My Name Is Mary Sutter Part 2

"A tear," Mary said, thinking of her hands deep inside Bonnie earlier that day.

But Dr. Blevens was already raising Bonnie's reddened nightgown while s.h.i.+elding her nakedness with a blanket. "Lie back; don't be afraid." Swiftly, he palpated the pillow of her abdomen, and after a few minutes began a circular ma.s.sage. Behind him, Mary Sutter stood reluctantly impressed. He had been hunting for the uterus, to see if it had relaxed, which obviously it had, because as soon as the ma.s.sage began, the flood had stopped. The ma.s.sage contracted the uterus, shutting off the open blood vessels where the placenta had been attached. This was the first step in any maternal hemorrhage.

The tide abated, Blevens took Bonnie's hand and pressed her fingers deep into her stomach.

"Do you feel that?" he asked, helping Bonnie find the hard ball of her uterus underneath her navel.

"What is that?" she cried.

"Your womb," Blevens said, smiling now. "Yours is a bit recalcitrant for some reason. You'll need to rub it every few minutes so that it will keep contracting and you won't bleed. Can you do that?" Over his shoulder, he called to Mary, "Have you any ergot?"

Reduced to the role of nurse in her own lying-in room, Mary dispensed the medicine and then called the maids to help her change the bedding. While everything was made right, Dr. Blevens scooped up the baby and retreated to the window, where he bounced the child in his arms. Then Mary led Blevens to the kitchen so he could wash his hands. His frock coat was edged in blood.

Mary said, "You know far more than you let on this afternoon, Dr. Blevens. Did you even need my help in the delivery?"

The maids scurried out, pretending not to pay attention. Later, this conversation would be told in the kitchens on Arbor Hill in the Sixth Ward: And then the doctor said. And then the Miss said. Outside, the pigs would be rooting in the garbage and the maids would be saying to their husbands, "And her so haughty."

Blevens said, "I don't practice enough to feel successful in deliveries, but I am not completely ignorant of the needs of women. Bonnie's hemorrhage was easily controlled, merely atony of the uterus. You would have done the same."

She could barely contain her humiliation. She would not have done the same, and the failure of her usual unerring intuition made her furious. She would have hunted for the tear, wasting precious time. "Why do you think I knocked at your door today, Dr. Blevens? Did you really think that I would prefer to apprentice when I could attend a college? Did you really think I wasn't at the end of my choices?" She was pinning and unpinning her hair, the curls disobedient, refusing to be locked in place.

Laughter echoed from the upstairs, where Amelia had gone to supervise, having already taken graceful leave of Blevens in the hallway. Jenny and Thomas were closeted away in the parlor, lovers with shortened time. Christian had gone out again after shaking Blevens's hand.

"I'll say good night," Blevens said, bowing.

The front door swung shut behind him, sounding like the end of something. Outside, the rain had not let up, and he remembered too late that his horse and carriage had been quartered in the carriage house in the alley behind. He should have exited from the kitchen, where the door led to the yard and alleyway. For a moment, he paused on the stoop, but then hunched his shoulders and walked down the windswept, rainy block, turned right, and turned again into the alley, where he located the Sutter carriage house and led his horse and carriage from the warm confines into the dreary night.

Chapter Two.

Amelia Harriman and Nathaniel Sutter had married for reasons of family; his land near Ireland's Corners ab.u.t.ted her parents'. Their union was to expand the Harriman orchards and to support Amelia's midwifery practice. It was not a loveless marriage, however; economic cooperation was the added bonus of a childhood affection. As Amelia saw it, Nathaniel Sutter was the man least likely to complain about her profession. Her mother had been a midwife, and her mother before her, in a line that extended back to medieval France. Her great-great-great-great-grandmother had once delivered a dauphin, afterwards using ergot she had culled from the rye in her garden to stem a hemorrhage in the queen, earning the La Croix family a parcel of deeded land near Versailles, which they fled during the revolution.

In America, the tradition continued. Amelia's mother married James Harriman, but everyone knew who she was-the French midwife. There was simply no question of Amelia not being a midwife, and yet while American men might want good midwives for their wives, they did not wish to marry one. Nathaniel Sutter was different. And so the knowledge that had once saved a dauphin was preserved for the women of Albany County. In addition, the proximity to Amelia's parents ensured that when Amelia was called away on a delivery-staying at the home of a woman in confinement days beforehand in antic.i.p.ation of the onset of labor-her mother, who had retired after decades of sleepless nights, would be nearby to care for any children that arose from the marriage.

