She squared her shoulders as she trudged on. Ruby had said that Adam would never forgive her for tricking him and her words had felt like a curse ever since. They were always there at the back of her mind and she knew they were true, but she hadn’t realized how living with hate, day in and day out, affected every single little thing. But it was no good belly-aching about it. None at all.

Much later that night, when Alice was asleep and she and Adam were in bed, his snores punctuating the silence, she felt the old familiar pain in her belly and knew what was happening. She hadn’t mentioned it to a soul but she had missed two periods again and had known she was pregnant. She had told herself, stupidly she admitted now, that if she kept it to herself she might, she just might carry this baby to full term. But it wasn’t to be.

Sliding out of bed carefully so as not to awaken Adam, she pulled on her dressing gown and pushed her feet into her slippers. This was the third miscarriage now, and she knew she had to get downstairs to the privy to deal with what would follow.

The night was warm as she stepped outside into the yard, the moon riding high in a velvet-black sky surrounded by a myriad twinkling stars, and she felt small and alone and utterly bereft as she entered the privy, sliding the bolt behind her. The pain was stronger now, grinding away at her and making her gasp and moan when it reached peaks, peaks she knew were expelling another tiny little baby from what should have been the protection of her body. Tears were pouring down her face, not because of the agony she was enduring or the immense and harrowing loneliness she felt sitting in the dark in the silent night, but because of the grief she was feeling for the little boy or girl who would never see the light of day, never feel the sun on its face on a summer’s morning or snuggle into her arms when she carried it to bed at eventide.

A tinge of pink was stealing into the sky when she opened the door of the privy some time later, spent in body and mind and as pale as a ghost. Adam would be up soon and she must get his breakfast on the table for when he came downstairs. She wouldn’t say what had happened. There was no point. He wasn’t interested in her or having another child, and there would be no sympathy for her, she knew that, just denunciation at her failure to achieve what other women hereabouts seemed to do so easily.