Three weeks later
Three weeks laterThey came for her at dawn.
She was already awake. The life inside her had made sure of that, shifting around, pressing her belly out with what she thought could be an elbow or a heel. She was always grateful for the touch. He – she sensed it was a ‘he’ – had gone quiet for a couple of days and she had scarcely slept at all, sure that she had lost him, as she had lost the other. Then the pushing out, the shifting, came again. A sunbeam in her darkness.
Her babe woke her; her thoughts kept her so. What am I to do, she wondered? What in Christ’s holy name am I to do?
Thomas Betterton had made it clear two nights before. If he occasionally admired her talent, he never really liked her, she knew. Only a few days after the murder of her husband John Chalker
