I nodded in agreement with him. Besides, the feeling was not foreign to me; it felt much like morning sickness, which I still remembered despite the passage of two decades. The rolling waves of nausea had struck me early, even before I missed my monthly course, and the fatigue came soon after. But I had known it was not just any fatigue; as well as I could hold two seeds side by side and declare which was borne of a yellow lily and which of a white, I knew without doubt that I carried a child inside of me. Despite the sickness and fatigue, one would think I had discovered the secret to all happiness, for never in my life had I been more gleeful than I was in those early days, carrying Frederick’s child.

The mother smiled at me and pulled the sleeping baby off her nipple. “You would like to hold her?” she asked. I flushed, having not realized that I was staring at the child.

“Yes,” I whispered before I knew what I was saying. “Yes.”

She handed me the child, telling me that her name was Beatrice. “Bringer of joy,” she said.

But as the weight of the child filled my arms and her warmth carried through the layers of fabric to my skin, I felt anything but joy. The bundle of peach skin and tiny breath settled in my arms like a gravestone, a marker of loss, of having had something special ripped away. A knot formed in my throat, and I instantly regretted this means of passage to Southwark.

To die in the arms of a lover as I lie alone, waiting, the corridors silent. The words in the letter that brought me here seemed a curse already.

The baby must have sensed my discontent, for she startled awake and looked around, disoriented. Even with her full belly, her brow crumbled as though she was about to wail.

Instinct told me to bounce her up and down, up and down, and hold her tighter. “Shhh,” I whispered to her, aware of the mother and father watching me. “Shhh, little one, there now, nothing to fuss over.” Beatrice calmed and locked her gaze on mine like she meant to see into the depths of me, to peek at my secrets and all that made me ache.

If only she could see what rotted within. If only her little heart could understand the heaviness that had plagued me for two decades, kindling the trail of vengeance that now blazed across London and burdened me with a lifetime of other people’s secrets.