Aletta Engelshofen scurried in out of a heavy downpour just as the sun began to break through the clouds about halfway to the horizon. She set down the covered basket that served as her apothecary cabinet, then slipped off her platform street shoes and removed her soggy hooded cape, hanging it on a hook near the ceramic stove in the corner. She shook her head as if to free the long blond tresses from their severe confinement in the simple white headdress worn by all women of the Children of God.
“God has smiled upon my afternoon,” she said to her moeder. The short little lady sat on a low stool before the open hearth stirring the evening meal in a black iron pot. “Smells like one of your tasty fish and cabbage stews.”
Moeder Gretta laughed. She had a finely sculpted nose, snappy dark eyes, and a narrow mouth and chin. Aletta always found her smile contagious and her words few. “Whatever our faithful Lord provides, Oma’s herbs improve,” Moeder said.
“That’s not all her herbs do.” The young woman removed a long loaf of bread from her bag and set it on the table. “Today I visited seven patients. Vrouw Bakker’s cough is over. Little Hennie’s inflamed eyes are clean—”
Aletta stopped short when the door flew open and ten-year-old Maartje burst into the room, her plain brown dress and cape spattered with mud, her miniature headdress windblown. “Tante ’Letta, come quickly,” she called. “Emilia needs you!”
“Emilia?” Aletta looked at the girl, puzzled.
“Her baby comes not out.”
Aletta spread her hands. “Where is the midwife?”
“Gone to call the surgeon.”
“The surgeon?” Aletta felt a shudder run through her body. “Birthing is a woman’s business, not a man’s.”
Maartje narrowed her eyes and said softly, “I heard the midwife say she thought the child is already dead.”
Moeder Gretta uttered a sharp cry. “Butchers, those surgeons are. Ach! Ach!”
“Why did you not call your oma?” Aletta asked the girl who had come for her. “I am only her student.”
“She’s out in the countryside with some farmer’s vrouw. Just come. Vader insists.”
“But I know not what to do. I’ve never done it before. How…?” Aletta grabbed her moeder by the arm and looked at her with imploring helplessness. “What if I make a mistake and the baby dies—or the moeder?”
Moeder Gretta patted her hand and said, “Fear not, my child.”
“Come with me along, Moeder.”
“Nay,” the woman protested, pulling back. “I’m not even an herbalist. Just keep the woman warm and calm, and follow the instructions in Tante Lysbet’s herbal.”
“Tante Lysbet’s herbal?” Of course. Aletta patted her bodice where she kept the book and used it every day. Tante Lysbet had used it for all the years she cared for Moeder Gretta in her long illness. She said it was her moeder’s before her. When Aletta left Breda, Tante Lysbet had given it to her. But Aletta had never even read the birthing pages!
“May I be your assistant?” Maartje tugged at Aletta’s hand.
“I won’t go without you,” Aletta said, offering a faint smile. This granddaughter of Oma Roza, the Herbal Healer Lady of East Friesland, had followed Aletta into many an untried situation. How often the girl’s warm enthusiasm, concern, and insatiable curiosity buoyed her up through a stormy duty.
Still hesitant inside, she slipped into her shoes, pulled her cape from its peg, and picked up the basket. As she reached for the door handle, Moeder gripped her other arm.
“Give this to your patient,” she said, handing her a steaming pot. “Broth from tonight’s soup. I pray you Godspeed!”
Aletta stepped out into the freshly cleansed air. Maartje led her by the hand around the corner and past a row of high houses to the squat little home of Karel and Emilia, who were a part of Hans’ and Oma’s hidden church. Before the house, Karel paced the cobbled street, puffing on his long-stemmed pipe, staring hard at the ground. A strange sound—half moan and half mumble—accompanied each step.
In front of the dark green door, Maartje’s vader, Hans, awaited them.
“Thank God you’ve come,” he said, reaching for the door handle.
“I know not what I must do,” Aletta said. “I only know it’s a God-loved little life, and I cannot believe He wills it to be lost.”
