Chapter Text
Even after the long night’s trial of helping bring a brand new life into the world, Adam realizes there is far more work yet to be done.
He takes up the mantle of fatherhood like a woven crown worn atop his laurels as a husband, proud and humbled in the face of his new duties all at once. He knows without question that it is an honor to care for his wife and child and one that won’t ever be taken lightly. If it is a lifetime obligation, he is the one who is graced with endless life with which to serve.
Elizabeth still bleeds in the hours after birth. Not worryingly so, but in the natural way—her body spent and weary as it heals itself after a great undertaking. She winces through residual cramps, made worse somehow by the baby’s nursing, and is flustered by the sight of her bright blood on their bedding when Adam helps her stand to use the chamber pot. Elizabeth trembles in his arms while she kneels and relieves herself with thin sounds of discomfort, a bucket of steaming water already waiting at their feet.
“I’m sorry for all this tedious mess,” she says quietly, in a strained sort of voice that makes Adam’s heart ache. “And for making you do the work of a dozen scullery maids on my behalf.”
Adam shakes his head only once as he settles her at the bedside upon a folded square of clean linen and reaches for the bucket of warmed water. “You refuse to suffer my endless apologies for the nature of what I am and what cannot be helped,” he says, kneeling on the hardwood in front of his wife. “Why would you ever ask forgiveness for any of this? For what you have gone through in bringing us the gift of a child.”
Elizabeth bows her head with fresh tears burning in her eyes. “I know that I shouldn’t,” she whispers, looking at where their brand new baby sleeps in her cradle only an arm’s length away. Adam is quiet while he dampens a rag and begins washing the tacky smears of blood and fluid from the insides of her bare knees and thighs with painstaking gentleness, devoted as he is in his work. The warmth feels heavenly and Elizabeth wants to weep all the more in the face of it. “It is so strange to feel—suddenly helpless, even the smallest amount. And it seems like there is nothing I can do to stop the blood or fluid from leaking at every possible orifice.”
“Do not fret in trying to quell any part of it,” Adam tells her as he rinses his rag and douses it in the steaming bucket again, carefully washing the fluid from her sunken belly now emptied of its occupant. “You are healing and your body is mending itself. Your strength will begin to return once you’ve eaten and rested—and I will be here to tend you in the meantime.”
There is a glass bottle of distilled witch hazel by his knees that Adam uses to anoint a clean cloth. “It is a privilege to be by your side at every waking moment,” he adds, leaning forward so that Elizabeth may brace her hands upon his shoulders. “This one is no different.”
Elizabeth smiles through her pitiful tears and leans forward to press a kiss against Adam’s widow’s peak. “You are an angel to me,” she croaks, sniffling as she rises up and allows him to hold the cool compress against the sorest place between her legs before gingerly lowering herself again at the edge of the mattress. “Have I ever told you that?”
“Many times,” Adam rumbles, turning his face to kiss whatever part of Elizabeth he can reach—first the inside of her arm, and then the front of one bare shoulder. “But I will never tire of it for as long as I walk this earth.”
They stay like that for several minutes, simply leaning into the familiar shape and warmth of each other. Elizabeth’s tears gradually dry down and she allows her husband to help her pull a simple shift over her head with its mismatched pearl buttons down the front. Instead of any small clothes, Adam brings more rags for her to tie between her legs with the soft deerskin circlet. It is all Elizabeth can manage to do before returning to the soft bed to rest, and from against a bastion of pillows she eats the bread and butter Adam offers, and drinks the hot tea he brews with brimming gratitude.
When the baby begins to fuss and stir in her cradle, Adam is there again to gather up the child into his hands and bring her to Elizabeth. He moves as if to draw the blind man’s chair over to the bedside again, but Elizabeth reaches for his sleeve and coaxes him up into the bed with them. “Please,” she says, tiredly fumbling at the front of her shift. “Be with us here for a while and rest yourself. You have done enough for one morning.”
