The glory of autumn passed in a passion, and November being no longer at Hillside than it was in any other place, shortly gave way to the anticipatory month of December. Richard and Laura Lee were returned to them and as though in compensation for having been so often away in term-time, stayed close all through that month, not a little because by then the winter had come with a vengeance and it was too cold to think of going out further than the shelter of the front porch, and then only for half-hour intervals. They came in red-cheeked and shining-eyed, touched with the damp where their breath had melted the snow and glistening like crystal where it had lingered. Di bundled them in blankets and nursed the numbness from their fingers and lips with mugs of cocoa.

It was a weird spring when it did come and cold, a stillborn season that had at its centre a thing that should never have happened. It was well after Midi-Carême, the Thursday that follows on the heels of Refreshment Sunday, so that Eastertide began to be in sight, that it happened. Richard and Laura Lee were in school at the time, for which everyone was afterwards grateful. It was enough, Di thought, to have Caro and Paul held hostage in the kitchen environs by unseasonable snow, and a gently chattering Ruthie and Robbie, their little bird-song voices throbbing with childish enthusiasm for everything, underfoot when doctor Carson came.

It was hardly the first time he had come to deliver a baby and to begin with no one worried. Caro grew uneasy as St. Christopher did; that grey cat with his curious presentiments stalked the length of the hall between the stairs and the kitchen, snarling and hissing in a way that suggested one of his undomesticated ancestors, and it was not, Di thought, because he could not go out-of-doors. Mr. Harris, emerging from the outbuilding he had appropriated for work that was not farm-work, and seeing the cat in such a mood, was all for throwing him out into the yard, but Di, thinking of that first drive to Hillside and Peter's words about the goodness of the cat, he keeps trouble from Hillside, he had said, would not hear of it.

It was only when doctor Gregory was sent for that Di began to seriously worry, and by then it was catching. Peter had come in from work and had Caro on his lap and Paul at his knee, trying and failing to engage them at the sundial without giving it much attention himself.

'They want Colette,' he murmured, and Di, watching as St. Christopher flew to the door and flung himself at it, was inclined to agree. This child after all, was meant to have fled the world long ago, on an afternoon when its mother had imbibed a dose of tea made with pennyroyal and parsley. There came anguished sounds from overhead, and Ruthie, abandoning the doll that had so much occupied her earlier, found a corner of Di's skirt and tugged at it with all the vigour she could summon.

'Mummy,' she said worriedly, sounding as no child of just over a year should ever sound, 'mummy not wight?' for she had not yet got the trick of her R's, they were still wavering as to where they sat in her mouth.

'She'll be all right, Ruthie-love,' and Di gathered the little girl up into her arms.

'But they're talking about a hospital,' said Paul unhelpfully, 'listen.'

Mercifully, 'hospital' was not a word Ruthie, or indeed Robbie had had cause to encounter, and the meaning was lost on them. Di and Peter caught it and traded looks, each possessed of the same improbable thought; they must not take Mimi out of the house.

'Colette,' came Mimi's voice overhead, as though she had divined Peter's earlier sentiment, 'would she know…' but the thought was left unfinished. Over sounds that occasioned much disquiet came the voices of the two doctors arguing; doctor Gregory thinking that the slight and willowy sage-feme from Burnt Church might make a difference, her hands, he said, held life in them, but doctor Carson, would not have it, so much superstition, she was more nearly a witch, wasn't that what people said?

'Not a witch,' said Caro, understanding this much if no more, 'Colette isn't,' and Peter smoothed her hair against her head as Colette had been used to –and Di too had he thought of it –but he left assenting to Di. If doctor Gregory made any rejoinder that agreed with her own, it was not heard by Di or rest of the knot of worried beings in the kitchen. They knew in the end only that it was doctor Carson whose decree went forth, Mr. Harris being inclined to side with him and not his mother's doctor, with his talk of young girls with the capability to balance life and death in a moment.

It was only little Robbie, unnoticed at the kitchen door, who saw and never forgot what the others only heard; the image of his mother being carried down the narrow stairs that connected the upper and ground registers of the house. Nor could he forget the image of St. Christopher as he flew at doctor Carson's ankle and bit it when he tried to carry Mimi across the threshold, his claws leaving angry welts in the man's legs that looked like the angry red of fireweed; the image was to recur in nightmares he could never afterwards account for; a cat the colour of the mist over the sea on a day when all the world looks the grey of an over-boiled egg, flying with claws extended and a hunter's inclination at the doctor. For a moment Robbie forgot entirely that it was his sister he was closest to, and he called out to the woman in the doctor's arms, 'mummy!' or tried to, but his throat was closed, the word would not leave his mouth, no noise escaped it; he could only shape that word over and over, mutely, ineffectually, mummy, mummy, mummy, nearer to her in that moment than he ever had been before in his young life. Mummy, but no sound left him and she was taken away. He began to cry and St. Christopher, bereft of his charge, to scream.

