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“An unmarried woman carrying a child can’t stay in a home above three days. Then there’s a fine thereafter. Three shillings each day, if I recall rightly.”

“She is fined for being pregnant and unmarried?” Anne was shocked.

Dovey nodded. “If she stays in Newport, aye, and I imagine it’s the same all over. Only the workhouse might get a stay from the fine. The vicar argued for us before the aldermen that St. Sefin’s were a hospital and the girls came for care, so it was left to us to charge them as we wished.”

“Fined for being a woman alone,” Anne repeated. She stroked the baby’s knees, marveling that the shape of him could be so perfect, all the parts in place that would, with nurture and God’s grace, grow into a healthy boy and then a man.

“I had to prove I would support myself before I could pay my fee to become a freewoman here.” Eilian pushed a lock of hair off her forehead.

It was warm in the kitchen, with the stove always going.

“Pay to not be a foreigner any longer, but a true citizen of the town. But as a woman with no husband, I must convince the council I had land or money or work to support myself. They don’t want women coming in and setting up as bawds. ”

“You had to pay to set up your own household? How much?”

“Twenty shillings. Would have been forty, were I a man.” Eilian dabbed around the baby’s tiny fingers, and he reflexively clenched the cloth. Anne’s heart clenched at the tiny being, so driven by instinct, so determined to survive.

“So you no longer have a husband, Mrs. Lambe?” Anne asked delicately.

Eilian grinned. “Never did. There is no Mr. Lambe, leastaways that I know of. But an unmarried woman falls under more suspicion than a widow. So it’s the widow of a baker I am.”

“A baker and a cunning woman,” Dovey observed.

“My father was a baker, and me mum a baker’s wife, wasn’t she,” Eilian said with playful indignation.

“But aye, it’s apprentice to a midwife I was, back in Abergavenny.

A fine cunning woman she was, and the best midwife in the Bannau Brycheiniog.

That’s the Brecon Beacons to you Saes ,” she told Anne.

“And who is the other woman running the bakery with you? She was there yesterday,” Anne observed.

“That’d be Mrs. Reece, a widow true, and another as knows the baking trade. When I learned she was coming here, where she was born, I thought it easiest to come with her. I’d have too many eyes rolled my way with suspicion did I come a woman alone.”

“I thought it was acceptable for a widow to live on her own,” Anne said, thinking of Prunella.

“If she’s money enough, she can go anywhere,” Dovey said, then paused. “So long as she looks like the rest of them.”

Anne floundered, unsure how to address a prejudice she had never experienced, never would experience.

“Gwen told me your husband died,” she said to Dovey. “That you were left to raise young Cerys alone.” She stroked the baby’s thighs, lean from the struggle of birth and carrying the folds of skin he’d grow into. “Like Leah will be raising Daniel here alone.”

Dovey nodded, working her pestle. “We lived in Bristol and were married proper, lines of the register in St. Thomas the Martyr for anyone who cares to look. But I got a fair number of looks after his ship went down, a woman and child and no man. Landladies raising the rent. Shopkeepers telling me so kindly they hadn’t work for me when they hired the next girl who came in the door.

So I came across the Channel looking for better, came to the priory looking for a place to stay, and Gwen found me. ”

“And then you found me.” Evans limped into the room, a crutch tucked under his arm. The empty sleeve on the other side was pinned to his coat so it didn’t dangle free. Dovey smiled up at her husband, her face shining with tenderness, and he dropped a kiss on her brow.

Anne looked away, uncomfortable at the sight of the man’s mauled body, and perhaps too by the glow on Dovey’s face. The glow of a woman who had found her love.

“And now I’m respectable again, I am,” Dovey called after him as he moved on to one of the storerooms. “As much as I can be, I suppose, married to a rogue such as you.”

“’Tis why I kept all the better men away,” Evans called back. “Left me your only option, dint I? Gibraltar took my arm but not my wits.”

Dovey chuckled and added more herbs to her pestle, a contented smile on her lips. She wouldn’t trade her husband for anyone else, not even a whole man, that Anne could see.

“Marriage,” Anne said slowly. “’Tis the answer to everything, isn’t it? For a woman.”

Eilian nodded. “So they want us to think. And so they try to make it, men like the aldermen as write up the rules. They want the woman yoked into marriage, and if it’s a bad lot she’s drawn, a sot or a fool or a man who raises his hand to her, it’s a pity.

Only death can set her free.” She patted Daniel dry after his washing and then laid out the swaddling cloth, showing Anne how to cross and fold and tuck until he was wrapped like a twist of spiced nuts.