“Allow me to do one thing more,” Adam says, helping Elizabeth undo the gown’s buttons while the swaddled newborn thinly cries along the seam of her legs. “There. Now I will join you.”
He crawls into the creaking bed and sits on the side nearest the wall without jostling Elizabeth and the baby. Once settled, Adam watches as his wife opens the front of the shift and guides the child to her swollen breast. There is a small flash of pain on her face when the baby latches that doesn’t go unnoticed, and he weighs out whether it’s appropriate to voice his curiosity in the face of Elizabeth’s tiredness. The violet half moons hang heavily under her honey eyes, almost bruised looking in the mid-morning light.
“Does it hurt you?” he asks softly, gazing at his wife’s face. “To nourish her like this.”
“It feels—a bit strange, and slightly chafing,” Elizabeth admits, though she reverently strokes the baby’s hair as she suckles. “I think I will get used to it more with time.”
Adam nods, unwilling to pry any more for the time being. He looks at the flash of silver resting against Elizabeth’s sternum and gently reaches to turn the pendant so the leaf faces outward, then stills his hand when he sees the damp spot gathering on the other side of the cotton shift still covering her left breast. Elizabeth doesn’t notice his gaze now that she’s tipped her head back and closed her eyes while the baby drinks, and Adam feels free to take in the whole picture of her in this newfound portrait of motherhood.
“If I could make art with any skill, I would paint you just as you are in this moment,” he tells her softly, reaching to tuck a piece of hair behind Elizabeth’s ear. “I wish that I could hold this image in my mind for eternity and never see its edges fade.”
The corner of Elizabeth’s mouth quirks up into a smile as her lashes briefly flutter open and then close again. “Don’t worry, sweet prince,” she says as her fingers instinctively find the pale whorl of hair on their daughter’s head. “I have a feeling there will be many more mornings like this one yet to come.”
While Elizabeth sleeps in dozes throughout the long afternoons or in the night between waking for feedings, Adam often sits beside the cradle and watches over the baby.
Sometimes he reads by candlelight and sometimes he merely gazes at the tiny life wrapped in her swaddling and knit cap, the way her face twitches and her pink lips dream of nursing in her sleep. Watching the child evokes a great warmth behind Adam’s rib cage, a yearning tenderness that feels so new in his strange life thus far. He hangs upon every miniature whine and snuffling breath, not truly needing much sleep himself, and sometimes cannot look away for what seems like hours at a time. Pyrrhus rests at his feet with enduring patience, sighing every now and again until Adam eventually leans over to stroke his head while they watch the logs burn in the hearth.
“You have a new charge to look over, my friend,” Adam tells the dog. “A small but vibrant life we must protect while she flourishes and grows. Can you help me with that?”
Pyrrhus’s tail thumps twice on the floorboards in gentle agreement. Adam smiles and rubs around his velvety ears, looking up quickly when a small cry comes from the cradle. “Oh, our hour of service is upon us already,” he murmurs. “Elizabeth needs her rest.”
The crying begins to unravel into thin peals of newborn grief and Adam stands to gather the baby up into his arms. He doesn’t wish to wake his wife, so he draws his daughter close and gently shushes her, wanting her to feel the comfort of his heartbeat and warmth the same as she does against her mother. “Hush, little one,” he whispers, strolling across the cottage with the child tucked under his chin. “I am here with you now.”
The baby quiets almost immediately, tiny complaints tapering off until her breath calms, but she still wriggles in her swaddling with a sort of restlessness Adam doesn’t fully understand. Her mouth doesn’t root for a nipple against the raised seams between his collarbones, but she seems nonetheless discomfited and he takes her closer to the firelight to undo her swaddling and check the rags wrapped around her little bottom. They are damp but not fully soiled, and he finds what he needs to put a fresh nappy on the baby just as Elizabeth showed him the day before, neatly pinning the clean cotton into place.
