The Following Winter

Gavin had faced a good many hard things in his two-and-thirty years. He had gone into a burning house, once, though not soon enough. He had stood on a bare hillside among the standing stones with a pistol leveled at his heart and put his own body between the ball and a child, and had felt the thing strike him and had not, in the moment of it, been afraid. He had believed himself, on the whole, a man who knew the measure of his own courage.

He had not, until this night, understood that all that courage was worth precisely nothing against the sound of his wife crying out behind a closed door that he was not permitted to open.

He walked the length of the upper corridor for what must have been the thousandth time, from the tall window at the stairhead to the shut door of the chamber and back again, and the boards he had walked bare of their polish told him nothing, and the shut door told him no more, and his own useless hands, that had done so much in his life, could do not one thing that signified now. Inside that room the better half of his heart was laboring in the dark to bring the rest of it into the world, and he was out here, in the cold passage, with the candles guttering, entirely and monstrously helpless.

“You will wear a trench in my floor,” said Duncan, from the settle where he sat, “and pitch the both of us through into the library below.”

“I cannot sit.”

“No,” his uncle agreed. “No, I do not suppose you can.”

Across the passage, on the hard bench beneath the window, Lucinda sat with her hands knotted white in her lap and her eyes fixed upon the door, and beside her, very close, sat her husband. Bell had his medical bag at his feet, though it was not his place to be used tonight, the birthing of a child being women’s country into which no physician was admitted save at the last and worst extremity. And Gavin understood that the bag was there less for any use than for the comfort of having it near, the way a man keeps his hand on the hilt of a sword he does not mean to draw.

“It is too soon,” Lucinda said, for the third time. Her voice was thin. “Ninian. It is a month too soon. She is not to come till the turn of the year. You said so. Bell said not before the new year.”

“I said the turn of the year was my best reckoning,” Bell answered, and took her knotted hands into his own and gentled them apart, one finger at a time, the way a man works a frightened bird’s claws loose from a branch. “A reckoning is not a promise, my love. Children come when they are ready to come and not one hour before, and they care nothing for a physician’s arithmetic. Early is not the same as ill. Your sister is strong. She is well made for this, and she is well tended, and Mrs. Baird has brought half the glen into the world these thirty years and lost fewer than any surgeon in Edinburgh. Hold to that.”

He said it steadily, and he said it kindly, and Gavin, who had grown these long months into a close and grateful knowledge of the young physician’s face, saw the muscle standing tight along the line of his jaw all the while he said it, and loved him for the lie of his steadiness, and was not for one instant comforted by it.

From behind the door came another cry.

It went through Gavin like the ball had gone through him on the hillside, only worse, for the ball he had chosen, and this he could not. He was at the door before he knew he had moved, his hand upon the latch, and it was Duncan’s hand that closed hard over his wrist and Duncan’s voice, low and iron, in his ear.

“No, lad. Not in there. There is nothing for you in there but a woman’s work you cannot do and a fright you cannot mend. You will only make of yourself one more body in the road. Stand here. Stand here with me and bear it, the way she is bearing hers. It is all that is left to either of us.”

So Gavin stood, and bore it, with his uncle’s hand upon his wrist and the sweat standing cold on his own brow, and it was the hardest hour’s standing of his life.

The door opened once. Mrs. Sutherland came out of it sideways, her sleeves rolled past the elbow and her face flushed brick-red and a great steaming bowl held out before her, and she nearly ran the Duke of Braemere down where he stood.

“Out of my road, Your Grace, if it please ye, and if it please ye or no,” she said, not unkindly, for even Mrs. Sutherland had her softer registers on a night like this one. “The midwife’s wanting more hot water and clean linen, and she’ll have it this minute, and I’ll not be stopped in the fetching of it to answer a man’s questions when I’ve no answers to give him.” She paused half a step, at the pass, and something in her hard face gave way for the smallest moment. “She’s working hard, your lady. Hard and brave, and no worse than she should be at such a time. Now let me by, and take that graveyard look off ye, for it does no earthly good and it frights the boy.”

It frights the boy.

Gavin turned. He had forgotten, in the great roaring of his own fear, and the forgetting shamed him. At the far end of the corridor, on the third stair up, small and still in his nightshirt with his bare feet tucked under him, sat Felix, who ought hours ago to have been asleep, and who had plainly no more been able to be got to sleep on this night of nights than the grown folk had, and who was watching it all with his enormous dark eyes gone solemn and frightened in his white face.

Gavin crossed to him and sat down upon the cold stair beside him, too large for it, his knees up round his ears, and put his arm about the small rigid shoulders and drew the boy in against his side.

