There was an exasperated raise of his brows. He had not seen a pregnant woman up this close, and by God he wished it had stayed that way. But the day to make certain the unthinkable did not pass had quite passed and came to a new sunset: what now? What now that his brother lived in sin? What now of this woman, who may or may not be of their people? What now, that this child be born to haunt them all as a constant reminder of human error?

The woman might yet pass – or Hashem might will it that the child never see sunlight, and even she might have a second chance at life. Especially if it were born in that sweat, and that mud!

But until then, the child was no less their duty than an orphan on a doorstep.

“I see,” he said to Uriel with an expression not unfamiliar to him: that of being thoroughly unimpressed.

He made no move to take her hand.

“Zechariah Meijer,” he introduced plainly. “… Not calamitous,” no thanks to her. “I doubt I need to tell you to make yourself comfortable.”

The butler had draped a sheet over the couch and its nice throw pillows (but alas, it would be taken away by the time Menachem was bleeding all over it), and Zechariah took a seat across from it at the coffee table.

“B’sha-ah tova,” he sighed. “When do you marry?”

The butler ambled by with a tray of three glasses and a table wine what with Victorian stances on drinking essentially being ‘the earlier, the better’. The cork came out without a fight or corkscrew, and it looked to be a third gone as it were.