‘Now, Teresa, can you find me some water, and a cloth? Then I want you to bathe Mama’s face and give her a drink. See how hot and tired she is? And I will see if the baby is ready to come.’
Once given something to do, the child stopped crying. She brought a bucket of water and a crude wooden cup and a cloth. While she tenderly bathed her mother’s face and lifted her head so she could drink, I turned back the woman’s skirt, which was soaking, and checked to see how far she was dilated. The baby was nearly ready to come, but it was clear the woman was almost at the end of her strength. I had feared that the baby might have been badly presented, but its head was in place. The woman lay inert and flaccid. Perhaps she was already dead. I was afraid I might have to cut the baby free, and I could not do that in front of the child.
Then the woman’s body gave a convulsive shudder. It was still suffering contractions, though the woman seemed barely conscious.
‘When did you last have something to eat?’ I asked.
‘Before the bad men came,’ the girl said.
‘Have you nothing? Something to drink? If we could give Mama some ale or some wine, it would make her feel better.’
‘Paolo might have some.’
‘Paolo?’ I looked around. There was surely no one else in the cottage, which had only this one room, with a ladder to a loft above.
‘Next door.’
She scrambled to her feet and darted out of the cottage. The woman arched her back and gave another low moan.
In a few minutes the child was back, carefully carrying another wooden cup in her two hands. ‘Paolo gave me this.’
‘He is your neighbour? He is coming?’
‘He can’t walk. The bad men beat him. But he says the wine is good. He had it hidden.’
It was a dark red. I dipped my finger in the cup and licked it. It had a fierce kick, but it should give the woman a little strength. With some difficulty I managed to get my arm under her shoulders and lift her enough so that she could drink. Her eyes flickered and she fixed them on Teresa, who knelt beside the palliasse, watching anxiously.
‘You must drink, Mama. The doctor says so. Paolo sent you the wine.’
She drank, then. Some of it dribbled from the corners of her mouth down the front of her dress, but most of it went down her throat, in small gulps. She coughed a few times, but I could see it reviving her.
After that, everything happened very quickly. The woman had already borne two children, probably more, given the difference in age between the two here. The baby was ready to come and she had a little strength now, at least for a short time, to respond to the rhythmic convulsions of her body. It cannot have been more than half an hour later that the baby slithered into my hands, a girl. Healthy enough, though small. Teresa found a piece of torn blanket and I let her wrap the baby in it and hand her new sister to her mother.
When I had finished tending the woman, I got stiffly to my feet, after kneeling all this time on the earth floor, and gave Teresa a hug. ‘You see, you are almost a doctor yourself. Now you must help Mama look after the baby. I will send you food.’
She smiled up at me, the smile transforming the pinched dirty face. ‘You are good man, Doctor Christoval.’
‘My friends,’ I said, ‘call me Kit.’
I packed up my satchel and swung it on to my shoulder.
‘It is late now, and you must all sleep, but in the morning I will bring you food.’
As I ducked out under the low lintel of the door, I found Dr Nuñez sitting on a quayside bollard opposite the cottage. He looked tired, but alert.
‘You should not have waited for me,’ I said, stretching my arms above my head and flinching as my shirt caught the half healed burn on my shoulder.
‘Oh, I have not been here all the time. I have been back to the Victory, and dined, and come ashore again. It was a woman in labour, was it?’
‘Aye. Babies do not know to wait when a town is destroyed in battle and a siege is under way. Their midwife has been killed. By our soldiers. The child was terrified and the woman at the end of her strength. Is this how we make war?’
I felt bitter, feeling that I was tainted by association with this wicked violence.
He rose to his feet and we turned together to where we could board a boat to take us out to the Victory. After the incessant din of the daylight hours, the silence and the clear air felt like a blessing. The wind was still blowing from the west, bringing with it the fresh scent of the ocean. A few lights shone from some of the ships, with their reflections dancing in the waters of the harbour. Overhead the sky was blue-black and clear of cloud, so that the stars sparkled as vividly as the jewels on a monarch’s robes of state.
‘I care for this no more than you do,’ Dr Nuñez said, ‘but there is little we can do, we are in other men’s hands.’
We climbed down into one of the skiffs moored at the end of the quay and a sleepy boatman began to row us out to the ship.
‘One thing I can do,’ I said, ‘is to take that little family some food tomorrow. The child said they had eaten nothing since the bad men came. I thought we were supposed to be taking the food stockpiled for the Spanish navy, not leaving civilian children to starve. There was no sign of a father. I suppose he is either dead or escaped from the town.’
‘Or joined the garrison.’
‘Perhaps. But I think he was nothing but a poor fisherman. Probably dead. There is a man next door who has been so badly beaten by our soldiers that he cannot walk. I will visit him as well.’
‘Have a care, Kit. You must ask for permission before you begin to act on your own.’
‘I will ask the Dom himself, then. Let us see whether he has the compassion a ruler should possess.’
That night I slept in luxury in my tiny cabin. After so many uncomfortable nights on deck, the strenuous journey through the town to the English camp below the walls of the citadel, and delivering the baby in the fisherman’s cottage, I fell into a deep restoring sleep free of dreams and woke late to find Dr Nuñez already gone from his cabin. After a hasty breakfast at the table where the ship’s officers and gentlemen passengers took their meals, I sought out the Dom.
I found him on the forecastle, in conference with Ruy Lopez and Captain Oliver. Dr Nuñez was nowhere to be seen. I had to wait until I could interrupt them, but the Dom bent a condescending smile on me.
‘Dr Nuñez has told us that you have done valiant work caring for our injured soldiers.’
I bowed my head slightly in acknowledgement.
‘They are suffering a good deal, but so too are the few civilians left in the town, with whom – surely? – we have no quarrel.’
‘I understand you assisted at a birth,’ he said.
‘Aye, a woman in one of the fisher cottages along the shore. It seems our men have murdered the town’s midwife.’
He had the grace to look somewhat ashamed at this, so I pressed home my request.
‘If you are agreeable, Your Grace, I should like to take food to the woman and her small children. And I am told there is a badly injured man in the next cottage, injured also by our soldiers. It was too late last night, but I should like to see if I can help him, or any others of the poor folk who are still left in the town.’
He considered for a moment, then gave a nod. ‘I see no reason why you should not. It will demonstrate that our quarrel is not with the common people of Spain, who may be our friends in future. Our quarrel is with the overreacher Philip and his army.’
This was delivered in ringing tones, as if he saw himself already upon the throne and addressing the Cortes. That the desolation of the town was mostly the work of our own ungovernable army, I did not mention. I did, however, draw attention to another problem.
‘Your Grace, there are many bodies lying unburied in the streets of the town. Some have been dead for several days now. If we are to remain here any longer, we ourselves risk disease from them. A burial party should be mustered to deal with the dead. It is not merely common humanity. It is an urgent necessity.’