FOUR
1749–1750
y January of 1749, St. Petersburg’s salons were rife with speculation about who among the Imperial Favorites would win the battle for a place in Elizabeth’s bed. For a while the Empress appeared frequently in the company of the actor who had played Susanin at the Russian Theater. Then some Cossack from Kiev, swiftly promoted to Lieutenant, dazzled her with his “Devil” dance. Next came Nikita Beketov, a choirmaster, rumored to be one of the Chancellor’s protégés. Beketov’s supremacy seemed assured until he was foolish enough to accept a gift from Countess Shuvalova, a jar of whitening cream, promising to smooth his skin. When his face erupted with bloated red patches, the Countess made sure the Empress feared for the pox. Beketov left the palace in disgrace.
Much was made of the fact that in the Imperial Bedroom, Countess Shuvalova scratched the imperial heels and told the Empress stories. “Might it have anything to do with the Roman nose of her handsome son?” I heard my husband ask with icy glee. He meant Countess Shuvalova’s youngest son, Ivan Ivanovich, whose father, Marshal Shuvalov, had once been one of Elizabeth’s lovers. There were more Shuvalovs at the court; one of Ivan’s uncles was the Chief Prosecutor, two more served in the Secret Chancellery. “Open a coffer and a Shuvalov will pop up,” Egor told me, “sniffing for his share of the spoils.”
Word spread of Ivan Shuvalov’s youthful charm, the soft, dark curls over his high forehead, the absentminded smile on his sensuous lips. “Eighteen years younger than the Empress. Always with a book in his hands. He has written a play. He wants her to rebuild the palace. He corresponds with Voltaire! He has given a pure white falcon to the Grand Duke.” St. Petersburg salons resonated with cries of astonishment, accompanied by an uncertain laughter.
There were too many drunken feasts in Oranienbaum and too many military parades, often interrupted by displays of Peter’s rage. Chairs had been smashed, a bottle hurled out of a window. I believe that the Soldier’s heart is good, Catherine wrote, but his mind is getting feeble from too much drinking, and then he gets unpredictable.
I reread her letters greedily before the flames consumed them. Some things should never be written, not even in secret.
If only we could talk, I thought.
Alone.
“Imagine this,” I heard.
Imagine the Winter Palace where there is no more late-night switching of bedrooms, no shrieks of anger, no fear of the dark. Behind the bedroom curtains, imagine fiddlers playing, choruses singing old Russian ballads. Imagine a mechanical table always in use for the Empress’s late-night suppers. Imagine love’s blindness, a woman bewitched.
I tried to, but my thoughts drifted away.
To Masha’s delight, I sniffed rot everywhere and gagged at smells: the wet sheepskin coat of our coachman, the frowsy smell of Egor’s riding boots. In the mornings I was waking up feeling nauseated. For days I would eat nothing but dark, coarse bread and drink only kvass. The midwife had told me to fill my mind with pleasant thoughts.
I was again with child.
“Our son,” Egor kept saying, putting his hand on my still tight-laced belly. “Our little soldier.”
I heard the softening in his voice. I felt his hand move up to caress the skin at my throat. I thought of the butcher who had not been paid this month. Of tallow candles that smoked, for we could no longer afford wax ones, not even for the parlor. Of the string of pearls that had disappeared from my jewelry box.
In St. Catherine’s cathedral on the Great Perspective Road, where once I listened to Mass with my parents every Sunday, I knelt at the altar and crossed myself the Latin way. It was a daughter I prayed for, a daughter who would not refuse to be born. A daughter I could call mine.
Pregnancy suited me. As the child grew in me, my hair thickened, my skin glowed. I dutifully drank teas the midwife gave me; I never raised my hands above my shoulders, never wore a necklace around my neck. Masha fed me leeks and cooked prunes. I let her massage bear grease on the skin of my belly, tie a red ribbon around my wrist and mutter her incantations.
This time all will be well, she said, and I believed her.
Masha saw the red velvet jacket and gold rings of a grand man wishing to talk to her mistress, the manservant standing behind him, holding his cane, and I heard her mutter a hasty prayer, flustered and uneasy.
“Good day, Madame Malikina,” the Chancellor said. Bestuzhev’s rust-colored velvet jacket was straining at the seams, and I imagined it cracking open, revealing the white cambric shirt, the scars underneath.
