She stared through her open bedroom window for whole afternoons at a time, without seeing anything. In the garden below no blooms graced the bushes or beds. Everything that had lived a few months before was dead or dying. She thought for sure the shock of Henry’s death would kill the baby. She half hoped it would. More than once she doubled over with cramps, while relief and guilt elbowed in on her. But the blood didn’t come and the cramps always faded. She’d sure made a mess of things. Had she been eighteen instead of twenty–eight, her parents would have forced her return to polite society quicker. Instead they contented themselves with her nourishment, leaving meals outside her door to be cried over in her own time. She did cry, and whimper and seethe and snivel and rant and rage and pity herself. Eventually, as everyone does, she got beyond tears. Then, her thoughts took a sharp turn from the tragedy of Henry’s death to its consequences. She was in deep trouble.She knew there were back street doctors whose job it was to uncomplicate unwed women’s lives.