Nathaniel soon discovered that he had little desire to tend flowering cherry trees, as his deceased mother and father had. A year after his marriage to Amelia, he sold the bulk of their land and bullied his way into a job with the New York Railroad, where his engaging, gregarious, and tireless personality disguised a rapacious capacity for stealing freight contracts away from the Erie Ca.n.a.l. As soon as the ca.n.a.l was finished in 1825, it proved to be slow and feeble in comparison to the speed of the railroad. Nathaniel believed that despite the inherent dangers of rail travel-the crashes, the bridge collapses, the derailments-no one would want to put their goods on an open barge in Buffalo to be dragged by a team of mules when you could place the freight on a railcar and have it arrive in Manhattan in two days. Two days when the ca.n.a.l took at least two weeks! The railroad was in constant battle with the legislature; the state's debt from the ca.n.a.l was still a financial burden, the railroad an upstart that threatened the state with bankruptcy if the ca.n.a.l could not retain enough contracts to pay off the cost of building it. Nathaniel thrilled to the battle, Amelia less so. The job rendered him frequently absent.

Two years after the marriage, Amelia's parents died, and Amelia and Nathaniel moved back into her childhood home, a three-room clapboard on the rise that ran toward the Shaker settlement. When children finally did come, five years after their marriage, their lives became a negotiation. Amelia could no longer stay in a woman's home for days before the woman gave birth. Husbands had to come and find her when labor started, always risking that Amelia wouldn't be able to respond if Nathaniel was away.

One dawn in June of 1842, Amelia sent word from a neighboring farm that she was just about to return home. An hour, two at the most, the boy reported to Nathaniel. But Nathaniel had to catch a train at eight a.m. He was due in Buffalo that evening. He stood at the bedroom threshold and made a calculation. Amelia was just a half mile away. Their two-year-old twins were asleep in their cribs-Mary restless, but still sleepy, Jenny quiet, her thumb in her mouth. The boy had said Amelia was coming in an hour. Two at the most. He could wake the twins and load them into the wagon and hurry them cranky and unfed to Amelia, or he could let them sleep alone in the house for an hour. The light was soft; a breeze billowed through the gauzy summer curtains. An hour. That was all.

When Amelia returned home that evening after failing to save her neighbor from a sudden hemorrhage, her girls were standing in their crib, their faces wet with tears and mucus, their nightgowns stained with urine.

The argument when Nathaniel returned home went like this: I had to go to Buffalo. The railroad needed that lumber contract.

But you should have brought the children to me at the Stephensons'.

You sent word that you were coming home.

Dolly bled suddenly, I couldn't leave.

I didn't know. If I had known, I would have brought them to you.

But how could you abandon them?

Amelia's distrust, once roused, could never fully be put to rest. From then onward, she took the children with her, even in the middle of the night. She ordered them to dress, don shoes, bring their blankets. While Mary sleepily complied and Jenny and Christian cried, Nathaniel argued, even as the husband of the laboring woman stood leery at the door. But Amelia would not relent. The children went-on with the bonnets, on with the boots-the twins propelled by a watery memory of an echoing stretch of time inhabited by terror and hunger and finally, their mother's tear-stained face, bent over the crib in which they had been confined. That vestigial memory of abandonment made them follow Amelia out the door to fall asleep in the wagon as she barreled down washboard roads after worried husbands.

They became vagabond children. When they were younger, they played with the children of the laboring mother; when they were older, they hauled and boiled water, and listened to birthing cries in houses high and low, becoming accustomed to joy being predicated on misery. This accounted for their a.s.sured nature; prescient, possessed, they would later feel at home anywhere and in the face of anything.

The first time Mary asked to help was in a brooding house along the Shaker Road, not far from home. The house was two stone stories, with looming windows and a narrow stairwell. Well along, the woman shrieked upstairs. The walls were drab, the bed a ticking upon the floor. Two toddlers sucked thumbs beside their mother.

"Are you certain?" Amelia asked, when Mary pulled the bonnet from her head and said, "I would be grateful, Mother, if you would let me stay."

Her mother's eyes pierced, giving her the look that Mary would later learn to ignore: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. But then she said, "So, it's you," having wondered which of her daughters would become a midwife.

Jenny, never eager, was happily relegated to the dull tasks of water and childcare, while Mary seized opportunity.