They would hear afterwards that the child was dead from the beginning; it was not even that the cord was too tight or the delivery too long; there had simply been no life there, only the shell of a child, imperfectly beautiful, with the dark hair of his father, the round wide eyes of his mother, and fingers that were disproportionately long on a child so small, but an empty vessel for all that.

It was Di who took Laura Lee to one side when she came home, bursting with questions about her mother and the baby.

'I need you to be terribly grown up for me,' said Di. They were kneeling together by the glow of the kitchen stove, Laura Lee's hair shiny with the unseasonable hoar-frost of the April day. It glistened like seed-pearls upon her hair and her forehead, a lucent and aqueous wreath. Crowned thus, the little girl was transported temporarily beatified, Our Lady Star of the Sea made into a miniature adult, though she had not the tranquility of that vestal about her in that moment. The fire flickered, the heat of it evapourated the hoar-frost and she was again a very young girl, though she might try not to feel it.

'All right –but will you tell me about the baby when I've promised?' Laura Lee set her mouth as she asked and looked unhesitatingly at Di.

'There –isn't – a baby –do you understand?'

'I think so –like the things Colette sometimes talks about? The cord, or the recipe in the Willow Book –the one for loosing an angel?' Di shivered and did not ask where Laura Lee had heard such things, what conversations she had listened to on purpose to find out; now was not the time to scold her in any case.

'No, not like that.'

Laura Lee's eyes grew wide, but she had promised to be grown up. 'I see –I think. The way sometimes a baby won't breath? Like the one at the Cordiners' that was never alive?' and for all her efforts at being grown up, she bit her lip in her nervousness.

'A bit like that, yes.'

Laura Lee released the lip she had been biting; there was an indent on it that showed how near the skin had been to breaking.

'I won't ask mummy about it,' she said.

Had that been all, they might have got on all right. Though Hillside was for some days entombed in silence, they would have got by. But the hospital would not let Mimi home at once; it wanted her to lie in bed for weeks. Colette said it was the surest way to catch milk-fever or worse, but she was not bold enough to say it to Mr. Harris, or even Peter, who might have convinced the other man; he was the one person in all the world who had the ability to make her close-lipped about the skill she had. She said it only to Di, and then in an outburst of feeling she could not quite check. But she had the sense to wait until she had gained the sanctuary of St. Mary the Virgin and was kneeling at the feet of her advocate before giving way to weeping and whispering ad infinitum, until voice and tears had both exhausted themselves, 'for my fault, for my fault.'

Mimi would have told Colette it was not her fault; that the freakish thing had happened at the hospital; it could not have happened anywhere else. Afterwards they said it should never have happened at all. The little boy was taken away and enshrouded in swaddling bands and she had not seen him again but had succumbed to a sleep that overwhelmed her in spite of the great and aching loss that had settled over her as a sensation of heaviness. She had dreamed fitfully, of the screaming grey cat that was St. Christopher, half wild with fury at being outwitted, the wide, wide eyes of her little boy watching her as from the kitchen, his lips moving soundlessly, mummy, they had said, his hands outstretched to her, mummy.

She was pulled out of this sleep by a whimpering, almost a cry, the sound of a nurse's voice and the sensation of a child being pressed into her arms, and Mimi saw then it had all been one protracted nightmare. He was not dead after all, her little boy, but alive and kicking ineffectually against her ribs as she held him. He was sucking at her breast and feeding happily before it dawned on the nurse, overworked from the weather and the inability of the other sisters to get into the hospital over the past few weeks as they otherwise would have done, that she had made a terrible mistake, a dreadful and irreparable error, by which point woman and child had formed that intrinsic bond of nurturer and dependent. He crinkled his eyes against the light of the world and curled his fingers round the skin nearby her breast, taking without fuss the yellow colostrum that would otherwise have gone to no purpose, uncomplainingly sustained by it and by her. He had fed all he wanted, which was hardly at all, for he was still only new into the world, by the time the nurse nearby was alert enough to realise.

'I'm so sorry,' she said then, and would continue to say, 'I'm so sorry.'

It was a mistake that undid forever for her the suggestion that family was forged by blood only, and motherhood too, for the baby in Mimi's arms had nursed so instinctively, Mimi had held him so unhesitatingly, and they had relied so much one upon the other, that it seemed for a moment to the nurse, overwhelmed with work and short of sleep, that they were mother and child; it struck her then that so long as there was the wish, the instinct to mother, it did not matter about the baby and where it came from or how it came to be in the arms of the woman who nurtured it, provided there was love mixed in with the milk to see it happy and well.

Of course she took him away too, and Mimi did not see him again after that. It was him, the child she had taken to her breast, she said to Di, late one evening, more than the stillborn boy that had died of the pennyroyal, that she grieved for.

'What do you suppose his other mother is like?' Mimi asked of her with the somnambulance of grief, having often pictured this woman to herself; a small and delicate woman like the fragile boy she had nursed, with his brown eyes perhaps, and heart-shaped chin.

'What do you think she looks like?'

'I don't know,' said Di, who could not decide if she was more unnerved by the question or the way Mimi was staring out longingly at the water from the front room.

'Tell me,' Di said, tucking her hand into Mimi's, 'what did you name him?'