“I don’t imagine there’ll be much for you to do, Mrs.

She’d felt a dull ache and scattered pains, with no sensible pattern, but she wasn’t unwell, and remembered eating, only two hours before, a small breakfast, which she hoped was enough nourishment to sustain her for the labor to come. Blenkinsop’s questions with an uncanny calm: Her waters had started as a trickle but ended as a gush as she’d stood in the kitchen that morning. It was a fine house, with fresh white walls and open windows, tall as Heaven, inviting a cordial breeze that followed them down a hall, up two steep staircases, and into the airy bedroom where the missus led her, answering each of Mrs. In the garden out back, which was enjoying its first late-summer bloom, the midwife caught sight of a little girl, three years old, she guessed, playing with a young woman who seemed to be telling her the names of plants. Blenkinsop had seen far more disarray in her time, and liked the simple touches, cut flowers in every room and a single oval portrait, just a face (that looked very much like the missus herself) gazing out from over a mantel. Though they hadn’t met, the woman took the midwife’s hand and led her past half-furnished rooms, introducing them as she went, waving away stacks of books on a Turkish carpet, anticipating shelves, and the occasional wood box and leather trunk, as “the old life still finding its place in the new.” Mrs. The home and its mistress, in a muslin gown and indigo shawl, smelled of apple dumplings.

Blenkinsop arrived at a neat circle of three-story houses at the edge of North London, surprised to find her charge at the open door, holding her ripe belly with both hands and ushering her inside with an easy smile and no apparent terror of the event to come.

Love and fury by samantha silva