Mary was not given a corner from which to watch. No clinging to territory, no adult separation of I know better than you. Amelia said, Hand me this, hand me that. You might not want to see this; turn your head. At times it seemed to Mary that the world over was rent with the cries of women giving birth. But when at last the baby emerged, slippery, fighting, squalling, the woman's thighs trembling and then collapsing, and Mary was given charge to kneel beside the mother and wipe-gently-the writhing baby dry on her stomach, the battle of labor proved a war worth fighting. What did Mary remember most? Not the mother's bulging flesh, the bullet-shaped head of the infant, the gasp of love when at last the mother encircled the infant in her arms, but Amelia's stillness. Her grand remove. Competence incarnate.

And so the tradition continued. With Mary, not with Jenny. It could have hardly been otherwise, for Mary had set her heart. Within two years, it was she who said, Hand me this, hand me that. Fifteen, and already precociously able. She was spoken of: It is something about her hands; it is something about her voice. And around the city, at suppers and church socials and dances and even upon the streets, when an alert matron spotted a newly expectant mother, Mary Sutter's name was whispered.

When the success of the New York Railroad made Nathaniel his fortune, they sold their land and moved into Albany and the Dove Street home, eschewing old-money Eagle Street for the outskirts of the city. There followed the consequent ease of wealth and servants, and with it no longer any need for Amelia to take the children along with her. But Mary continued to go to deliveries with her mother, while Jenny and Christian stayed behind. It was said that Amelia Sutter had ruined Mary for society, and that she had nearly ruined Jenny. That Amelia's running about risked her marriage, that only her charm and beauty saved her. For Amelia Sutter was indeed charming. She was at ease in conversation, knew how to deploy a hand to a forearm at just the right moment. And in the childbirth room, her presence was a gift. But the combination of social status and occupation puzzled. Midwives were supposed to be matrons beyond childbearing age, with years of life in which to have been disappointed enough to wish to spend all one's time delivering babies. Not that the women of Albany County were not grateful; instead they were envious, which took its form in criticism. The problem, they said, was that she neglected her family. Never mind that they never left her side. Never mind that Mary took first place at the Girl's Academy. Mary Sutter, talented as she was, couldn't string two words together unless they were combative ones, and Jenny Sutter, why, that girl was destined for trouble.

When the girls turned eighteen, there was a trip to Wellon's Bookstore on State Street for Mary to purchase Gray's Anatomy, newly published, resplendent with ill.u.s.trations, and Notes on Nursing by the celebrity Florence Nightingale. For Jenny, there was a party and dancing. Amelia enjoyed both equally, though perhaps, if pressed, would confess to having liked Jenny's more, for the frivolity of dancing past midnight. And though in her daughters, their mother had cleaved-Jenny had adopted Amelia's charm, Mary her persistence-no one could say that Amelia Sutter was not proud of each of them.

Mary turned twenty years old the day her father died in September of 1860. Her first delivery had been nothing compared to the utter helplessness of watching death stalk her father. Even the memory of the woman's dreadful house, the hard work, the boiling of water, the jack towel tied at the head of the bed for the mother to pull on, the screams, the fatigue, paled in her mind as her father suffered. In the face of her own ignorance, she peppered the doctors with questions. Why are you bleeding him more? What is the matter with him? But they could not answer her. She studied the Gray's at his bedside, employed every tenet of Miss Nightingale's, seeking to alleviate his pain, but he died in an agony that not even copious doses of whiskey and laudanum could dull. The day after her father's funeral, Mary wrote her first letter to Dr. Marsh. It was the day that the Fall family moved into the new home next door, and a then young and diffident Thomas Fall, not yet having suffered his own great grief, tipped his hat to Mary as she went out to post the letter. The new neighbors did not go to Nathaniel Sutter's funeral, not wanting to press the burden of hospitality on their newly bereaved neighbors.

