The Honourable Midwife. Lilian Darcy

she said. ‘I can see why you’d want Dr Di Luzio and Dr Cassidy.’

      Gian Di Luzio was Glenfallon’s one obstetrician and gynaecologist, and a woman would have to go quite a distance to find another one. Like most parts of rural Australia, Glenfallon was chronically in need of specialists. As a result, there were several GPs in the area who’d obtained extra credentials in various fields to meet demand.

      Pete was one of them. He’d returned to Glenfallon at the beginning of the year after two years spent in Sydney, and he was now better qualified than anyone but Gian in delivering babies and dealing with associated areas, but he was by no means too proud to reach out and grab a fully fledged specialist’s extra experience when he needed it. With the twin risks of post-partum haemorrhage and a delicate baby, this was one of those times.

      Nell Cassidy was no slouch when it came to extra experience either. She ran the hospital’s accident and emergency department with an iron hand, and no velvet gloves involved. She also oversaw the hospital’s acute-care patients—adults, children and infants. She was extremely bright, unflappable in a crisis and always the very last person to accept that a patient couldn’t be saved.

      She’d revived one of Pete’s patients last year—a four-year-old girl, the same age as his daughters now were—after a near-drowning, and she’d kept vigilant when everyone else had been ready to celebrate and relax.

      Two days after the incident in the back-yard pool, when Amber Szabo had already started smiling and talking and her parents and hospital staff were talking about her discharge, Dr Cassidy had headed off a major organ shutdown, battled death once again and saved the child.

      Now, as far as Pete was concerned, the A and E staff could saddle the woman with any unflattering nickname they liked, but he would defend her with spirit all the way.

      They had a full team assembled by seven-twenty. They had type A-positive blood waiting for Patsy, and a neonatal resus trolley equipped and waiting for her baby. They had oxygen and intubation equipment, monitors for heart rate, respiratory rate and blood oxygen saturation, and a barrage of drugs on hand.

      They had overhead lights switched on, trays of shiny, sterile equipment lined up, and their patient ready to be wheeled in. The pace had picked up in Labour and Delivery, too. The recently delivered mum had been moved across to the post-partum ward, but they had a new admission to take her place—a young woman of nineteen, who’d had only sporadic prenatal care and no second-trimester sonogram, and was uncertain of her dates. Around eight, eight and a half months gone, she thought.

      Thirty-six or thirty-seven weeks? Apparently Bronwyn Jackson wasn’t convinced of this after a manual examination.

      ‘She feels too small,’ the midwife reported to Pete. ‘By the height of the fundus, I’d say thirty-five weeks, maybe even thirty-four.’

      ‘Can we try to stop the labour?’ Pete asked.

      ‘No chance. Fully effaced, half-dilated, contractions every few minutes. This baby’s coming today, and we’ve got the resus trolley on hand.’

      ‘I’ll get there for the delivery if I can.’

      ‘The joint is jumping all of a sudden.’

      ‘Better phone Alison Cairns and tell her she might be needed, too.’ Dr Cairns was good with fragile babies.

      The new admission, Rebecca Childer, had been put down as Pete’s patient, although her family was fairly new to Glenfallon, and he’d only ever seen her mother, Susan, for a couple of routine things. He didn’t like having this new, questionable labour hanging over his head when Patsy and her baby were uppermost in his mind.

      The baby obviously didn’t want to stay in Patsy’s tumour-filled uterus any longer. He only hoped the little girl would be safe out of there, and in their hands. Should he have sent Patsy to a bigger facility before this? She’d argued against the idea very strongly, but he could have presented it in starker terms.

      If we lose this baby, came the insistent thought, how much will I question my own decisions? And where’s Rebecca Childer going to be up to in her labour when I get out of Theatre?

      ‘Dr Croft looks terrible,’ Emma said quietly to Nell Cassidy.

      Although Emma was over a year younger than the A and E specialist, she and Nell had been friends since their school days. More specifically, since the Glenfallon Ladies’ College Senior A netball team’s memorable trip to Sydney about seventeen years ago, for a round of competitions.

      Teenage giggles and confessions during the long bus ride had gradually evolved into the more considered honesty and support of adult friendship, and had survived divergent career paths and life experiences, long periods of living in different places and even some significant criticisms of each other’s choices.

      Nell knew that Emma considered her too cool and too uncompromising in her approach to her work. Emma knew that Nell would have ‘thrown that parasitical stepmother of yours out months ago’, instead of putting up with the situation until Beryl had left in a huff to go and live with her own daughter earlier that year.

      Somehow, however, these differences of opinion didn’t matter. This same honesty now made it possible for the two of them to have a serious, if snatched conversation on an unrelated subject while they waited for their own role in safeguarding the McNichol baby’s first minutes of life.

      ‘Terrible is a bit harsh,’ Nell said in response to Emma’s comment. ‘He looks tired, definitely. And stressed.’

      ‘That’s what I meant, Nell. It was sympathetic. I wasn’t accusing him of having a bad hair day and tacky clothes. Is he tired and stressed?’

      ‘Most people are when their marriage is in the process of doing a slow-motion shatter.’

      ‘I thought his marriage was over. In his e-mails, he always…Well, in his e-mails, he sounded better than he looks.’

      ‘These things take time, Emma. But I expect if he’s been talking about his divorce in his e-mails, you know a lot more about it than I do.’

      ‘I know hardly anything,’ Emma said quickly.

      She was sorry she’d made the initial comment to Nell now. She hadn’t meant this to turn into an analysis or a catechism. Having thought of Pete Croft as a kind of penfriend for the past three months, she’d been concerned to see the evidence of stress and problems in his face—problems he’d mentioned to her only in the most oblique way.

      Something changed in him when they began the surgery, however. She saw him blink and work the muscles in his face, as if trying to wake them up, and there was a new alertness in his expression, a determination and focus that stripped away the signs of weariness and emotional preoccupation she’d first seen.

      Pete was a good-looking man. Somehow, she’d never seen it before. Maybe because he didn’t fit the tall-dark-and-handsome model that most women wanted. He was tall enough, yes, but he wasn’t a giant—just under six feet, nicely built in an athletic way. He wasn’t dark. He did have brown eyes, but they weren’t for drowning in. They were too focused, too intelligent, too ready to be amused and too casually kind.

      His skin was typically Australian—fair, a little roughened by the power of the sun, and uneven in tone. On a woman, it would have been disastrous skin, but on a man it was…very male. Rugged and strong and casually attractive.

      As Nell had pointed out, he hadn’t been near a razor that morning, and his beard was growing in fast, a red-gold sheen of stubble surrounding firm lips which looked thin when he was absorbed in his work and fuller when he smiled his generous smile.

      His hair was cut so you could see that it started as a very dark, rusty gold and went blonder as it grew out, until it settled on sand mixed with straw as its definitive colour. He had little creases at the corners of his eyelids—creases he needed a woman to kiss away with soft, tender lips—and he had a tanned curve of neck at the back which could make that same woman want to stroke it with her fingers, then thread them upwards into the