The midwife is plucking at her sleeve, but Mary seems to have given up trying to entice her to the stool. Agnes will not be led; she feels that Mary knows this by now. Mary sits down on the hateful stool and holds out a muslin cloth, ready to catch the baby.
The theatre, he had written, was in a place called Shoreditch; Eliza had had to sound out the word, letter by letter, to get the sense of it. ‘Shore’， she had said, and then ‘ditch’。 Shoreditch? Agnes had repeated. She pictured the bank of a river, silted, reed-frilled, a place where yellow flags might grow, and birds would nest, and then a ditch, a treacherously slippery sloped hole, with muddy water in the bottom. ‘Shore’ and then ‘ditch’。 The first part of the word a nice-sounding sort of place, the latter part horrible. How can there be a ditch at a shore? She had started to ask Eliza, but Eliza was reading on, describing a play he had watched there, while waiting for the man with the glove contract, about an envious duke and his faithless sons.
The midwife is huffing, getting down on the floor, fussing with her skirts and apron, saying she will need extra pay, that her knees aren’t up to this. She near-flattens herself to the rug and peers upwards.
‘It’ll soon be over,’ is her verdict. ‘Bear down,’ she says, a touch brusquely.
Mary puts a hand to Agnes’s shoulder, the other to her arm. ‘There now,’ she mutters. ‘Soon be over.’
Agnes hears their words from a great distance. Her thoughts are brief now, snipped short, pared back to the bone. Husband, she thinks. Gloves. Players. Beads. Theatre. Envious duke. Death. Think kindly. She is able to form the realisation, not in words, perhaps, but in a sensation, that he sounded not different in that letter but returned. Back to himself. Restored. Better. Returned.
She watches, with a kind of detached fascination, as something domed appears between her legs. She curls her head under, into herself, to see it. The crown of a head easing from her, turning, twisting, slick, like a water creature, a shoulder, a long back, beaded with spine. The midwife and Mary catch it between them, Mary saying, a boy, a boy, and Agnes sees her husband’s chin, his mouth in a pout; she sees her father’s fair hair, once again, growing in a peak on this brow; she sees the long, delicate fingers of her mother; she sees her son.
Agnes and the boy are on the bed, the child feeding, his tiny fist curled possessively at his mother’s breast. She would feed him before anything, before washing herself, she said. She has insisted that the cord and caul be wrapped and bound in cloth; she raised her head to watch, as Mary and the midwife carried out this task. She will, she tells them, bury it under a tree when the child has passed his first month. The midwife is collecting her tools, packing her sack, folding a sheet, emptying a bowl from the window. Mary is sitting on the bed, saying to Agnes that she must let her swaddle the baby, it is the right thing to do, that all her babies were swaddled and look how they turned out, great strong lads, all of them, and Eliza too, and Agnes is shaking her head. No swaddle, thank you, she is saying, and the midwife is smiling to herself in the corner, because she attended Mary in her last three births and found her a great deal more pleased with herself than she ought to be.
The midwife, swirling a cloth around a bowl, has to bow her head because this daughter-in-law, a strange girl by all accounts, is a match for Mary. She can see that. She would be prepared to bet all her pennies （hidden in an earthen jar behind the daub of her cottage, which no living person knows） that this baby will wear no swaddling clothes.
Something makes her turn, wet cloth in hand. When she is telling the story, to a dozen or so townspeople later, she will say that she doesn’t know why she turned: she just did. Midwife’s intuition, she will say later, tapping her finger to her nose.
Agnes is upright in bed, one hand pressed to her middle; with the other, she still holds the baby to her breast.
‘What is it?’ Mary says, rising from the bed.
Agnes shakes her head, then doubles up again, with a low moan.
‘Give me the boy,’ Mary says, holding out her arms. Her face is alarmed, but tender. She wants that child, the midwife sees, despite everything, despite her own eight children, despite her age. She wants that baby, wants to feel it up against her, to hold its parcelled, dense warmth.
‘No,’ Agnes says, through clenched teeth, her body curled into itself. Her expression is bewildered, stretched, frightened. ‘What is happening?’ she whispers, in the hoarse, fearful voice of a child.
The midwife steps forward. She puts a hand to the girl’s belly and presses down. She feels the skin tightening, pulling into itself. She lifts the skirts and peers upwards. There it is: the wet curve of a second head. It is unmistakable.