Poetry of the Damned
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 12: The Worst Day
They sent a boy to the grounds for him and he came at a dead run, and was up the stairs before he’d got his breath, and the door of the room was open and the warm wrongness of it reached him before he was through it — the fire built up too high, the basins set ready, the close hot smell of the room, and only the girl yet at the bedside, her sleeves pushed up; and his wife in the bed with her hair stuck dark to her forehead and her face working through something he had no name for. But she smiled at him. That was the thing he held to. She was tired and she was gripping the sheet and between the gripping she smiled at him and said it had started, it had started, wasn’t it wonderful, and he knelt by the bed and took her hand and said yes, yes it was, and believed it absolutely.
“Tell me it’s all in hand,” he said. “Tell me what’s wanted and I’ll see it done.”
“It’s all in hand.” Vinda breathed through a tightening and let it go. “The fire’s up, the water’s hot, Kara’s seen to everything, my mother’s on her way. I’ve had my drink, the settling one — “ she managed a flicker of the old grin “ — so I shan’t disgrace us by screaming the street down. Women have done this since the world began, Merko. I’ll do it as they do. By myself, the proper way.”
The girl had been working her hands over the great taut curve of Vinda between the pains, pressing, feeling for something, and her face when she straightened was not a face that agreed the thing was all in hand. “Master.” She kept her voice low and even, the voice for saying a hard thing in a room that didn’t want to hear it. “I think the baby isn’t sitting as it should. It’s lying across, I think, not down. I’ve thought so a day or two. We should send for a midwife — a real one, a good one — now, before it’s further on. I’d be glad to be wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”
And Merko looked from the girl’s steady worried face to his wife’s flushed certain one and did the thing he would have a great deal of time, afterward, to do again and again in the dark: he let it be decided by the person who wanted the comfortable answer.
“Oh, she frets, that one,” Vinda said, fond and dismissive, riding out another grip of it. “It’s how she’s made — she can’t help caring, can’t see a soul in want of anything without wanting to put it right; she’d nurse a sparrow and sit up the night with it. It’s the best of her and it’s a trial both at once. But carrying isn’t illness, Merko, and a hard hour isn’t a crisis. Let’s not have a stranger tramping through and frightening us all and charging the earth to tell me what my own body’s doing. Wait for my mother. Mama’s had five. Mama will know.”
“Wait for your mother,” Merko agreed, and was glad to agree, because his wife was smiling and a midwife felt like admitting something, and the girl dropped her eyes and said nothing more, and the morning went on.
Her mother came within the hour, swept in all competence and scent and reassurance, and laid her hands on her daughter and pronounced it ordinary. Hard, she said, but ordinary. The girl tried once more — said her piece about the lie of it, the crosswise of it, said it carefully to the mother as the senior woman in the room — and the mother heard her out and patted her arm and told her she was a good girl and a clever one but that she’d birthed five and buried none and knew a normal labour when she had her hands on it, and that the young ones always wanted to be running for help at the first hard hour. “And if you were right,” she added, not unkindly, settling her daughter’s pillows, “well. Then there’s no help to run for, is there. So we’ll have none of that talk. We’ll get on.”
Merko did not understand what the mother had just said. He turned it over — if you were right, there’s no help to run for — and could not make it mean the thing it meant, and so he let it go, the way he let most things go, and held his wife’s hand, and waited for the ordinary hard thing to be over.
By midday the pains were coming fast, one on the next almost, and Vinda had stopped smiling between them. By the early afternoon she had stopped talking much at all, and there was a great deal of effort and no sign whatever of the thing the effort was for, and her mother’s face had begun, very slightly, to change — and Merko, who could read his wife’s mother better than he could read the medicine, watched that face change and felt the first cold finger of real fear go down him. He kept asking. Is this right? Is it meant to be this long? Is she meant to be this tired? And got back the soothing nothings, first babies, takes its time, she’s strong — until the afternoon wore down toward evening and the girl came round the bed to him, white and certain, and said, “Master. Please. Let me go for the midwife now. Please.”
And this time he heard the fear in his own chest answer her, and he stood up and said go, go now, get the best there is, I don’t care what it costs, run — and felt, saying it, a rush of relief that he was doing something at last, and never once let himself know that he was doing it three hours past the hour it might have done any good.
“I’ll ask next door,” the girl said, already at the door. “The Carrows know a woman — the best in the quarter, she teaches the others at the Magdalen — I’ll have her here inside the hour.” And she was gone down the stairs before he could ask how a kitchen girl came to know the best midwife in the quarter and where she taught; and the question floated up in him and found nothing to land on and drifted off again, because there were larger things, and he went back to the bed and his wife’s gripping hand.
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