It was Mary and Thomas who met first, at a show at Tweddle Hall, two weeks after Nathaniel died. Amelia had insisted that Mary get out of the house. Go somewhere, do something, you'll shrivel up if you stay inside a moment longer. Gas leaked from the chandelier; the smell was very strong, and everyone had covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. Thomas arrived late, and chose a seat next to Mary, whom he did not at first recognize because of the makes.h.i.+ft veil. But it was impossible to mistake her for anyone else; he had watched her comings and goings from the window of his house and had admired the dignified way she carried herself, the resolute set of her shoulders, the graceful neck that stood out from her otherwise plain appearance. The simple act of walking down the street seemed to communicate that she knew who she was. That he did not completely know yet who he was or what he wanted was a discomfort he kept at bay with industrious endeavors toward happiness that daily seemed, in light of Mary's apparent self-possession, an insignificant enterprise. He was pleased to find her here, though a little surprised to see her at entertainment so soon after her bereavement, though Thomas decided he admired even this break with convention. He noticed, too, that Mary did not wear the traditional black, but a s.h.i.+mmering deep navy, and that the rich color suited her dark brown eyes, which he decided were the most remarkable feature of her face. From time to time during the performance he glanced her way, but Mary kept her gaze fixed on the dozen jugglers from Boston who first lobbed b.a.l.l.s and oranges, then plates and cups, followed by chairs and stools, and finally knives and swords, but decided against lighting their flaming batons because of the gas.

Absorbed as she was by the spectacle, Mary blinked back tears. She was not usually so vulnerable a person. She knew that it was said of her that she was odd and difficult, and this did not bother her, for she never thought about what people usually spent time thinking of. The idle talk of other people always perplexed her; her mind was usually occupied by things that no one else thought of: the structure of the pelvis, the fast beat of a healthy fetus heart, or the slow meander of an unhealthy one, or a baby who had failed to breathe. She could never bring herself to care about ordinary things, like whose pie was better at the Sunday potluck, or whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise, or what anyone was saying about an early winter or an early thaw or if the wheat would blight this year due to the heavy rains, or if the latest couple to marry had any chance of happiness. Perhaps it had been foolish to come to the theater, where potential death was being offered as entertainment, though Mary knew that no matter what she did or where she went, she would always see mortality where others saw frivolity. As a dozen swords sailed effortlessly onstage between the performers, all Mary could think was how precarious life was.

The performance ended, and Mary rose. She lowered her handkerchief, the opening Thomas had been waiting for. He touched the tip of his program to her gloved hand and said, "I am terribly sorry about your father."

It was this simple gesture that immediately made her like him. He did not say, How do you do, or Pleased to meet you. Instead, he said the essential thing. She liked his directness; she liked that he did not inquire why she was out so soon; she liked that he hadn't even introduced himself.

Thomas guided her by her elbow out of the auditorium to the street, conscious of the whispering their pairing induced in the other patrons. Mary Sutter? Out so soon? And who is that young man she's with? As they started up State Street, his fingers moved to the small of her back, and for the first time in a long time Mary felt that someone was taking care of her.

Thomas was pleased to have made himself so easily acquainted with his new neighbor. He'd been nervous how she might take his overture so soon after the loss of her father, but she seemed untroubled by, and even grateful for, his boldness. He glanced over at her, uncertain what to say now that they were alone. In the twilight, Mary Sutter appeared to be older than her age. The midwife, everyone said of her. But there were no claims to her affection among any of the young men of Albany. They did not attribute the cause to intimidation, but rather named the distraction of the more beautiful twin sister. All this Thomas had learned one night at the Gayety Music Hall, where he had gone last week to make himself known. He would make his mark among the society of men in Albany; he would not feel unsettled, as his mother did, by the change from the country. Her preference for Ireland's Corners was something she hid; the country was generally viewed as unsophisticated, except as a summer escape from the dust and heat. Thomas liked the city; he liked the novelty of the noise and the ready proximity to theater and dining saloons. He liked being out and about. He liked being a young man.

Though their families came from the same village, they were barely acquainted. The Fall family had lived on Loudon Road, the Sutters on Shaker Road. The Falls were Presbyterians, the Sutters Episcopalians. And though the Sutters had once owned an orchard, Nathaniel's sale of the family land and Amelia's practice had rendered them acquaintances only. Amelia had not delivered Thomas; another midwife had, for Thomas was born just as the twins had confined her to her bed. He was three months older than Jenny and Mary, but now he felt much younger. Years in the company of women in agony had conferred on Mary an aura of wisdom; she inspired respect and trust; it was this, Thomas thought, that made him feel so young.

The whitewashed brick homes and St. Peter's Church reflected the last of the light; it was an Indian summer night of hypnotic beauty. At the top of the street, a few farmers' wagons lingered in the market square; soon coal fires would acidify the air until the springtime winds scrubbed the skies clean.

In the park by the Boy's Academy, they rested on a bench. Just across Eagle Street the pillared white marble of the medical college reflected the ghostly beauty of the evening light. Mary gazed at the building, thinking of her letter of application on Dr. Marsh's desk and how she might soon hear from him. Twice a day she accosted the postman at the door, only to be told there was no letter. Amelia said she was being impatient, and Mary said that she could not help it. The antic.i.p.ated letter was her distraction from grief. It was also her future.