Once they are by the fire, the balmy warmth radiating outward from the hot bricks makes Adam hesitate to wrap the child up again. He thinks of how she calms and goes still against Elizabeth’s bared chest after nursing and makes an easy calculation in his mind. He only wears his lightweight tunic over his trousers, and after settling down upon the bearskin by the fire with great care, Adam tucks the baby inside his shirt so that she may rest against his patchwork skin with the thin layer of gauze covering her back from any wayward chill. The effect is remarkable; the child curls against his chest and stills, and Adam feels as if his beating heart may burst from his ribs with the sheer force of its blood pumping adoration through his veins.
Pyrrhus comes to lie beside them, his shaggy bulk tucked firmly against Adam’s right hip. He lays there in the flickering firelight with his child and his dog and feels a sense of great rightness, as if he was merely waiting for this moment to find him from the time he woke in the tower and stumbled off the slab upon which he was created. Elizabeth sleeps soundly and safely in their bed a few strides away, and though he wishes she were in his arms as well, the incredible blessing of simply being in this time and place coalesces into purest clarity and nearly pulls the breath from Adam’s lungs.
He can’t help but hold up a hand to stroke careful fingers around the perfect pink shell of his daughter’s ear while her brand new heart beats so close to his own. Against all possible odds, his wretched life has at last turned out to grasp onto a scrap of goodness that he can claim and hold onto, and Adam knows he will not give it up for the entire world.
Sleep eventually overtakes them both, lying there near the crackling embers in the hearth with loyal Pyrrhus keeping sleepy watch through one brown eye. Elizabeth finds her family dozing in the faint light of rising dawn an hour or so later when she opens her eyes, frightened at first by the sight of the empty cradle, but intrinsically knowing that Adam would have the baby with him no matter where he wandered. And he does—lying there with her skin to skin, the two of them as serene as sleeping angels carved from alabaster and ivory.
It is a beautiful start to a brand new day.
As the first few days of their child’s life creep closer to a full week, Elizabeth’s changed body begins to transform again. The newborn’s cries gradually strengthen and the fresh peals of hunger or discomfort ring out with a force that seems to physically push the milk from her body. It wets the front of her chemise or blouse, making cloudy fluid dribble down her chest and belly if she can’t reach the baby with enough quickness. And even if the child is firmly latched on one side, the other breast will leak like it’s weeping tears of sympathy in its neglect.
Adam observes the subtle change with quiet interest, though he is always there to offer a clean muslin cloth when Elizabeth should need one. He wishes he could do more to help with feeding the baby when she cries out in hunger and silently curses the inefficiency of the basic male form—for all its strength, still lacking in the fundamental equipment to grow and nurture new life. It makes him think of Victor at times, and his belabored quest to create a man from nothing. What would his maker think of the creature now that he himself has become a father through the means of procreation? Adam tries not to dwell upon the bitterness in Victor’s scorn, yet other times cannot push the face of his creator from his mind. He’s thinking of his cold and barren beginnings in the catacombs beneath the tower on one such occasion while Elizabeth feeds the baby beside him when her sweet voice pulls him away from the painful relics of memory, a gentle blessing he clings to like a lifeline drawing him from the tiled depths.
“Come back to me from those faraway places, questing knight,” she teases, having no real idea of the bleak hidden enclave in his mind. Adam blinks into the present and looks over at his wife, still holding the nursing baby at her breast. “Could you be a darling and fetch a glass of water? I’m parched beyond belief and didn’t want to move just yet.”
“Of course,” Adam says, already standing on his feet before he even knows his body has made the decision to move. He goes to the ladle some cool water from the bucket drawn up from the well and pours it into a glass before bringing it back to his wife. Elizabeth drinks deeply and gratefully with one hand, cradling their child close with the other. Adam watches the line of her throat bob and then his eyes drift lower beneath his lashes, gaze casting over the sight of her breast there where it’s casually bared to the warm room. He doesn’t mean to stare, and yet there is a perfect bead of milk gathered at the tip of the nipple Elizabeth currently isn’t using to feed the baby, catching light almost like a baroque pearl.
