Her husband spent every possible hour at her bedside. Her mother nursed her with the old medicines, and the Constable rousted the apothecary away from the homes of the wealthy to tend to her, but try as they might, there was no heat or medicine that could touch the girl’s body or soul. All they could do was watch helplessly, hopelessly, and pray as the flesh slipped quickly from her bones. She vomited up the broth they fed her, and her pains grew stronger and her breathing shallower until the end almost seemed like a release. All it took was a single, shocking week to turn her from a healthy young wife into a wraith.

Nottingham used his position to have her buried when the earth thawed briefly at the end of month, the service conducted by a curate while the vicar stayed close to his roaring hearth. Just a day after he’d thrown a sod on the coffin and stayed to see the earth mounded on the girl whose childish glee still rattled in his head, the freeze returned. Since the funeral the Constable had barely slept. Even in the bare, brief hours he managed, the dreams that came pulled at his heart like a chain of beggars.

At home, he and Mary, his wife, moved as if there was a fog between them that neither could penetrate. They still talked about the everyday things, but the topic of Rose lay off to the side, pushed away behind a fence, never mentioned but always on the edge of view. They lay in bed side by side, and he knew full well that hours would pass before her breathing subsided into the uneven rhythms of a grieving sleep. Sometimes his fingers would start to reach across the sheet for her hand, but he always stopped short of touching her skin. What could either of them say that would help? In this world, simply living past childhood was an achievement. If God had robbed them of their joy, it was nothing more than He’d done to thousands of others. Every toll of the corpses he’d filled out since December bore testament to that.