Rita closed her eyes the better to focus. She had decades of nursing experience, but her knowledge did not end there. She had spent long evenings studying books intended for the use of surgeons, had memorized anatomy, had mastered the science of the apothecary. Her practical experience had developed these pools of knowledge into a deep reservoir of understanding. She now permitted the evening’s experience to be placed alongside what she knew. She did not chase after explanations or make effortful attempts to connect thoughts. She simply waited, with a growing thrill of trepidation and exhilaration, until the conclusion that had been carefully preparing itself in the depths came to the surface.
The laws of life and death, as she had learnt them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.
A door opened, beckoning her towards new knowledge.
Again she missed God. She had shared everything with Him. From childhood she had gone to Him with every question, doubt, delight and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking, in action He had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.
What to do about it?
She listened. The breathing of the girl. The breathing of the man. The breath of the river.
The river … She would start there.
Rita laced up her boots and buttoned herself into her coat. In her bag she groped for something – it was a slim tin box – and dropped it into her pocket before creeping quietly outside. Around her lantern flame the chill darkness expanded vastly, but she could make out the edges of the path. She stepped off it and on to the grass. As much by feel as by sight, she made her way to the riverbank. The cold air sidled through her buttonholes and the stitches of her muffler. She walked through the warm steam of her own exhalation, felt it lay itself as wetness on her face.
Here was the boat, upturned on the grass. She pulled off a glove, and her cautious fingers found jagged edges of wood, but then a solid part; she placed her lantern there.
She took the box from her pocket and held it for a moment between her teeth while – ignoring the cold – she gathered the folds of her skirt and tucked a bunch of hem into the same pocket so that she could crouch without getting her dress wet. Before her was the dark shimmer of the river. She reached forward and down till she felt it nip viciously at the flesh of her fingers. Good. Opening the tin, she removed from it a glass-and-metal vial with complications impossible to see in the dark. By feel, she immersed the tube in the freezing water and counted. Then she rose and, with all the care her numb fingers could muster, closed the tube in its case for protection, and without bothering to straighten her dress made her way as swiftly as she could back to the inn.
In the pilgrims’ room she held the tube as close to the lantern as was necessary to read the gauge, then took a notebook and a pencil out of her bag. She wrote down the temperature of the water.
It wasn’t much. But it was a start.
She eased the child off the bed and settled her gently on her lap, in the chair. The little head nodded to rest against her chest. I won’t sleep now, she thought as she arranged the blankets to cover herself and the child. Not after all this. Not in this chair.
As she prepared herself to sit out the night, with scratchy eyes and an aching back, her namesake came to mind. Saint Margaret who consecrated her virginity to God and was so determined not to marry that she bore the pain of torture sooner than become a wife. She was the patron saint of pregnant women and childbirth. In her early days at the convent, washing the filthy, bloodied sheets, laying out the bodies of the women who had died in childbirth, Rita had been rather relieved that her own future was as God’s bride. She would never be sundered by a child emerging from her belly. God had left her, but her commitment to virginity had never wavered.
Rita closed her eyes. Her arms folded around the child, whose sleeping weight rested heavily against her. She felt the