Lady of the English - By Elizabeth Chadwick Page 0,57
she could persuade physicians and churchmen to part with. She had studied the Tractatus de egritudinibus mulierum, the Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum and the De curis mulierum. She was determined to know as much detail as her physicians did, because such knowledge might aid her survival. An experienced soldier did not go into battle without armour. If she was going to bear this child and survive, she had to be as prepared as possible. On the day Geoffrey had discovered the piece of moss in the passage to her womb, she had had to adapt and change her focus. This child, if it lived, would be heir to Anjou, Normandy, and England and she had to do her best.
During the last three months, she had eaten a diet of light, digestible foods: eggs, chicken and partridge, plenty of fish. She had taken constant baths in sweet-scented water and anointed her skin with oil of violets to keep it supple. Having accepted the inevitability of her pregnancy, she had done everything within her own power to ensure that the carrying and bearing of this child went to plan. The rest was in God’s hands. She had been labouring since the early hours of the morning, and it was now a little past noon. Outside she knew Geoffrey was pacing. He kept sending a servant to find out how the birth was progressing. She knew it was not concern for her that drove his anxiety, but for the safe delivery of his heir.
Her entire lower body felt as if it were being wrung inside a giant fist. She wondered how the baby felt, being squeezed and pushed towards the moment of birth.
Geoffrey’s servant knocked again. Matilda closed her eyes and endured the contraction, pushing down with all her might, grunting and straining. Vaguely she heard the midwife’s 142
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attendant telling the man that the babe was almost born. Within the hour, if all continued well.
Matilda gave a humourless laugh. “He is afraid I will birth a girl child,” she gasped. “Before I entered my confinement he was constantly worrying at the possibility like a dog with fleas.
He says I would do such a thing just to spite him and my father because I am contrary. It would serve them both right if I bore a daughter.” She bit back a cry as the next contraction started to build. “The books say that a woman is a vessel in which the man plants his seed, so how can a woman be to blame for the sex of a child?”
“Sometimes a woman’s seed is stronger than the man’s, and then the baby is a girl,” said the senior midwife. “That is the lore.”
“In that case, all my children will be daughters!” Matilda panted.
On the next contraction the baby’s head crowned at the entrance to the birth passage and emerged, followed by slippery little shoulders and crossed arms. Matilda closed her eyes, pushed again, and felt a warm, wet slither between her parted thighs.
“A boy!” The midwife beamed from ear to ear. “Madam, you have a son, and he’s perfect.”
An infant’s thready wail filled the chamber as the woman lifted up the bawling, mucus-streaked baby for his mother to see. Matilda felt no immediate burst of maternal love, but there was satisfaction at a task accomplished and enormous relief that she had borne a living baby this time, whole of limb and wailing with lusty lungs. That was what brought a sob to her throat.
Two women cut the cord and took the infant aside to bathe him in a bowl of warm water, while two more stayed with Matilda to attend to the delivery of the afterbirth. She was so tired that it was difficult to raise the strength to expel the dark, liverish mass, but she managed. The women made 143
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her comfortable, removing the soiled bedstraw on which she had laboured, binding soft linen rags between her thighs to absorb the bleeding, and making up the bed with clean linen sheets. Matilda drank a small cup of hot wine infused with fortifying herbs and closed her eyes. She heard the soft splash of water as the women bathed the newborn in a large brass bowl, and the senior midwife cooing to him as she wrapped him in swaddling bands.
The peace of the moment was broken by a commotion at the door and Geoffrey burst into the room like a storm. “Where is the child?” he