Page 3

"Then he must be better soon," Elizabeth reasoned, "because he has not finished telling me about the owl in my book."

Minna folded her daughter against her and held her so tightly that Elizabeth began to understand how frightened she was.

Minna felt the child's heart beating hard against her ribs. She had been so occupied with Henry's fever that she had allowed Elizabeth to see her fear without ever explaining it. There were a hundred things she wished to teach her daughter—how to distinguish the call of a blackbird from a thrush, how to mend the torn page of a beloved book, how to disagree with a person of consequence without surrendering either courtesy or conviction. Now she could scarcely gather breath enough to say a word.

When Elizabeth fell asleep at last, Minna remained beside Henry's bed. His hand lay above the blanket, the fingers still and strangely cold. She brushed the ink stain from his middle finger with her thumb, although it would not come away. He had promised the child another afternoon with the bird book. Minna looked at it on the bedside table, a ribbon marking the chapter on owls, and for an unreasonable instant felt angry with him for leaving a promise unfinished.

Henry's eyes opened. She bent close enough to hear him. He did not ask whether he would recover. He asked if Elizabeth had eaten her supper.

"Half of it," Minna whispered. "She is waiting to show you the picture she has coloured."

His lips moved into the smallest of smiles. Minna held that expression in her mind long after his eyes closed. The next morning, when Elizabeth asked whether Papa was awake, Minna drew her close and said he was resting. It was not a lie; it only felt cruelly inadequate.

Henry died before the week was out.

The days that followed would remain forever confused in Elizabeth's memory. There were black dresses that smelled of new dye, whispering visitors, a clergyman who spoke kindly and whose words she could scarcely hear, and a burial under a grey sky. She remembered her mother's hand, icy inside her glove. She remembered asking whether they might go home now, and realizing that home was no longer the same place.

Minna tried to go on. She read with Elizabeth each morning, even when fatigue made her voice faint. She instructed Mrs. Hale about the household accounts and wrote several letters, one of them to Henry's elder brother at Longbourn. But the fever that had taken Henry had not entirely passed from the house. Minna began to cough, then to shiver despite the warmth of the rooms. The physician returned, and the servants grew quiet again.

Elizabeth had ceased trusting assurances that all would be well. She sat outside the bedchamber with her natural-history book open upon her knees, unable to read a word.

At last her mother asked to see her.

The room smelled of lavender water and medicine. Minna lay against the pillows, her hair braided loosely over one shoulder. She held out a hand, and Elizabeth climbed onto the bed with a care she had never previously thought necessary.

"My darling girl," Minna murmured in German. "You have been very brave."

"I do not want to be brave," Elizabeth answered in the same language. "I want you to be well."

"I know."

"If I am quiet, will you get better? I have not troubled Cook once today."

Tears filled Minna's eyes. "Nothing you do or fail to do can make me ill, Liebchen. You must never think so."

She reached beneath her pillow and drew out the locket Elizabeth had seen about her neck for as long as she could remember. The little red stone caught the light from the window.

"This belonged to me before I met your father," Minna explained. "It is the only thing I have from that time. I should like you to keep it."

Elizabeth stared at it. "But it is yours."

"And now it shall be yours. It is not the gold that matters. It is a reminder that we carry those we love wherever we go."

Minna opened the locket and showed her the miniature portrait. "I have often wished I knew who she was. Your father believed she might have been my mother. Perhaps one day you will discover her name. But do not let an unanswered question prevent you from being happy."

"Will you tell me about Germany again?" Elizabeth asked. "About the woods and the snow?"

"Of course." Minna drew a breath. "I remember a garden with white roses, and a lake where the ice shone like glass in winter. I remember my brothers laughing at me because I was determined to skate as well as they did. They held my hands until I learned."

Elizabeth looked up. Her mother had rarely mentioned brothers before. "Did you have two?"

Minna's forehead creased. For a moment she seemed to follow a memory just beyond reach. "I think so. One was very kind. There was another ..." She stopped, distressed, and shook her head. "I am sorry, my darling. It slips away when I try to hold it."

"You need not try," Elizabeth told her quickly.

Minna kissed her forehead. "Your uncle Thomas will come for you. He is your father's brother, and he has promised to love you as one of his own. You must be good to him, but you must not fear being loved. Do you understand?"

Elizabeth did not. She nodded because her mother needed her to.