“We’ve a French Dr. Poignand, from the hospital. Maybe it’s for the best.”

Mr. Godwin looked from the cradle to his sleeping wife, his tall forehead collapsing into folds. Mrs. B had seen it before, a husband wrestling with his helplessness. Men believed in action above all.

“What would the missus want? Maybe think of that.”

“Yes,” he said, pressing his kerchief three times across his brow. “What would Mary do?” Mrs. B could see him thinking it through, never taking his eyes off his wife. “To think that not much more than a year ago I believed in my solitariness with the greatest vehemence. There was not a woman in the world worth giving up the life I kept very much for myself, to do and think and write and dine and sleep exactly as I wanted. Marriage, I believed an intolerable oppression, a prison, a compromise I would never make. I was … delineated, and I liked it that way. And now? I can hardly find the line between us. Her thoughts are mine. Her feelings, mine. Our difficulties, ours. I am a different man because of her, Mrs. Blenkinsop.” He looked squarely at the midwife in a way men rarely did. “My love for Mary has freed me from the prison that was my life. And I cannot comprehend going on without her. What man I would then be.”

Mrs. B nodded. There were words he’d said that she didn’t know, but she had the sense of the thing, and was touched by him telling her. In the hundreds of births she’d attended, she could not remember a single man baring his whole soul. Pray, yes. Weep, yes. Punch a wall, she’d seen that too. But never this. She tried to imagine her own husband, what he might say, in far fewer words.

No, she told herself, don’t think of that. She must keep in the room.

Mr. Godwin held the handkerchief to his lips and regarded his wife with a look of despair.

“She would want to live, Mrs. Blenkinsop. For her daughters. But I need her to live … for me.”

Mrs. B kept both hands bearing down on the missus’s belly, at Dr. Poignand’s instruction. Mary moaned and writhed, her hair stringy with sweat. In moments she fainted altogether, which the midwife counted as a blessing. When conscious, she tried to lift her head to look between her legs. Mrs. B was determined that Mary not see the horror down below, the bloody mess, the doctor up to his elbow inside her, peeling the placenta, piece by piece, from her womb. The pain, she knew, was worse than childbirth itself.