He did not know whether he would ever meet her.
He had not yet decided how to describe their connection in words that honored both her life and the wrong Catherine had done to him.
Thomas found him sitting alone outside the workshop.
He asked what the note said.
Daniel handed it over without speaking.
Thomas read the brief message and sat beside him.
He said that a child’s safety could bring relief and sorrow at the same time.
Daniel asked whether he was permitted to love Eleanor when he had not chosen the circumstances of her birth.
Thomas said nobody else possessed the right to tell him what he must feel.
The answer did not solve the question, but it gave Daniel room to live beside it.
Daniel carved the name Eleanor into the underside of the wheel.
He had seen beautiful objects made for children who grew up surrounded by silk and servants.
His daughter might grow up without either.
He wanted her to possess at least one object made without a threat behind it.
He wrapped the wheel in cloth and asked Rose to deliver it when she next visited Rebecca.
Rose returned three days later with news that Mary had been stopped at a toll station.
She had escaped immediate arrest by claiming she traveled to visit an ill aunt, but a clerk had recorded her description.
Richard’s agents were asking questions at the river crossings.
Rebecca’s house was no longer safe enough to remain there indefinitely.
Miriam began searching for a family farther north who would protect Eleanor without expecting payment or loyalty from the people she came from.
Colonel Blackwood had not waited for Graves to return.
He employed a private clerk named Edwin Sykes to prepare statements supporting his account of the birth.
Sykes visited servants who had worked at the manor and told them they could keep their positions if they confirmed that Catherine’s child had died.
He offered a small payment to the doctor who had filed the original certificate.
He threatened the midwife’s relatives with prosecution if they refused to cooperate.
One of the servants was Agnes, a kitchen assistant who had brought water to the nursery shortly before dawn.
She remembered the baby crying and the midwife asking for more clean cloth.
Sykes wanted her to sign a statement that she had heard nothing unusual.
Agnes could barely write her name, but she understood the meaning of the paper.
