To her relief, he left at once. Soon after that, she and Eustace returned to Raven Hall, and Rosa went to the nursery to see Ada, in the hope that her surviving daughter might be some comfort. But the infant started to cry as soon as Rosa took her from the nanny. The sound was like nails across her skin, blades in her gut. Esme’s empty crib was a horror that seemed to scream at her with its resounding, accusing silence. This was not right. There should be two babies here, not one. Not one.

Ada howled out her rage, and Rosa wondered whether her surviving daughter knew somehow that her sister was gone, whether she missed her too. The little girl seemed to be forever looking over at the other crib and screwing up her face in a frown, as if offended not to see her sister gazing back at her. Either way, it seemed that Ada and Rosa had no love or comfort to offer each other. Rosa’s eyes slid to the empty crib once again, and the longing to hold little Esme in her arms was so overpowering that she really thought she might vomit. Wordlessly she handed Ada back to the nanny and returned to her own room, where she gathered her clockwork ravens about her and locked herself in.

She must find some way to rewrite the story she had had so clearly in her mind, of herself with her twin girls. Esme’s absence left a slashed, dark space in that story, and it was impossible to stitch up the gap without distorting the entire page around it. The pieces no longer fitted together. The story did not make any sense. Now it was a book that had been half-ravaged by fire, all charred around the edges, with great chunks missing, and scorch marks blurring the meaning of the carefully chosen words.

It was not fair.

Worst of all, with Esme’s absence, all her love for Ada seemed to shrivel away into nothing. As the days crawled by, she could not look at the child without being reminded of Esme’s loss. She no longer found any delight in Ada’s tiny hands, even when they gripped tightly around her own fingers. She didn’t marvel at her deep-blue eyes when they fixed searchingly on her own. She no longer even seemed to feel the warmth of Ada’s small body when she held her in her arms. The baby almost ceased to feel like a living, breathing thing at all. She might as well have been a doll made from wax. The orchids in the hothouses and the clockwork ravens in the rafters seemed to have more soul than Ada.