Bruce Holsinger - The Invention of Fire

“Stephen,” she said between heavy breaths. “Stephen, you must run to Coleman Way and fetch Rose Lipton.”

“The midwife,” he said, shocked from his daze.

“Aye. Fetch her if you will.” She huddled herself into another seizing, though not too soon to see his face brighten with the assignment. He was gone, and absent for three more of the clutching pains before he returned. Alone.

She lay on her side and glared up at him. He gaped down at her writhing form. He stayed near the bedchamber door, half in, half out. “Mistress Lipton wasn’t at home,” he said timidly. “Gone to the Riding, I suspect, with all the rest.”

“Very well,” she said, girding herself for the shame of it. “You will have to- ohh !” The sharpest seizing yet. It spun her thoughts around, shot through from toes to skull.

“Are you-can I-” He looked on, his face a mask of confusion and boyish fear.

“Stephen,” she gasped. “Stephen, you must help me. You must-you must birth this babe.”

He backed into the gallery, his hands up, his eyes round as shields. “Oh I could not do that, mistress. Not-not that .”

Not that ? Her fury rose above the pain. Not that. As if lifting her sodden dress and eyeing up her parts would put him in any worse state than he already was. She looked into his shifting eyes, thought of his strange mind, how it worked, how it tested things. Not the devil’s mind, as Robert would jest. Yet not fully human either, was Stephen Marsh. He saw everything in the world as part of his craft. Hawisia, in a moment of clarity in the midst of her pain, saw herself as she needed Stephen Marsh to see her.

A machine.

She seized up, yet even through the agony she forced the needful words together.

“Stephen,” she gasped when the worst of it had passed. “Stephen, this is a matter of mechanics, this body you see. Think it as one of your devices, your snakes or your guns or your hinges. Bone, muscle, flesh, grease. Moving parts, all of them. Some fit, some not. Some work as they should, some not.” She suffered through another seizing, her eyes blurring with the sweat.

“Yet the machine-the contrivance is meant to work, Stephen. God-God Himself means it to work, and God means a child to slip through. Now make it work, by God’s damned bones! ” She cursed through the first moments of the next seizing, and she swam in a deep and throttling pain, the longest yet. Something shifted inside her with this one; she felt an opening in her inmost parts, a need to push the damned thing out, and yet it could be too early, the babe could be twisted or choked or broken and then what would she do?

When the spasm passed, Stephen Marsh was at the foot of the bed. He had moved her onto her back somehow. His hands were on her knees, and his face had changed. The apprehension and boyish fear were gone, replaced by the confidence of the artisan. A smith at his forge, a founder at his mold. A craftsman, curious, quick, up for a new challenge. He told her to move to her hands and knees, then to her elbows and knees, and she did, exposing her nether world to him, queynt and arse and all, without a mind to modesty.

What Hawisia would remember most clearly from the hour that followed was the reassuring steadiness of Stephen’s voice, the calm questions and observations as he manipulated her inner and outer flesh with the practiced adeptness of a born surgeon.

You’ll be wanting to push. But not yet, mind. Circle’s opening up but needs a mite ’nother inch.

Digging in your back, you say? Aye, makes sense, as the thing’s turned about, isn’t it.

Oil’s what we need, just there, and there.

Ah, the feet. All ten toes, Hawisia, not to fear. The thing needs a twist about now.

So it went, for over an hour more; he told her when it was done. At the hazy end of it she was on her back, clutching a slimed, screaming thing at her breast. A daughter. Robert Stone’s living daughter, and her own. There were a few voices from the yard now, the youthful calls of the apprentices returned from the Riding.

Hawisia looked at Stephen, who sat at a chair by her bed. He had been with her for nearly half that day, his voice in her ears, his hands within her privity, pulling life from her womb.

“You did well, Stephen Marsh.”

His eyes moistened. Hawisia handed him the sleeping babe. Stephen held the girl, smelled her swaddled head.

Stephen sat with the babe all that day as the servants and apprentices and guildsmen drifted back to the foundry, murmuring among themselves down in the yard and the shop, worrying over the presence of Stephen Marsh back at Stone’s, wondering when the beadle or constable would come for him.

At the stroke of four Rose Lipton appeared in the gallery. Stephen had gone out to the barn, his presence known only to the workers of the foundry. To Hawisia the midwife looked angry that the babe was alive. Rose’s hands were at her hips, her lips tightly pursed as she took in the sight of this widow lying abed, a new mother without her aid.

Rose inspected the infant, then turned to Hawisia’s nether parts. “Quite a tear down there,” she said, sounding pleased as she fingered it roughly. “Don’t expect it to heal, and you’ll want to watch for fever, poor dear.”

“I shall.”

“She was swift out of your womb as well,” said Rose with a cluck. “And as we midwives will say, quick to life, quick to death. My own birthings were slow affairs, even the seventh!”

“She came legs first. Like a mallet with a big head,” said Hawisia, smelling her sweet child, and silently thanking God a smith was there to take the handle.

The ward was lit up with the talk in those first days after the Riding, every mouth a lantern burning with news and slander. Hawisia half listened as she went about her work in the foundry, knowing the truth was more wondrous than all the lies being whispered about the foiled massacre at the city gate. Stephen had told her what he’d done, and through the week of Hallowtide she kept him hidden in the ’prentice barn, the whole of Stone’s sworn to a secrecy all warily embraced. Stephen himself seemed as calm and content as a fugitive killer could be, warming touchingly to her new daughter, whose visits to the barn fast became part of the infant’s daily routine.

Over a week passed before Hawisia learned what was to become of Stephen, and thus herself and the foundry. The first sign came from Mathias Poppe, the beadle who had sought out Stephen for questioning about the girl’s death in the woods. He arrived at Stone’s on the Thursday, asking after Stephen.

“Haven’t seen his face in over a fortnight, Master Poppe,” she said, smoothing her hand over the small back of her child. “Not since he left sanctuary at St. Mary’s.”

He could tell she was lying, Hawisia suspected, though he let it pass, acting satisfied with her denial. She promised to let him know the moment Stephen Marsh appeared at the foundry.

The next visitors, less benevolent, were liveried men of the Tower wardrobe. She found the two of them slinking about the shop on the Friday when she returned from the smithy. Long knives at their sides, scowls on their hardened faces.

“Where is he?” the first one asked her, without so much as a word of greeting.

“Who?” she said, widening her eyes.

“You know well enough,” said the second. He spat on the rushes.

Her eyes went to the ugly spurt, back to him. “You’ll be leaving my shop now, the both of you.”

“That’s what you think, is it, my pretty mother?”

“And we as well,” said a voice. Hawisia turned to see three burly workers at the yard door, each of them trained up in the craft by Robert Stone and Stephen Marsh, and all bearing lengths of iron in their hands. Two apprentices stood behind them, looking young, frightened, but passing brave.