Mrs. B knew a good deal about pain. She was childless herself, not for lack of trying, but that was long ago, so long she hardly remembered what trying was like, though she never forgot the wanting. In the early years, as apprentice to a country midwife, she found herself jealous of the pain that childbirth brought, though she never told a soul. How willing she would have been to suffer it, had she a child to show for it in the end, just one, that’s all she’d asked of Him. Instead, over time she convinced herself that God had spared her from her own travail that she might serve other women in theirs, and with that, her desire gave way to duty, her jealousy, to joy observed. But to pain, she became obedient mistress. To her way of thinking, it wasn’t enough to call a birth “lying-in,” or “groaning,” or “crying-out,” as if a woman could be measured by the amount of noise she made. No, pain had a thousand likenesses, each as different as rough weather, every variation and never two days the same. She had seen women claw at their bedclothes, beat their own thighs, and try to climb the walls in hopes of escape.

But this was pain of another reach.

“Look at me,” said Mrs. B, pointing to her chin. The midwife disapproved of Poignand’s method—of doctors who believed if there was room enough for a child in the womb, surely there was room for a hand. But she had sympathized with Mr. Godwin wanting to do something, anything, that might turn the tide in his wife’s favor. She’d watched him from the window, frantic at being unable to find a carriage in the middle of the night, set off almost at a run for Parliament Street where the doctor lived. She wondered if she’d been too tired to press her point, but it was out of her hands now. Mr. Godwin’d returned shortly before dawn with Poignand, who sprung to action, refusing even almond oil to cleanse his hands.

Mrs. B found it hard to look herself. “Keep your eyes right here,” she said to Mary, tapping the round button of her chin.

Mary, in a delirium, tried again to lift her head, to form her parched lips into words, but couldn’t. It was as if she’d lost her voice altogether, Mrs. B thought, with everyone else talking for her. She squeezed some drops of water from a cloth into Mary’s mouth.

“What is it, dear? Tell me.”

“I want to die, truly,” Mary whispered, “but I cannot leave her.… I am determined.”

Mrs. B pressed the cool cloth to Mary’s brow and clutched her hand. “Then don’t leave her,” she said.

“Both hands on the belly, Blenkinsop,” said Poignand. “And can we not give the poor woman some laudanum?” By now he was sweating too.