She takes the cuff of the top sheet between her fingertips and eases it down, revealing Frieda’s bare chest, thin and blue as milk and bowed, well made, like the bottom of a boat. Sylvia sweeps the damp cloth lightly over Frieda’s skin to cool her. The little girl is burning, alarmingly so, though Sylvia has not been able to look for the thermometer or the rubbing alcohol, still packed in one of the boxes downstairs in the parlor. She is afraid to leave her children for that long, afraid that Nick will fall out of the bed, afraid that Frieda will have to vomit again before she can bound up the stairs to help, and their only place of comfort, the only place she can care for them both at once, will be irretrievably soiled. She has no more clean sheets; all she brought from Court Green have been used up over the week in the babies’ room. Now they molder inside her wet pillow slips in the pram at the bottom of the stairwell.

Under the soft gilding light of the candles, Frieda opens her eyes and gazes into her mother’s face. Bending over her child, moving the cloth gently over her skin, Sylvia sees herself reflected in Frieda’s guileless blue eyes, glassy with fever, as her own shadow grows up the wall, a mountainous giant of head and shoulders, taller and wider than the windows. Frieda looks so little once more, no toddler now but merely a baby, her body a neat, vulnerable package, lost among the bedclothes as she so often seemed as a newborn, her skull like the skull of a bird’s. Delicate and brittle as the skull of a bird. Guilt clutches Sylvia’s heart as she waits for Frieda to ask again for Ted. But Frieda doesn’t, not tonight, not in the still, broad hours of this endless night. Her whole world is here, reflected in her eyes—all she knows of safety and love. Her whole world has shrunk to the aureole of a candle, to the feel of her mother’s hand against her burning cheek. Again, as before they left her breast, Sylvia is the empire, complete. This Frieda is not the child who is learning to tell secrets all by herself—cupping her hand at a willing ear, blowing into it an incomprehensible roar that modulates to a whispered non sequitur delivered with pride: “psst—a bee,” “psst—a cloud,” though that child will be back tomorrow, or the next day. This Frieda is the child who once sat on her mother’s lap, a wristwatch held to her ear for the very first time: her tender little face first blank, then flowering into a laugh, hearing the tick.