When the breathing changed—when the pause between inhale and exhale grew longer, and longer, and then finally stalled—Rose’s calm evaporated. She panicked, clutching the child so fiercely she worried she might do damage. She pressed her ear to Lizzie’s mouth, then to her chest, and at last heard the desperate flutter she had been waiting for. But it was faint, less a heartbeat than a question mark.
“Lizzie, darling,” she whispered, but her own voice sounded strange, as if someone else were speaking from a distance.
There was no reply. The baby was utterly still. The color in her cheeks was now a sickly red, her hair plastered to her scalp.
“Lizzie,” Rose repeated, louder this time, and her arms began to shake.
Felix burst into the room, drawn by the sound. He stopped, saw the tableau—Rose, wild-eyed and clinging, Lizzie a doll in her lap—and seemed to shrink, all his certainty deserting him. For a moment, he hovered at the threshold, then crossed the floor and knelt beside them.
“Is she—?” He could not finish.
“I don’t know,” Rose choked out. “She’s… not breathing right.”
Felix reached for the child, but Rose held on. “Please,” she said, and the word was sharp as a slap. He dropped his hand and sat on the rug, helpless.
Rose began to rock, small, tight movements that scraped her spine against the solid wood of the chair. She bent her head so that her mouth was against Lizzie’s ear, and she whispered, “Please stay. Please, darling girl, just one more breath. You can do it. I know you can.”
She prayed in hymns, in scraps of poetry, anything that might fill the abyss opening under her. She promised everything, anything: that she would be better, that she would give up anger, that she would never again question whether she deserved to be a mother.
She pleaded, over and over, her voice fraying at the edges.
Felix moved closer but did not touch.
Rose kept whispering, no longer sure if the words were for Lizzie or herself. She told the baby about the garden, about the songbirds she would teach her to name, about all the books they would read together. She confessed, at last, that she was afraid, that she had been afraid from the start, and that nothing mattered but this tiny, stubborn piece of life.
The clock chimed. Rose did not hear it.
Lizzie made a small sound—a whimper or just the last gasp of air. Then nothing for a long, terrible stretch.
Rose began to sob; her entire body wracked with it. The tears ran hot and wild down her face, soaking Lizzie’s hair. She rocked harder, desperate for any sign.
And then—impossibly—Lizzie coughed. It was weak, but it was real. Another breath followed, then another, and with each one the child reclaimed a little more space in the world.
Rose held her, not daring to move, for fear that the spell would break.
She looked up at Felix, who had begun to cry as well, silent and stunned.
They sat like that, the three of them, until the sky outside the window lightened from black to blue, until the city’s bells began to ring, and until Lizzie’s breathing settled into a slow, steady rhythm that felt like a promise.
Only then did Rose allow herself to believe they might be safe.
She pressed her cheek to Lizzie’s head and whispered, “I will never leave you. Never.”
And in the quiet of the nursery, she felt the words take root, fierce and unbreakable.
CHAPTER 21
The room was all gold and shadow. The only light was cast by the fat wax tapers on the mantle and the coal glow of the nursery fire. Felix watched from the threshold, not quite hidden, not quite invited, as Rose held Lizzie through another siege of fever.
He could see the shape of her exhaustion in the way her shoulders canted. The blue shadows under her eyes were so stark they might have been paint. Her hands never faltered. Not once. Even as the hours had worn her hollow and left her voice hoarse from humming and shushing, still she cradled the child with the precision of a saint carrying a relic to safety through the dark.
Lizzie’s hair was wet with sweat; her skin so pale it seemed transparent. Every so often, she let out a mewl that made Rose’s whole body contract, as if willing the pain to herself instead.
Felix hated the sound; it had none of the wry defiance or the cleverness he had come to expect from the infant, just need, pure and animal.
He remembered his own mother sitting such vigils. She had always been smaller than he recalled, almost frail, but there was nothing fragile in her resolve. She, too, had hunched over his bed in the handful of times he’d been sick with the rigid grace of a warrior at last stand.
His father, on the other hand, had rarely been present. When he was, it had been only to issue orders, to dismiss the women and the children, to stalk the halls of Carden House like a restless wolf. The old duke’s love had always arrived with conditions attached, if it arrived at all.
