Little by little they made themselves comfortable. But every day she had to figure out something new: the business of survival was remarkably complicated. And life was relentlessly hard, every hour from dawn to dusk filled with hard physical labor. The frosts of winter came, and life grew harder yet.

Still, even though the new life in her belly grew relentlessly, Regina felt herself becoming stronger, the skin of her hands and feet and face hardening, the muscles in her legs and shoulders thickening. She ate ravenously, to feed her unborn baby and to keep out the cold. But she did not fall ill. Carausias suffered a good deal, though; his joints and back, already frail, never recovered from the long walk from Verulamium, and though he gamely tried to keep up his share of the work, his weakness was obvious.

And it was, to Regina’s horror, Cartumandua who became the most seriously ill of all.

It started with a pain in her belly. It persisted no matter what she ate, and even when she didn’t eat at all. When Regina touched Carta’s belly she found a hard lump, below her rib cage, almost like another, malevolent child.

None of them had any idea what could be ailing Carta. There was, of course, no doctor to call on. Regina even tried begging medicines from the bearded farmer. Exsuperius offered nothing save advice about letting Carta chew on willow bark. When Carta tried that she found the gathering pain would, if only briefly, be lessened. But gradually, day by day, Carta grew weaker and more sallow, and Regina felt a growing dread.

When the days were shortest, much of the marshy land froze. The daily chore of fetching water could never be skipped, but they had to walk farther to find a place where the water wasn’t frozen, or where the ice was thin enough to break. The water walks came to dominate their lives, the first thing Regina woke up thinking about each morning.

On one particularly bleak, gray midwinter morning, she and Marina made the first walk down to the marsh. They had dug a cesspit here. Regina squatted over the hole in the ground, her dress lifted up to expose her backside to the raw cold.

Suddenly she imagined how her younger self might have felt if she could have seen her crouching in this muddy pond. In her mother’s villa there had been a latrine close to the kitchen, so water from the kitchen could be used to flush. There were sponge sticks and vials of perfumed water to keep yourself clean, and the little room was always rich with cooking smells. And now, this. She had come to this pass step by step—and every step downward—she had been so busy staying alive that she had forgotten how far from home she had come.