The rest of the day and night swirled in the midwife’s head, but she remembered a sort of peace settling on the house while Mary slept. Mr. Godwin had showed her his wife’s study—a sliver of a room with one tall window, a writing desk, a chair, the settee. A housemaid brought up a blanket. The cradle was moved in. Whenever Mary stirred, Mrs. B propped her up with some pillows, gave her something to drink, and laid the baby at her breast, with no success. Even when Mary pleaded with pretty words, the child’s cries grew fainter every hour, her little breaths shallower.

When Mr. Godwin took his turn to rest, Mrs. B gave Mary clean linen pinned lightly around her waist, and then set to work, as quietly as she could, making the chamber sweet and fresh. She opened the door and window, asked that the room be brushed, the carpets cleaned and aired. She’d seen enough births in small houses, crowded hospitals, and jails, where the whole air was foul and unfit for breathing. She’d seen women, new-delivered, covered up close in bed, extra clothes piled on, curtains drawn and pinned together, every crevice stopped up, even the keyhole. She wanted Mary to feel September on her skin, to breathe free and grow strong after her ordeal. It was her child’s best hope.

When it was Mrs. B’s time again to rest, her mind wouldn’t stop turning circles. She smelled bread baking, heard little footfalls on the stairs, Fanny crying, begging to see her mother, then laughing outside just minutes later. She could see a slice of Mr. Godwin through the crack of the door, clutching his fragile newborn with ink-stained fingers, opening to a page from his journal, it looked like, reading to Mary, soft and low.

“‘I am overcome with love.…’”

Mrs. B closed her eyes and let his voice, and the faint morning breeze, wash over her.

“‘Never shall I forget in the moments after her birth, the effusion of soul, the kindness which animated us, increased as it was by peril and suffering, the sacred sensation, the way we read in each other’s eyes a shared and melting tenderness and inviolable attachment.…’”

Mrs. B could hear his voice catch in his throat, feel a lump in her own. This was why she meant to stay with them. She had delivered, over some forty years, the wives of traders, shopkeepers, innkeepers, sailors, clothworkers, artisans, but never this. Two people who seemed to think and write for a living. Who pressed their foreheads together, who said things, in all her years, she’d never heard anyone say. These married people made her own home seem wanting. Her whole life, wanting.