Gaslight flickered in the lamps along State Street. Thomas and Mary sat together, the conversation arising naturally as between old friends. Soon she was telling him how just before her father died, he had apologized to her for once leaving her alone when she was a baby. Her father said he attributed her independence to this, his worst mistake, thereby taking credit for her accomplishments while completely ignoring the fact that her twin sister, likewise abandoned, was utterly uninterested in midwifery.

While she talked, Thomas studied her. She had a way of carrying her grief that gave the impression she was doing well and would continue to do well. "I am certain you were a comfort to your father," he said.

"He died badly. I never want anyone to die as badly again."

Mary leaned forward. Did Thomas have any ambitions?

"I am to take over my father's business." He explained about the orchards in Ireland's Corners.

"My family once had orchards there," Mary said. "Are you pa.s.sionate about farming? Will the endeavor sustain you?"

Thomas thought Mary asked this as if he should question everything, but she did not appear disappointed when he said that he had no idea; rather, she nodded, as if she too found uncertainty the expected state of existence.

"You, however, have already accomplished quite a lot," Thomas said.

"Not enough," Mary said. Her eyes shone, and the stiff posture with which she held herself disappeared. "I want someday to attend medical school." And she lifted her gaze to the wide pillars and high windows of the school; off to the right was the hospital wing; under its golden cupola was the lecture hall. The surgeries and laboratories resided in the wing to the left. She knew its layout by heart from having once sneaked past the clerk guarding the school from behind his desk.

Thomas studied the building, and Mary held her breath, though not consciously, but having revealed herself she felt exposed. She hadn't meant to say what she wanted so clearly. Desire had burst out of her, as if it could not be contained. And the goal seemed within reach. Any day now, she would receive the answer; any day now, she would be the first female student of the Albany Medical College. She waited for the puzzling, troubled look from Thomas, the one that said, You are overreaching, the one that said, What an absurd idea.

Instead he said mildly, "You want to be a doctor?" There was only a slight tilt to his head, only a brief, quizzical glance, as if she had spoken in a foreign language that he had had to translate in his head, and then a wide grin blossomed on his face. The evening light was beginning to wash the color from the sky, but Mary could see clearly that Thomas's eyes were sharply blue. Boyish, happy, his face shone with generosity. He seemed incapable of guile, incapable even of finding her ambition extraordinary. As if the entire world were an open place, holding out its arms to everyone. As if munificence were the normal course of things.

"Wouldn't that be something?" he said, leaning back, holding her in a gaze of respect and admiration.

For the first time since her father died, Mary smiled.

They walked homeward in a companionable silence, a damp gust of wind scurrying up State Street behind them. By the time they reached Dove Street, leaves were already beginning to fall from the maple saplings lining the street. From the corner of her eye, Mary could see the curtain parting in the Sutter parlor window. Jenny had been aghast that Mary would follow her mother's suggestion that she get out of the house; Jenny still spent most of her days in tears. The curtain's lace s.h.i.+elded her face, but it was Jenny, watching.

"I am pleased to have met you, finally," Thomas said, cradling Mary's hand in his. She was a surprise, he thought. Though the frame was large, the hair unmanageable, the chin too square to do her credit, there was something about her manner that drew him in. He did not want to say good night.

"Thank you," Mary said, "for the diversion of conversation and your company. I have been very sad."

"Perhaps our families could dine together, after your mourning is over," Thomas said.

"My mother would welcome an invitation."

"Good night," Thomas said. And he watched her climb her steps and enter her house before taking the adjoining stairs two at a time into the Fall home, whistling.

Jenny was seated in the parlor, looking at a book, turning the pages too quickly to be reading them. Amelia was staring at the fire, but turned when Mary came in, a look of expectation transforming her features from the sadness that had haunted her the last few weeks.

"Did you have a good time?" Amelia asked.

"Yes."

"Who was that?" Jenny asked. In her pale face, her eyes snapped with color. Since the death of their father, she had been uncommonly quiet, when usually she was voluble, joyful. Jenny found it difficult to be serious about anything for long. Of Mary's intensity and seriousness, she often said, "You really ought to laugh more."

Mary turned, unpinning her hat. "Our new neighbor."

"Did you meet him on the street?" Jenny was forcing her voice toward blandness, turning the pages of her book three at a time.

