Raven looked in his bag for the chloroform bottle and couldn’t find it. The prospect of attempting a delivery like this without it was not in any way appealing. He recalled giving a bottle to Archie and panicked briefly, but his fingers grasped what they sought just as he remembered where he had got that one. He thought then of Quinton, that supercilious cadaver of a man, but perhaps he was wrong about him too.

There was something to be said for bringing order to Dr Simpson’s chaos. Perhaps simple book-keeping might yet cast an unexpected light upon his practice. He wondered what knowledge might be found were he to look back at a definitive tally of how much of each medicine they went through over the course of a week, a month or a year; what patterns and tendencies might reveal themselves.

Raven administered the chloroform to the woman with practised ease and made a preliminary examination. He had become so accustomed to this work that he felt a sudden alarm when he couldn’t fathom what he was feeling. It was something boggy and swollen, and after poking about for a bit he realised that the presenting part was not the head but the breech. It was not usually so difficult to make a distinction between the two, but the mother’s pelvis was too narrow to allow the breech to descend into it and as a result it had become impacted and grossly swollen.

He glanced up at the exhausted and sweat-soaked young woman, rendered oblivious for now by the chloroform. For all she had gone through, he felt it unlikely that she would be presented with a living child when she came around.

With a considerable amount of manoeuvring, he managed to pull down the legs and then the arms but significant force was required to deliver the after-coming head. Under other circumstances Raven would have been concerned about the resultant compression of the skull, but he was in no doubt that the death of the infant had preceded all of his efforts.

As anticipated, the infant was well beyond any attempt at resuscitation when finally delivered, but with a bit of luck (and the fact that he had washed his hands) the mother may yet survive her ordeal. He would have to be content with that.

As he lay the infant upon the bed, the neighbour knelt down beside it, said a short prayer then got to her feet and made for the fireplace.

‘Flora put some coins aside in case she needed the doctor,’ she said.

Raven told her to leave the money where it was.

‘She’ll want to hold the bairn,’ the neighbour said.

‘Of course.’

There was still some warmth in the infant’s tiny body. He wrapped it in a blanket and held it to his chest, hoping it would not be entirely cold by the time the mother woke.