Mrs. B didn’t know herself this morning. She was always quick to pack up after a birth, as soon as any danger passed and things were set to rights, eager to put the kettle on at her own house, simple as it was, take off her shoes and rub her tired feet, then begin a soup for her husband, a rough bread. She liked the feel of dough through her fingers, the push and pull of the knead, the shaping of the loaf. Her husband always kept the embers live in the great ash bed of the kitchen hearth, providing ready light for a candle, a quick boil of water, and warmth most of all, for her creaky bones. She relied on him for it.

Not wanting to disturb the serenity of mother and child, Mrs. B felt her skirts for the diary tucked in a pocket. She hadn’t managed to write in it for two days, and that part of her itched to record the time spent. She sat quietly at Mary’s writing desk, fashioned from walnut, the midwife knew (her husband was a cabinetmaker), with one simple drawer, nothing showy about it—a plain top, no leather, no marquetry, no veneer—but French, she judged by the fancy turn of the legs. A botanical drawing in a simple gold frame hung right above it, love-in-idleness, and a pinchbeck quizzing glass, cracked in two places, hung on a faded velvet ribbon over the frame’s edge. Mrs. B pushed a pile of loose letters toward the porcelain inkstand, and opened her little diary. She always started one fresh at the New Year, keeping records of births, deaths, remittances, expenses such that she might add them up at the end of each month to have an accounting of the year, and then ten years, and now forty, come and gone. She tried to say something of each birth to remember it by: the weather, inside or out, the health of the mother, the child, which tinctures and remedies were useful, what difficulties arose, which had been overcome, and which had done the overcoming. But what was it all for?

“Cloudy and cool. The missus is comfortable. Little Mary is cleverly, and, no doubt, as fine a babe as I’ve ever seen.” She hesitated. “I am not so well as I could wish,” she wrote, and then scribbled it out. Mrs. B set her pencil down and rubbed her face. When she took her hands away, her eyes darted to the pages she’d pushed away, stacked willy-nilly, the deep black ink of the letters peeking out, written not in one hand, but two. Where her own writing was small and considerate of space, not calling attention in any way, these words wanted reading. She always prided herself on keeping the privacy of her patients, not listening to gossips, or at least not spreading their spew. But this had a pull of a different sort.