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Reina’s throat cinched around her answer. “She’s grown too weak to talk. She won’t open her eyes.”

“There’s no one more skilled at this procedure than Dr. Gibson.” He began to button the shirt’s half placket. “And it’s being done the way Tuppence wants. She’ll have a female doctor with the midwife assisting, and June there as well.”

“June?” Reina echoed in surprise.

“She’ll take care of the babe during the surgery.” As he saw her worry, he added, “She said she has experience looking after children.”

“Not newborns.”

“When she talked to the doctor, she seemed confident.”

“June always seems confident,” Reina said, her frown deepening. “Even when she’s not.” She went to the open doorway to look down the hallway. It was eerily still. But she could hear the sound of June’s voice drifting out from the kitchen, and the deeper timbre of Maddock’s replies.

“A surgery . . . a baby being born . . . in my kitchen,” Reina said, shaking her head in wonder. “How odd.”

“Is it?” John came to the threshold, keeping a small but necessary distance between them. “To my mind, it’s fitting.” His gaze moved tenderly over her face as he added, “The work done in a kitchen is an act of care and love.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Let the River Be a River

Never show fear. Plow through obstacles, deny mistakes, and hit back harder. Those were a few of the lessons of June’s hardscrabble childhood. She and Ma had lived in a lodging house in Marylebone, with one privy in a yard shared by many families. There had always been spiteful comments from the others about Ma working as a cookmaid for a kept woman. Everyone liked to have someone to look down on, and poor folk were no different. The other children had mocked June for it, the little ratbags, until she’d shut their mouths with her fists.

That kind of life hadn’t equipped June with the vocabulary for moments like this. She wasn’t scared, exactly; this feeling was a few steps sideways from that. She didn’t know what her own reaction would be, seeing her friend being operated on. Maybe it would all go wrong in there. Maybe her beloved kitchen would turn into a chamber of horrors. This medical procedure named for a tragic, stabbed figure was cloaked in mystery.

But Dr. Gibson had said she could use the help, and June wasn’t going to turn her back on Tuppence.

Carefully she unfolded a sterilized white sheet over the kitchen table and dampened it with the carbolic solution sprayer. Nearby, the black-haired Irish bloke who’d carried in equipment for Dr. Gibson was attaching little mirrors to surgical lamps. A cool one, he was, not inclined to chat.

Mad was in the kitchen too, having been recruited to sprinkle the floor with disinfecting powder. All three of them had washed first, with a nasty chemical solution that made June’s hands and arms prickle unpleasantly.

To her surprise, Mad took a clean towel from a metal tin and brought it to her.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“Your eyes is watering.”

“That’s on account of fumes,” she snapped, “not nerves.” She darted a wary glance at the Irish bloke, but he paid them no mind, acting like he hadn’t even heard.

“Didn’t say it was nerves,” Mad replied.

“Good, ’cause it ain’t.” She snatched the cloth, blotted her eyes hastily, and tucked it into her sleeve.

“Everyone’s got nerves, now and then,” Mad said.

“What are you going on about?” June asked irritably. Did she look scared? Was it that obvious?

He shrugged. “Just thinking on the night you and the other ladies in cookery class was learning how to bone a duck. Sharp knives—why, any one of yer could’ve cut off a finger, quick as a wink. And it ain’t pretty work, pulling a ridgebone clean out of—”

“Spine,” June corrected.

“—spine clean out of a duck carcass. But you all did it. Not one of you ladies hung your arses back. You all went on and did your work.”

June thought back to that evening. Everyone in the class had dreaded the disgusting task. But Mrs. Bannsright had advised them to divide it into small steps, which had helped. The first time was always the hardest, she’d said. And Mrs. Blot had added that instead of thinking about how unpleasant the process was, they should try to focus on how important and necessary it was to prepare good food for others.

The Irish bloke had gone to glance down the hallway. “It’s time,” he said calmly. “Pembroke’s bringing her.” He motioned for Mad to leave the kitchen with him.

June’s heart banged painfully in her chest. She was embarrassed by the desire to walk into Mad’s arms and hide like a field mouse that had found a knothole in a corn barn.