Klara rocked her baby in her arms. The fever had left him. He was sleeping peacefully at last.

“You have to live,” Klara whispered. “If I lose you too, how will I bear it?”

Beneath her icon of Mother Mary, three candles burned. Candles for the three little children that Klara had already lost. There was her firstborn, along with his sister. Just two Christmases ago, they had both been carried off by diphtheria. And then poor little Otto last year. Born so sickly, the doctor could do nothing. Just three days old and the angels had taken Otto to Heaven.

“Angels!” Klara’s husband scoffed. “Heaven!” He often scoffed at her beliefs.

Outside the snow was falling, even though it was only mid-October.

“Six months old! Yes, my little one, tomorrow you will be six months old! We will celebrate.”

What a harrowing six months it had been! Colic and croup, and sudden unexplained fevers. The same doctor had come often, patient and caring, understanding how the young mother worried.

“But you will survive,” Klara whispered to her sleeping infant. “You will grow strong and make your Mama proud. Yes, my little one, my hope is in you.”

The baby seemed to smile in his sleep. Klara felt a rush of love and of joy fill her heart.

In that moment, nothing else mattered. It didn’t matter that she was married to a loud-mouthed bully. A real tyrant, that Alois! Sometimes she couldn’t understand why she had married him.

She had arrived here in town as a teenaged servant girl, sent by her farm-worker parents because there were too many mouths to feed back home. And also because Alois was a distant relative. His wife at the time was ill. So Klara took over the domestic chores.

Then the wife died. And Alois suggested that Klara marry him. Well, he insisted really. And what could she do? She needed a roof over her head and clothes and food. She was young – twenty years younger than him, or more. In fact, she found it difficult to call him anything but ‘Uncle’, even now.

So here she was, wife to a bad-tempered older man who drank at the tavern and then came home to yell at her. At the children too, back when they were alive. Sometimes he beat her if he was in a really foul mood.

Yes, and mother of three deceased children. All of them taken before their third birthday. As though there was some evil curse on her womb.

“But I have you, my precious one,” Klara whispered to her baby. “You will make everything right and blessed. You will grow up gentle and kind, the way a true man should be.”

The front door slammed. Klara shuddered and felt her heart sink.

“Good evening, Uncle,” she called in her sweetest voice. Perhaps that would soften her husband?

But he yelled back, “Where is my supper? Did you make supper? Or did you waste your day nursing that sickly brat of yours?”

***

Tell us what you think: Will Klara’s fourth baby survive and make her hopes come true?