By four twenty-two on Thanksgiving afternoon, I had already decided that if my husband brought his mistress into my house, I would not scream.

My daughter was born on the twenty-second of December, during the third major snowstorm of the winter.

She did not wait for the hospital in Charlottesville.

At two o'clock in the morning, the water broke with a sharp, heavy pop that woke me from a dream about river stones. By three, the contractions were coming every four minutes, like iron bands tightening around my pelvis, dragging me down to my knees on the rag rug beside the four-poster bed.

Rosemary did not call an ambulance.

She knew the county roads were drifted four feet deep through the hollow and that the state plows wouldn't reach the turnpike until noon.

She called Dr. Henderson from the village—a man who was seventy-one, drove a nineteen-eighty-five Jeep with chains on all four wheels, and had delivered Daniel in the very same room thirty-eight years before.

The room smelled of boiling water, lavender oil from the dresser, and the clean, sharp cold of the snow that had banked up against the lower panes of the south windows.

Rosemary stood on my left side, her sleeves rolled up, her strong, swollen old fingers locked around my wrist with a grip that felt like an iron cable.

“Breathe through the nose, Maggie,” she said, her voice steady, low, and completely devoid of panic. “Don't fight the bone. The bone knows what it’s doing. It’s been doing it since eighteen-eighty-four.”

At five-fourteen, as the first gray light of the winter solstice began to outline the gables of the carriage house through the snow, the child arrived with a single, furious wail that sounded like a brass trumpet in the quiet house.

Eight pounds, four ounces.

Thick, dark hair like her great-grandfather’s, and eyes that were the deep, slate-gray of river stone before the sun dries it.

Dr. Henderson wiped her with a warm flannel towel, tied the cord with linen thread from Rosemary’s workbasket, and laid her on my bare chest.

Her skin was hot, slippery, and smelled of salt and sweet milk.

She stopped crying the moment her cheek touched my collarbone. Her small, purple mouth opened and closed against my skin, searching, until her fingers—long, strong fingers with tiny, perfect nails—curled around the platinum band on my fourth finger.

Rosemary sat down on the edge of the mattress.

She was exhausted. The lines in her forehead looked like deep trenches carved into old dry earth, and her shoulders were curved forward with the seventy-year weight of the Hollis name.

She reached out with a single, trembling finger and touched the child’s cheek.

“What will you call her, Maggie?”

“Eleanor,” I said, my voice hoarse from the work, my eyes burning with the tears I hadn't let myself shed since Thanksgiving afternoon. “Eleanor Hollis Vance.”

Rosemary let out a long, slow breath that sounded like a prayer.

“Her great-grandmother was named Eleanor,” she whispered. “She was the one who brought the rosebushes from Ireland in a tub of lard so the roots wouldn't freeze on the boat. She lived to be ninety-two and never let a man tell her where to plant a cabbage.”

She looked up at me, her old eyes shining behind her spectacles in the gray morning light.

“She’ll do, Maggie,” the old woman said, pulling the wool blanket up over the baby’s shoulders. “She’ll do very well indeed.”

Downstairs, the grandfather clock struck six.

Six heavy, brassy rattles that traveled up through the floorboards, through the joists, through the heart-pine sills that had been laid when the oxen were still pulling stone from the riverbed.