“Good day, Varvara Nikolayevna,” he repeated, the missing teeth molding his lips into a grimace.
I walked right past him.
Masha scurried behind me along the Moyka Bridge. Panting, she tugged at my sleeve. I refused to stop. I didn’t look back, either, delighting in the sound of my steps on the paved sidewalk.
I heard the carriage door open and close, the horses’ hoofbeats on cobblestones, a snarl of a stray dog frightened away. By the time I reached the door of our house the Chancellor was there. Masha hesitated for a moment, but I told her to go inside.
He asked about my health and my husband’s.
“We are both well,” I answered coldly.
The summer heat brought out the smell of fish and rotting roots from the Moyka River. Without warning, I thought of myself in that first year at court, the child I had been, the scalding pain of my loneliness. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Bestuzhev had asked then. I pushed back a wave of nausea.
The shrewd eyes of the man who had once been my teacher noted my disgust. The Chancellor flashed me a brittle smile, followed by a grave nod, as if I were still a child in need of chastising.
It’s not over. You cannot afford to hate me, the look warned. I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to give in.
“I’d like you to assure the Grand Duchess of my respect for her,” he said.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by his words, but I was. Once again the old palace game demanded a shift of alliances, a shameless turnabout. The Shuvalovs courted Peter, so Bestuzhev had to turn to the Grand Duchess.
“The little Hausfrau with a pointed chin?” I could not resist a sneer.
“I was wrong. I willingly admit it.”
“How willingly?” I challenged.
The Chancellor gave me an indulgent smile. You can have your brief moment of satisfaction, he seemed to be saying. You have earned it.
“Most willingly.”
“How can I assure the Grand Duchess of anything?” I asked. “I don’t ever see her now.”
“That mask of ignorance doesn’t suit you, Varvara Nikolayevna. Jewels become you far more.”
I heard the warning in his words, and I stiffened, knowing I would not sleep that night. I had suspected that the Chancellor might know of the letters the jeweler Monsieur Bernardi smuggled out of Oranienbaum but decided that he allowed them, a wise investment for the uncertain future. Each time I examined Catherine’s seals, however, they always seemed intact. What else did I miss that I should’ve seen?
“I’ll pass on your assurances to the Grand Duchess when I have the opportunity,” I muttered. A wagon loaded to the brim with birch logs rolled by. An onion seller wearing long braids of onions around his neck was spreading a dirty-looking blanket on a wooden crate. My stomach churned again.
“Good,” the Chancellor said, as I opened the door to the house. “This is all I wished to hear. For now.”
Ivan Ivanovich’s first invitation from the Empress had been to a pilgrimage. In the salons of St. Petersburg, praying together had become a synonym for the sexual act.
The Shuvalovs may have won, I heard, but success is fleeting. Ivan the Devout would not last long. There were limits to even the most ardent of prayers.
Each morning, when I woke up, I placed my hand on my belly, to feel the vigorous thumps of the tiny heels. From the kitchen wafted the smells of roasted kasha and warm bread. Masha made omelets for me with caviar. Egor’s commander, Colonel Zinovev, had sent us a basket of gifts. Honey that sweetened my tea came from his country estate. So did the cured hams and smoked sturgeon. Now that his favorite Lieutenant’s wife had to eat for two, the attached note said, she had to have the best.
I lowered myself into the rocking chair and let it sway gently. “Swedish,” Egor called it, on account of its glossy black finish decorated with red and gold.
He said he would name our son Dmitry. After his own father. Our second son could be Nikolay, after mine.
The dark November days were bitterly cold, the air smelled of sour smoke. The cherry tree outside my bedroom swayed in the wind. Flocks of sparrows descended on its bare branches, only to depart in a swarm of startled wings. “Open the window,” I begged Masha, but she refused, muttering of drafts and bad air and the evil eye.
Pushed out of the depth of my pain, she was covered with my blood and already wailing. Healthy and alive.
Mine, I thought, bracing myself for Egor’s disappointment.
In the street I heard a sleigh come to a stop. Horses neighed. In the commotion that followed I heard whistles, catcalls, and laughter.
As an old custom demanded, Egor’s comrades would take him to the banya and lash his back with birch twigs. They would taunt him as his skin reddened, as tiny beads of blood mixed with his sweat. The bathhouse demons had to have their revenge on a man whose firstborn was not a boy.
