Mrs. B tells me to hold you to my breast, but with your eyelids too swollen to open, your lips unaccustomed to the ways of sucking, your little beak searches but cannot find me. I see the worry in her eyes; she needn’t say so. You’re too small, your lungs work too hard, each breath a jagged try. But I would tell her I will not let you die, my own life force now inextricably tied to yours, a thousand times knotted together. And though we cannot choose which day we are born, into what time or place, a day chooses us. Never forget, little bird, that the day that chose you comes at the end of a month when a comet blazed across London’s skies, heralding your arrival.

Another girl, in this world!

And so I will tell you the story to fill you up and bind you to this wondrous vale, if you stay with us, little bird. Please stay. I will tell you the moments that begin and end me—because we are made of them all, strung like pearls in time, searching always for where the new circle begins its turn, the place of our next becoming. Where the line becomes an arc, and curves.

Mrs. B

August 31, 1797

“Mary W safe delivered at 11 hours 20 minutes last Evenin of a daughter after a long travail. Placenta not yet delivered,” Mrs. Blenkinsop wrote in her pocket diary when the patient finally slept for a few moments. Mr. Godwin refused to set down the child, but sat in a chair pulled up close to the bed with their “little bird” tight in his arms. Mrs. B thought she ought to rethink him, after her first impression last night when he’d knocked on the door to inquire whether they ought not call a doctor, given the unexpected length of the labor. He’d been told by friends at dinner, and could confirm, having once read in a book, that it is the fashion to call a doctor or at least a male accoucheur to assist, to have the benefit of those with real medical training.

“Not at all necessary, sir. I prefer to trust in Nature,” said Mrs. B. “Great and marvelous is the goodness of Providence.”

“I am an atheist, Mrs. Blenkinsop. That is of no use to me.”

Mrs. B had never met an atheist, but she had encountered nervous men. In her experience, the bigger the brain, the greater the worry. She judged, by the way Mr. Godwin wrung his hands as he spoke, that this was his first birth. He seemed an awkward man, like a stiff chair that hadn’t been sat on enough—the opposite of her own husband, whose life force had always pulsed in his large, rugged hands. Mr. Blenkinsop, whom she’d tried to put out of her mind these last days.