The Serpent's Tale Read Free Page A

high prices. No, Adelia was a graduate of the great and liberal, forward-thinking, internationally admired School of Medicine in Salerno, which defied the Church by enrolling women into its studies if they were clever enough.
    Finding Adelia’s brain on a par with, even excelling, that of the cleverest male student, her professors had given her a masculine education, which, later, she had completed by joining her Jewish foster father in his department of autopsy.
    A unique education, then, but of no use to her now, because in its wisdom—and it was wisdom—Salerno’s School of Medicine had seen that midwifery was better left to midwives. Adelia could have cured Mistress Reed’s baby, she could have performed a postmortem on it were it dead and revealed what it died of—but she couldn’t birth it.
    She handed over a basin of water and cloth to the woman’s daughter, crossed the room, and picked up her own baby from its wicker basket, sat down on a hay bale, undid her laces, and began to feed it.
    She had a theory about breast-feeding, as she had for practically everything: It should be accompanied by calm, happy thoughts. Usually, when she nursed the child, she sat in the doorway of her own little reed-thatched house at Waterbeach and allowed her eyes and mind to wander over the Cam fenland. At first its flat greenness had fared badly against the remembered Mediterranean panorama of her birth, with its jagged drama set against a turquoise sea. But flatness, too, has its beauty, and gradually she had come to appreciate the immense skies over infinite shades of willow and alder that the natives called carr, and the richness of fish and wildlife teeming in the hidden rivers.
    “Mountains?” Gyltha had said once. “Don’t hold with mountains. They buggers do get in the way.”
    Besides, this was now the homeland of the child in her arms, and therefore infinitely beloved.
    But today, Adelia dared not indulge either her eyes or her mind for her baby’s sake. There was another child to be saved, and be damned if she was going to let it die through her own ignorance. Or the mother, either.
    Silently apologizing to the little thing in her arms, Adelia set herself to envisaging the corpses she’d dissected of mothers who’d died with their fetuses yet undelivered.
    Such pitiable cadavers, yet when they were laid out on the marble table of the great autopsy hall in Salerno, she’d withheld compassion from them, as she’d learned to do with all the dead in order to serve them better. Emotion had no place in the art of dissection, only clear, trained, investigative reasoning.
    Now, here, in a whiskery little hut on the edge of the civilized world, she did it again, blanking from her mind the suffering of the woman on the bed and replacing it with a map of interior organs, positions, pressures, displacements. “Hmm.”
    Hardly aware she was doing it, Adelia withdrew her baby from her left, now empty, breast and transferred it to the other, still calculating stresses on brain and navel cord, why and when suffocation occurred, blood loss, putrefaction… “Hmm.”
    “Here, missis. Summat’s coming.” The daughter was guiding her mother’s hands toward the bridle that had been tied to the bed head.
    Adelia laid her child back in its basket, covered herself up, and went to the bottom of the bed.
    Something was indeed emerging from the mother’s body, but it wasn’t a baby’s head, it was a baby’s backside.
    Goddamn. A breech birth. She’d suspected it but, by the time she’d been brought in, engagement in the uterus had taken place and it was too late to insert her hand and revolve the fetus, even if she’d had the knowledge and daring.
    “Ain’t you going to tug it out?” the daughter asked.
    “Not yet.” She’d seen the irreparable damage caused by pulling at this stage. Instead, she addressed the mother. “ Now you push. Whether you want to or not, push. ”
    Mistress Reed nodded, put part of the bridle