The child was born during the first norther of the season at Touro Infirmary, with the rain turning to sleet in the gas-lamps along Foucher Street.
He was a boy.
I named him Wilder. The papers were signed Wilder Marlowe — my surname, not Thorne's, and the nursing matron took my pen out of my hand and looked at me twice before she wrote it.
He cried twice and then took my finger in his fist and would not let it go.
Cass stood in the corridor outside the glass of the nursery window all night.
A nurse came past and said brightly, "Won't the father step in to hold him."
Cass said, without looking away from the glass, "She hasn't asked me to."
The nurse glanced at me through the glass. She did not ask again.
He stayed on the stool outside until dawn.
A month later, on the small celebration day Mlle. Toussaint and the matron from the building helped me arrange in my front parlor, Silas arrived on the landing with two black-clad porters carrying a christening locket on a silver chain, a child-sized embroidered blanket, and a parcel of silver Touro-Infirmary souvenir spoons.
I did not open the door.
Silas spoke through the panel.
"Beatrix. I only want to see him."
"There is no need."
A long silence.
He said, against the wood, "He looks like you. The matron said."
I did not answer.
Then he said, low, "He looks like Thorne, too."
Inside, Cass was bent over a porcelain wash basin on the parlor table changing the child for the third time that hour. He had managed it the first two times in a way that suggested he had been trained by a senior bookkeeper. He had a long pin between his teeth. His brow was as drawn as the day I had seen him sign a freight contract for a hundred thousand dollars.
Wilder kicked him solidly in the chest.
Cass muttered, "Old man. Hold still."
Outside the door, Silas heard him.
Something behind his eyes gave way.
He said, almost too quietly to carry through wood: "Beatrix. If none of it had happened — we would have had a child like this."
I came to the door and put my hand on the panel.
"No."
A breath.
I said, "You did not love me, in any of the lives."
His voice came hoarse.
"I love you."
The words were so late they sounded like the words for some other woman.
I heard him fumble in his coat. He set something on the threshold of the door, gently, and stepped back.
I opened the door a crack.
On the threshold lay the broken half of a wax doll's head. The cinnabar parchment was crumbled inside it. The dragonfly was dust.
I had not known he kept it.
He said, "Since the chapel, I have pain. Not in the bone. Here."
He put his fist on his sternum.
"I dream the first life. I see you go out of the carriage door. I dream the second. I see your face when the knife goes in. I call your name. You do not turn."
I felt my hand tighten on the door.
So he remembered. He had been given the same draught of the past two lives.
Three lives' worth of him calling my name too late.
Silas went down on his knees on the landing.
"Beatrix. I was wrong."
The corridor was very quiet. From inside, Wilder fussed and Cass murmured something at him in a low voice.
I looked down at Silas.
In my first two lives I had waited for this sentence the way a girl waits for a window in a wall.
Now that it was here, I only wanted to shut the door.
"Silas. You remembered too late."
I shut the door.
Through the panel, after a moment, I heard him say, very low, "I know."
I went five years without seeing either of them.
Wilder grew. He learned to walk in the gallery between Mlle. Toussaint's bench and mine. He learned his letters from a primer Cass sent every Christmas through Mr. Devereaux as if it were a wholly anonymous bequest. He could pick out MARLOWE on the brass plate at the gallery door by his fourth birthday.
When he was five I took him up to New Orleans from Bay St. Louis for the spring exhibition. He wore sailor pants and a wide-brimmed straw boater that I had to keep settling on his head. He took my hand at the corner of Royal and St. Peter and tipped his face up at me under the brim.
"Mama. Are there bad men in town."
I straightened the brim. "There are."
"Then I'll keep you safe."
I smiled and touched the top of his head.
"All right."
The exhibition opened well. By three in the afternoon I had lost him.
I went through the gallery from end to end. The doorman had seen him five minutes before with a tall woman in a gray hood. The woman's eyes had been familiar but he had not placed them. I crossed Royal at a run and found a constable. The constable went up the alley to the photographer's that had a hand-held camera in the front window, and the man at the counter had taken a portrait of the woman and the child on the sidewalk fifteen minutes earlier without their knowing.
The woman in the print was Pearl Lacroix.
