“You should have gone back to sleep,” he said, after a while.
Cecily didn’t think it sounded like a complaint.
“I know,” she muttered.
Neither of them moved.
* * *
The fever broke properly by the second morning.
Dori, who had expected this outcome and was pleased to have been right, confirmed it. Mrs. Peel, who had come each day and stood at the nursery door with the careful hopefulness of a woman who had learned not to assume, allowed herself to sit down on the third day.
“She fed well this morning,” Doris reported to the room in general. “Both times. And she’s keeping it down.”
“Both times,” Mrs. Peel repeated.
“Both times.”
Mrs. Peel looked at the baby for a moment. Then she pressed her lips together and said nothing further.
The baby lay in the crib with her eyes open. She was still small. She would be small for a long time yet. But the flush was gone from her cheeks, and her breathing had settled into something that no longer required counting.
When Cecily leaned over the crib and said good morning, the baby turned her head toward the sound with slow, deliberate effort, as if learning that voices were worth attending to.
“Good morning,” Cecily said again.
The baby blinked, then smiled weakly.
“She recognizes you,” Doris observed.
“She recognizes a voice near the crib,” Cecily countered.
“Same thing at this age,” Doris said with triumph.
The sisters visited every afternoon.
Letitia arrived on the first day with a small cloth rabbit she had found in the attic, which she presented to the baby with the solemn ceremony of someone making a significant diplomatic gesture. The baby looked at it with her usual focused expression.
“She likes it,” Letitia declared.
“She can’t see it clearly yet,” Isadora pointed out. “Infants can only focus at close range.”
“She likes the idea of it.”
“That isn’t how vision works, Letitia.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
Cecily watched them arrange themselves around the crib—Letitia talking to the baby with complete unselfconsciousness, Isadora reading the physician’s notes with methodical attention that reminded her so much of William—and thought that whatever happened next, whatever shape this household took in the months ahead, these two girls would be all right.
She was fairly certain of that.
She was less certain of a number of other things.
William came in the evenings, after the day’s work was done, and stayed for an hour. He did not make a ceremony of it. He simply appeared, stood by the crib, asked Doris the practical questions, and listened to the answers with the focused quiet of a man updating his information.
He spoke to the baby occasionally, not with the performed enthusiasm of someone trying to engage an infant, but just quiet words. The baby turned toward him, which Doris said was significant, and which William received without visible reaction.
