"So much promise in this wee soul," he said to his children, his voice raspy with grief. "Your mother's last gift to us."

Silence fell upon the room for a moment. The campaign had ended. Lives flickered and shone like night fires on the battlefield.

Another brother. Another spark flared.

Yet another went out.

The dale would remember Jennie Gosling for her kindness, her mother wit, and her fine sturdy children.

The dale would carry on.

It was Gemma whom Lysander worried about now.

GEMMA COULD NOT WEEP for Jennie. What sort of monster was she to have no tears for the kindest woman she'd ever known?

Without a care for her still-healing wrist, she lifted a heavy crockery jar to her stillroom work table and began to scoop large quantities of dried tansy flowers into a basket. When she filled it, she replaced the tight-fitted lid and put the jar back on the lowest shelf.

Every movement felt slow and careful, yet her thoughts were not at all engaged in her task. She felt as if she floated several feet above herself, watching but not caring.

After picking up the basket of dried blooms, she went up the stairs to the linen press in the hall. After staring at the neatly folded contents of the shelves for a single eternal moment, Gemma reached for a set of finely woven bed linens. The embroidered lengths were from her own trousseau, eagerly worked by her own hands before her wedding to Edmund. They were the best she had.

It was the least she could do.

Down the stairs again, step by methodical step. She heard the baby wail from the kitchen, where Mr. Bing and Shepherd Gosling were hoping to get the little one to take a bit of sheep's milk from the corner of a soaked cloth. The sound halted suddenly, signifying success.

Gemma felt nothing. Her eyes were dry. Her heart felt as cold and still as a stone. I am unnatural.

In the room where Jennie lay still and cold, Mr. Cabot and Mr. Button were just finishing bathing her body. When Gemma entered, Mr. Button was combing out Jennie's lovely long hair. It drifted over the pillow like a shimmering fall of sunlight, pooling on the sheet in a lengthy coil.

Gemma stared at Jennie's beautiful hair. She hadn't known Jennie as a young girl, only as a practical farm wife and mother who always pinned her hair properly away. The notion of young girlish Jennie, with her eye on a burly Gosling boy and her entire future before her, facing it with a fearless smile —

An iron spike of agony broke the chill stone of Gemma's shocked heart in half. Inside, it contained such a crushing outpouring of pain and guilt and self-loathing that Gemma felt her knees weakening. At once Lysander was at her side, his supportive arm about her waist. Where had he come from?