“Begging your pardon, my lady, but there’s a woman here to see you,” Estelle announced in her wispy voice.
“A woman? What woman?”
“She wouldn’t state her business, my lady, but she gave her name as Mrs. Cox. Should I show her in?”
Caroline sat mesmerized with shock. There was a long pause, in which the sound of approaching feet could be heard.
“No!” Caroline managed at last, standing up abruptly but too late, as Mrs. Cox pushed past Estelle and stood before Caroline with rainwater dripping from her hem onto the Persian rug. She fixed Caroline with a fiery eye and a determined set to her jaw. “That will be all, thank you, Estelle,” Caroline whispered.
Mrs. Cox looked immense but as she unbuttoned her raincoat the reason for this became clear. William was asleep, safely warm and dry beneath the coat, in a sling the woman had fashioned from a length of cotton canvas.
“I don’t know what you mean by it!” Mrs. Cox exclaimed at last, when it became clear that Caroline was lost for words. “Leaving the child with me all these many weeks… I don’t know what you can mean by it!”
“I…” But Caroline had no answer to give. Her careful neutrality, her passive acceptance of her fate, had written William out of the script. She had distanced herself from all thoughts of him, all responsibility. Seeing him again, waking up now as light and fresh air reached him, gave her a feeling like a blow to the stomach, a hard spike of love that was riddled with guilt and fear. “How did you find me?” was all she could think to ask.
“It wasn’t that hard, not with news of your wedding published in all the papers. I waited a bit longer, thinking you’d wanted the child kept safe and quiet while you got wed, but then I saw you weren’t going to come for him at all! You weren’t, were you? And him such a good, healthy boy… I don’t know what you mean by it!” Mrs. Cox repeated, her voice growing thick. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “And now I’ve had the expense of bringing him here on the train, and the trouble of walking him here through all this rain without him catching his death…”
“I can pay you. For the train, and… for the time you’ve had him. I can pay you more than that, even-here!” Caroline rushed to the dresser, withdrawing a purse of coins and holding it out to the woman. “Will you keep him?” she asked suddenly, fear making her voice shake. Mrs. Cox stared at her.
“Keep him? What can you mean? I’m not running a baby farm, I’ll have you know! You’re his mother-a child belongs with its mother. And look at the life he’ll have here!” She gestured at the grand surroundings. “I’ve enough mouths to feed and enough bodies to find beds for without taking on another one!” The woman seemed distraught. Caroline could only stand and stare in desperation as Mrs. Cox began to work at the knot holding the sling around her shoulders. “Here. I’ve brought him back to you now. Fit and well. All his things are in this bag-all but the carrier, for which he has grown too big, and I could not carry it as well as him to come down here. I… I hope you’ll love him, ma’am. He’s a good boy and he deserves to have a mother’s love…” She seated William on the red silk cushion of a winged armchair. He held his arms up to her and smiled. “No, lovey, you’re staying with your real mam now,” she told him, her eyes again filling with tears. Now that it came to leaving him, Mrs. Cox hesitated. She looked from William to Caroline and back again, and then her face creased in anguish and she knotted her hands in the folds of her skirts. “Take good care of your boy, Lady Calcott,” she said, and hurried away. William sat quietly for a minute, his eyes darting around the room from one unfamiliar object to another. Then he began to cry.
Frantic to hide him, Caroline scooped William up and went quickly via the back stairs to her bedroom. She put him down on the bed and stepped back, clasping her hands to the sides of her head, trying to still her thoughts, and her heart, which was clattering far too fast in her chest. Her breathing came in short, panicked snatches. Quickly, she found a pacifier in William’s bag of things and gave it to him to distract him. He stopped crying and grasped at the familiar, tinkling object, making small conversational noises to himself. Gradually, Caroline calmed down. He had grown so much! But then, he was a year and a half old now. His skin was darker and his hair was thicker. His face was beginning to show the high, slanting cheeks and straight brows of the Ponca. How could she ever have thought he was Corin’s child? William was Indian, through and through; it would have been obvious even if she had not come to realize that her failure to give Corin a child had more to do with Corin than with herself. Which meant that she had stolen Joe and Magpie’s baby. The enormity of this heinous crime hit Caroline like a poleaxe, and she sank to the floor, cramming a fist into her mouth to stifle uncontrollable sobs that surged up from her stomach and near strangled her. And she could not undo this terrible thing. There was no redress she could offer to Magpie-kind, gentle Magpie, who had been nothing but loyal and friendly, who was missing her child thousands of miles from where he now lay. Thousands of miles that neither she nor William would ever traverse again. It was another world, another lifetime. In bringing him here she had crossed a one-way boundary. In that moment, Caroline did not know how she was going to live with what she had done. She sat slumped on the carpet, and she wished to die.
Half an hour later, the maids and the housekeeper, Mrs. Priddy, saw Lady Calcott struggling across the waterlogged lawn, carrying something heavy in what looked like a cloth bag. They called after her, and wondered whether to accompany her and make sure she was well, but if Lady Calcott heard them she showed no signs of pausing. She vanished with her burden into the trees at the furthest edge of the gardens, and when she appeared again, pale and shivering, at the mudroom door, she was without it.
“What a day for a walk, my lady!” Mrs. Priddy exclaimed, as they found clean towels for her and unlaced her muddy boots. In truth it was a mild day, beneath those soggy English clouds, and certainly not cold enough to have brought on the storms of shuddering that wracked their new mistress’s frail body. “Let’s get you up to your room. Cass will bring you some hot tea, won’t you, Cass?” Mrs. Priddy addressed the chambermaid, a girl of fifteen who goggled at Caroline with round, green eyes. If any of the staff thought anything more of Mrs. Cox’s short visit, Caroline’s walk in the rain or the pillowcase missing from the bed, they knew better than to say anything about it. All except Cass Evans, that was, who whispered things late at night to Estelle, up in the small room on the top floor that they shared.
Caroline kept to her bed for several days. She lay in a state of dread and sorrow, which deepened when she slid her hand beneath her pillow and found William’s pacifier there. The one she had given him, to quieten him as he lay on the bed; the one she and Corin had presented to him as a welcoming gift. She ran her fingers around the silken ivory, cradled the silver bell gently in her hand. She ought to get rid of it, she knew. She ought not to have anything in her possession that could link her to the child, to any child. But she could not. As if some essence of William, of Magpie, of life and love, remained caught up in that one precious talisman, she clasped it tightly in her fists and held it close to her heart. And when Lord Calcott returned from London with an empty wallet, she finally delivered the news of her delicate condition with an expressionless face and a calm demeanor.
The tinker family did not move on, as Caroline had assumed they would; as she had prayed they would. Instead, a few days later, they brought William to the door, to ask politely if anybody in the household had any idea to whom the child belonged, since their inquiries in the village had proved fruitless. Caroline saw them coming along the driveway from her position at the drawing room window. Her heart squeezed fearfully in her chest-just as it had when Corin had first told her she had Indian neighbors-and she jumped up to flee before realizing that there was nowhere to go. She waited as the butler opened the front door, heard muffled words spoken, then the approach of footsteps and a subtle knock.