A Kiss for Midwinter (The Brothers Sinister) by Courtney Milan

the other woman’s very visible pregnancy or pleased by it—he never could guess how women would react.
    But Lydia greeted Mrs. Hall as she greeted everyone—with a warm, happy smile, with bright conversation and compliments.
    “I do love these curtains,” Lydia said earnestly. “They are both functional and quite pretty. Never tell me you made them yourself?”
    Jonas had never been able to manage that sort of small conversation. The labyrinthine rules attached to kind words usually left him bemused. And Miss Charingford was so good at it. He could have watched her make people smile for hours.
    When he saw Mrs. Hall, he didn’t see a woman who made curtains. She wasn’t slender to his eye. She was undernourished. On her skinny frame, the pregnant bump of her belly sat like a grotesque lump.
    There was a disease that was peculiar to women, and Mrs. Hall had it. It wasn’t a disease that came from exposure to contagion. It didn’t have a name. It was a sickness that took years to come on, and it crept up so gradually that people rarely noticed what was happening. It ravaged the rich and the poor alike—although, as with all illness, it landed most heavily on the poor.
    Miss Charingford moved from Mrs. Hall to her children, never once looking at Jonas. She hadn’t looked at him at all since her outburst.
    Not that it mattered now; he had work to do. Jonas set about seeing to his patient.
    “I lost another tooth,” Mrs. Hall said quietly. “I lost it two nights ago.”
    Her skin was dry and scaly to the touch; she had dark bags under her eyes. Her children gathered around Lydia in a group. From Miss Charingford’s basket, she’d taken a mass of wool stockings, which she distributed.
    “Good of you, to bring her by,” Mrs. Hall said. “Once was, I’d not take charity. Now…” She shrugged, as if to say she’d take anything she could get.
    “Your heart rate is acceptable,” he said, letting go of her wrist. “Just acceptable. There’s a little fluid in your lungs. I think that so long as you have a chance to rest and recover, you should not suffer too much in the next month.”
    She nodded at this. “I’ve done eight already,” she said. “I do know how it’s done, Doctor.”
    “It is not the childbirth itself that worries me.”
    He didn’t know the name of the disease she had, but he knew its symptoms. A man who wouldn’t breed his mare two seasons in a row for fear of causing her an injury would be at his wife within weeks of childbirth. He’d plant his seed in a field that had not lain fallow for years, and like an overproduced field, the wife inevitably failed. Her back stooped. Her skin changed. Her eyes yellowed. Teeth fell out; bones that were once strong would snap at the smallest slip on icy pavement. Carrying a child was hard on a woman’s body, and eight children, delivered ten months after one another, left a woman no room to recover.
    Every time he tried to make the argument, though, he found that women disliked being compared to mares and fields, no matter how apt the analogy was.
    As for the men—a fallow field, apparently, said nothing about a man’s virility. But a wife who bore child after child formed a living, walking boast, one that he could parade in front of his compatriots. Look at me! I’m a man!
    “The stuff that babes are made of comes from your own body, Mrs. Hall.” He straightened and put away his stethoscope. “If the babe needs the material of bones, it comes from you. If it needs the material of skin, it comes from you. There’s a reason you’re losing your teeth, Mrs. Hall.”
    She looked away.
    “You need to take a rest from bearing children. This babe likely won’t kill you. The next one might.”
    Mrs. Hall glanced over at Lydia, now handing out oranges to the children. She lowered her voice. “And how am I to feed them all if I take a rest? I know they might not look like much to the likes of you, but they’re precious to me.” Her tone