“I have prayed for you,” Hans added, “that you will hear God’s voice and administer His grace in your gentle touch.”
Something in the bearded widower’s calm easy manner gave the trembling young herbalist a new sense of assurance.
Hans opened the door and ushered Aletta and Maartje into a world of subdued light, stuffy odors, and loud wailing. She found a handful of neighbor women clustered around one side of the curtained bed in the far corner. That must be the spot where they had confined Emilia to the birthing stool. Aletta had seen these uncomfortable-looking contrivances on several occasions but never witnessed one in use. It was a semicircular wooden chair of sorts, with arms and nothing but a narrow ledge around the inside edges for a seat. The birthing woman sat perched on this ledge while the midwife stationed herself in front to guide, tug, and catch the baby when it came.
Aletta hurried to the far side of the room, hardly giving her eyes time to grow accustomed to the dim light. She noticed a plume of steam issuing from a kettle hanging over the open fireplace and an oblong wicker-basket crib, draped with curtains of its own and sitting by itself just outside the circle of hovering women.
“An empty basket,” Aletta whispered and clutched Maartje’s hand. Something in the sight before her brought back the fears she had dismissed just moments ago.
“Your moeder prays for Godspeed,” the girl whispered, “and my vader too. Our God will help you.”
If only it could be so simple. Maartje was still a child with so much of life yet untasted. Yet something in her simple faith stroked Aletta’s troubled soul. She squeezed the girl’s hand. The fears did not go away, but she now knew she could go on, one halting step after another.
A woman had risen from her place in the group and was moving toward them. Probably as old as Aletta’s moeder, she was built like her too—short and slight. Her hair was so well ensconced in her headdress that Aletta could only guess its color to be gray. She did not smile as she approached.
“I live across the alley,” the woman said, barely above a whisper. “I’ve helped bring three babies to birth in my many years.” She stretched out a pair of rough dirty hands. “I know not the arts of a midwife, but these hands are at your service, whatever you need.”
“I’m sure we’ll find something important for them to do,” Aletta said, her head awhirl with questions.
At this instant, the women ceased their wailing, and the abrupt silence was pierced only by a low steady whistle from the water kettle above the fire. Aletta found Emilia sitting in her miserable birthing stool, leaning her head and shoulders against a woman at her back. Her pale face was wreathed in distressed wrinkles and sweat, her eyes were closed, her lips cracked. With her hands she gripped the arms of the stool in an attempt to keep from falling to the floor. Aletta laid a hand on her shoulder. How dreadfully she trembled!
“Fear not, Emilia, my sister,” she said, suddenly knowing no more fear for herself, only a compassionate terror for her patient. “Our God who loves your child will carry you through.”
Emilia’s eyes opened a crack and she breathed a labored, “God bless you, angel.”
Aletta knelt beside the woman, stroking her arm. In her mind she heard her moeder’s parting words, “Keep her warm and calm.” Little wonder that the pains had stopped while the woman remained in such excruciating confinement.
“How long has she sat in this torturous stool?” Aletta asked the neighbors.
“Since the first pains began.”
“When was that?”
A mumbling of voices filled the room. At last she heard a solid answer. “Yesterday.”
Standing to her feet, Aletta began giving orders. “First, we put her back into her bed with a warming brick and a soothing hot drink.”
She heard an outburst of gasps from all around her.
“Nay! That can’t be done!”
“Why not?” Aletta stared at them, unperturbed.
“No child is ever birthed outside a birthing stool.”
“Obviously this child is not ready to be birthed in one. You will help me move her into the bed.”
She turned toward the eager child at her side and said, “Maartje, fetch what bricks you can find from the fire.”
“Forget not your moeder’s broth,” the girl said.
“As soon as we have her bedded down, you may bring it.”
Aletta nodded toward several of the women and added, “In the meantime, we move the patient.” Hesitantly, each woman found a spot. Together, they lifted the pregnant-heavy woman and laid her into her bed, with Emilia crying out in pain and Aletta offering her soothing words of comfort. Maartje was already there with the first cloth-wrapped brick, and the woman who had held Emilia’s head was tucking blankets and propping cushions.
