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

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 to be 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