My pains start at midnight. “It’s too early,” one of my women breathes in fear. “It’s at least a month too early.” I see a swift glance between those habitual conspirators, my mother and My Lady the King’s Mother. “It is a month too early,” My Lady confirms loudly for anyone who is counting. “We will have to pray.”

“My Lady, would you go to your own chapel and pray for our daughter?” my mother asks quickly and cleverly. “An early baby needs intercession with the saints. If you would be so good as to pray for her in her time of travail?”

My Lady hesitates, torn between God and curiosity. “I had thought to help her here. I thought I should witness . . .”

My mother shrugs at the room, the midwives, my sisters, the ladies-in-waiting. “Earthly tasks,” she says simply. “But who can pray like you?”

“I’ll get the priest, and the choir,” My Lady says. “Send me news throughout the night. I’ll get them to wake the archbishop. Our Lady will hear my prayers.”

They open the door for her and she goes out, excited by her mission. My mother does not even smile as she turns back to me and says, “Now, let’s get you walking.”

While My Lady labors on her knees, I labor all the night, until at dawn I turn my sweating face to my mother and say, “I feel strange, Lady Mother. I feel strange, like nothing I have felt before. I feel as if something terrible is about to happen. I’m afraid, Mama.”

She has laid aside her headdress, her hair is in a plait down her back, she has walked all the night beside me and now her tired face beams. “Lean on the women,” is all she says.

I had thought it would be a struggle, having heard all the terrible stories that women tell each other about screaming pain and babies that have to be turned, or babies that cannot be born and sometimes, fatally, have to be cut out; but my mother orders two of the midwives to stand on either side of me to bear me up, and she takes my face in her cool hands and looks into my eyes with her gray gaze and says quietly, “I am going to count for you. Be very still, beloved, and listen to my voice. I am going to count from one to ten and as I count you will find your limbs get heavier and your breathing gets deeper and all you can hear is my voice. You will feel as if you are floating, as if you are Melusina on the water, and you are floating down a river of sweet water and you will feel no pain, only a deep restfulness like sleep.”

I am watching her eyes and then I can see nothing but her steady expression and hear nothing but her quiet counting. The pains come and go in my belly, but it feels like a long way away and I float, as she promised that I would, as if on a current of sweet water.