The Honourable Midwife. Lilian Darcy

and brief, most of them, they’d bounced from heartfelt to practical and back again in the space of three sentences. She had replied in the same vein, and several times over the past three months they’d had a conversation going back and forth for days—a conversation which had had nothing to do with the impersonal tenant-to-landlady issue that had begun it.

      Standing in her empty, pristine kitchen, Emma smiled.

      She’d enjoyed those electronic conversations. She’d enjoyed the fact that she’d been sitting in an internet café in Paris, with half a dozen languages chittering around her. She’d enjoyed feeling tired and hot, and she’d enjoyed smelling of sugar and cheese and chocolate after hours of lessons in haute cuisine.

      Most of all, oddly enough, she’d enjoyed the companionship. On a professional level, she’d known Pete Croft on and off for…well, it had to be several years, at least, but it had taken flurries of e-mails flashing back and forth across half the world to make her feel as if she knew him as a person.

      E-mails, and the fact that he’d been living in her house.

      Emma was tired and jet-lagged after the long flight from Europe and the connecting hop, in a small propellor-driven aircraft, from Sydney to Glenfallon. The ground didn’t seem quite steady beneath her feet. There was a lot to do if she was going to get settled back in before she started work on Tuesday, but she found it impossible to put her flagging energy to anything useful just yet.

      Instead, she wandered around the house and garden, finding evidence of her tenant’s recent occupation. He’d repaired the latch on the side gate, and the torn flyscreen on the kitchen door. His four-year-old twin daughters, Jessie and Zoe, had dropped a brown Lego horse in the daffodil bed.

      He’d left a bottle of brand-new aftershave on the bathroom window-sill, hidden behind a set of cheap lace curtains which she intended to replace soon. For some reason, Emma was tempted to open the aftershave, to see if it smelled like him—What, could it smell like his e-mails?—but sensibly she didn’t. She would give it and the Lego horse back to him when she got a chance, but doubted the matter was urgent.

      She knew Pete had bought a house in the new development at the edge of town, but didn’t have the address. He would be busy moving in, finalising the details of his divorce, his property settlement and his custody arrangements. Plastic horses and missing bottles of unused aftershave would be far, far down on his list of priorities.

      ‘I’ll unpack, and put on a load of laundry, and get myself organised,’ Emma decided, and wondered if it was only because her wonderful three months in Paris was over that she felt so flat.

      ‘Dr Croft? It’s Patsy McNichol.’

      ‘Yes, Patsy? What is it?’

      Pete blinked, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and tried to lift his voice above its early-morning creak. The red figures on the clock radio beside his bed showed six twenty-five, and it was not yet fully light. He was quickly alert, however. He knew this patient wouldn’t be phoning him at such an hour on a whim.

      ‘I’m bleeding again,’ she said. ‘But it’s much worse, this time, and…and there’s some cramping, too.’

      ‘What kind of cramping?’

      ‘Well, I don’t know. Could it be contractions?’ She was trying to keep her voice steady, but it wasn’t working. Pete could hear the wobble and the pitch of panic. She didn’t want this to be happening yet.

      ‘How does the pain feel, Patsy? Is it steady? Describe it for me.’

      ‘It sort of drags, like really bad menstrual cramps, but it’s tight, too. It builds, and then it ebbs, and then a little while later—I should have been timing it, shouldn’t I?—it builds again. It woke me up about half an hour ago, and I just lay there, but then I felt the blood.’

      ‘How much?’

      ‘The bed is soaked.’

      ‘Is it still flowing?’

      ‘It’s eased off. Seems to have.’

      ‘Are you lying down?’

      ‘Yes, with my feet up.’

      ‘Can Brian drive you to the hospital?’

      ‘We’re already dressed. I didn’t want to disturb you any earlier than I had to.’

      Pete dammed back a sigh of frustration. Why were people like this? He had patients who would phone his home number at midnight, complaining of a paper cut, without so much as a ‘Sorry to bother you’, and patients who would hang back on a lifesaving call in order to give him ten minutes more sleep.

      ‘I’ll see you there as soon as I can,’ he told Patsy.

      He dressed quickly, opting for a set of green surgical gear—drawstring pants and a short-sleeved, V-necked top. Realistically, given the position and size of Patsy’s uterine fibroids, he was probably going to be assisting with an emergency Caesarean first thing this morning.

      He could feel the aridity of his new bedroom as he moved around it in the early-morning light. The whole house was still far too bare and echoing and new after the cottage cosiness and warmth of Emma Burns’s place, which he’d been forced to abandon three days ago.

      How did you achieve that sort of atmosphere? he wondered. He wasn’t convinced he had the skills, or the time. Well, certainly not the latter. So much on his plate right now.

      Claire’s behaviour was like a nightmare. Her ultimatums to him didn’t make sense. He suspected she was sleeping around, but perhaps that wasn’t fair. Perhaps he was simply displacing the real sources of his anger onto a safer issue. How well was she looking after the girls? He wasn’t happy with their informal custody arrangement as it stood. He wanted more involvement in his daughters’ lives.

      And now Patsy McNichol had apparently gone into premature labour, with bleeding that didn’t surprise him but definitely wasn’t good. She’d done well so far with the pregnancy, and they’d all been crossing their fingers that this wouldn’t happen.

      There was no time to eat, or to gulp the coffee he craved. He left a message on the answering-machine at his practice, asking his staff to reschedule the first hour of his morning appointments, and he reversed out of the garage and pressed his finger to the button on his remote control garage door opener at six thirty-three.

      He couldn’t help reviewing Patsy McNichol’s history as he drove. She was thirty-five years old, by no means too old for a first baby but old enough to have developed the uterine fibroid tumours in the muscle layer of the uterine wall which had clouded the safety of this pregnancy from the beginning.

      Unfortunately, the fibroids had been small enough to have sent out no warning signals before she’d conceived. If he’d known about them before the McNichols had started trying for a baby, Pete would have recommended surgery—the procedure was called a myomectomy—which would in all likelihood have cleared the way for a normal, healthy pregnancy.

      As soon as Patsy had conceived, however, it had been too late. Pregnancy produced hormones—high levels of oestrogen and progesterone which stimulated rapid growth of the fibroids. With the relative positions of the fibroids and the placenta that he’d seen on more than one ultrasound scan over the past three months, Mrs McNichol had been lucky to have had so few problems thus far.

      There’d been signs on the most recent ultrasound, however, that the baby was no longer getting its optimum amount of nourishment. Although, thanks to the growth of the fibroids, the uterus itself was now very large, the baby wasn’t.

      Patsy was desperate to keep the pregnancy going in safety. She’d given up work around the family farm months earlier than she and her husband had originally planned, and had gone on bed rest as soon as Pete had mentioned the idea. She’d had two or three episodes of moderate bleeding which they’d managed to control through medication, but now there was cramping as well.

      A few months from now, when the uterus had returned to its pre-pregnancy