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The Mark of the King

By Jocelyn Green

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Paris, France
May 1719

“You shouldn’t be here.” With gentle authority, Julianne Chevalier ushered a man twice her age to the doorway of his young wife’s lying-in chamber.
“You have what you need?” Toulouse Mercier looked over Julianne’s head, toward Marguerite. “My first wife died in childbirth. I cannot lose Marguerite too. Or the baby.” He gripped Julianne’s arm, pulling her close enough to smell the pomade on his wig and to see the powder dusting the shoulders of his black robe. “Marguerite lost the last baby. The last midwife did not bleed Marguerite, and so we lost the baby before it was fully formed. Please.”
Gritting her teeth, Julianne peeled Toulouse’s fingers from her arm and gave them a reassuring squeeze before releasing them. “Oui, monsieur, we have bled her monthly as required, and today of all days will be no different. Now, am I to attend any further questions, or shall I attend your wife instead?”
His watery blue eyes snapped. “I am away. If you require the surgeon, I’ll fetch him posthaste.”
“I’ll notify you at once should such a measure become necessary.” She watched Toulouse bow out of the room and closed the door. As she unpinned her lace cap from the curls that crowned her head, she swept to Marguerite’s bed, where Adelaide Le Brun already stood watch. Julianne had completed her three-year apprenticeship under Adelaide months ago, but Toulouse insisted on having the seasoned midwife present for the birth.
“You will help me?” Marguerite’s voice quaked as she reached for Julianne’s hand.
“With all that I am.” Julianne smiled as she unpacked her supplies and tied her birthing apron over her skirt, pinning the bib to her bodice.
“I’m so afraid.” Marguerite’s lips trembled. At sixteen years, she was nine years Julianne’s junior, and dangerously slight of frame.
“We have taken every precaution.” Her fingernails trimmed short, round, and smooth, Julianne gently probed Marguerite’s belly through the thin sheet covering her. “Today will be no different.” Throughout the pregnancy, Julianne had gathered this sparrow of a girl under her wing, providing linseed oils to help her skin’s elasticity, wraps to support the weight of the child, and advice on what to expect.
Adelaide stood by Marguerite’s head, speaking encouragement to her in low, practiced tones. With greased fingers, Julianne reached under the linen, and with her eyes still on Marguerite’s face, skirted the neck of the womb. It was still small and unwilling.
“We have some time, yet.” Julianne wiped her hand on a rag. “Rest between the pains. Save your strength for the grand finale, oui?” Out of courtesy to both Toulouse and Adelaide, she caught the madame’s eye and cocked her head as if to ask if Adelaide wanted to examine Marguerite as well.
“It’s you she wants, not me.” Adelaide’s eyebrows arched innocently, but Julianne tasted the bitterness in her words. The mistress midwife had been practicing for three decades. But when clients began asking for Julianne, the apprentice, by name, rather than Adelaide, something shifted between them. Julianne never intended to usurp her teacher, but her young practice outpaced Adelaide’s.
Stifling a sigh, Julianne crossed to the window, opening it wide enough for healthful ventilation, and fragrances of orange and jasmine wafted in on the breeze from the parfumerie down the street. A hundred church bells chimed across the city. Rainwater gushed from the roof, cutting muddy channels into the road three stories below.
Marguerite stirred, and Julianne turned in time to see her belly harden into a compact ball. A grimace slashed upon the young woman’s face. With her palms upturned in a helpless gesture, Adelaide retreated petulantly to a chair in the corner of the room.
“Breathe through it.” Julianne seated herself on a stool and greased her fingers once more before reaching under the linen. During the next contraction, she pierced the membranes around Marguerite’s waters with a large grain of salt. The familiar sour smell pinching her nose, she replaced the soaked rags beneath Marguerite’s hips.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Adelaide crowed.
Julianne had forgotten nothing. But rather than argue, she allowed Adelaide to bleed Marguerite from the arm to ease her breathing, lessen engorgement, and soften the cervix so it wouldill stretch and open more easily.
“Forgive me for not asking sooner, Julianne, but do you have children?” Marguerite’s eyelids drooped.
“Not yet,” she replied.
“’Twould be a scandal if she did, given that she’s not married,” volunteered Adelaide. An unvarnished attempt to undermine Julianne’s credibility, as married midwives with children were preferred for their life experience.
Julianne exhaled her frustration. She could inform them both that years ago her betrothed had asked her to give up delivering other women’s babies so she could stay home and mother her own. She hadn’t agreed, so he cancelled the marriage contract. She could tell them her own mother had died giving birth to her little brother Benjamin, and that ever since then, she had wanted to be a midwife, to help spare other families such sorrow. She could say that she had raised Benjamin while her father drowned his grief in wine until he joined his wife in heaven. Then Benjamin had enlisted in the army and sailed for Louisiana, and Julianne had felt his loss with a mother’s heart.
But today was about Marguerite, and so Julianne said none of this.
Shadows lengthened on the floor. The hands of the clock pointed accusingly at the hour, and still the baby’s head did not crown. Malpresentation.
Breathing deeply, Julianne spoke. “Marguerite, I need to put my hand inside you. I need to know where the baby’s head is. Do you understand? Just keep looking at my eyes.”
Mercifully, Adelaide came and held both of Marguerite’s hands. Julianne’s gaze locked on the young mother’s pale face as she slipped her hand into the womb and probed the baby’s head for the V where the suture lines of the scalp met in ridges at the back. There it was. Slowly, she wrapped her fingers around the baby’s skull.