Aletta opened her apothecary bag and handed a small bottle of dried herbs to the old woman who had offered her hands. “Take this wild thyme, boil it in a small pot of wine, and give it to her to drink after she has finished the nourishing broth. ’Twill warm and relax her while I prepare my potions.”
She pulled Tante Lysbet’s tattered leather-bound book from her bodice. Seating herself on a low stool by the light of the fire, she opened its familiar pages. The original printed entries contained much useful information, but in the margins and on every unprinted page, scrawled in uneven handwriting, she found the most marvelous cures of all. She never knew which ones came from Lysbet and which from her moeder, but she’d learned to consult the marginal scribblings first.
The pages on birthing were all scrawled by two different hands. Eagerly she read, moving her lips but uttering no sound.
When Birthing Comes With Difficulty
First, send out all the neighbors and make the house quiet.
If the noise begins again, that shall I do. For now, I welcome their presence and assistance.
Second, put the patient in a warmed bed and give her a hot soothing drink—a nourishing broth, followed by one of these herbs boiled in wine—wild thyme, giant fennel (with a little myrrh), or horehound.
She lies in bed and sips the broth. The thyme boils on the fire.
Leave the patient in her bed until her pains are coming too close to give her a quiet repose in between. If pains should stop and need to be restarted, try one of these mixtures. Babies seem, even in the wombe, to have strong wills—or to be prevailed upon by demons—I know not which. But I have never known a living child that would not come forth with one of these remedies or the other.
A. Darnell in poultice form, mixed with barley meale, myrrh, saffron, and frankincense, applied to the belly…
I have neither barley meale nor saffron.
B. Horse-tongue—give half an ounce of powder of the root in a draught of sweet wine.
Oma has a jar of horse-tongue powder. But I have none.
C. Decoction of madder root is so great an opener that being only once applied, it brings down the birth and afterbirth.
Madder root? Decoction? I carry such with me at all times. Excellent in stanching blood and mitigating inflammations. Perhaps. What else?
D. Bellflower (columbine) seeds very finely beaten to powder. Give in wine—a singular medicine to hasten and facilitate a woman’s labor, and if the first taking is not sufficiently effectual, repeat it again.
Perfect! With this one I shall begin. Aletta hurriedly pulled from her basket a tiny bottle of the precious powdered seeds and a flask of wine. She mixed the potion and sent it in a cup by the hand of her old lady assistant.
“Give it to her for a gentle sipping,” Aletta instructed.
The woman reached for the cup and hurried to administer it while Aletta proceeded to read the instructions.
When once the pains have resumed, take a small root of the sowbread, hang it around the patient’s neck, and it will help to ease the discomfort while still bringing the child speedily out.
Sowbread root? Ja, ja. That I do have. I hope we will need it soon. She pulled it from the basket and set Maartje to finding a ribbon or thread for hanging it.
With no warning, a low moan came from the bed, followed by a piercing howl. Aletta rushed to Emilia’s side. She rested one hand on the patient’s shoulder and held the herbal book in the other. Between mumbled assurances of “Calm now. Thanks be to God, it has begun,” she read on.
When the pains resume, feel the patient’s belly, pressing downward, encouraging the movement of the child toward the opening.
Timidly, Aletta lifted the cover, placed her hands on the round belly, and pushed on the taut hard ball of a baby. Then the spasm subsided and the belly relaxed. Aletta continued to push. But nothing more happened.
“Is there more potion in the cup?” she asked of the old lady.
“Here.” She put it in Aletta’s hand and said softly, “After so long a time with no pains, the first ones to begin again can be slow between. Methinks it best to keep giving her the potion and pressing the baby.”
Aletta gave the weary moeder the rest of the liquid, continuing to offer her words of comfort. Then she went back to pressing on the soft belly for what seemed an hour. Suddenly she felt it tighten again. Once more, Emilia’s whole body contorted with the spasm and she cried out.
