Chapter 20
For Rose, the week was an experiment in survival.
She threw herself into Lizzie’s care with manic precision, similar to the energy that once marked the worst of her convent days. Each morning began in the nursery, with the act of coaxing the baby awake from her linens and warming milk to precisely the temperature that soothed and never scalded.
If the child fussed, Rose was there, hands steady, voice a metronome of comfort. She cataloged every feed, every evacuation, every twitch of a feverish brow, as if by charting the details she could arrest the drift of her own life.
She did not see Felix.
That is, she did not see the Felix who used to share breakfast with her, whose presence had once pressed against the atmosphere of any room he entered.
The Felix she saw now existed in echoes and absences: the creak of a floorboard, the residue of smoke in a corridor, the drift of masculine cologne in the air late at night.
If he passed by the nursery, he did so as a shadow flicking across the frosted pane of the hallway door.
She learned to listen for the brush of his boots on the stone, to anticipate the subtle click of him passing by, pausing—sometimes she thought he paused—before retreating.
The first days were the hardest.
It was not, as she’d supposed, the memory of the last conversation that haunted her, but the way that conversation devoured every subsequent silence.
In the late hours, when Lizzie at last fell into a gurgling sleep, Rose would rest her palm against the baby’s back and count the breaths.
She tried not to count the hours since Felix last spoke to her, but her mind was a greedy ledger, and it did so anyway.
Mrs. Finch, the housekeeper, seemed to know.
She managed the staff with uncommon tact, ensuring that trays appeared in the nursery at odd hours, that the tea always remained at proper temperature, and that warm bread could be had even late at night.
Rose wondered if the woman had once suffered her own heartbreak, or if she was merely a connoisseur of other people’s disasters.
Lizzie responded to the new regime by growing louder and more demanding. Her waking hours stretched until she seemed a perpetual engine of need.
Rose met each challenge with a rigid kindness. She sang lullabies, and though her voice was never particularly beautiful, the baby seemed to thrive on it.
In those rare moments when Lizzie slept, Rose allowed herself small luxuries: a half cup of tea gone tepid, a few lines of poetry scratched in the margin of a letter never sent, a minute of staring out the high nursery window at the late spring rain.
Sometimes she imagined what Felix was doing—if he still lingered in the study, surrounded by his treaties and law books, or if he took his dinner in the solitude of the gallery, the long table set for one. She wondered if he missed her, even a little. If he thought of her at all.
She did not let herself cry.
There was no room for that, not with the baby’s needs consuming every scrap of her. Instead, she compartmentalized: the hurt went here, the longing there, the regret carefully boxed up for another day.
On the third morning, Mrs. Finch arrived with a note.
It was not from Felix, but from the head gardener, requesting her preference for a new order of herbs for the kitchen beds.
The housekeeper did not comment on the thinness of the excuse, but Rose recognized the choreography: the staff was keeping her busy, as one might distract a convalescent or a dangerous animal.
She walked through the gardens with Lizzie in her arms, the baby’s head covered in a makeshift bonnet.
The damp air did her good; the sound of birdsong, the chill in her lungs, reminded her that the world was larger than her own pain.
She watched the gardeners as they cut back the deadwood, patient and ruthless, and she felt something like envy for their simple certainties.
Time congealed. A day became another, the baby became a little heavier, the world a little less sharp.
Each night, she thought about what she had said to Felix. “I love you.” And each night, she wondered if she could ever erase that moment and replace it with another. She did not think she wanted to because, when she said those words, she’d meant them.
By the sixth night, even her dreams had learned the trick of avoidance.
She slept in fits, and when she did, she dreamed of impossible things: Felix sitting beside her at the breakfast table, his hand brushing hers as if no words had ever come between them; Lizzie grown, running through the orchard, her face radiant with something that was equal parts defiance and joy.
In the dream, Rose called out to the child, but her voice was slow and syrupy, and Lizzie did not turn back.
She woke, sometimes, to the creak of the nursery door. Once she thought she saw the silhouette of a man in the hall, but when she blinked, it was only the lamp’s reflection against the window, the world outside so dark it swallowed any promise of movement.