“You have…” Adam begins, swallowing thickly despite himself in a reflex he doesn’t quite understand. His tongue feels like wet wool stuck to the roof of his mouth. “There is something—just there, at your chest.”
“Oh dear, I’m leaking again,” Elizabeth says with a little snort, holding out her hand to pass Adam the empty water glass so she can pick up the muslin cloth on her lap. “The humbling mysteries of motherhood are never-ending.”
She blots at the milk with the cloth and sweeps a tender thumb over the crown of the baby’s head before looking up at Adam still watching her with rapt interest. A sort of mutual current runs between them when their eyes meet, a soft arc of buzzing electricity. It doesn’t feel carnal with any undercurrent of raw sexual desire, but instead hums with a shared curiosity. Gentle intrigue, or the quest for unknown knowledge.
“I have never tasted it with any memory of the act,” Elizabeth admits, blushing deeply, while Adam reels with the sensation of her having read his mind like an open book. “But I have thought of it more than once in the past several days.”
Adam feels warmth bloom over his face and neck in a stark flush. “Tell me,” he says, clearing his throat. “You have thought of tasting the milk for yourself—or my tasting it for you?”
Elizabeth’s blush only deepens into a pretty pinkness that makes the base of his skull tingle with pleasure. “Both,” she says, biting into her lip. “Is that wicked of me to confess?”
“No,” Adam says, finally setting the empty glass down with a clink of finality. “I imagine it is an incredibly human thing to wonder. But I would have never dared to ask if you had not broached the topic first. It seems improper to pry as a crea—for a man, who was not nursed into being by his mother.”
Elizabeth considers this for a moment, watching their own daughter drink from her beneath her pale lashes. “The men who made you were nursed by someone,” she says softly. “You would not remember it, but neither would they. You are as entitled to wonder as anybody else. Perhaps even more so, considering how you were created.”
At this, Elizabeth reaches up to the neglected breast in question and gently squeezes, pulling outward toward the nipple not so differently from how she milks the nanny goats. A stream of yellowish fluid dribbles over her skin, not blotted away this time by the cloth, but instead caught in errant drops on her fingers. She brings her hand to her lips without further preamble and simply pops them into her mouth, brows slightly knit as she savors the taste of her own milk.
“It’s ever so slightly sweet, though certainly not as creamy as the goats’ milk,” she decides with a sort of clinical fascination. “I’m frankly thankful this isn’t what we put in our tea, but glad it nourishes the baby for what it’s worth.”
Adam doesn’t realize his mouth has fallen open in awe until Elizabeth reaches out to touch the swell of his lower lip. “Would you like to taste as well?” she asks, giving him an impish little smile. “There’s more than enough to go around.”
“Y-yes—but no!—I could not interfere while the baby is drinking,” he stammers, blinking rapidly as something heady and warm comes over him in a full-body grip. “Her vitality comes first, above all else. We both know this.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s only a cheeky little taste,” Elizabeth says, stroking her pretty fingers around the contour of Adam’s jaw. “Come here, you don’t need to squeeze anything out. You already know what to do.”
Adam very nearly gapes at his wife, but she only looks back at him with an open frankness in her expression. She trusts him with her life, why would she not trust him with this, too? It seems silly to dawdle and wring his hands over something so purely human and natural, so incredibly simple.
He bends there at the bedside, going down on one knee and bracing a hand beside her hip in the quilts. He silently prays not to jar the tiny baby where she still nurses and bows his head against Elizabeth’s chest, warm breath ghosting over her breast until he wraps his lips around the bud of her nipple. Elizabeth makes a soft sound and simply touches the back of his head, gentle and reverent, merely pulling him closer to her body until Adam instinctively widens the drop of his jaw and draws her warm flesh deeper into his mouth.
