Queen by Right (33 page)

“She is not happy she is not in charge, doctor,” Joan replied in French, smiling sweetly at the irritated midwife as she did. “In truth, she believes ’tis time Cecily was put on the birthing chair.”

Cecily snatched the roll from her mouth and retorted in English, “By all that is holy, one of you make up your mind. I need to pu—” She got no further. Another labor pain reached a crescendo and she pushed the cloth back into her mouth.

Constance nodded to Matty and acquiesced. “You are correct, Mathilde, we go to chair.”

Five minutes later, a scrawny, slimy girl child slipped into Matty Draper’s capable hands, and the midwife gave Constance a reluctant smile of gratitude. As the doctor and Joan supported the exhausted Cecily on the chair, Matty turned little Joan upside down and slapped her tiny buttocks. A cry of protest told the midwife that this child was hale and, but for a purple birthmark upon her left shoulder, perfectly formed. All four women stared at the mark, none wanting to voice the superstition that the child was touched by the Devil, but then Cecily put her hands out, gently took the babe, and cradled her to her breast.

“’Tis an old wives’ tale, in truth,” Joan said with finality. “It will probably disappear in a few days, mark my words. Come, Cecily, give me the child while these women finish their work.”

“Otherwise she is beautiful, is she not, Mother?” Cecily murmured, suffering but minimally as Matty helped her expel the afterbirth. “God be thanked. I have a healthy daughter.”

Joan and Constance smiled and nodded, while Joan washed the infant and then rubbed the pink skin all over with salt, causing the little mite to fuss and wriggle until a spotless linen cloth was wrapped around her to keep her from the autumn chill.

“Joan, my sweet Joan. How you have filled me with joy,” Cecily whispered, marveling at the tiny hands waving helplessly at her chemise, the mouth pursing and unpursing as the child sought her mother’s milk. Constance was in favor of Cecily suckling for two days but no longer. According to the tradition of the nobility, a wet-nurse would feed the babe for the first year of her life. A large young farmer’s wife who had just given birth two months before had been chosen, and baby Joan would reside with her until a routine could be established.

Countess Joan bent toward the bed when she heard the child’s name. “You have Richard’s consent?” she asked, brimming with pleasure. “You and Dickon honor me, truly.” Certes, this was not the first grandchild to be named after her, but because of the special bond she had formed with her youngest daughter, she was touched beyond measure.

“Aye, Richard knows, Mother,” Cecily said, purposely looking down at the greedily sucking child and avoiding her mother’s eyes. “It was my choice, and I am pleased you approve. Now perhaps you might go and tell my husband his daughter would like to meet him.”

She briefly wondered if Richard would be disappointed it was not a boy, but when he arrived breathless a short time later, had kissed her ardently and swept the tiny bundle into his embrace, she knew her answer.

W
ATCHING FROM HER
window as her child was carted away two days later almost broke Cecily’s resolve to be brave. At first she stood there quietly when the farmer helped Rowena into the back of the cart and Richard placed the precious basket next to her. But then she opened the casement wide and cried out for her child, and all turned to look up at the duchess, secluded from public view as was customary. She quickly pulled in her head and turned into Constance’s comforting arms. Constance shielded her mistress from seeing the farmer flick his whip over the placid ox’s haunches and the cart rumbling slowly away.

“How did you do it, Mother?” Cecily asked Joan later, and her mother shrugged. “It gets easier each time, Cecily. But ’tis for their and your own good.”

Cecily was not in the mood for a lecture and remained unusually silent during their shared supper. After Joan left and Cecily had been readied for bed, she dismissed her attendants quickly, buried her face in the pillow, and wept.

“A
FEVER?
” C
ECILY
felt cold fingers of fear grip her heart as her steward, Sir Henry Heydon, brought in the news a few weeks later that little Joan was ill. One afternoon, one of the farmer’s children returning from helping his father plough their field complained of an aching head and chills and had been put to bed. Because all the farmer’s children, excepting the two infants, slept on one straw mattress, the illness had spread.

