Against The World

Chapter 74: A Name to Answer To

The first naming proposal arrived before breakfast.

It contained a family tree.

I unfolded it across the table.

Then unfolded it again.

Evelyn watched the paper approach her plate.

“How far does it go?”

“Apparently to the invention of people.”

She lifted her tea before a distant ancestor could acquire a stain.

The sender recommended that our son receive the names of four distinguished rulers, two military commanders, and a grandfather whose principal achievement seemed to have been owning the land on which the sender currently lived.

I counted the suggested syllables.

“He’ll be asleep before we finish calling him.”

“Useful at bedtime.”

I looked at her.

She smiled into her cup.

Mary arrived with the ordinary correspondence, saw the table, and stopped.

“Another one?”

“Does this happen with every royal child?”

“I haven’t counted the historical examples.”

“Please don’t.”

Evelyn folded the family tree with rather more efficiency than I had opened it.

“Thank them for their interest.”

“And the suggestion?”

“We have received it.”

Mary nodded.

An admirably precise statement.

The weather cleared for six days.

The harvest crews used every one of them.

From the eastern wall, the cut fields looked striped and orderly. Closer to the ground, they were full of dust, bent backs, and carts that always seemed to need one more repair.

I spent two mornings helping shift loaded wagons away from a soft patch near the lower road.

On the second morning, the carters had laid boards before I arrived.

There was very little for me to do.

One of them offered me an apple.

I accepted the change in duties.

By the end of the week, Beatrice brought council a revised food estimate.

She placed it before us and sat down.

I read the last line first.

Then went back to the beginning.

Evelyn did the same.

“We can reduce the final emergency purchase?” she asked.

“Part of it,” Beatrice said. “Keep the agreed deliveries. Keep the reserve. But we no longer need to buy against quite so much missing grain.”

“How much does that leave?”

Mary supplied the figure.

Not wealth.

Enough to finish several roofs before the cold weather.

Enough to stop pretending the infirmary’s extra blankets could wait forever.

Enough that Beatrice looked at the estimate without pressing her mouth into a thin line.

I put the paper down.

Outside, a wagon rattled beneath the window.

For once, I knew what it carried.

The new room beside the maternity ward opened three days later.

There was no ribbon.

Nessa had said a ribbon would obstruct the door.

Evelyn and I went to see it in the afternoon, when the plaster was dry and the final shelf had been fitted.

Two beds.

A washstand.

A window overlooking a little patch of garden rather than the cart yard.

The apprentice who had struggled with blood was arranging folded linen in the cupboard.

She looked up when we entered.

Then remembered the sheet in her hands and finished folding it before greeting us.

“Ilyen says I’ve found my place for now,” she told Evelyn.

“Are you pleased with it?”

“Yes.”

She glanced toward the cupboard.

“People keep needing things. I can make sure they’re there.”

Evelyn smiled.

“That seems a useful place.”

In the adjoining room, a baby began to cry.

I turned toward the sound.

Nessa looked at me.

“Would you like to meet someone?”

The baby belonged to a woman named Senn, whose family lived beyond Willowbrook.

She had come through the gate several days earlier to stay near the midwives.

Now she sat against the pillows with a small bundle in her arms and her husband asleep in the chair beside her.

“He said he wouldn’t close his eyes,” she whispered.

“He appears to have reconsidered,” Evelyn replied.

Senn smiled.

Then looked at me.

“Would you like to hold her?”

I had faced armed men with less hesitation.

Evelyn noticed.

Naturally.

“You may say yes.”

“I was about to.”

Nessa drew up a chair.

I sat.

She guided my arms, and Senn passed me her daughter.

The baby was warm.

That was the first thing I noticed.

Warm, and heavier than the little bundle suggested, and full of small movements that seemed to require all my attention.

I looked at Nessa.

“Like this?”

“Yes.”

I looked at Senn.

She nodded.

Finally, I looked down.

A tiny hand had escaped the blanket.

Its fingers opened against my coat.

I stopped thinking about where to put my elbows.

Beside me, Evelyn became very quiet.

I glanced up.

She was watching us with one hand resting over our children.

“What?” I whispered.

She shook her head.

Then smiled.

The baby made a small, indignant noise.

I looked back down immediately.

“Hello.”

Senn laughed softly.

“She expects more from a conversation.”

“I’m discovering that.”

When we left, Evelyn kept her hand tucked firmly through my arm.

“You did well.”

“I sat very still.”

“An achievement.”

“She was so small.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re having two.”

“I've heard rumors.”

We walked slowly through the lower garden.

At the bench, Evelyn sat and drew me down beside her.

For a while, we watched the infirmary window.

Senn’s husband had woken. His silhouette moved across the light, then settled near the bed.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Tansy.”

I tried it quietly.

A name belonging to a flower, a warm bundle, and a family beyond Willowbrook.

No military victories required.

Evelyn leaned against me.

“We should choose ours soon.”

I looked at her.

“Do you have one?”

“A few.”

“So do I.”

She turned her head.

“You’ve been keeping them to yourself?”

“I wanted to be certain I liked them before you explained why I shouldn’t.”

“That sounds unlike me.”

I waited.

She sighed.

“Mostly.”

We did not choose that evening.

We argued, pleasantly, over six names.

Evelyn disliked one because a boy with that name had once put a frog in her sewing basket.

I disliked another because I could not imagine calling it without sounding annoyed.

We both liked a third until we said it with Grey.

Then we laughed and crossed it out.

Eventually, she put the list down.

“They’re people already,” she said. “It seems strange that we’re allowed to decide this.”

