SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…

Chapter 30

October came in gold and cold, and on the eleventh day of the month, in the room with the window facing the roses, Josephine Foster Hawthorne gave birth to a daughter.

It took nineteen hours. She would remember almost none of it — a blur of the midwife’s voice and the fire being built up twice and Raymond’s hand in hers, gripping hard enough to hurt, which she had not expected and which she would tease him about for the rest of her life. She remembered the smell of the room, which was clean linen and the rosemary the midwife had put in the fire to sweeten the air. She remembered thinking, at some point in the worst of it, absurdly, there were twelve ewes and now there are nineteen and Reuben has not told me, and then laughing, and then the laughing turning into the work again.

And then the sound.

A thin, outraged cry in that third room, at the top of Foster Hall, in the house that had stood empty for four years with a leaking roof.

Raymond did not hold her for the first ten minutes. He stood by the window with his back to the room while the midwife worked, and Josephine, half-conscious and knowing him, understood that he could not move.

“Raymond.”

He turned.

“Come here.”

He came. The midwife put the bundle in Josephine’s arms and then went to the basin to wash her hands, and there in the third room with the window facing the roses, Josephine looked down at her daughter.

Dark hair, already. Dark eyes. A furious small face.

“She looks like you,” Raymond said.

“She looks like everyone,” said Josephine. “She looks like my mother and your mother and Thomas and my father and probably Reuben, if I look closely enough. That is what a new person is.” She touched the small hand. “Do you want to hold her?”

“I do not know how.”

“Nobody knows how.”

He held out his arms anyway, and Josephine put the child into them, and Raymond Hawthorne — who had inherited his title at twenty-two when his father died, who moved through society like winter, who had not smiled in fifteen years — stood in the middle of the room holding his daughter and looked absolutely terrified.

“She is very light,” he said.

“She is three hours old.”

“She is very light,” said Raymond, and did not move, and did not hand her back, and did not look away from her face.

They named her Rose.

It was Josephine’s idea, and Raymond had said simply, “Yes,” which she had learned was his way of saying that is exactly right and I will not pretend to have thought of it.

Rose Foster Hawthorne, born in the third room of Foster Hall on the eleventh of October, in the year that her mother rebuilt the roof.

Edith came out for a week to be disagreeable about the linens and to hold the baby for two hours straight without giving her back. Millie cried. Dennis brought up a second wooden horse, better carved, and said the first one was a draft. Francis sent a letter of congratulations in the formal third person and then, two days later, a second letter in plain English that began, I am told you have named her Rose, which is a considerable improvement on the names currently in fashion.

Mrs. Osborne arranged for a cradle in July. It was finished in September. It was, as promised, the correct size.

And Reuben, when told, stood in the orchard for a moment with his hands in his pockets.

“A girl,” he said.

“A girl.”

“Girls are better with sheep,” said Reuben. “Come spring, I’ll show her the flock.”

“She will be six months old in the spring.”

“Plenty old enough,” said Reuben, and went back to work.

That night, when the house was quiet and the baby was asleep and the fire in the third room was banked low, Josephine sat up in bed with her daughter asleep in the cradle beside her and Raymond in the chair by the window with the roses dark outside.

“Are you happy?” she asked.

Raymond looked at her.

“That is not a question I have ever been able to answer,” he said. “Until now.”

“Until now?”

“Yes.” He looked at the cradle. “Now I think I know what the word is for. It is the opposite of what I had before. Before, everything was kept in drawers. Now there is nothing in any drawer in this house except paper, and everything else is in this room.”

Josephine held out her hand.

He came and sat on the edge of the bed and took it.

“Rose Foster,” she said. “She will never be sold and she will never be hidden and she will never have to cut her hair to get out of a house. That is the whole of what I want.”

“That is the whole of what I want too,” said Raymond, and the candle guttered, and outside on the south wall, in the dark of October, the last roses of the season held on through the cold.