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  “There is no doubt that you are with child,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Mrs. Cole. This must be a shock.” He hardly knew how to ask the question but opted for blunt honesty. “I suppose you are certain that the child is Mr. Cole’s?”

  She opened her eyes at that and then turned her head away from him to the wall. He was afraid that she was mortally offended. But when she spoke, her voice was level and clear. “There is a doubt,” she said steadily, gazing resolutely at the wall. “Mr. Cole is—” She broke off, partly through embarrassment and partly because she simply did not know the words. “I think it unlikely that Mr. Cole would make a child,” she explained very softly.

  There was a long silence. Stuart took a seat on the side of her bed without permission and took her thin hand in his. She was cold, despite the fire. He did not know if she could tolerate this shock to an already vulnerable system. “Do not be afraid,” he encouraged her. “We will find a way to manage this. Do not be afraid, Mrs. Cole.”

  She said nothing.

  “Mehuru is a friend of mine,” he said quietly. “I honor and respect him. He is a gentleman.” He smiled inwardly at hearing himself repeat the cant of their class. “A gentleman,” he said firmly.

  She shot a quick look at him. “Is it you who has taken him to radical clubs?” she demanded bitterly. “Who persuaded him that he must be free?”

  Stuart bit back an angry reply. This woman was a patient; he must care for her. “What I wanted to say,” he went on, his voice very low, “is that a child of his, even with a white-skinned mother, would be dark-skinned, would be noticeably dark.”

  She looked at him so blankly he thought that perhaps she did not understand, that the seizure of her heart had damaged her comprehension. He feared for a moment that he was making the most enormous and foolish mistake. He had assumed that Mehuru and Frances were lovers. He was assuming that the baby was Mehuru’s child.

  “Any baby of his will show its parentage,” he said carefully. “Any baby of his would be dark-skinned.”

  “Black like him?”

  “They call them mulattoes in the Sugar Islands,” he told her. “They are brown-skinned, very beautiful babies, enchanting children.”

  She blinked. She remembered, it seemed a lifetime away, Miss Honoria telling her that they always preferred mulattoes in the house as servants. She remembered Honoria’s easy gliding over unpalatable facts: “Papa likes to mix the stock.”

  She opened her mouth, her face blank as stone, and laughed, a high, shrieking laugh. Stuart recoiled, but she did not stop. She laughed and laughed as if nothing would stop her.

  “Enough,” Stuart ordered, and his voice cut through her screaming laughter.

  She looked wide-eyed at him. “What shall I do?” she asked simply. “I shall be ruined.”

  “Do you know when it is due?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “It was conceived in May.” Her face softened as she thought of the daffodils in her bed and the darkness of the May night.

  “It will be born in January, then,” he said.

  “It might die,” she said coldly, but her hand crept down to her belly, and she spread her palm over where the little head was lying.

  “Do you want it to die?”

  Her face quivered into life, and her color rose. “No,” she replied with sudden surprising conviction. “It is a love child. It is my child. It is Mehuru’s child. I want it to live. Oh!” She gave a small gasp of desire. “Oh! I want it to live very much!”

  “Then we must be very careful with your health,” Stuart said. “Avoid all excitement and disturbance, and rest as much as you can. For yourself, and also for your baby.”

  She nodded. “But if my heart is too weak . . .”

  “You must rest,” he insisted. “We may get you safely through this, and your little baby, too.”

  She was silent for a moment, and then she turned to him and faced him honestly. “I don’t care for myself,” she said quietly. “I have not been very lucky, you see, Mr. Hadley. Not in my girlhood, and not in my marriage, and not even in my love for Mehuru. Oh! It was not his fault! But the gulf between us was so great that I don’t think we could ever have bridged it. And I have not been good to him.” She paused, thinking. “So if I am ill, and if you ever have to choose . . . You will save the baby, won’t you?”

  Stuart grimaced. “I hope never to make that choice.”

  “But if I am dying and you can save the baby, you will do that—won’t you?”

  “If it is your wish,” he said slowly.

  “It is,” she said. “Mehuru’s baby. Think what a precious child that will be.”

  “Could you sleep now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The laudanum has made me drowsy.”

  He held her hand. “I will stay with you until you sleep,” he said gently.

  She opened her eyes for a moment. “Don’t tell Mehuru.”

  He hesitated. “You want to tell him yourself?”

  Her eyelids were drooping. “He has to be free to go,” she whispered, so softly that he could hardly hear her. “He has to be free. I have to set him free.” She glanced at him for a moment, in jealousy. “You want him free,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you will advise him where he could go, where they can all go, so that Josiah cannot find them and enslave them again?”

  “I will.”

  “Then he must be free to leave now,” she said simply. “He cannot stay with me.”

  When her eyelids fluttered shut, the doctor sat with her a little while, looking at her white face. The bedroom door opened quietly, and Mehuru stood there.

  “You can come in,” Stuart said quietly. “She is sleeping.”

  Mehuru came in as light-footed as a cat. He checked when he saw Frances, the slight rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed slowly and painfully, the waxy white color of her face.

  “She will need someone to watch her,” Stuart told him. “Night and day. Her heart is very weak. She needs to be kept quiet. She must have nothing to trouble her at all.”

  Mehuru remained silent, his eyes never leaving her face.

  “She will need someone to watch over her. I can find a nurse for the first few days, but they are not reliable women. Will Miss Cole care for her?”

  “I will watch her,” Mehuru decided.

  “You cannot—”

  Mehuru shook his head. “It is my right,” he said with gentle dignity. “I will watch her sleep and be here when she wakes.”

  JOSIAH DID NOT COME home that night, nor did he return the next day. Sarah, walking alone down to the old warehouse on the quay in the wintry dawn, with a shawl over her head like a trader’s daughter, found that he had spent the night in their old home and was sitting in his old office, looking out over the dock, waiting for Rose.

  In the following week, he did not come home to the expensive house in Queens Square at all. He chose to stay in his little warehouse, sleeping on a pallet on the floor wrapped in his cloak at night and sitting in his old place at the window overlooking his empty quay from the first gray light of the morning. He spent his day bargaining and dealing in tiny, pitiful amounts of cash on the quayside, while the bigger debts in the account books at Queens Square grew fat like maggots in the dark of the ledgers and the letters from Hibbard and Sons warning that they would prosecute for nonpayment collected, unopened, on his desk.

  He chose to dine in the coffee shop, sitting once again far from the top table. He might have claimed his place and been still tolerated. There were a few men who might have greeted him with sympathy, but Josiah did not try. He no longer wanted to be with them. He sat, neither with his new friends nor with his old, but at a little table on his own, near the window, where he could see his dock and the entrance to the harbor every time he lifted his eyes. He never stopped looking for Rose, and whenever he saw the shape of a travel-weary brig silhouetted against the sparkle of the incoming water, he woul