The babe will not feed. Dervorgilla cradles her hand behind its head, rubs her nipple into its mouth, but it will not latch onto her, it will not suck. It does not love her, she feels, it does not want to become a part of her. She teases the nipple around the inside of its lips, yet when she lets go of it, the breast, disappointed, slumps down. Frustrated, she pushes the nipple back into it once more, feels a dull resistance, and then a stinging impresses itself on her aureole. The babe is almost smothered by the cushioned force of her breath, and, still, it will not suckle. She turns to Long Tedbalt, stretched out across the bed.

‘She won’t drink,’ she says. ‘I cannot any more. What am I to do? I cannot.’

Lazy, and smelling like a charnel house, he does not respond, and she grows even more exasperated. She looks down at the child, at the soft fontanelle pulsing like a heart on its crown, and shivers. Ever since the child has been born, she has imagined her fingernails piercing through that soft spot. Unprotected by bone, her nails would slide so easily through the spongy skin, stirring out the brains. She kisses it on its cheek, and then, out of fear that her trembling will upset the strength in her arms, and the child will spill to the floor and break, she places it down in the gap between Tedbalt’s rangy legs.

This shivering in her limbs is something uncontrollable and recent that has been coming over her with increasing frequency, but it is something other than pain; it is almost ecstatic. I was only ever a little nervous, she thinks, but motherhood has intensified whatever unsure tendencies I had in me. I have become an uncaring thing, and I have been shaking for a long time. She pushes her dress down over her shoulders and exposes both her breasts to herself, begins kneading them, rolling them around as if she were testing dough, and then she pinches at her left tit so hard that she grits her teeth, but, still, no milk is produced. She tries the other.

‘I am a failure,’ she says.

A great sadness was produced in her when Jacotte was born. Dervorgilla had passed out at the first sight of her own child, and when she awoke it was as though she had given birth to both her own sadness and the babe, and if she were to compare them, she thinks, sadness would be the larger, and it would not stop feeding on her.

The midwife, who was called Segnat, was infamous for she had, as though she were a cat, delivered herself of four of her own children, and they were all, save Álmaith, still alive. She told Dervorgilla that she had bled too much, and that they had all thought she would die.