“You won’t have your soldier,” I told my husband.
He turned toward me and asked, “But she will live, won’t she?” His voice quivered with wonder. I stretched out my hands, and Egor placed Darya in my arms, gently, like the most fragile of china.
“Yes,” I promised. “She will live.”
Through the closed doors I heard the clinking of cups on a tray. I smelled sweet bread and felt my stomach rumble. Outside, in the street, dogs were barking themselves into a frenzy.
Darya, Egor had named her. Darenka.
I did not resent Egor’s choice. In Polish, my daughter’s name evokes a sumptuous gift, a magnificent offering worthy of the Queen.
Darenka wrinkled her tiny nose and then sneezed. “My little princess,” Egor cooed, and I thought that maybe I didn’t know everything about him, after all.
I marveled at how well her small, warm body fitted into mine as we lay together on our big canopied bed, on the white crisp linen, which seemed to hold the scent of the wind. How wide she opened her mouth in eager search of my breast. I watched the tremor of delight when I placed my nipple, wet with milk, into her toothless mouth. I shivered with love when she closed her gums on it and began suckling, her grip latched just at the edge of pain. I was no longer alone. I was no longer a voyeur watching myself live.
Darya. Darenka.
Masha gasped in bewilderment at my refusal to hire a wet nurse. I heard her warn Egor that I’d wear myself out, that he should talk sense into me. “A good strong country girl,” she would praise this or that candidate. “Go to your wife,” I would hear her urge Egor. “Tell her now.”
With Darya snug in my arms, I’d close my eyes and wait for the door to open, for Egor’s steps, hesitant, drowning in the thick carpet. For the whiff of the distant stables his clothes always carried, softened by the scent of snuff.
He would reason with me.
“You need rest, kison’ka. You need to heal. It’s for your own good.”
I let him speak, as he leaned over to see Darenka’s face, drifting into sleep. I heard his words turn into whispers and wane, and I knew he would let me do as I wished.
Alone with Darenka, her lips suckling on my nipple, I tried to remember my parents’ faces. Not the way they looked in their coffins, wax-like and shriveled, but at these precious everyday moments when they were alive. I recalled the tiny room in Warsaw where I sat, curled by my mother’s side, watching her turn the hems of my dresses. I recalled the way her face lit with hope on the day when we arrived in St. Petersburg and the time when she hung the Virgin pendant around my neck. I remembered my father peeling an apple so carefully that the peel formed a long unbroken line and then cutting it into fat wedges that—even in the dead of winter—smelled of autumn sun. How they would have loved Darenka, I thought, promising to take my daughter to visit their graves and to pray for their souls.
Time was gentle to us then. I murmured into my daughter’s tiny ear, already ticklish, nudging her into a shadow of laughter, the words of her first story, the story of her birth: I lay in pain for two days, and you had to be turned inside me before I pushed you out of my womb, I told her. Death was lurking, waiting for both of us, my darling, but we escaped. I am your mother, and you are my daughter. With me you are safe. I’ll never let anyone hurt you. I won’t let you die, and I’ll never leave you before you are ready.
“There cannot be any more children,” the midwife had said.
I’d heard her words, but their meaning had not touched me yet.
With Masha’s help, I arranged the baptismal gifts in our parlor, on a table covered with white damask, so that our visitors could admire them. A golden cross from her godfather. A chalice and a set of silver spoons in an ivory box from her godmother. Catherine’s gift, a rosary bracelet of black pearls from Monsieur Bernardi’s workshop, came with an inscription: For Darya Egorevna, whose future will always be in my heart.
With Egor at my side, I sat through rounds of visits as custom demanded, strangely soothed by the gasps of admiration: How perfect she is! How tiny! How glowing! I smiled as our visitors hung over the crib, pointing out resemblances. My nose, but Egor’s dark eyes. His lusty bawl, but my smile.
Darya Egorevna.
May she always be with those who love her.
May she prosper and be safe.
I wiped tears off my cheeks.
“May God grant her all this,” I whispered.
