“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.
By noon, Lizzie’s fever peaked. The baby lay limp, eyes glassy, skin stretched tight across her cheeks. Rose’s mind began to fracture, reality pulsing in and out. She heard herself singing, the same lullaby over and over, though she could not recall starting.
She wondered, somewhere deep beneath the exhaustion, if this was the price of her own confession. If, by saying she loved Felix, she had doomed the only real thing that still tethered him to her.
Around four in the afternoon, the baby’s temperature seemed ever higher. Rose, mad with worry, undressed herself to the chemise and held Lizzie skin-to-skin, the way she’d been taught by the oldest nun at the convent. She rocked, whispered, prayed, even though her faith was as thin as the muslin sheet between her and the world.
Felix appeared at intervals, always offering help, always being rebuffed. But he never left.
Rose realized, sometime around sunset, that he had not eaten, had not even left the nursery except to fetch more cloths or to stoke the fire.
At dusk, the fever broke for a few minutes. Lizzie sucked greedily at the bottle Rose offered, and for a moment, the world seemed right. But then the baby coughed, retched, and the heat returned, worse than before.
The physician came again. This time, his expression was grave. He listened to Lizzie’s chest for a long time, then sighed.
“It’s in the lungs now. There’s nothing more we can do.”
Rose wanted to scream, to throw him out, but Felix stood first and did it for her: politely and with a finality that asked for no argument.
When the door closed, Rose felt for the first time the certainty that she could not endure another night. Felix stood by the window; arms crossed. Finally, she saw him as he truly was: not a villain or a ghost, but a man lost at sea, grasping for anything that might float.
She wished she could comfort him, but she was hollowed out.
The hours bled together.
Once or twice, she thought she slept, but always the fever pulled her back, sharp and hungry. She lost track of time. The baby’s breathing grew shallow, then ragged, then faded so quietly that Rose was sure, for a moment, that Lizzie was gone.