“Like Mrs. Gossett,” Dovey said soberly. She set the pestle on the table and held out her arms, and Eilian put the babe into them. Dovey cuddled the infant, cooing at him, while Eilian took over grinding the herbs.

“Who is Mrs. Gossett?” Anne asked, taking the basin and cloths into the scullery.

“I can take you with me when I visit,” Eilian said.

“Her husband was a bare-knuckle fighter and prone to use his fists on her. He’s stopped of late, praise be, p’raps because she’s breeding again, or perhaps because Lord Penrydd had words with him.

Who knows if he’s changed his ways. And she’s three other babes in that house of theirs, and nowhere to go if she wanted to leave him.

Nowhere to go but here, to St. Sefin’s,” she added when Dovey opened her mouth to protest.

“But the aldermen could come and make her return to her husband, couldn’t they,” Anne guessed. “Even if he beats her.”

“And they’d have some scripture at the ready to back the law.” Eilian nodded. “The wife and the man are one flesh, or some such. St. Peter’s a busy one, that he is, keeping all those bad marriages together.”

Anne poured the dirty water into the deep trough of the scullery and hung up the cloths to dry on the line that held other baby clouts, also drying.

“I thought I could break my betrothal to Calvin Vaughn if I were ruined,” she said. It was easier to confess when she was in this low side room, dim with green light through the foliage against the small window. “So I arranged to be found in Hewitt’s bed.”

The two other women stared at her as she emerged from the scullery. “And?” Dovey asked, rocking the babe in her arms.

“I didn’t think it through,” Anne confessed. “Now Hew thinks he must marry me.”

Eilian’s eyes were round. “D’ye want to?”

“I thought I could simply leave if I were ruined.” Anne flushed with shame now to think of her own stupidity. Or rather, naivete, for how was she to know the ways of the world when no one had taught her? “I thought I could simply walk away. But now I see it is not so easy.”

“You might have caught,” Eilian said at once.

Anne shook her head. “We didn’t—that way.

” She gulped. “But as you know a bit about midwifery, perhaps …” She swallowed her shame and forged ahead.

“Perhaps you know how I might … keep from conceiving. Until I am ready to go through what Leah did.” The thought filled her with cold fear.

She could die. A baby could die. What woman could ever bear for a man to touch her, knowing what could result?

The pleasure, Anne supposed, a hot flush chasing away the cold in an instant, as if she had the ague. There was a great deal to be said for the pleasure.

Dovey nuzzled the head of the infant, who squirmed in her arms. “It’s pain, yes, Miss Sutton,” she said gently.

“There’s no way around that, if you want the result.

But a babe is a fine and precious thing, if it’s with a man you love, who loves you.

” She smiled as her daughter came into the kitchen, bringing her basket and the scent of warm, ripe fruit.

“And then you get a Cerys, to bring sun to your days, and white hairs to your head. Pfft, child, how am I to scrub those stains from your apron?”

“We’ll soak it,” Cerys said breezily. “Mother Morris will show me how to make a paste.” She held out her arms to take the babe, as confident as any seasoned mother.

Anne watched them, the infant and child.

That was the done way to have both such things, the pain and travail of childbirth.

Childbirth within marriage, if she wanted safety for herself and a babe.

Of course, she could stay at St. Sefin’s and wait for a child to turn up on the doorstep, like Ifor had at St. Woolos, if she indeed wanted a babe.

But to care for it, a woman alone, was made twice as difficult by law and custom.

She was terrified of the pain, yes, but she had that list of names after all. And Hew needed heirs for Greenfield. Anne suspected he would be the kind of father who lofted his son on his shoulders and allowed his daughters to lure him from the ledgers to play with kittens in the stables.

“I can find you the herbs to keep from catching, though it’s never a sure thing, mind.” Eilian tied a hat over her cap and reached for another basket, hanging from a peg beside the door. “Come with me now to take some cuttings, and you can go with me to Mrs. Gossett later, if you wish.”

“I don’t wish to be a burden,” Anne said humbly.

It felt wonderful and strange to be included in this women’s business, in the real and vital work that women did to support their lives.

The most she’d ever done was approve menus and give servants orders in her mother’s stead.

She knew so little of housekeeping, and even less of the real ways women lived beyond the houses like Vine Court and the papered drawing rooms enclosing gentlemen’s daughters.

“But I want to learn,” Anne said, lifting her chin. “I want to learn everything.”

Dovey smiled. Eilian grinned and held out another basket. “Aye, then. Let’s begin.”