He descends the stairs, but in body only; his mind is still on his production. He finds Rosalie making biscuits just the way Aunty Rogers taught her. She’s flushed and there’s a dusting of flour in her hair and on her rumpled shirtfront. Baby Joe is at the table cutting the biscuits from the dough with the rim of a water glass.

She asks Edwin to build up the fire in the stove, so he adds sticks and stirs the whole thing until it’s crackling. Edwin and Rosalie have a conversation that, because of Baby Joe’s presence, takes place in abstracts. It dawns on Edwin that while he has been working to avoid all thought of their parents’ treachery, Rosalie has been worrying over it like a dog with a bone.

“How much do you know about Lord Byron?” Rosalie asks him.

Edwin knows how often Mother has said that she ran off with Father because of Byron’s poems. They’ve all only heard this for their whole lives.

He knows that one of Father’s first gifts to Mother was an oval of Byron’s face, his dark curls encircled by a thin golden wreath. A brooch, and Mother treasures it, though she never wears it. Her life has turned out less dressy. The brooch is kept in a cupboard drawer with Mother’s other treasures, including Edwin’s caul. He knows that Byron was poor Henry’s middle name.

“I’ve read some of his poetry,” Edwin says. “I know he and Father used to be friends.”

Rosalie, it turns out, knows a great deal more. She tells Edwin about Byron’s abandoned wife and the sister whom he treated as a wife, and his friend Percy Shelley and his abandoned wife, who killed herself while she was pregnant (unless she was murdered, by whom and for what reason Rosalie couldn’t say), and also William Godwin, an anarchist who believed women were just as good as men but had one illegitimate stepdaughter who killed herself, and another who’d had an affair and a child with Byron, and also a real daughter who was that same Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein after running off with Percy Shelley. Oh, it was all a dreadful tangle and, as far as Rosalie can see, nothing but free love from top to bottom. Free love, she explains to Edwin in a scatter of flour, means that love matters more than marriage. Marriage is a prison in which love cannot be free.

Rosalie wipes her hands on an apron cross-stitched with fraying pieties—Her price is far above rubies. She has more flour in her hair now.