Clarence followed her rather than be left behind, but he wasn’t in any hurry about it and I kept losing sight of the shadowy mass of horse and man—and with them, any notion of where the trail was. I wondered how on earth the girl had found her way to us through dark and bramble; her legs and arms were scratched and there were leaves and pine needles in her hair; she smelled of the forest.

The moon was well up the sky by now, a lopsided, tricky lump of a moon that made it just possible to perceive deceptive openings in the forest, without actually being bright enough to see anything more than three feet away.

I had Agnes perched in front of me, her shift rucked up and pale white legs like mushroom stems dangling in the darkness to either side. I wondered whether she had left home in a panic—or whether perhaps the grubby shift was her only garment. It smelled faintly of cooking grease and singed cabbage.

“Tell me about your mother, Agnes,” I said, giving Clarence a solid kick in the ribs. He twitched his ears in annoyance, and I desisted. He was a good mule, but not above decanting a rider who aggravated him. “When—about—did her pains begin?”

She was a little less frightened, now that she had obtained the help she sought, and gradually grew calmer as she answered my questions.

Mrs. Cloudtree (was there a Mr. Cloudtree in residence? Yes, there was, though her body stiffened when she mentioned him) was near to her time (good, not a premature birth), though she’d thought it might be as much as another two or three weeks (maybe a little early, then … but even so, the baby should have a reasonable chance …).

Her mother’s pains had come on about midday, Agnes said, and her mother hadn’t thought it would take long: Agnes had come within four hours of the waters breaking, and each of her little brothers even faster. (Good, Mrs. Cloudtree was a multigravida. But in that case, she should have delivered fairly quickly and without complications … and plainly she hadn’t …)

Agnes couldn’t explain quite what the trouble was, other than a longer-than-usual labor. But she knew there was trouble, and that interested me.

“It’s not …,” she said, pulling the old shawl tighter round her shoulders and turning her head in an effort to see my face, make me understand. “Something’s different.”

“Something feels wrong to you?” I asked, interested.

She shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know. I helped, last time, when Georgie was born. And I was there when Billy came …. I was too little to help, then, but I could see everything. This is just … different.” I heard her swallow, and patted her shoulder.

“We’ll be there soon,” I said. I wanted to assure her that everything would be all right, but she knew better, or she wouldn’t have come running through the dark, looking for help. I could only hope that nothing irretrievable had happened at the Cloudtrees’ cabin in the meantime.