“I heard Mama shouting,” Felix said. Very small. “She does not shout. She never shouts. Is she hurt? Is the baby hurting her?”

And Gavin, who did not know how to lie to this child and had never once managed it, found the truth in himself and gave it over as gently as he had anything in his life.

“A little,” he said. “Bringing a baby into the world is a hard thing, and it hurts for a while, the way a great many worthwhile things hurt for a while. But it is the good kind of hurting, the kind that is making something and not breaking it. Do you understand the difference?”

Felix considered this with grave and total attention. “Like when Bell set Ewan’s arm,” he said at last. “And Ewan roared like anything, and it was awful, but after, the arm was mended and better than before.”

“Just exactly like that,” said Gavin, and his throat was thick. “Your mother is the bravest person I have ever known, braver than any soldier, and she is being very brave now, and in a little while it will be over and there will be a baby, and all the hurting will have been worth it.”

“Will she still love me,” Felix asked, in the smallest voice yet, the voice at the very bottom of the well, “when there is a baby that is really and truly yours and hers together, and I am only hers from before?”

The stair, and the cold passage, and the whole laboring house, went very quiet in Gavin’s ears.

He turned the boy by the shoulders until Felix faced him, and he looked into the frightened dark eyes that had looked at him without fear on a garden morning three years gone, when no living soul had looked at him so, and he said, with all the weight of a vow, “Felix. Look at me. You are mine. Do you hear me? Not from before and not from after. Mine. The very first day I ever knew there was such a thing in the world worth staying alive for, it was you that taught it me, you and your beetles, before ever I loved your mother, before ever I dreamed of any baby. There is no from-before about it. When that door opens, you will not have a sister who is more mine than you are. You will have a sister who is exactly as much mine as you are, which is all of me, and there is enough of me to go round, I promise you, for I have counted, and there is.”

The boy searched his face a long moment with the terrible thoroughness of the very young, hunting it for the lie the way he had once hunted it for the monster, and finding, as he had found before, neither. And then he came apart, all at once, the way children do, and flung his thin arms about Gavin’s neck and pressed his wet face into his stepfather’s collar, and Gavin held him on the cold stair and rocked him a little and said no more, because nothing further wanted saying, and Duncan looked studiously out the window at the dark, and Lucinda wept quietly into Bell’s shoulder, and behind the shut door the great work went on.

It was near four in the morning, with a grayness beginning at the eastern windows, not light yet, only the promise of light to come, when the last cry came.

It was different from the others. Gavin had not known that he had learned the sound of his wife’s pain so exactly, in that long night, until he heard the sound that was its ending, a great tearing effortful cry that crested and broke and fell away into a silence more total than any that had gone before, a silence into which the whole house seemed to lean.

And then, into that silence, thin and furious and astonishing, the cry of a child.

Gavin was on his feet. Felix was on his feet. Duncan had risen, and Lucinda, and they stood the five of them frozen in the gray corridor and listened to that small outraged voice announce itself to the world, on and on, gathering strength with every breath, and Gavin found that he could not see, that the passage had gone swimming and bright, and that Duncan’s hand had come to grip his shoulder hard enough to bruise.

The door opened.

Mrs. Baird the midwife stood in it, gray-faced with the long night and her apron in a state Gavin was careful not to look at too closely, and she was smiling, the deep tired satisfied smile of a woman who has done again the oldest and hardest work in the world and done it well.

“Your Grace,” she said. “Ye have a daughter. A wee lass, and a loud one, and sound in every part. And your lady is weary to the bone and torn about not at all and as well as ever I saw a woman after her first, and asking for you before I’d the cord tied, the impatient creature.” Her tired eyes crinkled. “Ye may come in. The one of ye. The rest may bide till she’s fit for company and the room’s put to rights.”

Gavin’s legs, which had carried him into fires and against pistols, very nearly failed to carry him through the door.

The chamber was warm, close, lamplit against the gray dawn, and it smelled of blood and tallow and lavender water and some deep animal thing underneath that he had no name for and would never after forget. And in the great bed, propped high on all the pillows in the house, white as her own shift and with her honey hair dark-darkened with sweat and stuck to her temples and her brow, more wrung-out and worn-through and undone than he had ever seen a living creature, sat Rosalind. And she was, past any argument, past any power of his to say why, the most beautiful thing he had looked upon in all his life.

In the crook of her arm was a bundle no bigger than a loaf of bread.

“There you are,” she said. Her voice was a thread. She was smiling, and weeping, both at once, in the way he had learned was her truest weather. “You took your time. We have been waiting an age, your daughter and I, and she is already of the opinion that her father is a slow, unpunctual sort of man.”

