but talked early. He struggled to eat but voraciously read, and wrote, and worked at mathematics far beyond his peers. He played with difficult books the way ordinary boys played war, showed a keen fascination with anatomy and guns, and practiced harpsichord simply but precisely as a clock.
Affectionate with Catherine and convivial with servants, Nicholas was stoic and at times even icy with his father, who often sensed rebellion in the boy’s unwavering expression.
The library was bright with a pair of brass lamps and heavy with the smell of ink and moldy books. Catherine’s shadowplants, carefully selected for a room without windows, had grown beyond their pots and sent their creepers, vines, and leaves crawling up the shelves. Even here the baby’s cries were easily discerned, penetrating cherry and mahogany and oak, shearing through the million-page buffer of the cases.
Bell stood before his son, bloody and composed.
Nicholas sat and watched him with his quill above a sketch. Kidneys, it appeared, and their connecting apparatus.
“You have a sister,” Bell intoned. “Her name is Molly.”
“Mother—”
“Your mother is dead.”
Bell could not recall the last time he had seen his son cry. Had he ever? Nicholas stared without a glimmer of surprise. He supposed the boy had sensed it—he had always been remarkably perceptive—or deduced it from the blood upon Bell’s own clothes. Shock or fear might have tamped down obvious emotion, yet his young son’s eyes had the clarity of scholarship, of someone who was carefully observing and recording.
“Come,” Bell said, pulling Nicholas toward him in a violent embrace.
The boy did not resist but pricked his father with the quill, quickly on the shoulder, accidentally it seemed. Bell pushed him off and grimaced at the stain. “Sit,” Bell said, loosening his collar. He was woozy from the strain again, and Nicholas had blurred. He wiped his eyes and said, “Your mother died of blood loss. It happens now and then, a complication of the birth. You mustn’t think it all a frightful mystery. She bled and didn’t stop and there is nothing further to explain.”
“Her uterus tore,” Nicholas said, so quietly that Bell leaned forward, trying to reconstruct the word—surely not “uterus”!—by picturing the movement of the boy’s thin lips.
The sketch upon the table wasn’t kidneys after all. They were ovaries, clinically precise and deftly drawn. Bell read the words “cervix” and “vagina,” copied from the volume Nicholas had opened.
“You oughtn’t … You’re a child. I forbid—”
“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said.
“Damn the doctor and his horse!” Bell shouted at the ceiling, pounding on the table and at last, with the outburst, startling his son. “Catherine, o my Catherine. What am I to do?” he said, feeling like the room was moving in a spiral. He clenched his eyes and calmed himself. “You mustn’t be afraid. We have suffered a terrible loss, a terrible loss. But people are depending on us now. Frances and the others. They will look to us—yes, even to you. Only six and yet a Bell. You must be brave and show them strength. You were crying for a moment. Were you crying? It is natural, of course, as natural as bleeding. But what are we to do with injuries that bleed? Stem the flow. Clamp the wound. So we will. So we must! But no: your eyes are dry. Look at me,” he said, holding Nicholas’s chin. “Have you heard me? Have you listened? Have you not a single tear for your own lost mother? She is looking at you now, looking down. Aye, she knows! The rain could be her tears, falling out of grief because she knows you do not care, not a whit, that she has died!”
Nicholas’s brows tightened in perplexity, not about the rain—that was obvious to Bell—but from his father having posited a notion so absurd.
“Get up!” Bell said.
He crumpled the drawings and seized the boy firmly by the arm. The baby’s wails steadily worsened as he dragged Nicholas out of the library, down the hall, and up the three flights of the rear staircase, and it was there, at the heavy dark door of Nicholas’s room, that the boy began to sob.
“No,” Bell said. “You are crying for yourself,” and locked him in alone to think about his mother.
Bell retreated downstairs to the study once more. He downed another rum, hugged himself tight, and trembled in a deep velvet chair, unable to think because of the baby’s noise, and Nicholas’s silence, and the rain that fell and fell and did, after all, seem a