In our apartment on Apothecary Lane, all locks and hinges had been oiled; our servants were ordered to wear soft slippers and keep their voices hushed. The cradle was beside my bed, but a spare room had already been turned into a nursery with canary-yellow walls and a cedar chest. The room smelled of varnish and paint. My daughter had enough cambric shifts for five infants, half a dozen shawls, a silver-fox throw to keep her warm in the winter, and an expensive china doll with a velvet bonnet.
Her father’s gift.
Once, by candlelight, I saw Egor bend over Darya’s crib, his voice rising and falling, soothing her whimpers. She gurgled in response, a string of sounds still incomprehensible. He picked her up and held her close to his face, smiling at her in an uneasy happiness I recognized so well.
In the street, a beggar boy was singing off-key, an orphan’s song. Soon he would knock at our kitchen door for a bowl of hot soup, a thick slice of buttered bread, and a few moments by the fire to ward off the November chill.
Another gurgle came, muted in bubbly spit.
I watched Egor place Darya back in her cradle and rest his right hand over his heart as if he was making a vow.
The beggar’s song ended, and I stepped back, careful not to make a noise.
For Christmas, the Chancellor of Russia sent the Grand Duchess a case of Hungarian claret and a few rare books acquired for her in Paris.
Both gifts had been returned.
“Was the book Machiavelli, or would that be too crude?” I asked the Chancellor when he came up to me that evening.
It was not the first time that he had sought me out at the Russian Theater, where Egor insisted we show up once a week, ever since I felt well enough to go out. The Chancellor always waited for the time my husband joined his fellow officers, and he always spoke of Catherine. The Grand Duchess, he told me, possessed a rare spirit. She had a unique combination of composure, courage, and quick wit. The Grand Duke would do well if he paid heed to her advice.
Slick words, I thought. Palace words.
“Let’s give up on blame, Varvara Nikolayevna. Let’s try a little more tact. Or even perhaps some Christian forgiveness.”
I noted how blackened the remaining teeth in his mouth were, and how long cuffs trimmed with lace were meant to cover the age spots on his hands. There had been talk of mercury cures and far too much vodka, talk confirmed by his reddened nose and bloodshot eyes.
There was such sweet pleasure in the shift of power between us. I dipped into it. I could not resist.
“Have you begun packing already?” I asked.
Ivan Shuvalov, rumor had it, had called the Winter Palace “no better than a drafty dump.” A house should be like the setting of a jewel, to match the grandeur of its owner. What was good for Peter the Great when he was still building Russia’s glory no longer sufficed for his daughter, who was now ruling over an Empire. Why suffer the sooty walls of times long gone? The low ceilings, the simple furniture any clumsy apprentice could have made? Where is the lightness and light of the present? The new horizons? The new vision? The new pride?
The Empress agreed with her latest lover. Her Italian architect, Monsieur Rastrelli, had already seen his initial plans for the reconstruction of the palace trampled by imperial heels. “Come up with loftier visions,” Elizabeth had demanded. “Visions worthy of my Russia.”
The Chancellor’s cheerful smile did not fade at my taunt.
“Packing? Is that what they say I am doing? All I’ve seen so far are the catalogs of Parisian auctions scattered all over the Imperial Bedroom. And rolls of architectural drawings taking up the surface of the huge desk that is there now. But nothing has been decided yet.”
“The carpenters in town have doubled their rates,” I reminded him. “The masons have tripled theirs. Does that not signify a decision?”
The Chancellor’s eyes narrowed. I could hear his foot tap the floor.
“Perhaps this is the secret of Ivan Ivanovich’s success,” I continued. “He has the courage of wanting more. The belief in what others snigger at. The ability to pluck the strings others consider long broken.”
My breasts were leaking milk. I thought of Darya’s lips on my nipple, her tiny hand gripping my finger.
“Ah, the courage of motherhood, Varvara Nikolayevna,” the Chancellor replied, dropping his voice. “Indomitable. And always infinitely touching. However, you should consider the fact that your husband has been borrowing quite a bit of money. A wiser choice of friends might alleviate—”
I didn’t let him finish.
“I’m not like you,” I said, walking away. “I don’t judge my friends only by what they can do for me.”
Back at the theater seat, waiting for the curtain to rise, I played with the paper leaves of my fan, on which river barges floated among the waves. Beside me, Egor was laughing hard at something his neighbor had just said.
I touched his shoulder. He turned toward me.
“Are we in debt?” I asked.
