A tremor shook the earth beneath Santa Fe and The Lilacs and all the houses around just when the hands were forming. Or was it an insect. Naturally people thought, sometimes murmured, about the possibility of heredity. But this was an idea that was quickly dismissed. There was nothing whatsoever like that in the background of Handsome Mr Blackwood and his Beautiful Wife.
Strange things happen.
It s fate, the stars, the planets, the insects, the wars. A friend of Mr Blackwood, a doctor, very gifted and visionary, said that if this kind of thing happened in the future it would probably be possible to reconstruct, fabricate, borrow, graft, grow the fingers. He said some really terrible and astounding things - if another baby died, supposing, then that baby s fingers could, in time to come, he imagined, be grafted like the cuttings of a fruit tree onto the little hands of a baby such as Aurora. So in one sense Aurora Blackwood was born too soon. Later in the century she could have had the knuckles, bones, joints, sinews, muscles, blood vessels and any other material that goes to make up the hands of the dead baby of a concert violinist.