The Knot

Henry Lyte closes his mouth and can do nothing but wait. He remembers now why she makes him grit his teeth, cocking her power deliberately beneath his nose because she can at times like these. Everybody knows what happened when she did not come to Anys. If she had come … well, there is no use dwelling in that, is there.

Through the muffling of the door he can hear her speaking firmly to Frances. ‘Up and kneel on the bed Madam! Kneel! In the country way! You can pray later. Your matrons will pray for you. There, you see. Good girl, good girl.’

Frances has prepared for death.

Henry fully intends to sit up all night on his chair in the corridor listening to Goodwife Dutton barking demands. For what seem like hours he strains to hear Frances’s responses but cannot hear his wife at all, no cries, nothing. All he thinks he can hear is the brush and hiss and breath of the ancestors, amassed in the draughty air just beyond the reach of the guttering pool of light cast by the candle at his feet. The dark tonight is all uncertainty, but he feels time rushing in to fill that newly opening potential. The first confinement is so often long and arduous and filled with peril, and though Henry Lyte has had other children born to him, this is the first by his new wife Frances and her strengths and weaknesses in that respect are an unknown quantity. But somehow he jerks awake and it is the grey of morning and Goodwife Dutton is before him in the empty corridor, a bundle of bloodied cloths in her arms. The ancestors have gone, their interest sated, for of course now they already know what he does not.

His heart contracts. Her face is unreadable as she tells him the news that he can hardly hear for the beating in his ears.

‘Today your wife is delivered of a strong child, Master, born at full time. Of sound limb and lungs.’

‘And is she—’

‘She laboured sore for twelve hours and is tired from her travail.’ She walks on. ‘But sitting up and doubtless will be glad to see you when she’s cleaned up well enough and has had a bite to eat.’

‘Thank God, Mistress, thank God.’ He tries to keep his voice from shaking. Henry can hear a thin, vibrating cry now from behind the door. His child! He cannot bear to wish. He must not, for it will be God’s judgement upon him if it is otherwise to what he hopes for. He goes to the chamber next door and opens a window, looks out without seeing and breathes the late summer air in deeply, his hands still trembling and sticky with sweat. What is the date? The nineteenth of September; cradled just between Ember days following the Day of the Holy Cross. A sacred day indeed!

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