Cissie Burns is separated from her son after giving birth when the baby is taken from her almost immediately, leaving her without even the knowledge of where he has gone. Recounted to Sunday Small after Cissie’s release from Hatter’s Hall, the event turns an imposed pregnancy into a devastating maternal bond—and exposes how institutional confinement compounds the violence done to her.

Confinement and the conditions of separation

Cissie’s account places the birth within the aftermath of Albert Pinnegar’s assault and her confinement at Hatter’s Hall. While carrying a child forced upon her, she expected to hate him: the pregnancy had not been chosen, and the man responsible had violated her. In retrospect, she identifies the apparent certainty of that hatred as the bleakest part of her confinement, because she could not yet imagine how her feelings would change when the child was born.

The novel sets Cissie’s confinement against a workhouse system organized around separation. Women, boys, girls, and men occupied different sections; women and girls were assigned work such as sewing, cooking, cleaning, and laundry, and inmates rarely came together except on Sundays, when they could attend church. Sunday had witnessed the damage that such divisions could do to families. Cissie’s forced distance from her child belongs to this wider pattern of institutional power over vulnerable people, though her account makes the particular loss unmistakably personal.

The birth and the brief encounter

When her son was born and placed in her arms, Cissie’s anticipated rejection gave way to love. She describes feeling something she had never felt before: the baby was part of her, and the identity of his father no longer mattered to her. Having never had anyone of her own to love, she experienced the brief holding as the arrival of a bond that was hers, even though the circumstances surrounding the child’s conception had been coercive.

That bond was cut short. Cissie was allowed to hold her son for only a couple of minutes before he was taken away. She never saw him again, did not know where he was, and did not know who had him. Her certainty that no one else would love him as she could is not simply a claim about the baby’s new home: it conveys the lasting wound of being denied both her child and any knowledge of his fate. The separation leaves the birth without the security of reunion or even an answer about what became of him.

Sunday’s intervention and Cissie’s return

When Sunday finds Cissie after her confinement, Cissie has been reduced to a painfully thin figure, with prominent bones and a blank, exhausted stare. Recognition comes gradually; then Cissie tells her that they took her baby. She breaks down in Sunday’s arms as Mrs Roundtree encourages her to cry. The reunion with her friend gives Cissie someone who can hear what happened, but it cannot restore the child she has lost.

Cissie later thanks Sunday for telling Lady Lavinia Huntley about her and helping to get her out of Hatter’s Hall. She says that she had lost all hope after her son was taken and believes that remaining there much longer might have driven her mad. Although she is beginning to look better, she is still painfully thin and troubled by dreadful nightmares; Mrs Roundtree insists that she rest for at least another week rather than return to work at once. Her recovery is therefore real but incomplete: release ends her confinement, not the memory of those years or the grief of separation.

Aftermath and significance

The episode makes the difference between imposed motherhood and chosen attachment central to Cissie’s story. She had every reason, as a victim of assault, to fear the child as a continuation of what had been done to her. Instead, the moment she holds him brings an attachment that is immediate and profound. The institutional act of taking him does not undo that love; it makes the loss more acute by leaving her with only a few minutes of contact and no account of his whereabouts.

Cissie’s testimony also gives Sunday’s rescue of her a concrete consequence: her friend’s disclosure to Lady Lavinia Huntley helps remove her from Hatter’s Hall and gives her a chance to recover among people who respond to her suffering. Yet Cissie’s release cannot resolve the separation itself. The baby remains absent, and the uncertainty surrounding him persists. The event thus joins private bereavement to institutional power: Cissie’s capacity to love is affirmed, while her ability to remain with her child is denied.