by Mary Balogh
Her hands grasped his elbows. “I do.” The admission came out sounding almost like a wail. “Oh, I do. I have always wanted it, though for a long time I have thought it was something that would never happen. I put it out of my mind and my dreams a long time ago. Then, when I married after all, I assumed it was too late even though . . . Well, even though I ought to have known it was still possible. And now it has happened. But I know you do not want any more children. You made that very clear to me when you offered me marriage. You chose me because I was older, because it was impossible, because all you wanted was a companion and friend. And you just said that I am all you want. I am so sorry.”
He felt like a brute. Had he really given that impression? Actually said it? And was she expecting that he would now blame her, even though he was the one who had impregnated her?
Lord God in heaven, was it possible? He had impregnated her. She was going to bear a child. He was going to be a father. They were going to be parents together.
He continued to gaze into her face for a few moments before gathering her into his arms.
“Dora,” he said, “I chose you because you were you, regardless of age or ability to bear children. First and foremost I wanted you as my wife, as my friend, as my lover. But to be blessed with a child on top of all those things? To be a father?” He moved one hand beneath her chin and raised her face close to his own. “To have a child with you? Can there be so much happiness in the world? And you thought I would be upset, even angry? You thought I would blame you when you could not possibly have got yourself into your present condition without considerable help from me? Ah, Dora. How little you know me.”
She raised one hand and ran the backs of her fingers over his jaw. She looked suddenly wistful.
“We are old enough to be grandparents,” she said.
“But not too old, apparently, to be parents.” He smiled at her. “Can you be happy now that you know that I am?”
“Yes,” she said. “Deep inside I have been happy anyway, but I have been upset to think that perhaps you would not be “
She was shrieking suddenly then, for he had bent down like the young blade he was not and scooped her up into his arms and was twirling her about while her own arms tightened about his neck. He set her feet back down on the path and straightened up, pleased to note that he was scarcely winded.
“I am going to be a father,” he said again, grinning like an idiot. “You were made for motherhood, Dora. I am so glad I have made it possible for you, that it is my child you will bear. I am honored.”
She looked at him in the growing dusk, and he saw joy in her smile.
He felt it in his own.
He was going to be a father! He felt the childish urge to shout it out to the world as though no one else in the history of the universe had ever been so clever.
* * *
Life was the oddest experience ever invented, George decided later that night. He had woken up abruptly, remembered, and realized that euphoria had been replaced by panic.
Women died all the time in childbirth. And Dora was thirty-nine years old. She would be forty when the baby was born, and it was her first.
He slid his arm from beneath her head, eased his way off the bed so as not to wake her, and went to stand at the open window, where the air felt blessedly cool against his naked body.
He would summon the local physician tomorrow. Dr. Dodd had probably delivered several hundred babies during his long career.
How many of those babies had been stillborn? How many of the mothers—
He braced himself on the windowsill with his fisted hands, hung his head, and slowly inhaled the slightly salty air. How could he so carelessly, so irresponsibly have endangered her? But how could he not once he had married her?
Abstained?
And yet, all mingled up with his terror, more than half swallowed by it, was a euphoria of joy that threatened to burst from him at any moment, as it had last evening when he had picked her up and twirled her about.
He was going to be a father. It was like a great miracle. If, that was, she survived the dangers of childbirth. And if the child did.
That was two too many ifs!
But . . . fatherhood. For the first time he wondered if the baby would be a boy or a girl. He did not mind which it was. He had his heir in Julian. He would be over the moon with happiness if it was a daughter. Oh, Lord God, a daughter, a little girl all his own. Or a son. He would love a s—
And suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, displacing both panic and euphoria, grief slammed into him, a grief so painful and so all-encompassing that he wondered for a few moments if he could survive it, or if he wanted to.
Brendan.
He closed his eyes tightly and pressed his knuckles against the sill to the point of pain.
Brendan. Ah, Brendan.
It did not lessen with time, the agony of grief. The intensity of it spaced itself out a bit more, it was true, but when it came—and it always did—it catapulted him as deep into hell as it ever had.
