The Dark Monk Read Online Free PDF

knocking on the door and praying aloud to St. Margareta. He didn’t dare enter—this was a woman’s realm—but if his wife or the child didn’t survive the birth, he already knew who was to blame: the goddamned midwife.
    Martha Stechlin groped inside the mother for the child, who was lying crosswise in the uterus. Her arms reached up to her elbows inside the Hainmiller woman, whose dress had slipped up over her thighs, but still the midwife could not get a firm hold on the child. The face of the older midwife was spattered with blood, sweat streamed down her forehead, and she had to keep blinking as it dripped into her eyes.
    Magdalena looked anxiously at the aunts and cousins. They whispered among themselves, murmured their rosaries, and kept pointing at the midwife. Just last year, Martha Stechlin had been accused of murdering a child and practicing witchcraft. Only quick action by Magdalena’s father and the young medicus had saved her from the fire. Nevertheless, the midwife was viewed in town with suspicion, and it clung to her like a baby’s first stool. People still called upon her when there was a birth or asked her for herbs to reduce a fever, but behind her back the good citizens crossed themselves to ward off her black magic.
    Just as they do with me, Magdalena was thinking as she wiped strands of matted black hair out of her face. Her eyes, usually so cheerful, looked tired and strained, and sweat gathered in her thick, bushy eyebrows. She sighed as she continued to push down rhythmically on the mother’s body.
    Magdalena was grateful when Frau Stechlin had asked her about half a year ago if she would like to be her apprentice. As the daughter of a hangman, she didn’t have many choices. The job of hangman was a dishonorable line of work, and people avoided her and her family. If she wanted a husband, her only real choice would be another hangman, and because that didn’t interest her, she had to support herself. At twenty-one, she could no longer be a burden on her parents.
    The vocation of midwife was just the right thing for her. After all, she had learned everything worth knowing about herbs from her father. She knew that mugwort was good for internal bleeding and parsley would ensure that unwanted children didn’t come into the world. She knew how to prepare an ointment of goose fat, melissa, and mutton bones, and she knew how to prepare hemp seeds with a mortar and pestle to help a young girl get pregnant. But now, seeing all the blood, the whispering aunts and the screaming mother, she was suddenly no longer sure she really wanted to be a midwife. As she continued pressing and squeezing, her mind wandered. In another world, she could see herself standing at the altar with Simon, a wreath of flowers in her hair and an “I do” on her lips. They would have children, and he would make a modest income as the respected town medicus. They could—
    “Stop dreaming, girl! We need fresh water!” Martha Stechlin’s blood-spattered face turned toward Magdalena. She tried to speak in a calm voice, but her eyes said something else. Magdalena thought she could detect a few new wrinkles in the wizened face of the forty-year-old woman. In just the last year, her hair had turned almost completely gray.
    “And moss to stop the bleeding!” the woman called after her. “She has already lost too much.”
    Magdalena, jolted from her reveries, nodded. As she went out into the hall, she glanced back into the overheated, dark room. The shutters were locked and the cracks filled with straw and clay. Out in the main room, women from the neighborhood were sitting on benches around the hearth and at the table, anxiously and skeptically watching the struggling midwife and her young helper.
    “Ave Maria, the Lord be with you…” Some of the old women started saying the rosary aloud. Evidently, they assumed that Josefa Hainmiller would soon be with the good Lord.
    Magdalena hurried down the hall, took a handful of