of the picture into a place of enchantment.
We did not talk very much about the Court, nor about the precarious nature of our two lives. We talked about Norfolk and our mutual fondness for its wide skies and its wet wind and the order and peace of its great parks. We talked about the Indian Nightingale: how, each in our own fashion, we remembered it as a significant thing. And we talked about Katharine and the peculiar ways in which, without meaning to, we sometimes bind ourselves to another person for all eternity.
With Finn in the house, I found that, when I could not sleep at night, I had only to imagine him downstairs on his cot for my loneliness to recede a little and I began to hope that, even after the child was born, he would still be there, lying a few feet from the ink-wells.
As the astrologer had predicted, the breaking of the waters of Katharine's womb occurred in the early morning of the twenty-fifth of February.
I dressed myself quickly and lit rushlights and positioned them round the bed. Frances Elizabeth put coal on the fires and went out to fetch the midwife, who lived in St Swithins Lane. Finn woke up and wandered about the house in his night-clothes, staring.
The midwife was a shy person, small, even dainty. She looked like a flower-seller. I said to Frances Elizabeth, 'Perhaps you have fetched the wrong woman?' But I was shooed away. Women are the sole overseers of birth, as if the process of it must be kept forever secret from men.
Before I left the room, I asked Katharine whether she was afraid. She replied that the pain of the body had no terrors for her, only the pain of the mind. 'Your leaving of me I fear,' she said. 'Nothing else.'
I breakfasted with Finn upon some chocolate cake and then walked with him to the playhouse where, he admitted to me, he was at work upon some Venetian columns made of thin wood. 'Well,' I could not resist saying, 'your day will be pleasant and easy, Finn, for you have had much practice with columns.' I waited for his smile, but it did not come. Indeed, he seemed crestfallen.
I idled my way home, stopping to buy some opium grains from my apothecary, in case Katharine should need to be stilled to sleep after the baby was born and then calling in, as had become my morning habit, at The Faithful Dray for a glass or two of wine. By the time I returned to Cheapside it was past mid-day and as I walked in I expected to be informed that my son, Anthony, had come crying into the world.
But he had not come. The house was noisy with women, neighbours of Frances Elizabeth who had come to help and gossip and wait. They built up the fires to an even greater intensity, dousing the coals with acrid-smelling potions. One of them made a batch of twenty-eight jam tarts. Another, who was a laundress like Rosie, washed all the crib blankets and dried them on a clothes-horse in the parlour. Another sang Scottish songs, one for each of her seven children and one for the eighth child who had died.
From time to time I was given news of Katharine. The labour was slow. Her body, for all that it was large, was weak. It could not seem to help the child to be born. And slowly the afternoon came on and then the dusk and still Katharine laboured, submitting every ten minutes or thereabouts to pain so severe that I could hear her cries even in the parlour where I sat and waited, passing the time by playing arpeggios upon my oboe.
Finn returned and we and the women had a poor supper of the jam tarts eaten with a boiled custard. After this, I felt very sleepy, having been woken so early in the morning, and would have gone to bed except that I had no bed to go to. So I played a little Rummy with Finn, dozing over the cards, so that he won five games one after the other. He went off to his cot in the ink-room and I lay down on a settle and one of the women covered me with a woollen cloak and I slept that fiendish kind of half sleep that is filled with dreams and daydreams flowing in and out of each other.
It was morning, however, when I did wake at last. I pulled my limbs into a sitting position and listened. After a moment I heard Katharine's cry come, but it was a weak, piteous cry, as if she really did not have the strength to make any sound at all.
I crept up the stairs and knocked on the door of the bedroom. It was opened by the midwife and she let me come in. I went to the bed, beside which Frances Elizabeth was sitting, holding Katharine's hand in hers. At that moment, the pain came again to Katharine's body and I saw her arch her back and open her mouth to scream, but, as I had guessed, her exhaustion was so great that no scream came. I looked at her face, and then touched it gently. It was waxy and cold and her lips were white and cracked. 'Katharine…' I whispered, but she could not speak or even smile.
'What is to be done?' I said to the midwife.
'The baby is large, Sir, and she cannot push it out of her.'
'What is to be done, then?'
'We can do nothing. Only wait and pray.'
'And then?'
'If she begins to slip away…'
'What?'
'I have seen the mother begin to slip away, and then there is only one way to save her.'
'To cut into the womb?'
'Yes. To send for a surgeon.'
I nodded. I looked at Frances Elizabeth, but she did not look at me. She knew perhaps as well as I that to save Katharine the surgeon would sacrifice the child, even cut it out from her body, limb by limb.
I left the room and went downstairs to the parlour. The fire was low, so I put a little coal on it. I knelt before it and did not move.
At half past ten, I heard two of the women go out and I knew that they were going to try to find a surgeon.
Then I got up and went into the kitchen and heated water and washed my hands. I knew precisely what I would have to do.
An hour later, the women returned. They did not bring a surgeon because at this time of plague no surgeon could be found.
Finn, who had no columns to paint that day, came and looked at me. His face was green.
'Merivel,' he said (for this is how he addresses me now). 'What are you going to do?'
'Finn,' I said, 'I am going to prevent a death.'
He swallowed. Then he took up the woollen cloak under which I had slept and wrapped it round himself, and stood huddled inside it, as if it were old Bathurst's cowshed – a place of retreat.
Then I began to give my orders. I told the midwife to wash Katharine's abdomen and to put clean linen under her. I sent two of the women to fetch pledgets and bandages; to another I gave the opium grains and told her to pound them and mix them with water.
Meanwhile, I fetched my scalpel and my suturing needle and cleaned them. In my heart, I felt not fear, as I should have done, but a welling of excitement that seemed no less intense than that which I had felt in the coal hole of my parents' house when I dissected the body of a starling.
I went up to the room. Katharine's eyes were glazed and staring, her breathing shallow like the breathing of the little dogs I had once tended.
There were six women in the room. When a little of the opium mixture had been dribbled into Katharine's mouth, I positioned them like sentinels – two to hold down her upper body, two to hold her legs and two (including the midwife, for whose small careful fingers I was about to be grateful) to help me.
The day was bright. Light shone into the room and glimmered on my hands on the scalpel blade.
I said a prayer, not to God, but to my mother and to Pearce.
Then I cut.
I cut into the skin. Beads of blood appeared, like the strand of a necklace laid on the belly from the navel to the pubic hair.
I cut into the tissue and the bright blood flowed over the belly. Hands holding the pledgets reached out and the lint began to soak it up.
I cut into the peritoneum and so into the abdomen. In a calm voice, I instructed the midwife and my other helper to put their hands into the two sides of the wound and hold it open. This they did and I laid down the
