The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers Read Free Book Online Page A

west windows and glowed gold and rose in the crystal glasses ranged on a shelf, and as the light faded and servants brought in lamps, the minister declared Michael and Julia man and wife by the authority vested in him.
    Josephine had been the strikingly unemotional maid of honor, and at this point she and Boyd were supposed to go out to the kitchen and come back, Josephine with an oatcake and Boyd with a wooden stoup of strong ale; the stoup was to be passed around the company after Crawford took the first gulp, and Josephine was to break the oatcake ceremoniously over Julia's head, symbolically assuring Julia's fertility and bestowing good luck on the guests who picked up the crumbs from the floor.
    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