“Push the baby harder!” came the cry from one of the neighbors.
“Put her on the birthing stool!” shouted another.
“Keep her skirts down. Don’t look at the baby as it comes” came the instructions from close at Aletta’s elbow.
The room had turned into a beehive of women’s voices, each trying to outshout the others for a hearing. As the second spasm waned, Aletta stopped long enough to command loudly, “Leave the room, all of you!”
A buzz of gasps and nays followed, and Aletta felt the bodies closing in around her as she continued to press on Emilia’s belly.
Suddenly, the little old lady began shouting at the rest, “Go, go, go! All your noise will frighten this child so much that he will never show his face in the world.”
“Who made you the midwife?” cried one angry woman.
“Go, go, NOW!” The little old woman waved her spindly arms at them. They acted as if she were not even there.
When all had grown quiet with Emilia again, Aletta stood to her feet and addressed the women still clustered about the bed. “You must leave us alone, or this child will never be born.”
The women fell to a low mumbling. “Young thing, she is,” one sputtered. “What does she know about it?”
Aletta spoke calmly with an authority in her voice that surprised her. “The midwife was not able, with all her experience and arts, to bring this child safely.” She held up the herbal book above her head and went on. “I have in this book the advice of a mother and daughter who delivered more babies into this world than you and I have ever seen. Their first instruction was to send you all out in the beginning. Disregarding that advice was my greatest error.”
More gasps and clucking murmurings hummed about the room. Aletta continued, raising her voice a bit. “Now, I implore you, if you have a drop of compassion for this woman and her child, leave me this instant and let me get back to the work before me.” Aletta stuffed the herbal into her bodice, then wiped her hands briskly together and concluded, “Good day, honorable women, good day.”
She reached out to the old woman. Laying a hand on her arm, she said, “But you must not leave me. We need you here.”
“Me?”
“I cannot do it without you.”
The old woman sidled up to Aletta, threw her shoulders back, smoothed out her apron, and sighed. Slowly, still mumbling between themselves, the rest of the women looked at one another, then began slinking away out the door. One stopped at the threshold and called back over her shoulder, “If the child is dead, don’t lay that to our charge.”
Aletta’s heart beat rapidly and she swallowed the tears that welled in her throat. She lay one hand on the now still belly and the other on Emilia’s forehead, wiping off fat beads of perspiration. “My moeder prays us Godspeed,” she whispered, “and so does Hans.” Emilia opened her eyes and smiled up at her.
Suddenly Aletta felt a sharp kicking movement in Emilia’s belly. Emilia started, her eyes alight.
“It lives!” she said. “My baby lives!”
Aletta felt Emilia’s body tightening into another spasm. She called to Maartje, “Bring the sowbread root.”
Aletta pressed harder than ever on the baby. “It moves!” she cried. “Come, help me.”
Maartje was at the bedside now, struggling to place the ribbon around Emilia’s neck. The old lady was there too. Another spasm came, then another.
Emilia was screaming, her face red, her hands tearing at the bed, her whole body contorted. “It comes!” she shouted.
The old lady yanked off the bed covers and ordered, “Pull up her skirts and look.”
Just then Emilia’s body went into one more spasm, and the baby’s head and shoulders came into view.
“Take it by the shoulders and tug,” said the woman. “Easy, easy.”
As if in a fog, Aletta did all she was told. Before she knew what was happening, the baby was freed and the old lady was cutting the navel cord and attending to the moeder. Aletta stood beside the bed, a slippery baby squirming in her hands.
“It’s a girl!” Maartje exclaimed.
Stunned, Aletta hesitated just a moment, then suddenly realized that a pair of outstretched arms was reaching for the baby.
“Give her to me,” Oma the Healer Lady said, smiling at her.
“Oma! I thought you were with the farmer’s vrouw.” Aletta felt her strength drain clear to her toes.
“I arrived in time to see you at your finest.”
“You watched me?”
“I watched and prayed God to guide your hands. I am so proud of you, my herbal daughter.”
