She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 24

The child was born in April, on a wet gray morning, after eleven hours of the kind of pain that has no comparison and cannot be explained to anyone who has not done it.

Rosalind had insisted on the truth from the physician in advance — every possibility, every danger, every statistic. She had also insisted, against every protest, on having Nell in the room and on sending the Duke out of it, and she stuck to both.

He stood in the corridor. He stood there for eleven hours, in the same place, and afterward the footmen said among themselves that the Duke of Ravenmoor had not moved except once, at the end, when the sound from behind the door changed and he had put his hand against the wall as though to hold the house up.

The child was a daughter.

She was born angry, with an extraordinarily loud voice and a complete head of dark hair, and the midwife laughed out loud when she held her up.

Rosalind was too tired to see properly for the first few minutes. She heard the cry, which was enormous and healthy and furious, and the sound of it went through her like a thaw.

“Give her to me,” she said.

Nell brought her, wrapped in linen, warm as a loaf from the oven, and put her in the crook of Rosalind’s arm, and Rosalind looked down at the small, red, exhausted, furious face and began to cry, which she had promised herself she would not do, and did anyway, at length.

They brought the Duke in half an hour later.

He came to the bedside slowly and stood looking down at the two of them with an expression Rosalind had never seen on his face and did not expect to see again.

“What will you call her?” he asked.

Rosalind had known the answer for months. She had known since the morning she stood in the church with white roses in her hands and thought about the woman in the portrait above the library fire, whose letter had been curled in a desk in a coward’s study for two years while everyone told lies about how she died.

She looked up at him.

“Celia,” she said. “If you will allow it.”

The Duke of Ravenmoor was quiet for a long moment.

“I would like it very much,” he said.

“Celia Rosalind.”

“Celia Rosalind,” he repeated, and then, in the same flat, careful, breaking voice he had used at the altar — “and God help whichever of us she takes after.”

The baby, unimpressed, howled.

That evening, when the room was quiet and the sky outside had gone the color of slate, Rosalind sent Nell away and lay in the dark with the infant asleep on her chest.

With her free hand she reached to the drawer beside the bed and took out the jet locket, the old black one, the punishment, the piece of mourning she had been given for a thing that had never died.

She opened it.

Inside was the lock of her own hair that her father had cut off, dark and shining and twenty-three years old, tied with a thread.

Rosalind looked at it for a while.

Then she took the thread, and opened the little clasp, and tipped her own hair out onto the covers, and gathered it up, and put it in the drawer with the crimson letters, where it belonged — with the knives.

And from the fine, dark, ridiculous head of her daughter, she took a small curl, one that would not be missed, and folded it inside the locket, and closed it, and fastened the ribbon around her own throat.

Now it means something else, she thought.

The baby slept. The house creaked around them, the way houses do, the way ships do, settling into the water.

Rosalind Vane, Duchess of Ravenmoor, lay in the dark and did not sleep for a long time, because she did not want to miss it.