Chapter 1 #2
The nuns filed out, robes hissing over the flagstones. Rose barely noticed. All her attention was on the letter and the baby whose fist poked blindly at the air. As the latch clicked behind the last nun, Mother Superior stood.
She gestured at the hard-backed chair in front of the desk. “Sit.”
Rose obeyed, folding her hands in her lap to keep them from trembling.
“How did you learn of this matter?” the Mother Superior asked. “Who has been passing messages to you?”
It was a trap.
Honesty always costs someone else.
Rose found a lie deep within herself, coming out as foreign as another language. “I overheard it in the hall. Some of the girls gossip when they think no one listens.”
Mother Superior regarded her in silence. “Eavesdropping is a sin, girl.” The proper response was immediate repentance, but Rose was so tired of bending to others’ whims.
“So is lying, Reverend Mother.”
Something flickered in the old woman’s eyes. The tension between them stretched like cooling wax, slowly growing brittle. With a soft sigh, Mother Superior slid the letter across the desk.
“You might as well read it.”
Rose lifted it, breaking the seal with her thumbnail before unfolding the single, lined page. The ink was blotted in places as if the writer’s hands had shaken, but the handwriting was delicate, familiar.
She read in silence at first, then aloud:
Dearest Rose,
If you are reading this, it means I am gone from this world. I am sorry, so sorry, to burden you once more, but I have no other. My daughter is named Elizabeth, though I call her Lizzie, and she is all I have left worth leaving behind.
Rose paused, the words lancing straight through her composure.
Julia had a child? She hadn’t seen her best friend for over two years—since she had been sent here.
After the initial disappointment of Julia never replying to her letters, Rose had begun to suspect that the nuns were confiscating her mail.
Julia had been too good a friend to desert her in her hour of need.
Rose recalled one-sided conversations where she had pleaded with the nuns to check if she’d received any correspondence, but they had always shrugged and feigned ignorance.
Now she had proof. How many of her letters had the Mother Superior burned? And now her friend was gone forever? The knowledge was almost too much to bear, but she forced herself to continue.
Please, keep her with you. I know that, with you, she might know kindness, even in the confines of duty. The Duke of Carden is her father, though he will never claim her. Please raise her with the gentleness you showed me. I wish only that she might smile and not always be in shadow.
I loved you best of all, and I am sorry. Pray for me.
Your Julia.
A sob cracked her last word. The letter shook in Rose’s palm, but she clung to it.
She crossed to the basket and slipped her eyes over the baby, over Lizzie, who blinked up at her with untroubled wonder. Her fist curled and uncurled, seeking a finger to wrap around. Rose obliged, letting the tiny hand clamp onto her index finger.
“Hello,” she whispered.
The baby’s lips pursed, then stretched into a lopsided, gummy smile.
Mother Superior cleared her throat. “St. Clement’s is far from an orphanage. We have neither the means nor the staff to care for an infant.”
Rose did not let go of the baby’s hand. Desperation rushed up, a heat in her chest that could not be ignored.
“She is no burden. I will see to her myself,” she said.
Mother Superior narrowed her eyes. Rose heard the desperation in her own voice and hated it, but pressed on.
“I’ll do whatever is needed. Extra duties, the night watches, the laundry.
Sister Margret will not assign anyone. I’ll do all of it. Anything for her to stay here.”
Mother Superior said nothing. She folded her hands on the desk with the patience of someone who had outlasted a great many pleading girls and expected to outlast a great many more.
“Please.” The word cost Rose something. “She is all that is left of my friend.”
“St. Clement’s is a house of God,” the older woman said. “Not a foundling ward. I will not have the order disrupted by the consequences of another woman’s choices.”
“She is a baby. She has made no choices.”
Mother Superior’s eyes moved to Lizzie with the cool assessment of a woman pricing livestock at a fair. Rose held still under it.
“You are a novice,” she said. “You have no means, no standing, and no authority to make promises on behalf of this house.” She paused. “And you may not always be here to keep them.”
“Then I will stay here,” Rose said. “As long as she needs me. I will never abandon my work or my duties here. Please… let me be there for this child.”
The clock measured out the silence between them. Mother Superior looked at the child once more, then at Rose, then at some fixed point above both their heads, as though consulting something neither of them could see.
“Very well.” Her voice carried no warmth. “But understand me: she is your responsibility entirely. If she disrupts the order, if she draws complaint, if she costs this house more than we can account for, she goes. No debate. No appeals. No second audience with me on the matter.”
Rose bit back her frustration and nodded.
Although the Mother Superior’s coldness made her blood simmer with indignation, a profound relief soon took over, filling her chest. She lifted Lizzie from the basket, tucking her into the crook of her arm.
The warmth of the little body against her own was more comforting than she expected. It was an anchor.
“Go, then,” Mother Superior gestured toward the door. “See to your work—and to her.”
Rose hoisted in her arms, pressed to her heart, and for the first time in years, felt the stirrings of something like hope.
She paused for a moment in the office’s threshold, bobbing the baby up and down in her arms. Her eyelids fluttered, then settled into the half-closed bliss of an infant who knew she was held and safe.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Then, silence fractured. Firm, distinctly masculine footsteps echoed down the corridor, forcing Rose to stiffen, place one hand on Lizzie’s head, and look up.
A man’s silhouette filled the office door. He was still draped in a gray overcoat. His vivid green eyes shone as he directed his gaze right at Rose.
She knew those eyes, had seen their echo in the baby’s face.
The man was Felix Greycliff, Duke of Carden.
“You…” she whispered.
Felix surveyed her. “That child,” he said, not as a question but as an accusation. “Is not going anywhere. She is mine.”