“Your baby is face up. That’s why we haven’t been able to make the progress we were hoping for yet. I have to turn the baby.” She stood up now, gaining leverage. D, and decided not to explain that if she didn’t turn him, his jaw would hook on Marguerite’s pelvic bone. “It’s going to hurt, but I’ll be as quick as I can. Then things will be much easier for you, and for him.”
Her right hand inside Marguerite, with her left hand, she felt through the abdominal wall for the baby’s limbs with her left. A contraction hit, and when it relaxed, Julianne shoved with her left hand at the same time she turned the baby with her right until he rolled facedown.
Marguerite arched her back off the bed in silent agony then fell back upon it, and still Julianne did not release the baby’s skull. Through two more contractions, she held him in place to be sure he did not slip out of his new position.
At last convinced the baby was locked into the correct position, Julianne withdrew her hand and wiped it with a rag. The rest of the delivery proceeded normally, and the baby boy was born. He was nine pounds, Julianne judged as she swiped her finger through his mouth and nose. Little wonder Marguerite had torn despite Julianne’s best efforts at greasing and gently stretching the neck of the womb. She wiped him off and handed the mewling newborn wrapped in clean cloths to his mother.
Marguerite’s arms shook as she accepted him. “My son,” she whispered. “My son.”
“You did well, ma chère,” Julianne told the young woman. “He’s perfect.”
Briskly, she readied the room for Toulouse’s arrival. She tied off and cut the navel string once the afterbirth slipped out. Because Marguerite was still bleeding, Julianne next soaked cloths in a mix of water and vinegar, wrapped them around Marguerite’s thighs, and placed one under her back.
Adelaide raised her painted eyebrow. “Shall we send for the surgeon?”
“Why? Is something wrong?” Marguerite’s voice trembled.
Irritation swelled within Julianne. that Adelaide would stoke such needless fear. Surely, Marguerite was in no danger. “Nonsense. The bleeding will stop soon on its own.” After all, she’d seen worse—and so had Adelaide, for that matter. “You’ll be sore, but your body will heal.”
Shrugging, Adelaide wiped the mother’s face with a sponge and smoothed her hair back into place.
Julianne smiled at Marguerite as she washed her hands. “Ready for your husband?” No sooner did Adelaide unlatch the door than Toulouse burst into the room and crossed to his wife in four long strides. Kneeling, he tentatively touched the baby’s velvety crown with one finger before kissing Marguerite on the cheek.
With calm efficiency, Julianne dissolved a hazelnut’s worth of Spanish wax into six spoonfuls of water and gave it to Marguerite to drink while Toulouse held the baby. “To help stop the bleeding,” she whispered discreetly.
Peeking under the sheet, she noticed that the cloths were already dark crimson, far too quickly. Alarm triggered somewhere deep inside her.
While Marguerite slowly sipped the concoction, Julianne pulled from her bag portions of wild chicory, orange blossoms, and a vial of syrup of diacode and capillaire. “Adelaide, could you brew this into a tea for Marguerite, please?” Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.
“I remember a time when it was you who brewed the tea for my patients. My, how times have changed.” But Adelaide prepared the tea, just the same. When Adelaide returned, sShe gave the cup to Marguerite and coaxed her to drink every drop, though the girl drifted to sleep between shallow sips and needed to be gently wakened to finish. Clearly, this sparrow of a girl would need more time than most to convalesce.
A sickening thud. Julianne spun around to see that Marguerite’s empty cup had slipped from her grip, and tumbled to the floor at Toulouse’s feet. Dread seized Julianne. The pallor of Marguerite’s face was not that of one asleep.
“Marguerite?” Toulouse rasped.
At once, Julianne whisked to her side. Lifted her hand, felt her wrist for a pulse, for a flutter, for some sign of life.
Felt nothing.
Toulouse yelled at Marguerite to wake up, and the baby cried, but it sounded as far away as the muffled tumult of theatergoers spilling back into the street a few blocks away. Sweat prickling her scalp, Julianne grabbed her jar of smelling salts and waved it beneath the young mother’s nose, her heart suddenly a rock in the pit of her stomach. But of course no scent or sound, not even that of a husband’s heart breaking or of a baby wailing for his mother, could bring dear Marguerite back from the dead. Her soul had already taken flight.
The baby dipped in Toulouse’s arms as he dropped to his knees beside the bed. He clutched hims son tighter and skewered Julianne with his gaze. “What have you done? He needs his mother. I need his mother.”
Words webbed in Julianne’s chest. She could scarcely take in that Marguerite was gone at all, let alone form a defense of her actions.
“You did this!” he cried. “You put your hand inside her, I heard you say so! How dare you invade the body of my wife when you knew her to be so narrow!”
“No, that’s a common practice. I needed to change the baby’s position. . . .” She looked to Adelaide for help.
“You killed her!” Toulouse’s voice trembled with grief-glutted rage.
Julianne reeled. “We took every precaution. The baby was so large . . . Madame Le Brun was here the entire time, i. If I had been close to making a misstep, she would have caught it.”
Toulouse rounded on Adelaide. “What say you?”
One word from the mistress midwife could absolve Julianne from any suspicions. Just one word. The truth.
With a scathing glance atto Julianne, Adelaide looked under the sheet to examine Marguerite’s condition. “Ma foi! The girl has torn dreadfully! No tea could have repaired this damage.”
Her breath suspended, Julianne sank to her knees beside the bed, watching Marguerite’s complexion grow waxy while Adelaide conferred with Toulouse in low tones. “A preventable tragedy. If only a surgeon had been called right away. Fatal negligence.”
“What am I to do?” Toulouse moaned. “Oh, what am I to do?”
“I’ll take care of assigning a nurse. As for Julianne, you know what to do. As a magistrate, you know this: an abuse of midwifery is a public crime.”
The room swayed. Julianne clutched at the ache in her chest as her gaze dropped to the bowl of blood Adelaide had let from Marguerite’s arm. Her dark reflection stared accusingly back at her. How could I have let this come to pass?

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