The first pull draws milk onto his tongue, thin and sweet and strange but not altogether unpleasant. He suckles again, slightly harder this time, and is rewarded with more liquid gold in a burst of warmth. Elizabeth sighs above him in something like relief and relaxes deeper into the pillows behind her back, and even though he’s sorry to pull away from something so lovely Adam slowly eases off with great gentleness and presses a kiss to her side before drawing the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Well?” Elizabeth asks, looking at him with keen interest. “Tell me your verdict.”
“Much the same as yours, I should think,” Adam says a bit roughly. “But it’s not offensive in the least. You discredit yourself by saying the goat’s milk is superior.”
“Do I?” Elizabeth laughs, radiant and joyful where she sits. Their child finally drowses and ceases her nursing, lulling into the fringes of sleep now that her small belly is quite full. Elizabeth gathers the baby up against her shoulder and rubs her back, still watching Adam with a devious little glint in her eye all the while.
“Did you enjoy that?” Elizabeth asks, tipping her head ever so slightly.
“I did,” Adam murmurs, though he reaches up and slowly begins buttoning her chemise with careful reverence. He does not know what else to say, but he feels peculiar warmth radiating from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. The baby burbles and spits up a little on the cloth at her mother’s shoulder, but now that she’s sufficiently burped Elizabeth goes quite still.
“Adam,” she says. “Stop buttoning my blouse.”
“Why?” he asks, mouth gone quite dry.
“Take the baby and lay her down in the cradle, please,” she says, offering him the drowsing babe in question. “And then come back to bed with me.”
Adam does as he is bidden, nervous and alight with something tantalizing all at once. “Your body is still mending,” he says, even as he swaddles their child and situates her in the waiting cradle. “You need more time to heal before we engage in any pleasure.”
“That shall not stop me from enjoying our afternoon of simple delights,” Elizabeth says, beckoning him over to the quilts. “And I may find pleasure in touching you, you know, even if you cannot yet touch me in the same way.”
And so Adam crawls into the bed beside his beloved and finds himself drawn into the softened warmth of her embrace, the linens surrounding them smelling equally of rose soap and slightly sour milk and something animal and primal he still scents at the top of their baby’s head.
“Come here, dove,” Elizabeth says, undoing the few buttons on her chemise he’d clumsily managed to do up only moments before. “Just lie with me and be close with me, and be a dear and finish what you started there on that side to balance things out.”
Adam cups her breast in his hand when it’s bared to him again, giving it a gentle squeeze. He wishes he could make love to his wife but knows there will be other times for that, later, when her changed body has healed anew and is ready to hold his devotion within her again. For now, he kisses the place above her sternum and then the skin beside the place where the pendant he made rests on her chest. He presses another kiss at her breast with its subtle silvery striping and then takes the nipple into his mouth, drinking with strong, even pulls while Elizabeth’s fingers card through his hair.
There is nothing to say that their closeness and bond doesn’t silently speak for them. It is an exchange of human comfort and relief in the face of what began as a curiosity, and it is good. Adam knows this to be true as he purrs long and low in his throat, content in the safe bliss of his wife’s welcoming arms.
On the evening their daughter turns a week old, Elizabeth tells Adam that she has gone long enough without a proper name.
“Then we shall grant her one,” he says, gazing at the baby’s tranquil face where she lies nestled between them in the bedding. “It has been a gift to know her as she is, her unbound nature for seven days and seven nights. But I could never claim to know the true colors of her soul or what she would wish to be called.”
“Neither could I,” Elizabeth admits, indulging in the strength of their child’s grip as she wraps her tiny hand around one of her mother’s fingers. “But there is an inherent selfishness in the act of raising a child, and we must decide on something to name her until the day may come where she wishes to be called something else. Do you have any ideas?”
“None that feel like a proper match,” Adam says. His eyes rove over the baby’s cheeks, the upturned tip of her nose—so much like Elizabeth’s—and the spidersilk lashes on her right eye. Her irises still seem murky and blue like deep water, but he hopes they will shift into honeyed brown with more time. “She is too unique to be named after anybody I’ve met through literature.”
