“Hush now.” And my dear sister stroked my cheek, her face a bit softer.

“Try to think it for the best,” she then said, though her voice was strange.

“What is for the best?”

“You never wanted a child.”

I closed my eyes.

“That’s right,” she said. “Think of that.”

I turned my head upon the pillow, away from her voice, and slid back into the welcome darkness.

“Mother!” I cried another night. “Oh, where is my mother?”

Susannah’s chair fell backward with a thud. I opened my eyes. Only the light burned low in the room, and Sue’s face leaning over me seemed half of darkness, half of light.

“How do you speak of Mother?”

I think I did not know my sister. Something buried had risen in her eyes.

I moaned. She patted my hand, though her touch was heavy, not gentling.

“Do not speak of Mother more. Do not speak of them who are gone. I cannot,” she cried fiercely to me, “I will not, bear it!”

My baby had bright black hair and eyes shut tight—

Three months are passed, and the gap on this page a silent witness. I have been lost to myself, to my sister. I do not recall Mother’s face any longer—only the smooth round of stone we placed upon it.

We are grown used to the split house, Susannah below, and I hardly go downstairs to her region. The attic suits me.

And today, I have seen my little one’s grave.

“Are you strong enough?” Sue’s voice trembled as she asked me.

I nodded and handed Susannah her wrap. It was a gray morning—snow already upon the ground, and the sky heavy with more. I leaned upon my sister’s arm and we walked out, down the steps and out across the white fields to the woods. Arm in arm we walked, without speaking, and for the first time in a long while, there was the old capacious ease.

Slowly, we tended toward the place where a part of me lies buried. And at the moment when the clearing appeared through the deep trees, my heart raced forward and I dropped Susannah’s arm and ran to the spot.

It is so little after all, the place. The stone, the mound of earth, the name.

PERDITA GRANGE

Pray for Her

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

When I put down her book, there was scarlet in the sky. All through the night I had read, turning page after closewritten page without looking up, so absorbed in the story, I hardly moved in my chair. So long had I lived in Nell Grange’s world, looking outward through her heart and mind, that when I raised up and saw Miss Grange’s shrouded body before me, I could not affirm with whose eyes I now saw.