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cut the cord and put the baby in the oak cradle at the foot of the bed where it lay without moving. She spewed in the potty underneath the bed and stayed there for a while, hunched and listening with painful concentration for her mother’s breath. When she sprang up she hit her head so hard on the iron bed she almost knocked herself out.
    Pulling herself together, she put her head on her mother’s breast and their red hairs mingled. At last she heard it, the faintest gasp from a face so pale the lips looked like glass. She took a brush and did her mother’s hair, hearing her own voice making mad sounds. She got up and ran to the window again. The sky looked thicker and darker than before with rain clouds gathering over Port Iago, and the hills blanked out. “I feel like a pie in the sky,” a silly voice inside her sang. She took a cloth and tried to rub some of the mud and blood from her hands and her pretty white dress. “It’s no good,” she thought. “It will never come out.”

Chapter 5

    Toward the end of the afternoon, it rained suddenly for half an hour and then the sun came out again, a brilliant, unreliable sort of sun, streaming through the windows and lighting up a huge cobweb Mother had missed. Catherine pushed her fingers through the cobweb, feeling just as weightless and insubstantial. When Mother groaned she held her head up and gave her a sip of water. When a line of grayish dribble fell from her mouth, she wiped it away, past grief, past disgust, locked now into a small world of action and reaction.
    “They’ll be home soon,” she whispered, without much hope. “Home soon: Daddy and Eliza and Mair. Home for Mama.”
    Mother licked her lips and stared blankly ahead of her.
    Catherine lit a candle, and got into bed on the other side of her mother, nearly suffocating now from the bad, sweet smell in the room, and fell into an uneasy sleep. Later, when the sky was black above the line of trees, she heard the rumble of a cart in the yard outside. She flew downstairs and, standing there like another kind of dream, was Deio. There was rain on his hair, and his sleeves were rolled up and the muscles and skin of his arms gleamed. Before she had time to think, she flung her arms around him. He felt so strong, so alive. She clung to him, sobbing and trying to explain all that had happened. They had never touched each other like this before, but she was too far gone to feel the strangeness of it.
    He took both her shoulders between his hands and stroked them, murmuring, “Ty Du. Ty Du . . . It’s all right. It’s all right.” He smoothed her hair and held it in a bunch as he gently explainedthat he’d found her father by the roadside, fallen from his horse but all right; he would be in shortly with Ceris the midwife.
    When her father walked into the kitchen, Deio and Catherine sprang apart. Father had torn his clothes and looked ashen with fatigue. She was shocked at the wave of pure dislike she felt at the sight of him. Behind Father, at the kitchen door, was Ceris, carrying a scuffed portmanteau in her hand. She looked curiously at the handsome young couple—she’d heard the gossip, too. Father, sensitive even in these circumstances to that look, bundled Deio out the back door, forgetting to thank him.
    When Catherine led them into Mother’s room, the stench was overpowering and Father, smelling it and understanding, groaned and put his head in his hands. Ceris threw off her shawl and went straight to the window, forcing it open, tut-tutting, and working her mouth significantly as she did so.
    Ceris, the Lleyn’s only midwife for fifteen years, had delivered babies in damp sheds behind haystacks, in bedrooms occupied by five people, in the poorhouse sanitoria, and, once, to a screaming girl with snow on her lips on the Bardsey to Aberdaron ferry. She took out of her bag a jar that contained a mixture of goose fat, fresh butter, and hen’s fat.
    “Right now, Mr. Carreg,” she said, walking