She pushes the sleep-damp sheet away from her, draws a hand over the drum of her belly, tests the ache in the hollow of her back and sighs.

The maid, Kate this time, leans to her. ‘Lady, will you drink?’

She closes her eyes again and doesn’t answer. The world seems so far away and of so little import.

Her sister is here now. Anne, who has borne four children and lost none. Who placed a child in her husband’s arms within a year of going to his bed. Who Cecily has envied to the point of loathing. She holds Anne’s hand now and is glad of her. She’s been floating, these days, and needs Anne’s presence to anchor her to the world. Anne speaks with the other women. Sometimes Cecily listens. They speak of their own birthings. Of children come early. Of children come late. Of the foolish things some women do. The risks they should never take.

‘My mother rode horseback till her seventh month and took no harm.’

‘My aunt’s maid ate the meat of a ewe lamb and her son was born a crouch back.’

‘A black cat crossed me at the foot of the stairs, but I prayed all night to St Margaret and the child lived.’

Cecily hears all these things. Eat nothing too salt, nothing too sweet, no beer but well-watered, no bull flesh or chitterlings or river fish. Keep the fire burning always, in case the Devil comes down the chimney to feed on the unborn soul. They do not speak of stillborns, or breech births; of milk fever, or of women who die and have their children cut from them. But these things are there in the room, she knows. In the shadows beyond the candlelight, in the space beneath the bed.

It’s dark now and all but Anne have gone to their sleep. Her sister sits by her pillow and sews in a pool of candlelight, familiar. It takes her back to the long ago of Raby, where Anne taught her to sew, the last of her sisters to leave her for marriage, badly missed when she was gone. Lying on her side, Cecily watches the needle dart, while the child rolls slow and heavy within her, like the dull-eyed carp whose backs break the dark surface of Fotheringhay’s fish pools, before disappearing again into the deep. She reaches out and stills Anne’s needle, grasps her hand and draws it under the cover to rest against her belly. She watches Anne’s smile grow as the weight rolls beneath her fingers, as the tight flesh stretches and subsides.

‘Let me rub you with the rose oil. It will send the child to sleep so you can rest.’

So she turns on her back, pillow-propped, and Anne brings the scent of summer in a slick of oil.