“I promised her, Doctor. No laudanum.”

Mrs. B thought she felt Mary squeeze her hand back. She leaned down to her ear. “It’ll soon be over, Mary, God willing. Think of your new little girl.”

But Mary had faded away again, and couldn’t hear. Mrs. B had seen it before. The pain with no name, no sound, neither screams nor breath. A prayer no more use than the tip of a chin.

Mary W

Little bird.

My true life begins not with my birth, but with a death, the shock of which will draw a line in my life that separates everything that’s gone before from all that lies ahead. I was thirteen years old, fiery but unformed, feared the wrath of my parents, hated my brother and my life, loved the countryside and my sweet spaniel, Betsy, who feared nothing, knew only joy.

We’d moved to the little village of Walkington, which, compared with the stink of Spitalfields, I was sure must be Paradise, or as close to it as I’d ever come. Best of all, I’d met a girl, in nearby Beverley, who I was quite sure had all one should ever want in life, and was all anyone should want to be. This day was Jane Arden’s birthday, and the hope that’d sustained me was that I’d be invited to her party. I’d had my one good dress, such as it was, washed and pressed for a week, hanging on a nail at the back of my door, with my pinchbeck quizzing glass, dangling from its velvet ribbon, looped around its collar, my single accoutrement. I’d waited every day for a letter to come, been on my best behavior, not argued, and done my chores in hopes Mama would let me go should the longed-for invitation come. But it hadn’t.