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Dedication

For all our daughters

Epigraph

You who were darkness warmed my flesh

where out of darkness rose the seed.

Then all a world I made in me;

all the world you hear and see

hung upon my dreaming blood.

—“Woman to Child,” Judith Wright

Mrs. B

August 30, 1797

Mrs. Blenkinsop arrived at a neat circle of three-story houses at the edge of North London, surprised to find her charge at the open door, holding her ripe belly with both hands and ushering her inside with an easy smile and no apparent terror of the event to come. The home and its mistress, in a muslin gown and indigo shawl, smelled of apple dumplings. Though they hadn’t met, the woman took the midwife’s hand and led her past half-furnished rooms, introducing them as she went, waving away stacks of books on a Turkish carpet, anticipating shelves, and the occasional wood box and leather trunk, as “the old life still finding its place in the new.” Mrs. Blenkinsop had seen far more disarray in her time, and liked the simple touches, cut flowers in every room and a single oval portrait, just a face (that looked very much like the missus herself) gazing out from over a mantel. In the garden out back, which was enjoying its first late-summer bloom, the midwife caught sight of a little girl, three years old, she guessed, playing with a young woman who seemed to be telling her the names of plants.

It was a fine house, with fresh white walls and open windows, tall as Heaven, inviting a cordial breeze that followed them down a hall, up two steep staircases, and into the airy bedroom where the missus led her, answering each of Mrs. Blenkinsop’s questions with an uncanny calm: Her waters had started as a trickle but ended as a gush as she’d stood in the kitchen that morning. She’d felt a dull ache and scattered pains, with no sensible pattern, but she wasn’t unwell, and remembered eating, only two hours before, a small breakfast, which she hoped was enough nourishment to sustain her for the labor to come.

“I don’t imagine there’ll be much for you to do, Mrs. Blenkinsop, but sit by and wait for Nature to do what your art cannot.”

“No objection by me.” The midwife put her old bag and bottle of gin on the floor.

“I can’t abide the lying-in. I was up next day with Fanny.”

“Sweet girl in the garden just now?”