She pulled her shawl closer and peered over his shoulder at the waiting carriage.

“You’re to come at once,” he said. “Get your things.”

“Come where? The Lying-In? Who sent you?”

“The Godwin house. Been a terrible turn in the patient.”

“The child?”

“Don’t think so. He said, ‘Tell her it’s the missus,’ for he knew you’d come at once.”

Mrs. B heard a great sucking in of breath, and realized it was she who’d gasped. It was the same sound that’d startled her a fortnight ago, when she woke in her feather bed to find her husband cold beside her.

She dressed, squeezed her swollen feet into her brogans, and replenished her bag as quickly as she could. How could it be? she kept muttering to herself. She’d left Mary standing and smiling on the very threshold where they’d met, radiating good health. She’d dressed simply for an expected round of visitors, read a book to her sweet Fanny, planned a dinner menu, and nursed her new girl for the third time since they’d risen. Mrs. B would not have left had there been any doubt, reluctant as she was to go.

On the galloping ride to the Godwin house, in the back of the carriage, Mrs. B felt the rattling deep in her bones. She’d arrived to her cottage the previous evening, wet and toilworn, to a thin layer of dust on the sills, stone floor like a mausoleum, crisp browned wildflowers in a small pewter jug. Exhaustion did odd things to the mind, she knew, but she felt herself standing in a strange house, or she the stranger. She relived those first minutes as if dreaming them, an uncanny awareness of her every movement, doing each thing again: Set down her bag, lower the hood of her cape, wipe her fogged spectacles on her skirt. How she reached for the old elm tinderbox, lifted its lid, strangely soothed to find it intact and still neatly divided, steel and flint in the one part, tinder and damper in the other. Instead of charred rags her husband collected dried moss, leaves, and fungus, anything from “God’s great floor,” he’d say, “to bring a bit of Heaven inside.” She let the hook-shaped fire steel hang over her fingers, marveling at how it conformed to the human hand, and in the other, held the sharp-edged piece of chalcedony her husband had chosen just for this. With a few quick strikes on the steel, she coaxed a spark, caught it on a piece of dried moss, then a splint of wood, blowing on it to help the spark become a flame, then flame to candle, candle to hearth.