“Miss Kawasemi?” Orito kneels on a stale and sticky futon. “Can you hear me?”
In the rice paddy beyond the garden, a cacophony of frogs detonates.
Orito dabs the concubine’s sweat-drenched face with a damp cloth.
“She’s barely spoken”—the maid holds the lamp—“for hours and hours . . .”
“Miss Kawasemi, I’m Aibagawa. I’m a midwife. I want to help.”
Kawasemi’s eyes flicker open. She manages a frail sigh. Her eyes shut.
She is too exhausted, Orito thinks, even to fear dying tonight.
Dr. Maeno whispers through the muslin curtain. “I wanted to examine the child’s presentation myself, but . . .” The elderly scholar chooses his words with care. “But this is prohibited, it seems.”
“My orders are clear,” states the chamberlain. “No man may touch her.”
Orito lifts the bloodied sheet and finds, as warned, the fetus’s limp arm, up to the shoulder, protruding from Kawasemi’s vagina.
“Have you ever seen such a presentation?” asks Dr. Maeno.
“Yes: in an engraving, from the Dutch text Father was translating.”
“This is what I prayed to hear! The Observations of William Smellie?”
“Yes: Dr. Smellie terms it,” Orito uses the Dutch, “‘Prolapse of the Arm.’”
Orito clasps the fetus’s mucus-smeared wrist to search for a pulse.
Maeno now asks her in Dutch, “What are your opinions?”
There is no pulse. “The baby is dead,” Orito answers, in the same language, “and the mother will die soon, if the child is not delivered.”
She places her fingertips on Kawasemi’s distended belly and probes the bulge around the inverted navel. “It was a boy.” She kneels between Kawasemi’s parted legs, noting the narrow pelvis, and sniffs the bulging labia: she detects the malty mixture of grumous blood and excrement, but not the stench of a rotted fetus. “He died one or two hours ago.”
Orito asks the maid, “When did the waters break?”
The maid is still mute with astonishment at hearing a foreign language.
“Yesterday morning, during the Hour of the Dragon,” says the stony-voiced housekeeper. “Our lady entered labor soon after.”
“And when was the last time that the baby kicked?”
“The last kick would have been around noon today.”
“Dr. Maeno, would you agree the infant is in”—she uses the Dutch term—“the ‘transverse breech position’?”
“Maybe,” the doctor answers in their code tongue, “but without an examination . . .”
“The baby is twenty days late, or more. It should have been turned.”
“Baby’s resting,” the maid assures her mistress. “Isn’t that so, Dr. Maeno?”
“What you say”—the honest doctor wavers—“may well be true.”
“My father told me,” Orito says, “Dr. Uragami was overseeing the birth.”
“So he was,” grunts Maeno, “from the comfort of his consulting rooms. After the baby stopped kicking, Uragami ascertained that, for geomantic reasons discernible to men of his genius, the child’s spirit is reluctant to be born. The birth henceforth depends on the mother’s willpower.” The rogue, Maeno needs not add, dares not bruise his reputation by presiding over the stillbirth of such an estimable man’s child. “Chamberlain Tomine then persuaded the magistrate to summon me. When I saw the arm, I recalled your doctor of Scotland and requested your help.”