Cecily sent the steward to alert the head groom that she needed a palfrey saddled with a pillion seat and a groom to accompany them to the village. In the name of God, Dickon, why are you always gone when I need you, she thought. He was at Wigmore for the week, hearing a petition in a land dispute, and had waved gaily to her as she stood on the keep’s roof, watching him leave, her marten-lined hood protecting her from the steady drizzle.

“Find Constance at once and tell her to prepare her traveling bag of medicines,” Cecily told Rowena. “Then fetch my cloak and meet me in the courtyard.”

Within half an hour, Cecily, with Constance behind her clutching her precious potions and accompanied by Piers Taggett, trotted over the drawbridge and then cantered along the Nene Way past the inn and the marketplace to a turn in the road heading north. Soon they saw the reed roof of the Woodsons’ farmhouse above the untidy hawthorn hedge.

Goodwife Woodson greeted the trio from the castle with tears and apologies. She flung herself at Cecily’s feet, her cap falling off revealing curly carrot-red hair.

“Raise yourself up, goody, I beg of you,” Cecily told her with great control. The woman’s hysterics terrified her. “Conduct me and my physician to my child at once. Cease that noise forthwith, and tell Doctor LeMaitre here how Joan is faring.”

Cecily’s calm but assertive voice had an immediate effect on the distraught woman. Wiping her nose with the back of her hand, she bobbed a curtsey and, chattering nervously to Constance, hurried them into the house. The yeoman’s wife readily accepted that the duchess’s physician was a woman; most common folk in a village relied on the wise woman for cures and remedies.

The small house was clean enough, Cecily noted approvingly, the hard-baked earthen floor freshly swept and the scrubbed oak table neatly laid with six wooden trenchers, a seventh piled high with rosy apples. A pair of pale blue eyes gazed at the duchess from one of the benches against the wall, and Cecily acknowledged a young girl with a quick smile, glad to see her face was washed and clothes well tended. The farmer’s wife kept an orderly house, Cecily thought, and she breathed more easily. Richard’s steward had made the wet-nursing arrangements with the Woodsons and had told Cecily that the Woodsons were a quiet, hard-working family and that Joan would be in good hands.

Cecily and Constance followed the goodwife up an open stair to the loft. A wooden bedstead took up one end. Two cradles were placed side by side next to it. Along the opposite wall, warmed by the chimney stack, lay a straw palliasse occupied by three other children, one coughing helplessly and the other two fretful, all gawping at the visitors. Constance bent down to touch the forehead of one and shook her head.

“La fièvre, madame,”
she murmured to Cecily.
“C’est évident.”

With great care Goodwife Woodson lifted Joan from the sturdier of the two cradles and offered her to Cecily. Then the woman beat as hasty a retreat as she could, stopping to pick up an empty cup and fuss with one child’s shift, before disappearing downstairs.

Cecily sat down gingerly on the rope-strung bed and held Joan in the crook of her arm. She marveled how quickly the child had grown but then puckered her brow at the waxy white of the baby’s skin. Joan’s eyes fluttered open and she let out a small cry, which was stifled by wheezing as the child fought for breath. Even through the swaddling bands Cecily could feel the heat emanating from the babe. Cecily sought Constance’s sympathetic eyes as she held the infant out to the doctor to examine. When Joan whimpered again, Cecily felt a tugging in her breasts, and she was vaguely aware the urge to feed her child was still very much alive.

With infinite care Constance unwrapped the confining bands, concerned that the child’s humor was still so hot and dry. The doctor pondered bleeding her but did not think Cecily would sanction it. She is but five weeks, Constance calculated, indeed she is very young. She decided against the fleeming.

Cecily was now crying. She had waited so long for this child and had been convinced the Virgin had protected her through the months of pregnancy and
through the birth of such a healthy little girl. Do not abandon my child now, sweet Mary, she pleaded before asking Constance, “What will you do, doctor? Will she live?”

Constance very much doubted the child would survive. The fever had been on her for two days, according to Goody Woodson, and unless it broke soon, she believed the heat would cause the tiny heart to explode. She took a deep breath and lied, “
Bien sûr, madame,
she will live. But we should take her away from the other children to where I can tend to her day and night.” She frowned as Joan wheezed again. “It will be dangerous to let her breathe the cold air on the way back, but I will tuck her inside my cloak, and with the saints on our side, we shall make her well again.”