"No. He walked me home from the hall." Mary set her hat on the table in the corner, near her mother.

"And he didn't think you odd for going out so soon?"

"He didn't say if he thought me odd or not."

"Well, I thought you odd."

"Girls," Amelia said. The word came automatically now. She could sense tension before either of them did. She and Nathaniel had often wondered how two such different individuals had come from her womb. Nathaniel. She sighed. No one had ever told her that grief was a leveling of all emotion, that life would stretch before you, colorless and endless, devoid of any hope.

Mary said, "He wants us to come to dinner."

"All of us?" Jenny said.

"Yes," Mary said. "At least I think so. Perhaps he just meant me."

"Oh," Jenny said. "Well." And she rose and left the room.

Amelia shot Mary a disapproving glare. "This is not a compet.i.tion," she said.

But they both knew that it was.

A week later, Mary stood in the alleyway behind the Dove Street house, waiting for the maid's son to finish shoveling coal into the chute so he could come and harness the little sorrel to her gig. Last night, Amelia had been called to a delivery on Arbor Hill, but one of the Aspinwall daughters out in Ireland's Corners was due, and Mary was going to stay at their home, Cottage Farm, until the infant arrived. Her bag rested at her feet; she might be away a week.

Though the Sutter family was in mourning, women continued to have babies. Amelia and Mary set aside their sadness to answer any summonses that arrived. It is the inescapable rule of caregivers that they have to be available despite how they themselves might feel. But Mary had found it a relief to plunge again into the intricacies of childbirth. Amelia yielded now to her in almost every respect, reserving only the most difficult deliveries for herself, but even then she taught Mary all she could. On those occasions, Mary observed over Amelia's shoulder, mimicking her movements, mumbling to herself, finding that she remembered Amelia's instructions better if she narrated. Twins: mother exhausted at second pa.s.s; it may be necessary to use smelling salts to rouse her. In case of cord entanglement, ease the child back into birth ca.n.a.l to lessen tension and slip cord quickly over neck. For async.l.i.tic presentation (fetal head tilted toward shoulder) check carefully for bleeding afterwards; use rags to compress. Bedrest for two weeks while the mother heals; movement could cause hemorrhage. In cases of stillbirth, give child immediately to mother in order to preserve maternal sanity. Mary inhaled the information her mother dispensed. Centuries of wisdom resided in Amelia's muscles. Often, when Mary asked questions, Amelia could not answer unless she was in the act itself, able to remember only as she performed. Instinct as textbook.

And work as distraction, for no invitation had come from next door. No word from Dr. Marsh either. Mary wrote another letter. Perhaps my first letter of inquiry was lost in the post? It seemed as if the universe was conspiring to teach her patience. What does Mary Sutter most desire? Let the stars withhold it.

Now, in the distance, thunder rumbled. A day of contradiction: Mary's bonnet shaded her from a sun bright enough to strain her eyes. The alley percolated: a privy tilted a half block away; the neighbor's poorly kept chickens flapped in protest at the confusion. An ice wagon lurched into the narrow ruts and climbed the slow rise, its wintered-over ice blocks crusted with sawdust. The last of the last, before winter set in and ice would be everywhere. The verge of deprivation and plenty.

"Miss Sutter?"

Thinking it the maid's boy, she turned and scolded, "I thought you would never come."

"You've been waiting for me?" Thomas Fall shut the gate and grinned, leaning against the whitewashed fence that separated the Fall home from the eyesore of the alley. "But perhaps you should have come around the front and rung the bell. I do not normally meet ladies here."

"And where do you usually meet them?"

"At Tweddle Hall, where they need walking home."

On his own ground, Thomas was self-a.s.sured, in command of his supple frame; he wore a hat to offset the flash of amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes.

"I'm going today to Ireland's Corners to await a birth. The maid's son is supposed to harness the gig, but I fear he has fallen asleep on the coal."

"May I drive you? I was on my way there myself. Father is at the farm and wishes to instruct me about preparing saplings for the winter, a concern that is not unlike your profession, which is, I believe, nursing things along."

Not dinner with his family, but something much better. Time alone. Mary tried to discern: merely kindness or real interest? She was seeking not to make a fool of herself, as she had sought not to every time she had left the house in the last week, feigning nonchalance as she descended the stairs, as if she were glancing to the right only to contemplate the chance of catching a cab and not hoping for the Fall house door to open and for Thomas to appear.

And now here he was, more confident than she had at first supposed.