When Margaret’s wailing subsides at last into hiccups, Elfriede calls for the downstairs maid, who appears almost at once. Pale, stricken face. Even the household staff adores Wilfred.

“Annie, I need your help with Mr. Thorpe’s kit,” she says, matter-of-fact.

“Shall I—” The maid gulps fearfully. “Shall I unpack it for you, ma’am?”

“Unpack it? No. You must bury it. Bury it in the garden, I don’t care where. Just bury it.” She strokes her daughter’s hair and bends awkwardly to kiss the small, trembling ear. “It upsets the children.”

“B—bury it?”

“Yes. Straight away. What are you waiting for? Bury it!”

And Annie scrambles to obey.

Soon afterward, the sporadic tightening of the muscles around her womb strengthens into regular, progressively deep contractions. She takes Margaret to her grandmother, who’s been living in the guest bedroom at Dunnock Lodge since July, managing the household in a spirit of tremendous Scotch efficiency, and rings up the doctor herself. “It seems to be advancing quickly,” she tells him calmly, and he promises to be on his way at once.

On her way back upstairs, she pauses outside the music room while a contraction grips her. They’re boiling the water in the kitchen, preparing the linens. There’s a baby on the way, after all, poor Major Thorpe’s wee babe, we must all do our bit for the major’s sake. Elfriede rides out the pain the way you ride a wave in the Atlantic surf, don’t fight it, let the wave do the work, let the wave carry you into shore. She holds herself upright on the doorframe and stares at the piano, remembering how Margaret played for them both on that last evening, before Wilfred returned to the front, and Wilfred himself took his daughter upstairs to tuck her into bed a final time while Elfriede, wanting them to have this moment of private farewell, stayed downstairs and played Chopin. Wilfred, returning, came to a stop in the doorway, exactly where Elfriede stands now in the iron-hot fist of a contraction. What’s the matter? she asked then, looking up to find his strange expression. You played that in Switzerland, he told her. That one always reminds me of Switzerland. She finished the piece and Wilfred came to sit by her on the piano bench, saying nothing at all, just sitting and staring at Elfriede’s hands on the keyboard.

When the contraction subsides, Elfriede lets go of the doorframe and continues to the stairs, up to the bedroom, where her maid, Mary, summoned from the mending, waits anxiously to change her into a white nightgown.

“You’ll be just fine, ma’am,” Mary says, for the third time. “Only think, a beautiful new baby to remember him by, a precious wee gift from the Lord. You’ll be safe in His hands, ma’am.”