The Remedy Read Online Free PDF Page B

head. I tried to call for help, but my throat was raw and painful.
    I lay still, whimpering with resentment. How dare they leave me alone? And I a Golden Book daughter, owner of a name a thousand years old! I screamed piteously that they had stolen my child and intended to leave me to die. Eventually I wore myself out and passed into sleep again, still sobbing.
    When I next roused, they were changing the damp and bloody linens around my privities. To lessen the shame, I still pretended at sleep until the dry rags were fastened and my shiftpulled down over my thighs. Then I opened my eyes and beheld the midwife and two nuns whispering by the door to my cell. I tried to speak but my throat was still constricted. I stared at them with imploring eyes until they noticed that I was awake. They began to speak to me in cool, impersonal tones. In chorus, as if rehearsed, they told me that my son was dead. They explained, all three looking at the floor, that he had tried to emerge with his face and not the crown of his head to the fore, increasing the difficulties of a near-impossible birth. With his large head he threatened to tear me in half. They had been instructed to spare me rather than the child, should the choice arise, and so they called in a doctor who had used the cranioclast on him.
    “What is that thing?” I croaked. “Cranioclast?” Still looking at the floor, they described the instrument, an iron tool used to reach into the birth cavern and break the skulls of mother-splitting babies. The doctor had pushed the cranioclast inside me, the pain being almost unnoticeable amid the tearing contractions. But in hearing of it, I thought I remembered a man’s voice and the sensation of cold metal inside me.
    “That was when I fainted?” I asked.
    They nodded.
    “What happened then?”
    Unwillingly, they told me. All within the theater of my womb, the doctor had sliced the child’s skull in two halves, sucked out the contents with a syringe, and squeezed the broken bones together. The crushed, dead baby was then pulled out with a hook. All this had happened while I was still unconscious.
    “And my throat?” I whispered. “Why does it hurt so much?”
    “We were obliged to insert a tube to keep you irrigated with laudanum. Had you woken or moved while he worked the cranioclast and hook then you would have been in the greatest danger.”
    My wits being capable of absorbing no more horrors, I fell asleep, for many hours, and when I awoke, I had been freshly dressed below. I licked my lips and found the traces of oat pap on them: They had also fed me while I slept.
    For days this was my life. Deprived of my own baby, I hadindeed returned to being one myself. I allowed myself only infant feelings: those of heat, coldness, satisfaction, and voiding.
    Later they told me that my absent lover had returned to London, and I asked for the money he had left for my new life outside the convent.
    They claimed that these funds had already been exhausted in the care of me during the birth and after. The doctor with the cranioclast was the most expensive in Venice. He feed extra for such emergencies. The drugs lavished on me during my recovery were also of the costliest kind, they added coldly, as if they considered this a poor investment.
    “You have lived,” they told me sternly. “You may count yourself fortunate.”
    And so they robbed me of my last portion of freedom, having already murdered my son.

• 8 •
    A Camphorate Electuary
Take Conserve of Rue 3 ounces; Venice Treacle 1 ounce; Camphor 8 grains; Oil of Amber 16 drops, mix .
It reprimands the Animal Spirits when too furious, and ready for Tumult and Explosion, disciplines them into order again, shakes off their heterogeneous Copula, and sometimes expels it quite. Upon these Accounts, it’s found by Experience to be very serviceable to Hysteric Women, howbeit some cannot away with the odious Ructus, which Oil Amber causeth .
    I myself cared little whether I lived or