"She's getting something, sure enough," the nurse said. Nellie heard the gulping noises the baby was making, too. The nurse went on, "You'll be better off if you go right on nursing her, too. Breast-fed babies don't get the bowel complaints that carry off so many little ones, not nearly as often as them that suck a bottle."

"Cheaper and easier to nurse a baby, too," Nellie said. "Nothing to buy, nothing to measure, nothing to boil. I'll do it as much as I can."

Edna watched in fascination. "They know just what to do, don't they?"

"They do that," the nurse said. "If they didn't, not a one of 'em'd live to grow up, and then where would we be?"

"You were the same way," Nellie told Edna. "I reckon I was the same way, too, and my ma, and her ma, and all the way back to the start of time." She didn't mention little Clara's father, nor Edna's father, nor her own father, nor any other man. That wasn't because she assumed they were the same way, too. It was because, as far as she was concerned, men weren't worth mentioning.

After about ten minutes, the baby stopped nursing. Nellie handed her to the nurse, who efficiently burped her. Clara cried for a little while, the high, thin wail of a newborn that always put Nellie in mind of a cat on a back fence. Then, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch on her back, she fell asleep.

Nellie found herself yawning, too. Not only were the remnants of the ether coursing through her, but she'd also been through labor and delivery: hard work, even if she hadn't felt most of it.

"Rest now, if you want to," the nurse said. "We'll want to keep you here for a week, maybe ten days, make sure you don't come down with childbed fever or anything else." She cast a speculative eye toward Nellie. That or anything else no doubt meant or anything else that's liable to happen to an old coot like you.

Had Nellie had more energy, she might have resented that. As she was now, without enough get-up-and-go to lick a postage stamp, she simply shrugged. A week or ten days with nothing to do but nurse the baby and eat and sleep looked like heaven to her.

Edna took a different perspective. "A week? Ten days?" she exclaimed in mock anger. "You're going to leave me running things by myself so long, Ma? That's a lot to hand me."

"I've already done a lot," Nellie said. "Besides, the place has to bring in enough to pay for my little holiday here."

It didn't, not really. She and Hal had saved up enough to meet the hospital bill. Hal knew how to sock away money. It wasn't the worst thing in the world. Nellie wished she were better at that. She'd learned some from paying attention to the way her husband handled things. Maybe she could learn more.

Edna stopped complaining, even in fun. Nellie thought she recognized the gleam in her daughter's eye. Hal wouldn't be able to watch Edna the way Nellie had ever since she'd become a woman. Edna wouldn't have a lot of time to get into mischief, but a girl didn't need a lot of time to get into mischief Fifteen minutes would do the job nicely.

And maybe, nine months from now, Edna would have an ether cone clapped over her face and wake up with a baby hardly younger than its aunt. If she did, Nellie hoped the baby would have a last name.

She yawned again. She was too tired even to worry about that very much. Whatever Edna did in the next week or so-if she did anything-she would damn well do, and she and Nellie and Hal would deal with the consequences-if there were consequences-later. The only thing Nellie wanted to deal with now was sleep. The light overhead and the hard hospital mattress fazed her not at all.

Before she could sleep, though, her husband came back into the room. He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek. "Everything will be fine," he said. "The doctor tells me you could not have done better. You will be well, and little Clara will be well, and every one of us will be well."

"Bully," Nellie said, and then a new word she'd started hearing in the coffeehouse: "Swell. Hal, you're sweet as anything, but will you please get the hell out of here and let me rest?"

"Of course. Of course." He almost stumbled over his own feet, he went out the door so fast. He paused in the doorway to blow her a kiss, and then he was gone. A moment later, Nellie was gone, too.

They woke her in the middle of the night to nurse the baby again. By then, all the anesthetic had worn off. Not to put too fine a point on it, she felt like hell. The night nurse brought her some aspirin. That was sending a boy to do a man's job. She wondered if she'd be able to go back to sleep once they took Clara away again. She did, which testified less to the tablets' effectiveness than to her own overwhelming exhaustion.

When she woke in the morning, she was ravenous. She would have yelled at Edna for serving a customer such greasy scrambled eggs, overcooked bacon, and cold toast. The coffee they gave her with it might have been brewed from mud. She didn't notice till the whole breakfast was gone. While she was eating, she noticed only that it filled the vast, echoing void in her midsection.

After Clara had had breakfast, too, a nurse escorted Nellie down the hall so she could take a bath. It was the first time she'd had a good look at her body since the baby was born. She didn't care for what she saw, not even a little bit. The skin of her belly hung loose and flabby, having been stretched to accommodate the baby who wasn't in there any more. It would tighten up again; she remembered that from the days following Edna's birth. She'd been a lot younger in those days, though. How much would it tighten now?

If Hal wanted her less after she came home… that wouldn't break her heart. It would, if anything, be a relief. She resolved to lay in a supply of safes. Now that she knew she could catch, she didn't intend to do it again. If Hal didn't care to wear them- She grimaced. There were other things they could do, things that carried no risk. She hated those things, having had to do them for men who laid coins on the nightstands of cheap hotel rooms, but she hated the notion of getting pregnant again even more.

As it had been on the way to the bathtub, her walk on the way back was not only slow but distinctly bowlegged. She remembered that, too. She'd had a baby come through there, all right. Clara was waiting for her when she returned to her bed. Nellie startled herself with a smile. Another baby, no. This one? "Not so bad," she said, and took her daughter in her arms.

On the night of November 4, Roger Kimball headed over to Freedom Party headquarters on King Street to get the Congressional election returns as fast as the telegraph brought them into Charleston. He'd tried to get Clarence Potter and Jake Delamotte to come along with him. They'd both begged off.

"If your madman friends do win some seats, I'll want to go out and get drunk, and I don't mean by way of celebration," Potter had said. "That being so, I may as well go straight to a saloon now. The company's apt to be better, anyhow."

"I aim to get drunk no matter what happens," Jack Delamotte had echoed. He'd gone along with Potter.

Summer soldiers, Kimball thought. They'd been willing enough to think about using Jake Featherston, but hadn't settled down for the long haul of using Featherston's party. A submersible skipper learned patience. Those who didn't learn ended up on the bottom of the ocean.

Smoke filled the Freedom Party offices when Kimball walked in. As soon as the door closed behind him, he held up a gallon jug of whiskey. A raucous cheer went up, and everybody in the place welcomed him like a long-lost brother. His was far from the only restorative there; several men already seemed distinctly elevated. He laughed. Potter and Delamotte could have got drunk here and saved themselves thousands of dollars-not that thousands of dollars meant much any more.