She escaped with Angelica, found excuses to stay away from the disruption until late in the afternoon. She brought her weekly gifts of money, food, and conversation to the widow Moore but failed to drown her worries in the old woman's routine, grateful tears. She dallied at market, at the tea shop, in the park, watching Angelica play. When they at last returned, as the long-threatened rain broke and fell in warm sheets, she busied herself downstairs, never looking in the direction of the staircase but instead correcting Nora's work, reminding her to air out the closets, inspecting the kitchen. She poked the bread, criticized the slipshod stocking of the pantry, then left Nora in mid-scold to place Angelica at the piano to practice "The Wicked Child and the Gentle." She sat across the room and folded the napkins herself. "Which child are you, my love?" she murmured, but found only sadness in the practiced reply: "The gentle, Mamma."

As the girl's playing broke and reassembled itself, Constance finally forced herself up to the second floor and walked back and forth before the closed door of Angelica's new home. No great shock greeted her inside. In truth, the room's transformation hardly registered, for it had sat six years now in disappointed expectation. Six years earlier, with his new wife seven months expectant, Joseph had without apparent resentment dismantled his beloved home laboratory to make space for a nursery. But God demanded of Constance three efforts before a baby survived to occupy the room. Even then it remained empty, for in the early weeks of Angelica's life, mother and daughter both ailed, and it was far wiser that the newborn should sleep beside her sleepless mother.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW • Q&A With Arthur Phillips

In the months that followed, Constance's childbed fever and Angelica's infant maladies ebbed and flowed in opposition, as if between the two linked souls there were only health enough for one, so that a year had passed without it ever being advisable to send the child downstairs to the nursery. Even when Angelica's health restored itself, Dr. Willette had been particularly insistent on the other, more sensitive issue, and so--Constance's solution--it seemed simplest and surest to keep Angelica tentatively asleep within earshot.

Nora had placed the chair beside the bed. She was powerful, the Irish girl, more brawn than fat to have hoisted it by herself. She had arranged Angelica's clothing in the child-sized cherry-wood wardrobe. Bleak, this new enclosure to which Angelica had been sentenced. The bed was too large; Angelica would feel lost in it. The window was loose in its setting, and the noise of the street would surely prevent her sleeping. The bedclothes were tired and dingy in the rain- gray light, books and dolls cheerless in their new places. No wonder he had kept his laboratory here; it was by any standard a dark, nasty room, fit only for the stink and scrape of science. The Princess Elizabeth reclined in a favored position atop the pillows, her legs crossed at the ankle; of course Nora knew Angelica's favorite doll and would make just such a display of her affection for the girl.

The blue chair was too far from the bed. Constance pressed her back against it until it clattered a few inches forward. She sat again, smoothed her dress, then rose and straightened the Princess Elizabeth's legs into a more natural position. She had raised her voice often at Angelica during their day out, barked sharp commands (just as Joseph had done to her) when kindness would have served better. The day she was destined to lose a piece of her child, the day she wished to hold her ever closer and unchanging--that very day, how easily Angelica had irritated her.

This shift of Angelica's residence--this cataclysmic shift of everything--coming so soon after her fourth birthday, likely marked the birth of the girl's earliest lasting memories. All that had come before--the embraces, sacrifices, moments of slow-blinking contentment, the defense of her from some icy cruelty of Joseph's-- none of this would survive in the child as conscious recollection. What was the point of those forgotten years, all the unrecorded kindness? As if life were the telling of a story whose middle and end were incomprehensible without a clearly recalled beginning, or as if the child were ungrateful, culpable for its willful forgetfulness of all the generosity and love shown to it over four years of life, eight months of carrying her, all the agony of the years before.

This, today, marked the moment Angelica's relations with the world changed. She would collect her own history now, would gather from the seeds around her the means to cultivate a garden: these panes of bubbled glass would be her "childhood bedroom window," as Constance's own, she recalled now, had been a circle of colored glass, sliced by wooden dividers into eight wedges like a tart. This would be the scrap of blanket, the texture of which would calibrate Angelica's notion of "soft" for the rest of her life. Her father's step on the stair. His scent. How she would comfort herself in moments of fear.

A stuttered song usurped unfinished scales, but then it, too, stopped short, abandoned in the midst of its second repetition. The unresolved harmony made Constance shudder. A moment later, she heard Angelica's light step on the stair. The girl ran into her new room and leapt upon the bed, swept her doll into her arms. "So here is where the princess secluded herself," she said. "We searched high and low for Your Highness." She ceremoniously touched each of the bed's dark posts in turn, then examined the room from ceiling to floor, playing a prim courtier. She visibly struggled to ask a question, moved her lips silently as she selected her words. Constance could almost read her daughter's thoughts, and at length Angelica said, "Nora says I shall sleep here now."

Constance held her child tightly to her. "I am very sorry, my love."

"Why sorry? Must the princess stay up with you and Papa?"

"Of course not. You are her lady-in-waiting. She would be lost upstairs."

"Here she shall be free of royal worries, for a spell": Angelica unknowingly quoted a storybook. She crossed to the tiny dressing table, dragged its small chair over her mother's protests, stood upon it to peer out the front window. "I can see the road." She stood on her toes at the very edge of the chair's scarlet seat, pressed her hands and nose against the window's loose pane.