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up.” Her shoulders were very cold, and her teeth were chattering.
    Eliza led her upstairs into their bedroom, unhooked her dress and helped her into a clean nightdress; Catherine was still shivering. “We should go in and see her now,” said Eliza.
    Hand in hand, they walked across the landing. Through the window the stars were coming out and, in the tall trees outside, rooks were settling in their nests. Inside her room, Mother was asleep, a lamp burning on the table beside her. The baby and the crib were gone.
    Mother’s face was so pale now that her lips looked blue. When Catherine gently stroked her cheek, she butted against her hand like a kitten. And at that moment, it seemed to Catherine that she looked upon the most precious gift of her life, and that all the objects in the room: the bed, the tapestry chair, the sentimental picture above the bed of a lad and lass in an English garden, had become remarkable and touched with an extra light.
    “Sit there.” Eliza settled Catherine into the blue chair beside Mother’s bed. The same armless chair Mother had fed them in as babies.
    “I’ll bring some bread and cheese. It may be a long night,” she said, leaving the room. How grown-up she sounded, all within a day.
    Eliza came back with some inexpertly hacked slices of bread and cheese. They ate ravenously for a moment before pushing their plates away. It made them feel sick to eat while Mother lay like that. Also, the smell, sick and sweet.
    They sat in silence for a while, as though frightened that words, or even the sound of their own breathing in their ears, might disturb Mother or stop them from hearing something important. Then Eliza got up and busied herself, hanging up Mother’s dress, straightening the bed, and putting some primroses in a blue vase on the bedside table.
    Watching her through half-asleep eyes, Catherine found these small observances comforting. Sweet Eliza playing dollies. She had a sense of everything being out of her hands now, as though she were a very small boat out on a far larger sea than she had ever imagined: she must wait now for the waves to take her where they would. From somewhere outside in the yard, she heard the honk of a goose. She closed her eyes and slept, dreaming of herself caught in a shop somewhere, wading through a stream of materials— organzas, silks, satins—certain she was urgently needed elsewhere, unable to stop herself twirling and beaming at her reflection in the glass in dress after dress after dress. When she awoke with a start and a stiff neck, the first thing she smelled was her mother dying, and grief flooded in like water in a sinking ship. Eliza stood at the door, a bowl of potpourri in her hands.
    “Eliza.” Catherine stood up. “Leave the room for a while. I’m going to change Mother’s sheets and clean her up. I know what to do now.”
    Eliza’s small white hands plucked at two drooping primroses, threw them into the wastepaper basket.
    “Please don’t, Catherine, don’t touch her, I beg you. Ceris will be back later, or Mair. Let them do it.”
    She looked so embarrassed that Catherine almost gave in.
    “Let her go with dignity,” Eliza said.
    “Dignity,” said Catherine, whispering furiously. “Damn dignity. I want her to live.”
    They stood on either side of the bed glaring at each other like two strangers who had collided in a freak accident, then Eliza, witha tearing sob, left the room, knocking over the vase of flowers as she went. Catherine, blundering around on the floor in a mess of water and broken pottery and petals, heard a faint cry from the bed and, jumping to her feet and rushing to the bedside, saw a thin line of what looked like black treacle coming from her mother’s mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. Life was neither pretty nor fair, she knew that now, all at once: not the dainty little garden in the sampler Mother had embroidered in the picture above the bed, with hollyhocks and delphiniums and