It will do until other arrangements are made. She heard the woman in the doorway make a small sound. She heard her husband say her name once more in a tone she had never heard from him. She ignored them both.
She looked down at the baby. The baby looked up at her with Serafine’s eyes and her husband’s chin and an expression of perfect unearned trust. Whose child is this? she had asked.
And she already had the answer. The afternoon interview took place in the small parlor. Camilla sat very straight, hands folded. She had expected to despise the woman.
She found she could not quite manage it. Serafine answered every question without flinching. There had been no plot. A season, two summers past, a man who had been kind when few were.
A thing that grew out of loneliness on both sides. She had not told him about the child until it was four months old. She had not wanted his money. She had wanted the girl to know she had a father, even one who could never claim her, because she herself had not known hers and had felt the lack every day.
And now? Camilla said. And now I am dying, said Serafine simply. The physician gives me until autumn, perhaps the winter.
I have no family. I considered the Foundling Hospital. I could not. I wrote to him because he is the only person living who has any claim of blood on her.
I would rather she were raised in a house that resents her than die in one that has forgotten her. Camilla sat with her hands folded and understood that her morning’s anger had been built on a foundation that no longer existed. She had prepared to fight a rival. She had been handed a woman three seasons from her grave, asking nothing for herself and everything for a child.
She will not be resented, Camilla said. Not in my house. I will not promise you that she will be loved, because I do not yet know whether I am capable of loving anything. But she will not be resented.
I am very good at seeing to things. Serafine looked at her for a long moment. Then she began silently to cry without covering her face, the tears simply falling while she sat perfectly upright. I had heard you were cold, she said.
The whole town says you are cold. The town, said Camilla dryly, has never once asked me what I am. She arranged the dower cottage at the edge of the estate under a name not her own. Serafine would see the child as often as her strength permitted.
When the strength was gone, she would be cared for properly. She would not die at a foundling hospital gate. And Serafine did not thank her for it as kindness, because both women understood pride. That evening the Duke came to her at nine.
He came not as a duke but as a man who had not slept, in his shirtsleeves, which she had not seen in years. He stood by the cold hearth and did not sit until she bade him. I have watched you all day, he said. I have watched you arrange the saving of two people who had every reason to expect ruin from you.
I have watched you do it as though it cost you nothing. And I have understood, finally, twelve years too late, that everything has always cost you something. That I have spent our entire marriage mistaking your silence for indifference. When it was the sound of a person holding the world up alone.
He stopped. His hands were not steady. I went to her because I was lonely, he said. And you will say I had a wife and no right to loneliness, and you would be correct.
I was starving at a full table because I never once thought to ask whether the woman across from me was starving too. She did not answer at once. She held the silence, not as a weapon, but because she did not trust her voice. I do not forgive you, she said finally.
Not because I wish to punish you. I find I have very little wish to punish you. I do not forgive you because forgiveness is a door, and once I open it, we will simply walk back into the house we lived in before. I will not go back into that house.
It was killing me by inches, and I had grown so accustomed to it that I mistook the dying for my character. He flinched. She let him. There is a child now, she went on.
Her voice thinned and caught. She did not stop it. She let it be heard. Her mother is dying.
I have decided to keep her. I did not decide it to spite you or to play the saint. I decided it because she reached for me. She reached for me, and no one has reached for me in a very long time.
I find I am not made of stone after all. Which is inconvenient, because stone does not feel the cold. And I am suddenly very cold indeed. He crossed the room.
He did not embrace her. He knelt beside her chair, which a duke does not do. He took her hand, the one the baby had held, and looked at it as though it were a document he had failed for years to read. Then let me be cold beside you, he said.
I will not ask to be forgiven. I will ask only to be allowed to stay in the room. To see you, to learn how, since I never troubled to learn before. I would rather be in your difficult company than in anyone’s easy company in all the world.
She looked down at him kneeling on her cold hearth rug. This man she had married as a stranger and lived beside as a stranger. Now she saw him as merely another person who had been lonely and afraid and had managed it badly. She did not say she loved him.
She did not know yet whether she did. That would be the slow work of years. But she turned her hand within his and held it deliberately, the way the child had held it. She let the silence between them become, for the first time in their marriage, not a wall but a room.
Light the fire, she said. I am tired of being cold. I have been cold for twelve years, and I find I have lost my taste for it entirely. He lit the fire clumsily, for he had never once laid a fire himself.
She let him struggle and did not help. At last it caught, and the light came up in the room. The two of them sat together without speaking. Two people who had wasted a great deal of time and had, against all reasonable expectation, a little left.
Serafine died in the first week of December in the cottage with a fire lit and clean linen and Camilla beside her holding her hand. There was no drama. She simply grew tired, then more tired, then slept. At some point in the small hours the sleep deepened into the other thing.
Camilla, who noticed everything, noticed the exact moment and did not look away. She thought that the world was a stranger and more merciful place than she had been raised to believe, and that she had nearly missed it entirely. The child, Juliet, grew. She was dark as her mother, with the considering mouth and the unmistakable eyes.
She grew up in the blue room that got the morning sun. She was told the truth of where she came from, gently, because Camilla had decided that this child would not be raised on silence. And she was loved. Camilla, who had not been certain she was capable of it, discovered that she was capable of very little else once the dam finally went.
The love came not as a flood but as a tide, slow and reliable and very deep. The duke’s sister, who had predicted ruin, eventually unbent when society decided the whole affair was romantic rather than disgraceful. She became Juliet’s most ferocious champion, claiming loudly that she had supported the arrangement from the beginning, which no one believed and everyone allowed. The sister in the north who would not have Serafine wrote some years later, asking after the child.
She was answered courteously and told nothing of consequence. The doorway she had refused to stand in was closed. Camilla and the duke grew old together, slowly, in the way of two people who began as strangers and chose late to become something better.
The choosing was the whole of it, made again each day in the laying of a fire and the keeping of a promise, in the long companionable silences that were at last rooms they were both inside of and not walls.