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Frances.
    “Did Catherine choose a name?” he asked above the cries.
    Frances stared across the room with a dawning look of fear, only starting to acknowledge that her mistress wasn’t moving.
    Bell repeated the question.
    “Molly,” Frances said, holding up his daughter.
    “Quiet her,” he said. “I need to speak with Nicholas.”
    He exited the room. Servants met him in the hall. Their expressions were composed, almost chiseled on their heads, and none of them was fool enough to offer a condolence. Bell strode past them to the stairs and started down. The doctor had arrived and was coming up to meet him, puny in a greatcoat and trembling from the wet. He craned to look at Bell, neck flaccid as a turkey’s as he paused upon the landing with an educated smile.
    “Please excuse my delay, Lord Bell!” the doctor said. “I had thought to come sooner … fought to come at all! I was far across the city, halfway to Woodchapel Gate, when I received your summons, and the rain overwhelmed me. The carriages were slow, my horse was nearly drowned,” he said, wringing out his wig upon the clean white floor. “But judging by the sound, my worries were unfounded. Healthy lungs. A sonorous child! Best congratulations. Does the child have a name?”
    “Molly,” Bell said.
    “Ah, a daughter! And the lady—”
    “Dead,” Bell said. “God damn your drowning horse.”
    He left the doctor thunderstruck, fumbling with his bag, and continued downstairs to the darkened study of the mansion’s first floor, where he poured himself a tumblerful of rum and gulped it down. Catherine’s shawl was on the lounge, near a book that she’d been reading. Bell dropped the tumbler. It didn’t break but bounced along the rug, and when he bent to pick it up he stumbled to the floor, fighting nausea and a wild swirl of dizziness and heat.
    He heard a servant in the hallway outside the door and struggled to a chair. They shouldn’t see him on his knees; they were terrified already. They would look to him as Frances had, desperate for instruction. They had loved Catherine. She had coddled them and oh, how he’d chastised her and criticized her kindness. Catherine’s ordinary kindness!
    He placed the tumbler on the highboy and straightened out his waistcoat. Even downstairs with a hundred feet between them, he could hear the baby’s cries as if the child were inside him. He imagined they could hear it from the stables, from the street. His son would hear it, too, and wonder what had happened. He would need an explanation. He would need to be consoled. That was his responsibility, Bell quietly remembered, having foolishly considered that his wife would offer solace.
    Nicholas was drawing at a table in the library. He sat alone, a boy of six with black hair, black eyes, and skin the color of his dead mother’s body. Frail from birth and perpetually ill, he had worried Catherine and disappointed Lord Bell until his fortitude, his will, and most of all his intellect had overshadowed any of his physical deficiencies. Nicholas had walked late but talked early. He struggled to eat but voraciously read, and wrote, and worked at mathematics far beyond his peers. He played with difficult books the way ordinary boys played war, showed a keen fascination with anatomy and guns, and practiced harpsichord simply but precisely as a clock.
    Affectionate with Catherine and convivial with servants, Nicholas was stoic and at times even icy with his father, who often sensed rebellion in the boy’s unwavering expression.
    The library was bright with a pair of brass lamps and heavy with the smell of ink and moldy books. Catherine’s shadowplants, carefully selected for a room without windows, had grown beyond their pots and sent their creepers, vines, and leaves crawling up the shelves. Even here the baby’s cries were easily discerned, penetrating cherry and mahogany and oak, shearing through the million-page buffer of the cases.
    Bell stood before his son,