She had been brought back into the country two years before for treatment at a private asylum upriver. She had been moved to Touro's chronic ward six months ago. She had walked out the side gate yesterday.
A boy ran up to me at the gallery door with a telegram blank.
The wire was directed to me by name.
Beatrix come alone. The Bywater wharves. The end-of-Piety pier. If you bring anyone I drop the boy in the river.
A voice cylinder had been wired with the message. The boy at the wire office had the cylinder in his pocket. I cranked it on the corner.
Pearl's voice came up out of the brass funnel, thinned and small, smiling.
Beatrix. Come alone.
Cass's hired carriage drew up at the gallery door before I had taken three steps.
He swung the door open from inside.
"Get in."
I did not ask how he knew. I climbed in.
We had passed Esplanade before the telephone aerial in the brougham buzzed — Cass had had the new wireless apparatus installed in three of his coaches by 'ninety-six and it had paid for itself within a year. Silas was patched through.
"Pearl has wired me. Beatrix, do not go alone — I have men closing the wharves —"
Cass took the brass speaker out of my hand and started to lay it back in its bracket.
I caught his wrist.
"He can help."
Cass's jaw set.
"I do not want him to see you."
"Cass."
A two-second silence.
He took the speaker back and held it to his mouth.
"Beauchamp. Speak."
Silas's voice came thin. "I have closed both ends of the pier. She has a knife. Do not approach her with men."
Cass's mouth was tight.
"I do not need instructions."
Silas did not answer that. He said, "Wilder is Beatrix's life. Therefore he is mine."
The line did not crackle for a moment.
We came in along the wharves through fog smelling of cotton waste and bilge.
Pearl stood at the end of the rotted pier in her hospital gray. She had Wilder in one arm. A pearl-handled paring knife — small, perhaps stolen from a hospital tray — was at the side of his throat.
Wilder did not cry.
When he saw me, he called out clearly across the water.
"Mama. I am not afraid."
I held the rail of the pier so I would not run.
Pearl laughed in the high, splintered way she had laughed in the asylum corridor.
"Look how like him. Like Cassius. Like you. Why do all of you get a fresh start. Why have I nothing."
Silas had come up the other side of the pier. He held his hands out from his coat.
"Pearl. Set the child down."
She turned her head and saw him and her face transformed.
"Silas dear — you came. I knew you would come. She is a faithless woman. She bore another man's son. She betrayed you."
Silas's eyes flicked to me. To Wilder. The look in them was the look of a man bleeding from somewhere not visible.
When he spoke, all he said was: "The child is not in this."
Pearl's mouth wavered.
"You used to love me, Silas."
His voice was hoarse.
"I was blind."
She screamed and the knife came down a half inch. Wilder's neck welled.
Cass shifted his weight.
She saw it. "Stay there."
I forced my voice level.
"Pearl. What do you want."
She fixed her eyes on me.
"You kneel."
Cass's face went white at the cheek-bones.
I did not hesitate. I lowered myself onto the planks of the pier on my knees. The wood was wet through. Cass's hand spasmed at his side.
Pearl laughed.
"Bow your head. Say you are bad blood. Say you do not deserve any of it."
Wilder broke.
"Mama, no — "
I looked up at him.
"Wilder. Close your eyes."
The instant his face turned into Pearl's sleeve, Silas moved. He went the full length of the pier in three strides and caught the blade of the paring knife in the palm of his right hand. Cass was a half second behind him — he plucked Wilder out of Pearl's left arm and turned in the same motion to put his back between the child and her.
The blade cut Silas's hand to the bone. Blood ran along the planks.
The two constables Silas had brought rushed in and took Pearl by the elbows.
She was laughing and screaming Silas's name as they took her down the pier.
Wilder dove at me. He locked both arms around my neck and shook. I held him on the wet planks and could not stop trembling.
Cass dropped to one knee and wrapped both of us into his coat.
His mouth came down by my ear.
"Done. It is done."
A little way off, Silas was on his knees on the pier in a pool of his own blood, his right hand still curled around nothing.
He looked at the three of us.
His eyes were as empty as I had ever seen them.
For the first time in three lives, he was the one between us and the blade.