joy at having delivered a brat into a hovel.

  Not for the first time, he wondered about her parentage, of which she was as ignorant as he. Brought up by a Salernitan couple, a Jew and his Christian wife, who’d found her abandoned among the stones of Vesuvius, her hair was the dark blond sometimes seen on Greeks or Florentines. Not that anybody could see it at the moment, hidden in that unspeakable cap.

  She is still the oddity she was when we first met on the road to Cambridge, Prior Geoffrey thought. I returning from the pilgrimage to Canterbury, she in a cart, accompanied by an Arab and a Jew. I put her down as their trull, not recognizing the virginity of a scholar. Yet when I began to bawl in pain— Lord, how I bawled, and Lord, what pain it was—despite all my company of Christians, only she played the Samaritan. In saving my life that day she reduced me, me, to stammering adolescence by manipulating my most intimate parts as if they were mere tripes to be cooked. And still I find her beautiful.

  She had been obeying a summons even then, brought from her work with the dead of Salerno to be part of a team in disguise led by the investigating Jew, Simon of Naples, to find out who was killing Cambridge’s children—a matter that seriously bothered the King of England because it was leading to riot and, therefore, a depletion of his taxes.

  This being England and not freethinking Salerno, it had been necessary for Mansur, Adelia’s servant, to set up as the doctor, with Adelia herself pretending to be his assistant during their investigation. Poor, good Simon—even though a Jew, the prior remembered him in his prayers—had been murdered in his search for the killer, and Adelia herself had nearly lost her life, but the case had been resolved, justice imposed, and the king’s taxes restored to his treasury.

  In fact, so useful had been Adelia’s forensic skill in the matter that King Henry had refused to let her return to Italy in case he should need her again. A miserly and greedy ingratitude typical of kings, Prior Geoffrey thought, even while he rejoiced that it had made the woman his neighbor.

  How much does she resent this exile? It wasn’t as if she’d been rewarded. The king had done nothing—well, he’d been abroad—when Cambridge’s doctors, jealous of a successful interloper, had driven her and Mansur out of town and into the wilderness of the fens.

  Sick and suffering men and women had followed them, and still did, not caring if treatment was at the hands of foreign unbelievers but only that it made them well.

  Lord, I fear for her. Her enemies will damn her for it. Use her illegitimate child as proof that she is immoral, take her before the Archdeaconal Court to condemn her as a sinner. And what can I do?

  Prior Geoffrey groaned at his own guilt. What friend have I been to her? Or to her Arab? Or Gyltha?

  Until he had himself teetered on the edge of death and been dragged back by Adelia, he had followed the Church’s teaching on science that only the soul mattered, not the body. Physical pain? It is God’s purpose, put up with it. Investigation? Dissection? Experiments? Si
c vos ardebitis in Gehenna. So will ye burn in hell.

  But Adelia’s ethos was Salerno’s, where Arab, Jewish, and even Christian minds refused to set barriers on their search for knowledge. She had lectured him: “How can it be God’s purpose to watch a man drowning when to stretch out one’s hand would save him? You were drowning in your own urine. Was I to fold my arms rather than relieve the bladder? No, I knew how to do it and I did it. And I knew because I had studied the offending gland in men who’d died from it.”

  An oddly prim little thing she’d been then, unsophisticated, curiously nunlike except for her almost savage honesty, her intelligence, and her hatred of superstition. She had at least gained something from her time in England, he thought— more womanliness, a softening, and, of course, the baby—the result of a love affair as passionate and as unsuitable as that of Héloïse and Abelard.

  Prior Geoffrey sighed and waited for her to ask why, busy and important man that he was, he had sailed forth to look for her.

  The advent of winter had stripped the fens of leaves, allowing the sun unusual access to the river so that its water reflected back exactly the wild shapes of naked willow and alder along the banks. Adelia, voluble with relief and triumph, pointed out the names of the birds flying up from under the barge’s prow to the stolid baby on her lap, repeating their names in English, Latin, and French, and appealing to Mansur across the water when she forgot the Arabic.

  How old is my godchild now? the prior wondered, amused. Eight months? Nine? “Somewhat early to be a polyglot,” he said.

  “You can’t start too soon.”

  She looked up at last. “Where are we going? I presume you did not come so far on the chance of baptizing a baby.”

  “A privilege, medica,” Prior Geoffrey said. “I was taken back to a blessed stable in Bethlehem. But no, I did not come for that. This messenger”—he beckoned forward a figure that had been standing, cloaked and transfixed, at the barge prow—“arrived for you at the priory with a summons, and since he would have had difficulty finding you in these waters, I volunteered to bring him.”