the situ ation was more difficult to hide. Grace sat upon her chaise and paused between pacing. The pungent smell of the ointment Mai Lin had rubbed onto her belly was hard to miss, but Mai Lin's mistress merely smiled between gritted teeth.
"Mistress is better today," Mai Lin said to the Reverend, which was not a lie, for her cough had improved.
"Her complexion does appear brighter," he commented.
Mai Lin thought it remarkable that he didn't guess that the sweat on her brow and over her rosy cheeks was the first strain of the birth process. But then again, the Reverend had always been blind.
"Mai Lin, see that Doc Hemingway is called immediately if she goes into labor," he said before returning to his study on the first floor.
Mai Lin knew she should obey, but her mistress's eyes flew open, and she said, "Don't you dare. This is my baby. Lock the door."
Mai Lin did as she was told, lit the lamp, and rubbed more oils on her mistress's back and belly. There was much to be done, and having a man in the room would have disturbed the effort. She lit the sacred incense to welcome a new life into the world and handed her mistress pillows to scream into, for one loud yell would carry into the courtyard, and the Reverend would be knocking in no time with Doc Hemingway at his heels.
It was a grave responsibility, but Mai Lin had birthed more babies than she could count. She concentrated with all her being on every sign given off by her mistress's body. She sensed the pain as if it were her own. As labor progressed, her own body rose and fell with the contractions, and she told herself that this would be her last birth. She was getting too old for this. Still, she kept a hand on Grace so she could judge the intensity of the spasms. When it became too much and Mai Lin couldn't stand it any longer, she shouted again for her mistress to push.
In the hour of the rooster, of the fourteenth day in the month December, in the second year of the Emperor Pu-Yi, in the reign of the Qing Dynasty, Grace finally let out a howl that echoed off the compound walls and cascaded into the dirt road and plains beyond. Mai Lin knew that the donkeys and horses in their stalls perked up their ears at the sound. Ahcho, smoking his pipe in the back alley, tipped his head to the side and offered a worried smile. The Reverend, seated at the teak desk in his library, set down the fountain pen with which he had been scribbling his Sunday sermon and finally allowed himself to grasp that his child had been born.
But at a moment like this, Mai Lin didn't have time for distracting thoughts. The baby was in her hands. She set its wet and squirming body on a soft pillow and cut the cord at the navel with a pair of pinking shears. Then she applied a special poultice of ash, mud, and dung to the umbilicus. In the way that she knew best, she lifted the child in her arms, pressed it against her shoulder, and slapped the tiny back ten times. A yowl issued forth. She wiped the infant perfunctorily, wrapped it, and placed it in her mistress's arms.
"Your daughter," she said.
Grace, as red-faced as the baby and wet with perspiration, held her child against her cheek and wept. "My girl, my precious, precious girl," she said.
Mai Lin knew this was only the beginning, for now she must help her young mistress to breast-feed, which the master did not approve of and so would take place only in private. Stupid Westerners, Mai Lin thought. The Reverend would change his mind when he understood that animal milk was virtually impossible to come by now.
After wiping the floor and tossing the birth cloths into the metal tub, Mai Lin returned to her mistress's bedside. The baby had begun to root, and Mai Lin took this for a good sign. This girl baby with her pinched and demanding face was not faint of heart.
Mai Lin took her mistress's wrist between her fingers and felt for her vital signs, which, unlike the child's, now appeared to be startlingly weak. She studied Grace's suddenly pale face. Only moments before the mother had seemed robust, but her skin was turning gray and chalky, her eyes glazed. Mai Lin pressed lightly again