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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 abutted 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 anticipation 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