With a throat dry as paper, I wished only for the dark to fall faster.

Madame became carer and I. The cared for. Some things I welcomed, for example, the gentle purgatives she urged me to try (they had to be gentle, she said, so as not to dislodge the baby while they did the work of dislodging me): leeks and spinach with fresh butter, honey, purslane with dock leaves, stewed prunes. These foods worked. She also indulged my cravings (salted nuts, goat’s cheese, candied fruit of any kind) because she said that to deny them would be to deny the baby, to deny you. She said that you would be born craving what you had lacked in the womb so badly, you would enter the world carping and whining like a little devil.

She had other ideas that I didn’t like so much – foolhardy, provincial superstitions. She warned against grinding coffee, or unwinding thread from a skein, or even plaiting my hair because, she believed, the circular motion could result in the birth cord winding its way around your neck, suffocating you. For the sake of peace I indulged her in this, but I refused to rub her suggested concoction of St John’s wort and brandy into the skin of my thighs, a procedure she believed would protect me from clumsy falls.

In the beginning, I concerned myself only with myself. You were simply the problem growing inside me, until one night in March, while I lay in bed, I felt the quickening. A moth at the window. So subtle I wasn’t convinced anything out of the ordinary had happened until, a moment later, it happened again. I sat up, sweating. Next to my bed, the wicker berceau Madame had already placed in the bedroom. Ambrose, the baby who’d lived for twelve days, had slept in this basket, which was lined with stiff, yellowing lace. As I sat up, it came again. A twitch in the deepest part of me.

This. This was the moment. This was you.

But I was so, so tired. I could scarcely get out of bed in the mornings yet I still had a job to do. As much as Madame wanted to coddle me, there was food to be shopped for, meals to be cooked and companionship to be made. There was always that. I felt as if I were wilting but Madame, she was blossoming. From old clothing she kept in a trunk in her room, she pulled out the layette she’d sewn herself: long slips and swaddling, night caps and undershirts, napkins, nightgowns, socks. All unworn, a little yellowed with age but with embroidery so fine and delicate, it touched my empty heart.

The season did what seasons do. Soft green buds appeared on the acacia trees and my belly grew. The hump of it was still concealed under my skirt but I could feel it there, hardening. You fighting already for your own space in the world. Everything changed, everything. The smell of fresh bread or the sound of horses on hard-packed mud. The well-dressed gentleman reading his news or the old woman selling her copper pots. Even the way the spring sun shone off the Paris stone – all different, unfamiliar again. It wasn’t that things had become worse, particularly. The world had been stained like wood. I had been stained.