Philippa Gregory - The Kingmaker's Daughter

The pains start at midnight, just when I am going to sleep with Isabel in the big bed beside me. I give a little cry and within moments she is up, throwing a gown over her shoulders, lighting candles from the fire, sending the maid for the midwives.

I can see that she is afraid for me, and her white-faced ordering of ale and her sharp tone to the midwives make me afraid in my turn. They have a monstrance with the Host inside it set up on the little altar in the corner of my room. I have the girdle that was specially blessed for Isabel’s first birth tied around my straining belly. The midwives have spiced ale for me and everyone else to drink, and they send orders to the kitchen for the cooks to be woken to make a great dinner, for it will be a long night and we will all want sustaining.

When they bring me a fricassee of game followed by some roast chicken and boiled carp the smell of the food turns my stomach and I order it from the room and prowl up and down, turning at the window and at the head of the bed while outside, in the presence chamber, I can hear them eating greedily and calling for more ale. Only Iz and a couple of maids stay with me. Iz has no appetite either.

‘Are the pains bad?’ she asks anxiously.

I shake my head. ‘They come and go,’ I say. ‘But I think they’re getting stronger.’

About two in the morning it gets a lot worse. The midwives, flushed and merry from the food and drink, come into the bedroom and walk me between the two of them. When I pause they force me to walk onward. When I want to lie down and rest, they cluck and push me on. The pains start to come more closely together and only then do they allow me to lean on one of them and groan.

At about three in the morning I hear footsteps coming across the bridge from the great chamber, and there is a knock at the door and I hear Richard calling: ‘I am the duke! How is my wife?’

‘Merrily,’ says the midwife with rough good humour. ‘She’s doing merrily, my lord.’

‘How much longer will she be?’

‘Hours yet,’ she says cheerfully, ignoring my moan of protest. ‘Could be hours. You get yourself some sleep, Your Grace, we’ll send to you the moment she takes to her bed.’

‘Why, is she not in bed now? What is she doing?’ he demands, puzzled, the door barred to him, knowing nothing of the mid-wives’ arts.

‘We’re walking her,’ the older one replies. ‘Walking her up and down to ease the pain.’

Pointless to tell them that it does not ease the pain at all, for they will do this, as they have always done it, and I will obey them, for I can hardly think for myself now.

‘You are walking her?’ my young husband demands through the closed door. ‘Is that helping much?’

‘If the baby was slow in coming we would toss her in a blanket,’ the younger one replies with a hard laugh. ‘She is glad we are just walking her. This is women’s work, Your Grace. We know what we are doing.’

I hear Richard’s muffled expletive, but then his footsteps go away and Iz and I look bleakly at each other as the women take my arms and lead me from fireplace to doorway and back again.

They leave me as they go to take their breakfast in the great hall, and once again I find I cannot eat and Iz sits beside me as I rest on the bed, and strokes my forehead like she used to do when I was ill. The pains come so often and so powerfully that I think I cannot bear it any longer. Just then the door opens and the two midwives come back in, this time bringing with them the wet nurse, who sets the cradle to rights, and spreads the sheets on the birthing bed.

‘Not long now,’ says one of the midwives cheerfully. ‘Here.’ She offers me a wooden wedge, polished by use and indented with teeth marks. ‘Bite on it,’ she says. ‘See those marks? Many a good woman has bitten on that and saved her own tongue. You bite on it when the pain comes, and then you take a good hold of this.’

They have tied a cord across the two bottom posts of my big bed and when I reach forwards from the day bed I can get hold of it and brace my feet against the foot of the big bed. ‘You pull on that, and we pull with you. You bite on the wedge when you feel the pain rising, and we roar with you.’

‘Do you have nothing you can give her to ease the pain?’ Isabel demands.

The younger woman unstoppers a stone bottle. ‘You take a drop of this,’ she suggests, pouring it into my silver cup. ‘Come to think of it, we’ll all take a drop of this.’

It burns my throat and makes my eyes water but it makes me feel braver and stronger. I see Iz choke on her draught and she grins at me. She leans forwards to whisper in my ear: ‘These are two greedy drunk old women. God only knows where Richard found them.’

‘They are the best in the country,’ I reply. ‘God help the woman in travail with the worst.’

She laughs and I laugh too but the laugh catches in my belly like a sword thrust, and I give a great cry. At once the two women become businesslike, seating me on the birthing bed, putting the looped cord into my hand, telling the maid to pour hot water from the jug at the fireside. Then there is a long confused time when I am absorbed by the pain, and the firelight reflected on the side of the jug, the heat of the room, and Isabel’s cool hand bathing my face. I feel as if I am fighting a pain in my very bowels and it is a struggle to breathe. I think of my mother, so far away from me, who should be here with me now, and I think of my father who spent his life fighting and who knew the final last terror of defeat and death. Oddly enough I think of Midnight, throwing up his big head as the sword went in his heart. At the thought of my father, going out on foot to put down his life in the fields outside Barnet so that I might be Queen of England I give a heave and I hear a crying, and someone saying urgently, ‘Gently, gently now,’ and I see Isabel’s face blurred with tears and hear her say to me: ‘Annie! Annie! You have a boy!’ And I know that I have done the one thing that my father wanted, the one thing that Richard needs: I have given my father a grandson and my husband his heir, and God has blessed me with a baby boy.

But he is not strong. The midwives say cheerfully that many a frail boy makes a brave man, and the wet nurse says that her milk will make him grow fat and bonny in no time, but through the six weeks of my confinement after his birth, before my churching, my heart quails when I hear him cry, a little thin reedy sound, through the night, and in the day I look at the palms of his hands which are like little pale leaves.

Isabel is to go back to George in London after the baby’s christening and my churching. We call him Edward for the king, and Richard says that he foretells a great future for him. The christening is small and quiet, as is my churching, the king and queen cannot come and although nobody says anything, the baby does not look likely to thrive, he is hardly worth the cost of a great christening gown, three days of celebration in the castle, and a dinner for all the servants.

‘He will be strong,’ Isabel whispers to me reassuringly as she climbs into her litter in the stable yard. She is not going to ride, for her belly is broadening. ‘I thought he was looking much stronger this very morning.’

He is not, but neither of us admit this.

‘And anyway, at least you know now that you can have a child, that you can have a live birth,’ she says. The thought of the little boy who died at sea, who never even cried out, haunts us both, still.

‘You can have a live child too,’ I say staunchly. ‘This one, for sure. And I shall come to your confinement. There is no reason that it should not go well for you this time. And you will have a little cousin for Edward, and please God they will both thrive.’