But when Josephine held the little cake over Julia’s head, she stared at it for a moment and then lowered it and crouched to set it carefully on the floor. “I can’t break her in half,” she said quietly, as if to herself, and then she walked slowly back to the kitchen.
“Well, so much for children,” said Crawford into the resulting silence. He drank some of the ale, and covered his embarrassment with a savoring grin. “Good brewers they have hereabouts,” he said quietly to Boyd as he passed the stoup to him. “Thank God it was the biscuit that they made her carry, and not this.”
Actually, Crawford wanted to have children—his first marriage had produced none, and he hoped the defect had been poor Caroline’s and not his … and he didn’t want to believe the rumor that Caroline had been pregnant when the house she’d been living in burned down, for at that point he had not even spoken to her for a year.
He was, after all, an obstetrician—an accoucheur—and in spite of the two years he had spent stitching up the wounds and sawing off the shattered limbs of His Majesty’s sailors in the wars with Spain and the United States, delivering babies was what he did best. He wished Julia’s mother could have been attended by someone with his own degree of skill.
The difficult delivery at St. George’s Hospital had made him and Boyd miss the stagecoach they were originally to have taken south from London early yesterday, and while they had waited in the taproom of the coaching inn for the next one, Boyd had irritably asked him why, after all his complicated surgical training, he should choose to devote his career to an area of medicine which not only made him late for his own wedding, but which “old wives have been handling just fine for thousands of years anyway.”
Crawford had called for another pitcher, refilled his glass and then tried to explain.
“First off, Jack, they haven’t been handling it ‘just fine.’ Most expectant mothers would be better off with no attendance at all than with a midwife. I’m generally called in only after the midwife has made some awful mistake, and some of the scenes I’ve walked in on would make you turn pale—yes, even you with your scars from Abukir and Trafalgar. And there’s a difference when it’s an infant, a person who … who you can’t think up any well-at-any-rates for—you know, ‘Well at any rate he knew what he was getting into when he signed on,’ or ‘Well at any rate if the man ever lived who deserved it, it was him,’ or ‘Well at any rate he had his faith to sustain him through this.’ An infant is … what, innocent, but more than that, not only innocent but aware too. It’s a person who hasn’t seen or understood or agreed to anything, but will, if given time—and therefore you can’t be satisfied with a merely good rate of survival for them, the way you can with … oh, tomato seedlings or pedigreed dog litters.”
“Still,” Boyd had said, “it’ll no doubt be squared away and systematized before long. Is there really enough there to occupy your whole life?”
Crawford had paused to drain his glass and call for another pitcher. “Uh … yes. Yes. Plain old prudery is what has kept it so primitive—it’s made a, a fenced off jungle of this area of medicine. Even now a male doctor can usually only assist at a delivery if they’ve got a sheet draped over the mother—he has to do his best with groping about blindly underneath, and so a lot of times he cuts the umbilical cord in the wrong place, and the mother or the child bleeds to death. And no one has begun to figure out what sorts of foods an expectant mother should eat or not eat in order to have a healthy child. And the goddamned ‘literature’ on the whole subject is just an accumulation of bad guesses and superstitions and misfiled veterinary notes.”
The fresh pitcher arrived, and Boyd paid for it. Crawford, still absorbed in his subject, laughed then, though his frown didn’t unkink.
“Hell, man,” he went on, automatically refilling his glass, “only a few years ago I looked up in the Corporation of Surgeons’ library a Swiss manuscript catalogued as being on the subject of caesarian birth, in a big portfolio known as The Menotti Miscellany … and I discovered that it wasn’t about birth at all—the person who catalogued the manuscript had simply looked at the drawings in the wrong order.”
Boyd frowned at that, then raised his eyebrows. “What, you mean it was a manuscript on how to insert a baby into a woman?”
“Nearly. It was a procedure to surgically implant a little statue into a human body.” Crawford had had to raise his hand at that point to silence Boyd. “Let me finish. The manuscript was in a sort of abbreviated Latin, as if the surgeon who wrote it had just been making notes to himself and never expected them to be read by anyone else, and the drawings were crude, but I soon realized that it wasn’t even a woman’s body but a man’s body the thing was being put into. And yet for hundreds of years this manuscript has been catalogued as a work on caesarian delivery!”
Through the inn’s window he had seen the coach entering the yard then, and he drained his mug in several long swallows. “There’s our transport to Warnham, where we meet Appleton. Anyway,” he said as they got up and hefted their baggage, “you can see why I don’t agree that childbirthing is likely to become an orderly art any time soon.”
Crawford and Boyd had dragged their baggage out of the building and across the pavement to the coach. The horses were being changed and the driver was gone, presumably into the taproom they had just left.
“Well?” said Boyd finally. When Crawford gave him a blank look, he went on almost angrily, “So why did this Macaroni person want to put a statue inside of somebody?”
“Oh! Oh, right, of course.” Crawford had thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know, Jack. It was seven or eight hundred years ago—probably nobody’ll ever find out. But my point was—”
“I got your point,” Boyd had assured him tiredly. “You like birthing children.”
And here his new sister-in-law was messing up the traditional fertility rituals of his wedding. Crawford smiled as Julia broke away from her father and the minister, who were talking by the drawing room window, and crossed to where he and Boyd were standing.
“Well, it was mostly traditional Scottish, dear,” she said, bending down to pick up the biscuit Josephine had left on the floor. “And it wasn’t actually an oatcake anyway—it was a Biddenden cake from just across the Weald in Kent.” She handed it to Crawford.
“I remember those, Miss—uh, Mrs. Crawford,” said Boyd, who had grown up in Sussex. “They used to be given out at Easter, didn’t they?”
“That’s right,” Julia said. “Michael, oughtn’t we tobe getting aboard Mr.—aboard your carriage and leaving? It’s getting dark, and Hastings is a few miles off.”
“You’re right.” He dropped the biscuit into his coat pocket. “And we’re supposed to be on the Calais boat by noon. I’ll begin making our goodbyes.”
Appleton and Boyd were staying on and taking separate coaches back to London tomorrow. He found them and shook their hands, smiling to conceal a sudden, momentary urge to go back with them, and to leave to braver souls the whole undertaking of marriage.
Julia had come up beside him and touched his shoulder. He nodded to his friends, then turned and took her arm and began leading her toward the front door.