46

28th October 1580

To Mistress Browne, midwife to Lady Flora, upon the safe delivery of her female child two pounds For Master Williams upon the return of the rector’s sister ten shillings

Accounts of Banstock Manor, 1576–1582

A new day at Banstock, after the night was made miserable by the labours of the lady of the manor. The gossips had assembled from the surrounding manors, goodwives to cluck and fuss over the poor woman even before her travail began. Now we are blessed with a healthy girl; not the son we all prayed for, but a hope for the future. The babe, tho’ small, is fat and healthy and God willing, will grow into another daughter for the manor. The lady laboured through the night but at the end the babe was born easily. Lady Flora rests and is naturally exhausted, but the sight of her living child has given her heart and my lord says it was a wonder to see a smile on her lips at last.

‘Next time, brother, a son for the manor!’ It is rare he acknowledges our kinship, but I am named as godfather, as is Master Seabourne. We rarely speak of the fallen sons, so hopefully reared at Banstock, only to die upon maturity; the wound is too raw. In three years Lord Anthonie has lost two sons. Two of his other daughters with Lady Marion survive. One is married to a baron in Devon, but is childless tho’ she eats a barrel of spiders a year and sleeps with cockerel feathers in her mattress. The other has a husband as old as her father, and there are no children yet. Neither are a penny to a pound to our sweet Viola.

She, the proud sister, was present at the labour and was a calming influence upon her stepmother. She feels herself a proper woman now as she is initiated into the great mysteries of childbed. She is busy in the nursery arranging her new sister’s accommodation, no doubt enraging the old nursemaid and the wet nurse, who will complain to me later. So it is when women rule the house.

Isabeau is still in Ryde, living with Eliza Dread. There are those who whisper already that when the witch left the manor, my lady prospered and issued forth a healthy child.

Agness was returned by a farmer, raving, to the manor this morn. She has been confined to a storeroom and made comfortable with a mattress and chair. The woman lies racked by fits of rambling speech, screaming, and crying. Sometimes she is as a child, pleading for her mother; at other times she screeches with accusations and fantastic stories of witches and demons and other horrors. No matter, her madness cannot be heard in the upper floor, where lies my lady and her new baby.

A visit to my lady’s bedchamber, now made comfortable by the uncovering of the windows and the burning of fragrant pastilles, is brief. I admire the baby, carried to my arms reverently by Viola, and remember that this is a new experience for her ladyship. She rests as best she can, in a room full of exultant matrons. She has, I am told, already put the babe to suck, and means to help feed her despite her lord’s preference for a wet nurse. More mouths to feed, think I, with the gossips, the nurses.

Outside, clouds gather thick and heavy, and though it is not freezing it reminds me of snow. I send men to cover haystacks in the open, and I sup sweet wine with the baby in my arms. She is as other babies, her eyes wavering in all directions, yawning and sneezing and farting, but I do not hear her cry. She seems content. She is to be named Lily as requested by Viola, in some remembrance of the last poor lamb. One dies, one is born, such is the nature of life.

Vincent Garland, Steward to Lord Banstock, His Memoir