Cecily nodded and busied herself rewrapping the child in the linen bands while Constance descended the stairs and informed the waiting goodwife of their intentions. Taking a vial from her leather medicine box, Constance gave instructions for administering it to the other sick children. The woman babbled her thanks, all the time casting anxious eyes at the loft, where Cecily had paused to say a few words of encouragement to the Woodson children.

Cecily was gracious upon taking her leave and pressed a shilling into the astonished goodwife’s hand. “When is Joan’s next feeding, goody?”

The woman hesitated and finally admitted that Joan had not nursed for more than a day, and it was that fact as well as the fever that had caused her to send a message. Cecily paled, but then told the woman to come to the castle at whatever time, day or night, she was summoned. Nodding vigorously and with an awkward bob, she followed the two women out into the farmyard, shooing chickens from Cecily’s path.

Dear Mother of God, Cecily prayed as her horse picked its way along the rough path, do not let this innocent child die.

As soon as Cecily arrived back at the castle, she dictated a letter to Richard. She signed off herself, writing, “
All I wish for now is your swift return. Your loving wife, Cecily.
” She pressed down on the hot wax with her falcon seal.

Then she returned to her solar, where a roaring fire greeted her. Constance had already sent a servant for the cradle and a large copper pan of cold water. Rowena and a tiring woman were laying a simple meal upon the green felt cloth on the table, and Rowena urged Cecily to take some nourishment in case the night was a long one. But Cecily could only nibble at some cheese and a slice of apple, anxiously watching Constance.

“You do not intend to bathe her in that, do you?” Cecily demanded, rising
and removing Joan from the cradle. “The water is cold, doctor. It will almost certainly kill her.”

Constance put down her bottle of cherry-bark syrup, which she was diluting with rosewater. Although Joan’s glazed unblinking eyes frightened her, Constance was more concerned with reducing the high fever in the child. In Paris, she had learned that the idea of immersing a feverish body in icy water had proved effective for a fully grown man, but she was reluctant to try it on a babe, especially with Cecily hovering. But Constance persisted.

“I swear to you it will not kill her, your grace.” Her brown eyes courageously held Cecily’s terrified blue ones. She dared to murmur, “Do you truly believe I would wish to harm the child? Trust me in this, as you did the night of your dream.”

Cecily dropped her gaze to the feverish child in her arms. “Certes, I know you for a good woman, Constance,” she said. She hesitated for a brief moment before deciding. “Very well, if I let you dip her in the water for a moment, will you also try another infusion? What else could help?”

“I have an old remedy given to me by a doctor in Salerno, madame, but I do not know if a child should be submitted to it,” she replied, biting her lip. She did not stand by some of the old medicines, including the one that Cecily wanted. It called for ground horn of unicorn and dried mare’s blood. But the doctor desperately wanted to try the cold-water method of reducing a fever and hoped the panacea might help the infant and pacify the desperate duchess.

Cecily nodded vigorously and began to undress Joan, while Constance mixed her potion and coaxed a few drops of the medicine between the child’s cracked lips. The child’s blocked windpipe caused her to gag and struggle for breath, and Constance grimaced, wiping away the expelled elixir.

“Try again,” Cecily urged. This time Constance dipped her finger in the mixture and gentled it into the baby’s mouth with more success. Cecily smiled, stroking the child’s cheek. Constance opened her hands for the baby, and Cecily sighed and nodded again. “Aye, now you may try the water—but only for a second, mind you.”

Knowing it took more than a quick dip to produce results, Constance reluctantly obeyed her mistress, sensing that Cecily would not tolerate more dissent. The child spluttered and seemed to revive as soon as she felt the cold water upon her fiery skin, and Constance was cheered. But Cecily cried out, “Enough!” and the doctor withdrew the whimpering Joan. But there was no miracle, and the fever persisted.

“Your grace, I know not what else to do,” the doctor finally said as Joan’s breath became shallower. “I believe we all need to ask for God’s guidance and perhaps”—she hesitated—“send for the chaplain.”

Cecily’s wail sent Rowena to her knees, wringing her hands and reciting the paternoster. Constance was by Cecily’s side in an instant and, without thinking of her station, took Cecily in her arms and rocked her.