He crossed the room. He knelt down at the side of the bed, because his legs would do nothing further and because it seemed the only right posture in which to come to such a moment, and he looked at the red furious little face in the wrappings, the screwed-shut eyes, the wet dark tuft of hair, the tiny working mouth, the one impossibly small fist that had worked free of the blanket and hung upon the air, curled tight about nothing at all, holding on with its whole strength to a world it had been in for the length of a quarter hour.

“Do you want to hold your daughter?” Rosalind asked.

He did not trust his voice. He held out his arms, the great scarred arms that had held so few soft things in so many hard years, and Rosalind, with a care that cost her visibly what little strength she had left, lifted the bundle across and laid it into the crook of his elbow, and showed him wordlessly with her own hands how to carry the heavy lolling warmth of the head, and he took the whole light impossible weight of his daughter against his chest and looked down into her face and was, quietly and completely and forever, conquered.

She stopped crying. Whether it was the change of arms, or the warmth of him, or some blind newborn sense of having come at last to the place she was meant to be, he could not have said, but the outraged little voice hushed, and the screwed face eased, and for one moment the eyes came open, unfocused and dark and swimming, and seemed to look up at the ruined face bent over her without the smallest fear in the world. Then she yawned, hugely, with her whole tiny being, and the fist uncurled and found the edge of his finger and closed about it, and slept.

“She has your coloring,” Rosalind whispered, watching them. “The dark. I am glad of it.”

Gavin could not speak for a while. When he could, what came was not what he had meant to say. It came up from somewhere older and deeper, unbidden, in a voice gone rough past mending.

“I should like,” he said, “if you are willing. If it is not too much to ask of you. I should like to call her Isobel.”

He had not known he would say it until it was said. He had carried the wish in silence through all the long months, never quite daring it, for it seemed to him a great and perhaps a terrible thing, to lay a dead sister’s name upon a living child, to ask this new small person to carry the whole weight of a grief she had no part in. He had thought Rosalind might flinch from it.

She did not flinch. She reached out and laid her hand over his, over the great scarred hand that cradled the dark downy head, and her worn face was wet and shining and wholly certain.

“Isobel,” she said, trying the shape of it, and the child slept on through the giving of her name. “Isobel Lennox. Yes. Oh, yes, my love. There could be no better name in all the world. She will grow up hearing what a fine brave laughing creature she was named for. We will make it a name to be glad of again, you and I, and not only a name to grieve.” Her fingers tightened over his. “Your sister would like that, I think. To be a beginning, and not only an ending.”

And Gavin Lennox, who had spent five years keeping a candle burning before a dead girl’s portrait in a ruined room, and who had thought that room the truest chamber of his heart, discovered kneeling by his wife’s bed in the gray dawn that he had been wrong. There was a truer one. It had been building itself in secret all this while, warm and lit and crowded, and he had only now been let through the door of it, and it was full to the rafters of the living.

The sun was well up, and the whole exhausted household fed and the room set to rights and Rosalind sleeping the deep flat sleep of the delivered, before they let the others in, a few at a time, to look their fill and go softly out again.

Duncan came, and stood a long while over the cradle without a word, and when at last he turned away Gavin saw that the fierce old man had been weeping, and neither of them remarked upon it, which was how such things were done between them.

Lucinda came, on Bell’s arm, and bent over her new niece with her ruined-and-mending face soft with wonder, and told the sleeping child in a whisper that she was the most beautiful baby ever born in Scotland or England either, and then straightened and said, with a shy new steadiness that had not been in her a year ago, that she had already sent word south by the morning post, to Somerset. To their mother and father.

Gavin looked at her.

“They have softened,” Lucinda said. “Since the wedding.” A faint color came up in her thin cheeks, and she glanced at her husband, and the glance was a whole quiet history. “Since I married Ninian this autumn, and it was in the papers, a physician of good family and a viscountess’s sister, respectable and dull and everything they had given me up for lost of ever being again. Mama wrote. It was a stiff little letter, and there was not one word of apology in all of it, for that is not in her, but she signed it your loving Mother, which she has not done since I was a child, and she asked, at the very end, as though it were nothing, whether she might be told if there were ever to be a grandchild.” Lucinda’s hand came to rest upon the edge of the cradle. “So I have told them. About little Isobel. I thought you would not mind it.”