“Oh, Oma, I hardly know what I did.”
Oma assumed her typically efficient manner. “Now,” she said, “the child needs cleaning up and wrapping. The moeder needs rest, and you need to step outside where your young man waits a bit impatiently for you.”
“Pieter-Lucas! Oh!” She looked at her bloodied hands and skirts, then back at Emilia and the baby. “But, Oma, you still need my help.”
“Nay,” Oma said. “I have Maartje and this old lady who assisted you so well. There’s a basin with a jug of water in the corner. Go, my child, now.”
Oma carried the baby toward the table, and Aletta stumbled off toward the basin. Still in a daze, she washed the blood from her hands, then started for the door.
“First,” Oma stopped her. “I need to know what herbs you gave to our patient.”
Aletta blinked. “Bellflower seeds, beaten to a fine powder and mixed with a little wine,” she said. “And Maartje hung a piece of sowbread root about her neck.”
“That is all?” Oma asked.
“That and the little pot of Moeder Gretta’s fish and cabbage soup broth.”
“Well done. I could have done nothing better.”
The cries of a newborn filled the air as Aletta hurried across the room. “Oh, ja,” she called back over her shoulder, “and on the fire a pot of wild thyme is boiling in wine.”
Before she could reach the door, it opened, and in burst a tall straight woman and a severe brusque man carrying a large black bag. They brushed past Aletta, not looking at her, and strode into the room with an air of authority, tinged with irritation. “The surgeon and the midwife,” Aletta mumbled.
Trailing behind the official personages, the long line of ousted neighbors clambered through the door and hurried to take their places once more around the bed.
“What goes on here?” the surgeon thundered.
Oma approached him, holding the infant in her arms, and said with an ironic sweetness, “A lovely girl child has just been birthed.”
“By what sort of trickery came she forth?” he demanded.
“Trickery?”
“God sent His angel,” Emilia whispered.
Ignoring the moeder’s words, the midwife turned to Oma. “You, mixer of strange potions, tell us how came you with your magician’s art to bring forth a living child from death in her moeder’s wombe?”
“I know not how you determined that the infant was dead,” Oma said. “’Tis obvious that she waited only for her moeder’s warmth and quiet peace of mind to make her entrance into our world.”
Quietly, the little old lady assistant shuffled over to where Aletta stood looking on. “If he’d come before you, we would have had to call the mourners.”
“What do you mean?”
The old woman whispered into her ear, “He would’ve dismembered the baby and removed her from Emilia’s wombe, piece by piece.”
“Nay! He couldn’t do it.”
“See that black bag he carries?”
“Ja”.
“Full of tools for cutting up and pulling out.”
So that was why Moeder Gretta called him a butcher! Aletta shuddered. The woman grabbed her by the arm and tugged her toward the door. “Now, take my advice and hurry home before the surgeon learns that you were the one who delivered this baby.”
“What would he do to me?”
“Make you answer too many questions.”
“What will he do to Oma?”
“They’ll do her no harm. She’s the revered Healer Lady of Emden.”
“But…I cannot understand,” Aletta whispered, holding back.
“Go!” She threw Aletta’s cloak over her shoulders, then opened the door and shoved her out. Aletta wrapped her cloak tightly around her stained clothes and stepped out into the hazy almost-twilight.
Three men stood brooding over the door and gave her their full attention—Karel, Hans, and Pieter-Lucas.
“My vrouw and child?” the first man asked.
Aletta, still dazed from the words of the old woman, forced a smile. “Your vrouw rests. Your new daughter is a perfect little creature,” she said.
“Mock me not, young lady,” the man retorted.
“I guided her into birthing myself and held her little body in my own hands.”
“And the surgeon?” Hans asked. “What does he in there now?”
Aletta stared at Hans without speaking. A lump too large to swallow filled her throat and threatened to block off the air.
“What does he do?” Hans repeated.
“He…he storms about,” she began at last, “accusing your moeder of using a magician’s trickery to bring a dead baby back to life.”