“Let this be my problem,” he said. His fingertips brushed the top of my hand. They were cold, and I pulled away.
The conversations around me were meant to be overheard, and thus they were useless: wishes for good health in the coming year, predictable gushings over Monsieur Rastrelli’s newest designs for the Winter Palace. Beside me, Egor sat in silence. “Wasted,” he had grumbled about the hours spent at court. Time, so precious everywhere else, stretched here like strands of hot tar.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t point out the need to look and to remember what I saw.
Elizabeth reclined on the throne, her snugly fitted satin gown shimmering with diamonds, its ivory white broken only by the crimson-and-silver ribbon across her chest. A golden cape lined with ermine and embroidered with two-headed eagles covered her shoulders.
“A daughter, Varvara?” the Empress asked when I kissed her hand, having recited my wishes of happiness and gratitude for another year of her reign. Up close, the double layer of rouge thickened the wrinkles on her face and neck. There was a hint of rot in her breath, softened with cherry brandy and clover. Where Catherine and the Grand Duke should sit, Ivan Shuvalov, the new Gentleman of the Bedchamber, lounged. “The ducal pair have just stepped out,” I had heard, as if one could leave the Throne Room at will.
“Yes, Your Highness,” I replied. “A daughter.”
The Empress gave me a bleak stare, then a smirk.
“Your husband is a patient man.”
I kept my head lowered, but Egor muttered something in response, some promise impossible to keep. Ivan Shuvalov, in scarlet velvet, flicked a curious look in my direction, as if trying to recall where he had seen me before. Behind him, the Chancellor wore an expression of deep satisfaction, as if everything had just gone according to his most wished-for plan.
I hid my disappointment at the Grand Duchess’s absence. Catherine had recently received news of her father’s death, and the Empress had ordered her to stop crying and forbade her to wear black. Eight days of private mourning was enough for a man who had not been a king, Elizabeth said. Mourning, I wrote to Catherine, you carry in your heart. There will be better years; you only need the courage to imagine them now.
The order to join the Empress for a private event reached us as we left the third antechamber on our way out of the palace. “Are you sure you got it right?” Egor asked the page who’d run after us. The boy gave him a sulky shrug.
There were only a few of us present, faces invisible in the darkness, muffled mutterings broken up by nervous giggles. Outside, in the streets banked with snow, the crowds were cheering Elizabeth Petrovna’s glorious reign, wishing her a long life and God’s protection. St. Petersburg taverns were serving free vodka and bliny.
On the stage the footmen lowered large wooden planks suspended from the ceiling and lit the candles. Now there was enough light to see the stage and the first row, where Catherine and Peter, their absence so jarring in the crowded festivities of the Throne Room, sat. Beside them were the Empress and her Gentleman of the Bedchamber.
From where I was, Catherine’s face looked small and narrow, like her waist. I recalled the letter that told me of mysterious pains in her joints. Oranienbaum’s climate was not healthy, she’d written.
The Empress clapped her hands. A door, deftly hidden in the paneling, opened. They were led in, her madmen: the monk who cut off his genitals with a razor to purify himself from desire and who insisted that only castrated humanity could build a true Kingdom of God; a valet who foamed at the mouth and claimed he had seen a demon woman undress herself before him and call him toward her.
“She had black teeth and big breasts. She had snakes and twigs in her hair,” he announced when the Empress asked him how he could tell that she was truly a demon. “The snakes moved and the twigs did not.” He snapped his fingers and smacked his lips. And then he wiped them with the back of his hand.
The doors opened again and two guards entered, gripping a tall, beefy youth by the arms. His complexion was ashen, his eyes haggard. He couldn’t keep them still but looked around as if something could jump out of the shadows at any moment and attack him.
The youth was dressed in a dirty sailor’s uniform, torn at the sleeves. He was barefoot, his feet callused and filthy with mud. When the guards released his arms, he made a circle around the room, shouting. “Make room for Ivanushka! Make room for Ivanushka!”
He came to a stop, raised his fists to the heavens, and screamed. The guards stepped back.
Beside me, I saw Egor’s hand fly to his heart and pause there.
Was it really him? Prince Ivan, the baby Tsar who had vanished on that November night more than nine years before when Elizabeth went to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers, beseeching them to help her? Or did the Empress of Russia trust the power of illusion?
