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used to cut the cord, and the blade lay cold just above her eye. He kissed her lips and tasted her and knew that she was dying, and he cried for the first time in years, very plainly, dripping tears on her cheeks where they blended with her sweat.
    “Catherine,” Bell said, incapable of more, just the clarity and cleanliness of “Catherine, oh, Catherine.”
    Quieter and quieter, he whispered it and stared, fearing that she truly might vanish if he blinked.
    “She isn’t breathing,” Frances said, muffled by the rain.
    “Catherine,” Bell said.
    “M’lord, she isn’t breathing.”
    “She is!” he yelled. “She is!”
    He could feel it on his face, every tiny exhalation that was passing from her lips.
    “Please!” Frances said, much closer, right beside him.
    Bell squeezed the knife until the handle seemed to bend. He turned to her and shouted for the doctor once again; Frances didn’t move but held the infant up to show him.
    “Please, she isn’t breathing, oh I’ve tried—she’s going cold!”
    Bell registered the deep, leaden blueness of its skin. He threw the knife against the wall and took the child by the ankles.
    “Softly!” Frances moaned, as if she hadn’t begged for help.
    He dangled it aloft and slapped the baby on the bottom, half a dozen times until his palm began to sting.
    “It isn’t helping,” Frances said. “Please, it isn’t help—”
    Bell slapped her, hard across the jaw. Frances backed away and finally held her tongue. He turned his hand upon the babe again, slapping at its back, at its thighs, at its chest, at its weakness and its breathlessness. He stopped and let it hang, wearied by his failure.
    With a gurgle and a cough, the girl began to cry.
    She cried as he had never heard a baby cry before, so fiery and red he almost dropped her in alarm.
    “You’ve done it!” Frances said, laughing through her tears. She took the baby back again, admiring the sound. “Bless her, little thing, listen to her now! Breathe, let it out. There you are, m’love, go on!”
    Bell returned to the bed and saw the umbilical blood smudged above his wife’s left eye. He licked his thumb to clean it off, tasting it and wondering whether it was Catherine’s or the child’s, unsure if there was really any difference. Now her eyes were on his face, midday blue. He touched her hair along her collarbone and held her feeble hand. Rain pounded overhead, bearing down as if to crush them, and the sconces on the walls weakened in the gloom. On and on the infant cried, fabulously loud, neither slowing nor diminishing but growing every moment. He didn’t dare turn and take his eyes off his wife—her watery expression and the flicker of her consciousness dissolving as if the rain were rinsing her away.
    Yet the wails were all he heard, all he felt, all he knew. He looked and there was Frances with the child in her arms, crying out and reddening and breathing as she cried.
    “Quiet!” Bell said. “Soothe her! Make her stop!”
    He clawed his head until his wig fell sullied to the floor, and then he turned to see his wife had closed her weary eyes. Her body had the same bleached pallor as her gown, and both the blood and Catherine’s hair looked darker through his tears. Bell slumped until his forehead pressed against her own.
    For an instant all the world vanished in her stillness. A silence fell around them and he might have spent the night there, stupefied and calm, just the two of them alone. But the baby called him back, and with the cries he heard the rain again, and Frances crying, too, and all the servants’ hissing whispers in the darkness of the hall.
    He studied Catherine’s face as if it might have been a portrait, worth his admiration but inanimate and flat. Not the woman he had married. Not a woman he could hold. He wiped his palms and tucked his handkerchief neatly in his pocket. His knife was on the floor, he suddenly recalled. He picked it up, snapped it shut, and walked toward