“Goodbye, Pa— Goodbye, sir.” The very last words Brendan had spoken to him when he left to join his regiment. George had not seen him again before they went off to the Peninsula and the boy’s death.
“Goodbye, sir.” Not Papa, but “sir.”
George did not know what the boy had said to his mother.
“George?” The sound came from behind him and he turned. “You must be cold. Can you not sleep?”
He straightened up. “It is not every day,” he said, “that a man learns he has been clever enough to beget a child on his wife.”
“I ought not to have said I was sorry so many times last evening,” she said. “Or at all, in fact. It must have sounded as though I were sorry about the baby and I could never be that—never, George. And it probably sounded abject, as though I was cringing before your expected anger. That was not what I meant. I meant that I was sorry that your dream of a happy second marriage was to be shattered by something so unexpected, something you had said specifically you did not want. I meant I was sorry there would be a wedge driven between us. I feared you would not want the child or love it. The fear of that was breaking my heart. But I am not sorry about the baby and would not be even if you had been unhappy about it. I would just have been saddened—for you, for us.”
He wrapped his arms about her and drew her against him.
“I have been standing here fighting my terror over the ordeal ahead of you,” he said, “and feeling my joy.” He added something he had had no intention of saying aloud. “And feeling grief over Brendan.”
He lowered his forehead to the top of her head and fought the soreness in his throat that threatened tears.
“Would you like me to play the pianoforte in the sitting room for a while?” she asked softly after a few silent moments had passed. “And maybe go down to the kitchen first to make a pot of tea? It is how I used to coax Agnes to sleep when she had something on her mind.”
It was tempting. A stealthy visit to the kitchen to make tea and maybe find some leftover biscuits, just like a couple of naughty children? And music?
“I think I’ll settle for holding you instead,” he said, “in bed, where it is warm. Did I wake you?”
“It was your absence that woke me,” she said as they got back into bed and she snuggled up to him while he drew the covers over them. “Your presence lulls me.”
“I am to be flattered, am I,” he asked her, “to be told that my presence puts you to sleep?”
She chuckled softly, her breath warm against his chest.
His next conscious thought was that he really ought to have closed the curtains so that all this sunlight would not be shining directly onto his face.
And then he realized his wife was already gone from the bed.
17
It was not the change of life.
Her Grace, Dr. Dodd confirmed the following morning, was approximately one month and a half into her confinement, and if there was anything wrong with her health, he could certainly not detect what it might be, and why should her age have anything to say to the matter? Twenty-nine-year-old ladies were giving birth all the time with no trouble at all. What was that? Her Grace had said thirty-nine? A man did start to have some trouble with his hearing after the age of sixty, he was discovering. Well, only thirty-nine? There was still time, then, to have brothers and sisters as companions for this first one. Only last year he had delivered Mrs. Hancock of her fifteenth child at the age of forty-seven, and it would not surprise him if he were to be summoned for the sixteenth before she was done.
Dora wondered in some amusement if he talked nonstop even through the delivery of a baby and guessed that he probably did. It was, she realized, his way of relaxing a woman while he performed intimate procedures on her body.
One result of his visit was that well before the day was out—probably even before the morning was out—it was perfectly obvious that every servant in the house, and doubtless out of it too, knew that she was in an interesting condition, though no official or even unofficial announcement had been made and Maisie, Dora’s maid, had assured her from the start that she was no tattler. Before another day was out, every servant for miles around would know too, and once the servants knew then so would everyone else.
Her suspicions were confirmed even sooner than she expected. Ann and James Cox-Hampton came to call the following afternoon, and Dora strolled in the rose garden outside the music room with her friend while George remained inside with his.
“Dora,” Ann said, linking an arm through hers and coming to the point without preamble, “what is this we have been hearing about you?”
“What have you been hearing?” Dora asked her while noting that at last she had caught the gardeners out in being neglectful. There were at least two roses that were past their best.
“That you are in what they call a delicate state of health,” Ann said. “Though how one would cope with nine months of discomfort and tribulation if one were delicate, I do not know. Are you in a delicate state?”
