Oh, I know, I said. It must be.

She assured us, He’s very good to me most of the time.

I’d ventured into these deep waters with no plan for getting out the other side. Now that Mary O’Rahilly had confessed the truth, what in the world was I going to advise her to do? She’d be taking her baby home in six days or less, and neighbours made a point of never coming between man and wife.

I made my voice firm. Tell him you won’t stand for any more of that, especially not now there’s a baby in the house.

Mary O’Rahilly managed an uncertain nod.

Bridie asked, Would your father take you in if it came to it?

She hesitated, then nodded again.

Tell your husband that, then.

I pressed her: Will you?

Bridie added sternly: For Eunice. So he’ll never do the same to her.

Mary O’Rahilly’s eyes were wet. She whispered, I will.

The baby pulled her head away and whimpered.

That ended the conversation.

Hold her upright now, I told Mary O’Rahilly, lean her face in your hand and rub her back to help her burps out.

I looked over at Honor White. Still out like a light, her head flopped sideways on the pillow.

No. Not sleeping.

My throat locked. I leaned over to examine her face. Eyes open, not breathing.

Bridie asked, What’s the matter?

I slid my fingers under the wrist that lay on the sheet. Still warm, but no pulse at all. I tried the side of Honor White’s pale throat too, just to be sure.

Eternal rest grant unto her, I whispered, and let perpetual light shine upon her.

Ah no! Bridie rushed over.

I stroked Honor White’s lids shut. I crossed her white hands on her breast.

I swayed; suddenly I couldn’t hold myself up. Bridie hauled my head down onto her shoulder and I held on tight enough to hurt. I could hear Mary O’Rahilly weeping over her baby girl.

I made myself pull back, straightened up. Bridie, could you ever go for a doctor?

When she was gone, I stared at the White boy. His little snuffles and tentative flailings. Had my donated blood and all our efforts only rushed his mother into the arms of the bone man?

Dr. Lynn came in looking worn. Nurse Power, what a sad thing.

She checked the dead woman no less thoroughly for it being hopeless. Then she filled in the certificate.

I had to ask, in an uneven voice: Was it the transfusion reaction, would you say?

The doctor shook her head. The pneumonia’s strain on her heart, more likely, exacerbated by labour, haemorrhage, and chronic anaemia. Or possibly a blood clot leading to a pulmonary embolism.

She drew the sheet up and over the statue’s face, then turned her glinting glasses on me. We’re doing our level best, Nurse Power.

I nodded.

And one of these days, even this flu will have run its course.

Really? Mary O’Rahilly asked. How can you be sure?

The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.

Bridie frowned. This grippe’s a form of life?

Dr. Lynn nodded as she covered a yawn with her hand. In a scientific sense, yes. A creature with no malign intention, only a craving to reproduce itself, much like our own.

That thought bewildered me.

Besides, pessimism’s a bad doctor, she added. So let’s keep our hopes up, ladies. Now, Mrs. O’Rahilly, I’ll have a look at you and your bonny newborn.

After the doctor examined Mary O’Rahilly, she peered into the White baby’s mouth. Has he kept a feed down?

I told her, Three.

Good lad. Filius nullius now, I suppose, she added soberly—nobody’s son, a child of the parish. I suppose he’ll be sent over to the institution where she was staying?

Into the pipe, I thought. I nodded.

The doctor said under her breath, Once this is over, Miss Ffrench-Mullen and I are hatching great plans to found our own hospital specifically for the infants of the poor.

How splendid!

Won’t it be, won’t it just. Rooftop wards, good nurses of any denomination, all the women doctors we can hire, nanny goats for fresh milk…

I caught Bridie’s eye and almost laughed; it was the nanny goats.

Dr. Lynn added, Also a holiday home in the country to restore the mothers.

Mary O’Rahilly said, That sounds lovely.

I’ll send up orderlies for Mrs. White, the doctor told me on her way out.

No next of kin on the woman’s chart, I remembered. That meant—I flinched—a pauper’s burial.

I took the nail out of the wall and readied my watch for the scratch.

Bridie whispered: Can I do it?

If you like.

I passed over the watch and nail.

She turned away from Mary O’Rahilly discreetly. She found a space and scored the silver with a deep, neat circle for Honor White.

I wondered how many more mothers I’d have to mark on my watch over the decades to come. The lines would overlap, lying together, tangles of hair. My words came out huskily: Such a number.

Bridie said, But think of all the others. The women going about their lives. The children growing.

I stared at the White baby. Arms little thicker than my thumbs flung wide on the crib mattress as if to embrace the world.

Groyne marched in, carrying a stretcher as he might a shield. Nurse Power, I hear you’ve lost another one.

That made me sound like a careless child dropping pennies.

Behind him, O’Shea clasped his hands to hide their tremor.

Groyne looked at the cot on the left. Ah, so the scarlet woman’s gone west.

I ignored that slur on Honor White and wondered who’d told the orderlies she wasn’t married.

In the shades now, he said to O’Shea with a melancholic relish. Riding the pale horse…

I asked, Is it all a pure joke to you, Groyne? Are we just meat?

Everyone stared at me.

After the event in question, you mean, Nurse? He slashed his throat with one finger, smiling. In my view, we are. Napoo, finito, kaput.

He tapped his sternum and added, Your humble friend included.

I couldn’t think of a riposte.

Groyne made me a stiff little bow and laid the stretcher on the floor.

O’Shea helped him set Honor White’s draped body down on it, and they carried her out.

Her baby, in the crib, showed no sign of knowing what he was losing.

I busied myself stripping her cot.

Bridie asked softly, Why are you so hard on Groyne?

I bristled. Don’t you find him grotesque? The constant ditties, the morbid vulgarity of the man. Went off to war but never got within whiffing distance of a battle, and now he swans around here, the greasy bachelor, trying out his music-hall numbers on women in pain.

Mary O’Rahilly looked disconcerted.

I knew I shouldn’t be speaking this way in front of a patient.

Bridie said, He’s not a bachelor, actually. What’s the word? Not just a widower, but someone who used to be a father.

My heart was hammering. When was this?

Years and years ago, before the war. Groyne lost his whole family to the typhus.

I cleared my throat and managed to say, Sorry, I wasn’t aware. I suppose the word is still father, even if…how many children?

He didn’t tell me.

How did you learn all this, Bridie?

I asked had he a family.