I am such a fool. That great heave was not birth but was quickening—but who knew that it felt so terrible? There’s nothing in the Bible to warn you that it feels as if you are about to die. But now it has happened to me, I know what it is. I am definitely with child, there is no denying it even to myself. Often now, I have this strange sensation of stomach-churning terror. The baby moves without my will, so sometimes I am lying in bed and my swollen belly gives a little jump and squirm and I can actually see the belly move as if I had a kitten hidden under my nightgown. But it is not a kitten—I would know what to do with a kitten, there would be no objection at all to a kitten—it is a baby and one that I am not allowed to conceive or grow or birth. But whether I am allowed or not, whether I want it or not, this child is coming, like a terrible unstoppable force, like a cloud of rain that rolls across open countryside, dark and forbidding and quite uncontrollable.

“Are you all right?” Mary asks me, with the frankness of a younger sister. “For you look as bloated as the queen when she is ill, and you are so bad-tempered these days.”

I long to tell her that I am in love with Ned but that I have heard no word from him. That he was supposed to go away for weeks but he has been gone for months. I long to tell her that we married, but he has deserted me and now I am with child and I can’t even complain of his treatment of me, since the marriage was a secret, and the baby an even more terrible secret, and I cannot bear to keep it secret any longer. And, in any case, sometime it must be born and then my secret is over and I am shamed as low as a strumpet whipped at the cart tail.

“I feel ill,” I say miserably. “I feel so very ill. Oh, Mary, I wish I could tell you how very ill I am.”

She hauls herself up to sit on the window seat beside me, her little feet sticking out. “You’ve not got a fever?”

“No, no, not an illness,” I contradict myself. “I just feel ill.”

“You are missing Ned?”

“Not at all.”