“I know what you mean,” Elizabeth says with a sigh. “Some part of me hoped to name her after maman, but it was a terribly greedy thing for me to presume, and I still don’t know if it would suit her.”
This makes Adam slowly look up in wonder. “You have never told me your mother’s first name,” he says. “I do not know it.”
“Evangéline,” Elizabeth says simply, rolling each vowel off her tongue with accented reverence. “I think of her often.”
“It is beautiful,” Adam says, quietly mouthing the name to himself to feel it move beyond his teeth and break upon the air. “Like music falling from your lips.”
“Perhaps for her second name, if we should decide to give her two,” Elizabeth says in a wistful sort of voice as she passes the pad of her thumb over the pale patch of skin at their daughter’s brow. “Our little spotted ladybird, perfect in every way.”
There is a beat of quiet in which Elizabeth sucks a soft gust of breath into her lungs as if in revelation. Her face breaks into a smile, and Adam cannot witness the joy there without knowing what has blossomed like a new flower in her beautiful mind.
“Tell me,” he begs, laying his hand over the top of Elizabeth’s where it rests on the child’s tiny belly. “You have thought of something wonderful, I know it.”
“Adalia bipunctata is the two-spotted ladybird,” Elizabeth whispers, as if it’s a secret cupped between them. “Her name could be Adalia.”
“Adalia,” Adam softly echoes, trying out the name for himself. And then, hoping to indulge his wife’s gentle fondness for her departed mother: “Adalia Evangéline.”
Elizabeth smiles even wider, her eyes sparkling with some innate light. “It does sound like music falling from that golden poet’s tongue,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”
“We have come to our decision,” Adam says, feeling like something in the world has once again notched into its proper place.
“Yes, though I have no holy water to christen her with,” Elizabeth laments. “It feels wrong to name her without placing a blessing upon her tiny soul.”
“Then we shall bless her ourselves,” Adam says without pause. “If not with holy water, then with anointing oil like the temple priestesses of old.”
He rises from the bed to go to the cupboard and brings back the smallest bottle of lavender oil distilled from flowers in their summer garden alongside a glass of cold water from the well. Elizabeth eyes both with a wary sort of curiosity, and watches as Adam tips three small drops of the lavender oil into the vessel of water.
“You taught me to pray on the night our child was born,” he says, reaching for Elizabeth’s hand so their fingers may lace together around the glass. “Pray with me now for her blessing, and then we will see it granted alongside her name.”
Elizabeth’s lips part open as her lashes flutter in surprise. Such boldness to carry out an unorthodox christening, and yet she cannot deny her husband or raise any argument against him. They were married with nobody but themselves and the Almighty above as witness, and so shall they name their daughter in the exact same way. Seeking no blessing or approval but the truth and belief in their own beating hearts.
And so Elizabeth joins her husband and prays over their firstborn with the glass of lavender water in their clasped hands, willing the light and goodness of God to protect their daughter from evils and harm, from sickness and despair. Adam takes the baby into his arms and cradles her against him, holding her up so that Elizabeth may wet her fingertips and gently sprinkle the tiniest amount of diluted anointing oil over her thatch of hair and the tiny soles of her feet.
Much like everything that has brought them thus far, it is imperfectly perfect, and all the more precious for it. “Adalia Evangéline Shepherd,” Elizabeth says aloud, uttering the fullness of the name for the first time as stippled gooseflesh rises on her skin. “You are here, and you are loved. A blessing brought by an angel who walks alongside me on this earth wearing stained glass upon his skin.”
Adam smiles at this, humbly bowing over to press his lips against their daughter’s forehead where her own small pane of cathedral glass disappears into her hairline. “You are wanted, sweet Adalia,“ he tells her. “For as long as I may breathe and ever after.”