The bird—unique with its glowing, purplish-green neck plume, more appropriate for a peacock than a pigeon—fluttered to the floor and waddled to Susan’s feet.

“I’m afraid I’ve spoiled you.” Susan poured feed into her hand and kneeled.

Duchess pecked at the grains.

The touch of the beak tickled Susan’s palm. She knew she shouldn’t be hand-feeding a pigeon—it wasn’t the Pigeon Service’s protocol, or her grandfather’s—and would no doubt cause problems if Duchess were put into service. But this bird was different. All because a feral cat had managed to scratch its way under the door and take the lives of Bertie’s prized racing pigeons, Skye and Islay.

Three years earlier, Susan and Bertie had found what was left of Skye behind the grain barrel. They had found Islay in her nest with a severely injured wing, sitting on an egg she had laid before her attack. They had tried to repair Islay’s wing with tape and splinters of wood, but she was too weak to eat, and she sat feebly on her egg for five days before she passed. They had buried her in one of Bertie’s tobacco boxes, next to Skye near the edge of Epping Forest.

When none of the other pigeons would sit on the egg, tainted from the feline tragedy, Susan insisted on incubating it, despite her grandfather’s belief that the chances of the egg hatching were extraordinarily slim, especially without a calibrated incubator that they could not afford. Stubborn like her grandfather, Susan retrieved a blue ceramic bowl, once used by her grandmother to eat oatmeal. She warmed the bowl with water from the teakettle to establish a good base temperature, then delicately wrapped the egg in a lightly moistened towel and placed it inside. Setting the bowl under Bertie’s desk lamp, she adjusted the distance to reach the ideal temperature by using a medical thermometer, which she had tested by sticking it under a nesting pigeon.

For two weeks and two days, Susan rotated the egg every eight hours and sprinkled drops of water onto the towel to keep the proper humidity. And despite the odds of having to bury the egg next to its parents, the egg quivered early on a Sunday morning. Susan and her grandfather skipped church, pulled up chairs, and watched for three hours as the egg slowly cracked open. As church bells rang over Epping to release their congregations, a shriveled hatchling poked its way into the world.

“Your parents and your granny would be proud of you,” Bertie had said.

Susan, a heaviness in her chest, had smiled and gently caressed the hatchling.