“I do not mind it,” said Gavin. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that it was true. The bitterness he might once have felt toward the two frightened grasping people who had sold both their daughters north had worn away in him somewhere across the long good months, worn smooth as a stone in a stream, until there was nothing left of it sharp enough to cut. They had done a wicked thing out of fear, and out of that wickedness had come, by no merit of theirs, all of his happiness, and a man could not go on hating the soil a flower grew in once he had the flower in his hands. “Let them come north in the spring, if they wish to see her. Let them see what their bargain made.” He looked down at the cradle. “It made this.”

Bell lingered at the door when Lucinda had gone ahead, and put out his hand, and Gavin took it, and the two men stood a moment in the plain understanding of one another that had grown up between them and needed no words. Bell had married Lucinda in the little kirk at Braemere on a bright gold morning that October, with half the glen come to see it and Felix strewing petals with more enthusiasm than aim, and Gavin had given the bride away in her father’s stead and found his eyes stinging through all of the service. And Lucinda, who had come to Braemere a broken drowned thing that flinched from every shadow, laughed now, easily and often, throwing her head back to do it, and it was this quiet steady bespectacled man who had given her that back, one gentle patient day at a time, and Gavin knew no way to thank a man for such a kindness except to grip his hand hard and let his face say what his tongue could not.

“Look after her,” he said, which was foolish, for the man had done nothing else for a year.

“To the last hour I am given,” said Bell, which was the right answer, and went out to his wife.

Last of all, when the room had emptied, a little figure crept in around the edge of the door, where he had plainly been waiting his turn with an agony of patience wholly unnatural in him, and stole across the floor on his toes to the side of the cradle.

Gavin lifted him up so that he could see over the edge.

Felix looked down at his sister for a long, long time, in a silence deeper than any Gavin had known the boy to keep, his whole small face working through wonder and doubt and a dawning enormous proprietary pride. The baby slept on, oblivious to inspection, her dark tuft of hair and her curled fist and the tiny outrageous perfection of her.

“She is very small,” Felix pronounced at last, judiciously, in a whisper.

“She is. She will grow.”

“She has no teeth. And she cannot talk, or walk, or do anything at all.” A pause, in which the scales were visibly weighed. “But I expect she will learn. I learned.” Another pause, and then, settling the whole matter, coming to rest at last on the ground of it, he leaned down close over the cradle and said, in the low serious confiding voice of a boy taking on a sacred trust, “I am your big brother. I am Felix. I will teach you about dragons when you are bigger, and about beetles, which are more useful, and I will not let anything frighten you, ever, not anything, because I am the biggest and I know how everything works.” He considered. “Papa will help. He is even bigger. But mostly it will be me.”

Something went through Gavin at the word, the way it always did, the way he supposed it always would, world without end. Papa. Given freely now, and not in a fever, and meant.

He set the boy down, and Felix climbed up onto the bed with the ancient right of the firstborn and curled himself carefully against his sleeping mother’s side, mindful even in his triumph not to wake her. And Gavin stood in the middle of the warm lamplit room with the risen sun laying gold bars across the floor, and looked about him at everything he had.

His wife, sleeping, safe, mended, hers the one true chamber of his heart. His son, drowsing against her, hers-and-his and no halves about it. His daughter in her cradle, dark-haired and small and loud and alive, carrying a lost girl’s name forward into a life the lost girl had never had. And through the tall east window, past the last of the fallen scaffolding, the wing rose whole again in the morning light, its new stone pale against the old, its windows glazed and shining, the ruin made a house once more, and above the herb garden the sunny corner room that was to be a nursery again, and would be, by winter, and now sooner.

Two years and a little more. That was all it had been since he had stood a man drowning by inches in a grief he had made a religion of, alone in a cold ruined house at the black end of the world, keeping faith with the dead because he had nothing among the living to keep faith with. And now he had this.

Behind him, in the bed, Rosalind stirred. He heard the small sound of her surfacing, and turned, and found her watching him from the pillows with drowsy heavy-lidded eyes, one hand curved protectively over her sleeping son, the other reaching, half awake, across the coverlet toward him.

“What are you thinking of,” she murmured, “standing there in the sun with such a look on your face?”

He came and sat on the edge of the bed and took the reaching hand in both of his, and he told her the truth, because he had learned from her that the truth, however large, was a thing that could be said and survived.

“I am thinking,” he said, “that I never once believed, in all my life, that I should be let have this. A family. A future. You.” His thumb moved over her knuckles. “I made myself content to go without it. I was so certain it was not for me that I near threw it back in your face when you brought it to my door.”

Rosalind smiled up at him, worn and radiant, and drew his scarred hand to her lips, and kissed it, and held it against her cheek.

“Well,” she said. “You have it now.”

And he did.