“My heart is rattling,” Lucia said. “Though I feel sleepy all the time, it keeps me awake.”

“It’s having to work twice as hard. Your uterus needs twice as much blood as usual, your kidneys a quarter more—”

“I am always breathless. I pant—puff, puff, puff.”

“The fetus is pressing on your diaphragm. You are breathing more rapidly and more deeply to increase your supply of oxygen.”

“I can feel my ribs spreading. My hips are so sore I can barely walk. I get pins and needles in my hands and cramps in my feet. I either have constipation or diarrhea. I am a martyr to piles. My veins make my legs look like blue cheese—”

Patrizia laughed. “All this is normal!”

“Yesterday I felt the baby kick.”

Patrizia, for once, hesitated. “Perhaps you did.”

“But this is my eighth week. I am still in my first trimester!”

Patrizia looked down on her. “Somebody has been reading too much.”

“Actually, I have been looking up the Internet from my cell phone.” And from that she had learned the startling fact that among contadino women a pregnancy would last nine months, and you would not expect to have more than one child a year . . .

“There is nothing for you to learn on the Internet. Child, we have been delivering babies here for the best part of two thousand years—our way, and successfully.” She placed her hand on Lucia’s forehead. “You must trust us.”

But after that conversation Patrizia took her cell phone away.

In the weeks that followed, the changes in her body only seemed to accelerate. She was subject to many more tests, some of them conducted with very modern equipment. She had a chorion biopsy, and a fetoscopy, and an alpha-fetoprotein test, and amniocentesis. Her baby was imaged with ultrasound. She was astonished at its size and development.

And then—just thirteen weeks after her sole intercourse with Giuliano—she went into labor.

Everything was a blur. She found herself squatting, naked, in a darkened room. Pina was behind her, supporting her under her armpits. Pina spoke to her, but she couldn’t hear what she said. There was little pain, for electrodes taped to her flesh were passing currents through her back.

Patrizia was here, working competently, calmly, and quickly. And she was surrounded by women—Rosa, other doctors and nurses, even some of the matres, a great huddle of femaleness, touching her, stroking her belly and shoulders, kissing her softly, their lips tasting sweet, somehow reassuring.

In the last moments there was a sense of calm, she thought. It was oddly like a church. People spoke softly, if they spoke at all, and every eye was on her. She was the center of everything, for once in her life, the whole Order following the rhythms of her own body.

But it is only thirteen weeks, she thought, deep in her mind. Thirteen weeks!