“What is your name?” she asked the youth now.
“Ivan.”
“Who are you, Ivan?”
“A prince.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“No.”
“You are in the Imperial Palace.”
“Yes. A prince lives in a palace.”
“But you don’t live here. We’ve brought you here.”
“I live here. This is my room.”
“If you are a prince, then where is your court?”
“Here. These people are my court. There are more of them. You don’t see them, but there are more. Lots of people. I can hear them. You can hear them, too. They call me Ivanushka. They know.”
“What do they know?”
“That God loves me.”
“What do you want to do now?”
The youth paused for a moment, troubled by the question. His fingers rose to his lips, and he sucked on them loudly. One of the guards moved forward as if to push him, but he swirled back and thumped his foot. The guard lunged forward. The Empress raised her hand to restrain him.
“What do you want to do, Ivanushka?” she repeated.
“I want to eat.”
“Are you hungry?”
He nodded.
“What do you like to eat?”
“Meat. Eggs. More eggs. Give me more eggs!”
“You shall have eggs.”
Another signal, and with a squeak the door in the back wall opened again. Three footmen carried in a small table, a chair, and a platter piled with food. Hard-boiled eggs, a whole roasted pheasant, a loaf of dark peasant bread.
Ivanushka did not bother sitting down. He flung himself on the food, ravenous and insatiable. He stuffed it inside his mouth, licking his fingers; he broke chunks of bread from the loaf and dipped them in the sauce. Drippings from the pheasant stained his sailor’s uniform; grease clung to his hair. But when an attendant approached with a towel, he shoved him away with a force that was astounding. The attendant was hurled against the wall; the bowl of water smashed on the floor.
“We are going now, Ivanushka. Is there anything else you want to tell us?” Elizabeth asked.
He didn’t hear. He had bitten a hard-boiled egg in half, and was plucking out the yolk with his fingers.
Was this public display of madness the Shuvalovs’ idea? I wondered. A warning not to pin one’s hopes on the ousted Tsar? What were they hoping for? Triumph over Elizabeth’s terror of a palace coup? Or a display of their own power?
The Empress rose and turned to the Grand Duchess.
“His mother may be dead.” Her lips sucked the words she spoke, the sound of bones emptied of their marrow. “But she had two more children after him. Plenty of heirs, if you don’t have one.”
Catherine rose from her seat. I couldn’t see her face as she walked out. How easy it could be to get rid of her, I thought. There was no need for crude methods, such as a thick pillow to cut off her breath. An innocent visit to a house where someone had just died of smallpox could be so easily arranged, a place offered on the ottoman where the sick person had just sat, a gift of a fan that had soothed the fever, or a cup touched by the lips of the sick.
Who would ask what had happened to a barren wife with no friends? Wasn’t the first wife of Peter the Great forced to renounce the world? Hadn’t she spent her days in a convent, watched at all hours, her guards given orders to slash her throat if anyone tried to free her?
The Soldier has ordered a new carpentry tool set and has had long consultations with puppeteers. As a result of his tinkering with the backbones, joints, and pulleys, the Faust marionette can twitch its nose, scratch its head, and move its cheeks in a rather clever fashion.
I told him that I thought it a diversion far better than others.
Only the Chancellor could help her now. As long as she would be careful not to trust him.
“I do not choose my friends by what they can do for me,” I had told him that evening. But I also do not abandon them when they need me, I thought now.
This necessary new alliance, I wrote to Catherine, will buy you time in these trying times.
I saw her at the end of some long winding road, alone, a black shawl around her shoulders, walking.
I stopped my carriage and asked her to step inside. “I’ll take you where you want to go,” I offered.
She gave me a look of great sadness. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t want to go where you are going,” she told me.
I closed the carriage door and moved on into the darkness, tormented by questions I had pushed away long enough. Had I truly been a mere child led astray? Had I not willingly listened to the spymaster’s voice? Had I not touched his flesh again and again?
When I woke, I was choking with tears. Egor was tossing in his sleep, muttering. The sheets were twisted, damp with sweat.
Suddenly I was struck by a terror that Darya might die, her death a punishment for my sins. The fear pierced me with such force that I got out of bed. I bent over my sleeping child. Her cheeks were warm, her breath even.
I knelt beside her cradle. I prayed until daylight spilled into the room.