She says that Edwin is the family’s seventh child and that he arrived with his caul still over his face. The caul has been saved in a small box in her mother’s cupboard. It has the feel of a well-worn handkerchief. Edwin has been shown this, but he won’t be allowed to touch it until he is older.

All these things, Rosalie says—the stars, the caul, the number seven—they mark Edwin as extraordinary. “This child will see ghosts,” the midwife had said when the doctor had gone and she was again in charge. “He will never drown. Men everywhere will know his name.” She took Edwin and swaddled him more tightly. There was something reverential, ceremonial, in the way she handed him back.

Before, Rosalie has always left out the part about seeing ghosts. Today she forgets. She feels Edwin stiffen at this news. So far, he’s shown no evidence of greatness. He’s an inactive, fragile, anxious boy.

The ten-year gap between Rosalie and Edwin is where all the dead children are.

ii

The Dead

Frederick was the first to die. He died away from home, off in Boston where Father had gone to try his hand at managing the Tremont Theatre. Mother had joined him there, taking Frederick, who was too little to leave behind. Ann Hall, their farm manager’s wife, and Hagar, a servant with no last name that either she or anyone else knew, cared for the rest of the children in their absence.

In November, only a few months past Frederick’s first birthday, he died. Rosalie hadn’t seen him since the summer. She missed his first words and his first steps. She desperately missed her mother. She was five years old.

The how and why of Frederick’s death have never been made clear to Rosalie—an accident, but nobody’s fault, is what she gathers, or maybe an illness. Father’s experiment at management had lasted only two months and then, when he’d gone off to New York to perform again, Mother had remained in Boston with Frederick for another few weeks, arranging the move back. When Mother finally came home, she came home alone.

Father followed soon after, bringing Frederick, or at least a little coffin and everyone said Frederick was inside. Rosalie remembers how Mother hardly spoke for weeks, how she no longer appeared at bedtime to check the cleanliness of their hands and necks, or to kiss the children she still had. She remembers Mother’s grief as peculiarly listless. There were no bouts of uncontrollable weeping, only an endless silent stream of tears. It was as if Frederick had taken her spirit along with him when he went, leaving only a Mother-shaped husk behind.

Rosalie remembers the exact moment she first understood that she was responsible now for Henry and for Mary Ann. She shared a bed with Mary Ann and one night, as Rosalie was crying quietly to herself, Mary Ann also began to cry. She was only two years old and didn’t have the words to tell Rosalie why, except that she said that everyone was always crying.