Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [67]
"It hurts, Eldmoder! It hurts!" With Fride's cries, the time of my own first birth came rushing back. As I watched the shadows on the other side of the blanket, the old woman stooping to where the young one lay, I saw again the face of the midwife who had caught my daughter from the birthing chair. She'd held my babe in both hands, her forehead gleaming with sweat and her voice cracked with weariness. "There's no crying," she had said. "'Tis not a good sign."
"No, please," Fride yelled again from across the room. "Oh, no!" Though I felt little love for the girl, I could not help but smile. How young she was! How little she knew of real pain.
"See?" Ædre's voice was patient, firm. "See how it stops for a bit?" Her shadow on the blanket raised itself to a standing position, and she sighed an old woman's sigh. "Here, now. Take some water, girl. Rest while you are able."
But still the screams went on. "Oh, by Mary's bones! I cannot take more! I cannot!"
While the girl carried on in this way, I bethought me to remove the other bag of gems I'd hidden. I reached under the cloak with which the old woman had covered me and felt inside my own body. That is how, as Fride gave birth with groans and plaints, I delivered a much smaller bundle in the wink of an eye with only two fingers.
"Aiyeee!" The wailing came again and then, abruptly, ceased.
"There she is, by the Lord's mercy." I could hear the old woman's smile in the light new cast of her voice. And I could also hear what I'd yearned for years before—the lusty, outraged squall of a newborn babe. "You've a daughter, Fride. And a long-legged lass by the looks of her."
A daughter! My knees weakened and I sank to a settle by the hearth. Beyond this bench and the table beside it, there was no furniture in the room.
I heard straw shift behind the blanket. As Fride stirred and sat up, I closed my eyes against the shadow picture I knew must come next—the babe in her mother's arms.
"Here, now, you hold her. She'll find no milk in these old teats." Ædre laughed as the babe cried, then clucked with approval as it quieted. "Ay, she's a hungry one, is she not?"
The things I did not want to remember, the hurt I'd laid to rest, came rushing back. I saw again my little Nayla, felt the milk pressing like a flood inside me as the midwife put her to suck. What joy when her tiny mouth at last had closed round me, what despair when it opened again and all the milk spilled out.
Fride, her trials over, was laughing, cooing at her child. "Look, Eldmoder," she said. "She has small feet like yours!"
"They are all small to start," the old woman said, then softened. "See how she looks at you, girl. 'Tis enough to make you fall in love up to your ears."
More rustling in the straw, more settling sounds. "And what name shall we call her, Grandmother?" the girl asked.
Ædre stood upright again, her hands on her waist. "Why, your dear mother's name, I think. Ebba is a good sound, eh?"
"Yes!" Fride bent to the little one in her lap. "You will be named for the incoming tide, little one," she whispered. "You will always come home."
How different it had been with my lost babe: I had already chosen her name, but I could not hold her gaze, nor make her take my finger in her hand. Even when I propped her against my knees and lifted her head to my face, her cloudy eyes fell away from mine.
When Ædre had made the new mother comfortable and returned at last to me, I pressed the jewels I had brought with me into her hands. She looked at me as though I had come to her with Moses' tablets or placed a phoenix egg in her keeping. "What be this, lady?" she asked. "What be this?" Though her eyes could plainly tell what she held: pearls, rubies, sapphires, and an emerald as big as a walnut.
I closed her trembling fingers around the stones. "This be, good dame, your great-granddaughter's dower." As the foolish woman continued staring first at me, then at the fistful of twinkling gems, I pointed behind her to the blanket. "You surely know, as does the whole of Coventry,