“He dare not touch my child!” the vader said.
“Nay,” Hans assured him. “My moeder is a strong woman. No one snatches a newborn from her protective arms.”
“I go in,” the new vader announced and barged through the door with Hans at his heels, reaching out to pull him back.
Pieter-Lucas stepped to Aletta’s side.
“You were a brave woman,” he said, taking her by the elbow and guiding her away toward home.
“Oh, Pieter-Lucas, I was so frightened. In fact, now that I know what horrible things the surgeon had planned, I am more frightened than ever.”
“What things?”
Aletta shook her head. “He would have killed the child.”
“Killed her? But how?”
“Make me not say it,” she pleaded. She felt Pieter-Lucas’ arm encircling her, and she half snuggled into its soft warmth.
“Aletta, my dear Healer Lady,” he said, “I am so proud of you. You saved Emilia and her baby. I would not like to think what her husband would have done if you had not come.”
She looked up into his wonderful blue eyes. Filled with that worshipful look he always gave her, they almost lifted her spirits, but not quite. Just for the moment she yearned to run home, bury her head in a feather bag, and sob—all alone.
“As always, my love, your words are kind,” she managed.
She sighed and they walked on through the streets without another word. An early risen moon was beginning to dart in and out between the scudding clouds of a twilight sky. It shed a faint light on the rain-slickened cobblestones and began to lighten the load of sorrow she carried. When they’d reached the corner nearest Aletta’s home, they stopped again as they’d done so often before beneath the protective spread of the oak tree, now filled with tender young leaves.
Pieter-Lucas cleared his throat and took both her hands in his. “One thing I must tell you before we go in for your moeder’s evening meal.”
If only she could search his eyes! But he stared at her hands and massaged them with strong fingers. “What is it, Pieter-Lucas?” she asked, tilting her head close.
Raising his head slightly, he stumbled on, “I…I must go out on courier duty tomorrow.”
“What?” she gasped. “How can Oom Johannes send you out now, of all times?”
Tugging at her hands, he spoke much too quickly and with an air of mock cheerfulness. “I have not to go far this time. I shall leave as the sun shows its face, and you have my word that I return before it disappears.” He was looking at her now, his eyes probing hers as if begging her to trust him.
It should work just the way he said. Why, then, did her mind persist in dredging up old frightening memories? Two other times when he’d left on some quick errand, promising to return soon, terrible things had happened. The first time he nearly lost his life in the image-breaking in the Great Church. The other time he was trapped in a dungeon, and before he could free himself and get home, her own vader had taken her away. That time they’d been lost to each other for nearly a year.
“What could be so important that you must go now, so near to our wedding day?” she pleaded.
He sighed, looked intently into her eyes, and lowered his voice. “Prince Willem has an urgent need that only a runner with Children of God connections can fill. ’Tis for his cause—and the Low Lands—that I go.” He lifted her chin with the tip of his forefinger and, smiling reassuringly, added, “And for you and me.”
“How can that be?” Confusion was causing her heart to pound.
“We live in a world at war,” he explained. “Until Prince Willem and his forces wrest our vaderland back from the Spaniards, you and I will remain exiles, with no way to go to Leyden or for me to become the Master Painter of Breda.”
“Can no one else run this errand?”
He shook his head. “You act as if it were some great dangerous duty. It’s really one of the simplest runs I’ve ever done—across Den Dullart to Siddeburen and back. Just trust me, Little One. Can you not do that much?”
All arguments stuck in her throat. She had to give him the answer he wanted. No matter that fear pounded at the door of her heart more than on any of his other trips from Emden. Nor must he ever suspect that she sensed something terrible lying out there on his pathway, waiting to change his plans and keep them apart once again.
Aletta lifted her gaze to the dearest face on earth and studied each line and shading of color, fixing it indelibly so that she would not forget one detail while he was away. “I will trust,” she said, holding each word reluctantly before she let it go, “and pray you Godspeed!”
He must never know how hard that promise came nor how profusely her confused heart bled.