I rested my hand against her stomach.

One of them moved.

“They appear to be offering an opinion.”

“On which name?”

“I missed the suggestion.”

She laughed, and the conversation ended with my head beside hers and the list sliding unnoticed onto the floor.

The following morning, Lady Sabine arrived with the final trade compact.

She came through Stoneford with one clerk, two guards, and a cloth-wrapped parcel she insisted was personal.

The parcel contained two small silver spoons.

Evelyn thanked her.

Sabine looked faintly uncomfortable.

“My sister said blankets were safer. I was informed your mother had already dealt with blankets.”

“Thoroughly,” I said.

That eased her expression.

The negotiations were less comfortable.

They were also nearly finished.

The unsupported mining levy was removed.

Ordinary customs remained, with the rates written plainly enough that merchants would not need to guess which official was having an expensive week.

The payment for verified protection services would be settled in installments.

Greykeep would acknowledge the people who had actually kept the old roads open.

Caerwyn would acknowledge that a service performed decades ago did not confer permanent ownership of everyone who traveled them.

Sabine read the final wording in silence.

Then placed one finger on the page.

“This clause. Appeals must receive an answer within a stated period.”

Mary leaned closer.

“The obligation should apply on both sides.”

“Yes,” Sabine said. “It should.”

We changed it.

Then read it again.

By late afternoon, the compact lay signed between us.

For several moments, nobody reached for another document.

I found that suspicious.

“Are we finished?”

“With this,” Sabine said.

It was enough.

Afterward, she lingered beside the memorial register Mary had brought for the supporting records.

Her uncle’s name appeared among those who had died escorting grain wagons years earlier.

I stood a little way off.

She touched the page once.

“My mother will want a copy.”

“Mary can arrange it.”

Sabine nodded.

Then closed the register carefully.

“Your children will grow up with gates where we had border posts.”

“Some border posts will remain.”

“Yes. But fewer excuses to pretend the people beyond them are strangers.”

She looked toward the nursery spoons, still wrapped on the side table.

“I hope you let them travel.”

“When they’re old enough.”

Her mouth curved.

“Parents and rulers have been postponing that age for centuries.”

I thought of the little girl I had held.

Of how quickly I had become reluctant to move even one arm.

“I’m beginning to understand the temptation.”

Garrick found me in the nursery that night.

He had come to deliver the chest.

It was large enough to hold the carvings he had already made, with room for the things he was plainly planning to deny making next.

He set it against the wall.

Then stood beside me, looking at the cradles.

“Evelyn tells me you held a baby.”

“Yes.”

“How did it go?”

“I believe everyone survived.”

“Good beginning.”

He ran a hand along the chest lid.

For a while, we listened to voices in the adjoining room. Helena and Evelyn were discussing the spoons.

“Were you good at it?” I asked.

Garrick looked at me.

“Being a father?”

I nodded.

“Sometimes.”

That was not the answer I had expected.

“I worked too late. Assumed I understood things before asking. Tried to solve problems Evelyn only wanted to tell me about.”

I glanced toward the open door.

“That sounds familiar.”

“It will continue to sound familiar.”

He smiled slightly.

“But I learned which stair creaked outside her room. How she liked to be carried when she was tired. Which stories she wanted twice.”

“Did that help?”

“It gave me things I could do while learning the rest.”

Evelyn appeared in the doorway.

“What are you two plotting?”

“Your childhood,” Garrick said.

She crossed the room and put her arms around him.

He held her close.

Watching them, I thought perhaps he had done better than sometimes.

The name came back to me while we were getting ready for bed.

Not a revelation.

Just one of the names I had written and then failed to cross out.

“Elias.”

Evelyn stopped brushing her hair.

She met my eyes in the mirror.

“For our son?”

“Yes.”

She said it aloud.

Then with our surname.

“Elias Grey.”

I sat on the edge of the bed.

“I like how it sounds.”

“So do I.”

We let it rest.

No list of ancestors.

No explanation of what he would owe the name.

Evelyn set down the brush.

“I keep returning to Clara.”

I looked up.

“For our daughter.”

“Clara,” I repeated.

The room seemed to grow quieter around it.

She watched me.

“Would that be too close to Caroline?”

I thought about my sister.

Then about a little girl I had not met.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded.

“It sounds like hers.”

“Our daughter’s?”

“Yes.”

Evelyn came to sit beside me.

“Elias and Clara.”

I tried them together.

Then separately.

Names I could whisper beside a cradle.

Names I could call into an orchard.

I began to smile.

Evelyn saw.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

She rested her forehead against mine.

For a moment, we stayed there, holding the decision between us.

Then one of the twins moved firmly beneath her hand.

She laughed.

“I’ll take that as agreement.”

“Perhaps they’d simply like us to sleep.”

“They have chosen an unusual way to request it.”

We told no one that night.

Evelyn took the old names page from the bedside table and turned it over.

On the clean side, she wrote:

Elias Grey.

Clara Grey.

Her handwriting slowed over the second name.

Then she handed me the pen.

“What am I adding?”

“Whatever you like.”

I looked at the two lines.

After a moment, I wrote beneath them:

Chosen together.

Evelyn read it.

Then folded the page and placed it in the drawer beside my blue book.

I helped her settle against the pillows.

When I lay down, she drew my hand over our children.

“Good night, Elias,” she whispered.

I swallowed.

“Good night, Clara.”

The window was open a little. Somewhere in the courtyard, a guard exchanged a quiet word with his replacement.

I kissed my wife’s shoulder.

Then we lay still and tried the names once more, softly, just for ourselves.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!