On the seventh morning, Lizzie woke with a small, fretful cry, her fists knotted in the blanket. Rose scooped her up, whispering reassurance, but the baby’s head felt oddly hot against her palm. Not a fever, not yet, but the ghost of one, coiled and waiting.
Rose pressed her lips to Lizzie’s brow, breathing in the fine scent of her, and felt the tremor of real fear.
She rocked the baby in the window seat, watching as the first light painted the orchard silver. It would rain again, she was certain, and somewhere in the house Felix would drink his coffee alone, eyes fixed on the page, his mind as far from her as the city itself.
Rose was tired. Tired of waiting, tired of pretending.
She wanted to reach across the hall, knock on the study door, and demand that he look at her—really look—but she did not.
Instead, she held the child tighter, memorizing the fragile weight of her, and promised herself that whatever storm was coming, she would not let it find Lizzie unguarded.
The hours passed, and the sky darkened. Rose drew the curtains, cradled Lizzie, and let the world outside the nursery collapse into a single, perfect point of focus.
Night collapsed on the house, buckling under its own darkness. Rose had managed, for a few hours, to sleep. She remembered nothing of drifting off, only the way her head jerked up at the first brittle shriek from the cradle.
She was across the room before she’d fully surfaced, the world reduced to the lurch of her heart and the shadowed outline of the nursery.
Lizzie’s face was a storm: scarlet, shiny, contorted in outrage. Rose scooped her up, but the heat coming off the child’s skin was enough to startle her backward. The baby howled, limbs thrashing, body rigid with pain.
Rose did the thing she’d done a hundred times: she shushed and swayed, checked the diaper, and pressed her cheek to Lizzie’s damp curls.
None of it mattered. The fever was a wall, and it would not be moved.
In the hall, her own cries must have been audible, for within moments the door opened. Felix was there, disheveled, shirt half-buttoned, eyes wild as if he’d run the length of the corridor.
“What happened?” he asked, voice too loud for the hour.
“She’s burning,” Rose said. “I—she woke with it. It wasn’t here at midnight.”
Felix strode forward, knelt by the nursery fire, and fetched the lamp. He inspected the child with detachment, something that might have once infuriated Rose, but now looked more like an effort to contain his own terror. He touched Lizzie’s brow, then the back of her neck.
“Fetch the doctor,” Rose whispered.
Felix nodded and rushed to the corridor, finding a footman and instructing him to alert the physician. The footman ran off, and Felix returned to the room.
She clung to Lizzie, listening to the shudder of the baby’s breath, the way it rattled and broke. Felix hovered nearby, uncertain, then reached for a quilt and wrapped it around them both.
The physician arrived before dawn. The man was skinny and white-haired, not the same doctor that Rose knew, and his hands trembled when he took Lizzie from her arms.
The exam was quick and brutal.
The doctor peeled back Lizzie’s eyelids, pinched her thigh until she shrieked, then held her up to the lamplight as if she were a specimen to be cataloged. He asked questions Rose could barely hear, then issued instructions in a reedy monotone.
“Keep her cool, but not cold. Small sips of water every hour. No milk. Bathe her head and neck if the fever climbs.”
“What else?” Rose asked, voice brittle.
He looked at Felix. “Pray. There’s little else to be done for infants when it is this dire. Sometimes it turns, sometimes it doesn’t.”
The phrase settled in the room.
Felix escorted the physician out, and for a moment, Rose was alone. She pressed her face into Lizzie’s burning shoulder and tried to whisper away the heat.
She did not remember sitting down, but she was in the nursery rocking chair, the baby cradled awkwardly in the crook of her arm, when Felix returned.
His face was unreadable. He knelt by her side, one hand bracing the leg of the chair. “She’s strong,” he said, not looking at Rose. “She’ll fight.”
Rose did not reply.
The hours went by. They followed the doctor’s orders with religious zeal.
Rose coaxed water past Lizzie’s lips, drop by drop.
Felix dampened cloths and rotated them against the baby’s brow.
Once, he tried to relieve Rose by taking the child, but Lizzie’s wails reached a hysterical pitch the moment she left Rose’s arms, and so the experiment was abandoned.
It was in the bone-white stretch of pre-dawn that Rose caught Felix watching her—not the baby, but her.
He said nothing, but his mouth was set in a line so hard it looked like a wound.