第17章 The Skein Tithe

The Tithe tide came in on the fifth night, and the whole village went out to the gate. Eudora went with them, because she was the midwife and the woman at the gate was in labour, and the labour had begun at dusk the way a long labour often begins, with a rumble and a long wait, and by the time the tide turned and began to fill the Skaithe the room by the sluice was warm and lit and full of the ordinary sounds of a woman working. Mirabel Ossel lay on the bed with her hands gripping the frame and did not cry out, and Eudora knelt and gave her water between the pains and told her, low and steady, what was happening and what would happen next, because that was the work and the work did not care what else was in the room. The village had come. They stood out on the bank in the dark with lanterns, silent, twenty or thirty of them, men and women and a few children, and Drusilla Rennock stood at the front of them with the green ledger under her arm, and Godwin Grike stood at the gate itself with his hands on the boards of the sluice, ready to raise them when he was told. The hollow boat lay moored to the stone of the sluice, riding low, its dark space showing the water beneath. Reverend Harrower was there and looked as if he wished he were anywhere else, and did not leave. The birth was long and hard and clean. Eudora had delivered two hundred children and she knew by the feel of it when a birth would be simple, and this one was simple, and the child came into the world head-first in the small hours of the morning with the tide at the flood, a girl, dark and quick, with a strong cry that filled the little stone room and carried out over the water to the bank, where the whole village heard it and a murmur went along the line of them. Eudora cleared the child's mouth and rubbed her back and looked at her, and the girl was as babies are: wrinkled, red-faced, furious, and she had no mark on either foot that a candle could find. She was a healthy child of a healthy mother, and there was nothing in her that a midwife could put a name to as strange. And yet when Eudora held her, she had the same feeling she had had in the reeds, the feeling of a room doing something, and she looked down at the child and the child looked back with the flat unblinking attention of the newly born, and outside on the bank the water was at the flood and rising no more. "She is here," Eudora said, to the room and to the woman on the bed. "A girl. She is well." Mirabel Ossel did not reach for her. She lay back and looked at the ceiling of the stone room and said, in a voice gone soft and strange, "Give her the name. It is owed a name, and I cannot give it. That is your office." The door opened and Drusilla Rennock came in with the ledger open and a pen in her hand, and stood at the foot of the bed, and the lamplight showed her old dry face and the reed strip in the book, and she said, "Name the child. Speak it once, and write it in the book, and then it may go." Eudora stood in the middle of the stone room with a newborn in her arms and the whole weighted hush of the parish waiting outside in the dark, and she did the thing she had come there to do, and the thing she had been circling for a week, and she did it as the midwife and not as herself, which is a distinction she would have said she did not believe in and which she found, at the foot of that bed, that she did. "Her name is Loveday," she said. "Loveday of the gate." The pen scratched. Drusilla wrote it in the ledger, and Eudora saw her write it, and saw her put it in the first column with the date and the mother's name, and then Drusilla closed the book and held out her arms for the child. "No," Eudora said. "You have named her. The office is done. Give her to the boat." "Look at her." Eudora turned the child toward the lamp. "There is no mark. There is nothing on her. You said the water makes a child and gives it back, and you said the midwife must name it and hand it over, and I have named it, and I am telling you plainly that there is nothing here to hand over. She is a living girl of this parish and if you put her in that boat you will be drowning a healthy child, and the paper you write it on will not change what it is." Drusilla's face did not move. "You have misread the Bond, Eudora Cawdle," she said. "It is not the child that goes into the water tonight." She turned and went out, and after a moment Eudora, holding the child, went to the door and looked out, and understood. The village was not looking at the boat. The village was looking at Mirabel Ossel, who had risen from the bed behind her without a sound and walked past her, out of the door, down the old steps to the water, and who was standing now at the edge of the channel in her white nightdress with her back to them all, and the water was at her knees. She turned her head and looked back once at the child in Eudora's arms and her face had nothing in it but a settled peace that Eudora had seen exactly twice in her working life, both times on women who had been through a long pain and had come out the other side of it. Then she walked out into the Skein, and the channel took her, and the water closed over the white of the nightdress without a splash, and the hollow boat slipped its mooring and went out with her on the ebb, and the whole parish watched it go, and no one spoke for a long time. Eudora stood at the door of the stone room with the newborn girl in her arms and watched the place where the water had closed over Mirabel Ossel, and she felt the whole of it settle onto her like a coat that did not fit. She had spent fifteen years being the person in the room who knew what to do, and the one thing she had been brought here to do, the one office the parish had hired her for from the beginning, was to stand at the water's edge and keep her hands still while a woman walked into the river of her own free will. She had done it well. She had done it so well that the parish would tell the story of this Tithe for another nine generations, and her name would be in it, and every woman in that story would be glad of her, and not one of them would ever understand what she had been too late to see. Behind her, Drusilla Rennock said, "Wrap the child. She has had a long night and she is owed a warm room." And Eudora turned away from the water, because there was a baby in her arms that needed a nurse, and that, at least, was a thing she still knew how to be. ---