She did not pray for a child because she feared that, without one, in her dotage she’d become a crone in a cottage: a woman such as Constance Winston. She did not pray for a child for Thomas: he was old and she wasn’t even sure that he desired another baby. No, she prayed for a newborn because she wanted now to love a child the way that Thomas’s first wife, Anne Drury, had loved Peregrine, and the way that child, now a woman, in turn loved her offspring.
