Still, Mr. Godwin was right that it was the custom nowadays, this sending for men, even when it might be no more than a common labor. It would be one thing if they were as old as she, with as much practical experience. Instead Mrs. B saw mostly boyish pretenders who, having attended an anatomy course and seen one or two dissections of female bodies, believed themselves experts in the field, as if they’d invented it themselves. Nothing filled her with more dread than the sight of a chamois leather bag opened to reveal its forceps, perforators, blunt hook, and a pair of bone cutters. She had yet to meet a doctor who believed that doing nothing was the best approach.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blenkinsop,” said Mr. Godwin, patting his glistening forehead with a cambric handkerchief. “I meant nothing by it.”

“Nothing taken, sir. The waiting’s hard, I know, but there’s no cause for worry. None at all.”

She’d seen the way he burst into the room immediately after the birth and sat at the edge of his wife’s bed, right up against her hip, how they pressed their foreheads together, knit their fingers. While she’d attended to the just-born child—scrubbed away the scurf with warm water and wine and put a flannel cap on her head—she couldn’t help hearing Mr. Godwin speak to his wife of a joy he’d never known, how sheltered he’d been before knowing her, and how wrong to let a Miss Pinkerton pursue him of late, how sorry he was for any pain he’d caused her because she must never doubt his love for her, and here was proof of their love, this little girl. As if a child had never been born on this good earth.

Mrs. B was reluctant to ask him to leave his post by his wife’s bed, but Mary looked to be in the afterthroes, which she took to mean that the placenta was soon to follow.

“It’s not finished, then? She’s not out of danger?” Mr. Godwin asked in a furtive whisper.

“There’s no danger, sir, just Nature, taking its time.”

He suggested, more gingerly than before, and with more respect, that they might call a doctor at any point she thought it necessary. She squinched her eyes in agreement, which seemed to satisfy him, but he only consented to leave the room when Mrs. B allowed him to take the child with him. Just for a little while.

“Watch over her, darling,” Mary said with a weak turn of her head.

“I promise,” he said, and forced himself from the room, their eyes not leaving each other’s until the last possible moment.