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toward the bed, “I must take a closer look-see . . . so if you don’t mind.”
    When Father had closed the door behind him, she lined up her pair of scissors, her dirty towel, a dark jar, and a vial of laudanum on the bedside table, then drew back the sheets. Felicia made feeble movements with her hands to push Ceris away.
    “Come on now, there there.” Ceris told Catherine to hold her mother’s hands on either side of her. “Come on,” she said sharply, “I don’t like doing this either, but I must you know.”
    Catherine watched the midwife lubricate her two fingers with the gray-colored lard from the jar. When her Mother screamed, she joined in. “Leave her alone now, it’s no good, I know it isn’t.”
    Ceris looked at her quietly, her two glistening fingers in the air, sad for this pretty girl in her stained white dress, but detached. She saw women every day in a parlous state: some with their pelvises distorted by rickets; others prematurely aged by desperate povertyor heavy physical work; most robbed of any sexual attraction by repeated childbirth. She was as gentle to Felicia as her skill and training allowed, but in her heart she resented her. This Englishwoman, with her pretty pearl earrings, lying under her satin quilt had had a better life than most of them. Far better.
    After the scream there was a timid knock at the door. Eliza, white as a sheet, stood on the landing, Father sitting crumpled in a chair behind her.
    With her arms folded, Ceris stood at the door and addressed them. “She’s bad, as I don’t have to tell you, with the puerperal sepsis, as you may not know.”
    She closed her eyes for a moment while this sank in.
    “All you can do is keep her nice and tidy with this.” She gave Catherine a vial of dark liquid, the same liquor of opium that Mother took for her headaches. “If she should by any chance start to come round”—the midwife’s look showed them how faint a possibility that was—“beef tea and some of this.”
    She cast around again in her untidy portmanteau and brought out a small bag of sago and one of arrowroot. “I’ll have to make you, um, you know . . . for this—times being hard,” she said.
    Father gazed stupidly at her outstretched hand, then reached into his pocket for money and paid her.
    “Half a crown for the visit,” she said. “Extra for the sago.”
Let them pay,
thought Ceris,
they can afford it.
“Poor little mite,” she said lifting the cover from the baby’s face.
    She pocketed the money and went downstairs, gazing curiously as she did so at Felicia’s pretty arrangement of pictures and at the one or two good pieces of furniture, fixing them in her mind so she could entertain her friends later to a full description of the house, and the look she had seen pass between the drover’s boy and Catherine.
    When she’d left, they stood in the kitchen together, surrounded by the devastation of the day. The breakfast plates still unwashed, Father’s bags dumped by the door. Deio’s forgotten coat, which lay over the chair by the range. Eliza, taking Catherine in her arms, saw the look in her eyes of someone too young to have seen somuch. She smoothed back her sister’s wild hair and hugged her tight.
    “Poor darling Catty,” she said, “poor love. You were so brave.”
    “No.” Catherine looked straight ahead of her, her mouth struggling. “I was hopeless. I didn’t know what to do.”
    The pain in her eyes was so terrible that Eliza, determined not to cry, said in her grown-up voice, “I’m sure you did, cheer up, we’ll get her better.”
    She looked so forlorn that, in spite of themselves, they both gave strange grimacing laughs, and then hugged again. “How did people live without sisters?” Catherine thought, not for the first time.
    “Are you hungry, Catherine?” Eliza was trying in a muddled way to clear the table.
    “No,” said Catherine. “But I want to change my clothes. Leave that to Mair, she’ll tidy