“Not at all,” Dora told her. “But I am with child. I suppose everyone knows?”
“Everyone and his dog,” Ann said. “Are you pleased?”
“Pleased?” Dora laughed. “I am ecstatic. You cannot know, Ann. You had all your children when you were young. You cannot know what it is like to watch all your contemporaries marry and have families and—”
“And live happily ever after?” Ann laughed too. “Just wait. James declares that our boys are sometimes more trouble than they are worth even though they are away at school for much of the year, and he grumbles that he will have to sharpen his sword soon to hold at bay all the men who will be eyeing our girls with lascivious intent. He attributes every one of his gray hairs to our offspring. And of course, he loves them all to distraction. I am delighted for you, Dora. We both are. George has always been such a melancholy figure—until recently. The transformation in him has been quite remarkable. Is he pleased?”
“He declares that he would shout the news from the ramparts,” Dora told her, “if it were not an undignified thing to do—and if Penderris Hall had ramparts. Shall we stroll out to the headland?”
Ann Cox-Hampton was her own age, perhaps a year or two older. She had five children, two boys and three girls, all past the age of ten. And, as with Barbara Newman, Dora had felt an immediate affinity with her, perhaps because she was an accomplished lady and they had a great deal in common. Ann was a reader. She also tried her hand at writing poetry and at miniature portrait painting. She played the pianoforte and sang, though her real interest lay in the ten-stringed mandolin her grandfather had brought back from Italy after his grand tour almost a century ago. Ann had inherited it and learned to play it.
It felt lovely, Dora thought, to have two particular friends, and ones who lived close by. And to have a husband she liked so well—and loved so dearly. And to be with child. Oh, she could never in her wildest dreams have predicted any of this just three months ago.
No happiness was ever unalloyed, however.
Parenthood was a new and wonderful prospect for her, but for George, joy was mingled with grief, for parenthood was not new to him. He had had a son—Brendan—and his joy in anticipating the arrival of a new baby must be tempered by guilt at rejoicing when his first child was dead.
And of course, for Dora there was all the anxiety over her mother. She had still not come. But neither had the carriage returned without her.
* * *
Sir Everard and Lady Havell arrived late in the afternoon two days later. Both of them looked weary, George thought as he stood on the steps outside the front doors with Dora, waiting to greet them. Lady Havell also looked apprehensive, as her daughter had been looking ever since she had sent the invitation on its way and he had sent the carriage. They looked remarkably alike, despite the older lady’s somewhat larger girth and silver hair. Dora gripped his arm tightly as the footman who had ridden up on the box with his coachman jumped down to open the door and set down the steps.
“Dora,” Lady Havell said as she stepped down onto the terrace. “Your Grace.”
She looked as though she was about to curtsy to them. Dora must have seen it too, for she released his arm and hurried down the steps.
“Mother!” she cried, and launched herself into Lady Havell’s arms. “You came! I am so glad. The days have been interminable, not knowing if you would come or when you would arrive. Oh, Mother, I am going to have a baby.”
And then she stepped back in sudden embarrassment, a feeling George shared, though he was also amused. He would wager Dora had not planned that particular greeting. But Lady Havell’s face was lighting up with a warm smile, and Sir Everard was descending from the carriage behind her.
“But that is wonderful, Dora,” she was saying as George held out a hand to shake Havell’s.
“Welcome to Penderris,” he said.
“This is a beautiful place, Stanbrook,” Sir Everard said, looking about appreciatively.
The weather had been kind for their arrival. It was a sunny, warm day, and even the almost omnipresent wind had reduced itself to a gentle breeze. The sea was sparkling off in the distance.
“Ma’am.” George turned his attention to Lady Havell and offered his hand. “I am honored that you came. I trust you had a pleasant journey, though I know from experience that it is also a long and tedious one.”
Dora meanwhile was greeting Sir Everard, who was bowing to her and addressing her as “Your Grace.” She had reprimanded him, George remembered, for making free with her name and Agnes’s on an earlier occasion. She probably remembered it too.
“Sir Everard,” she said, extending her right hand to him. “I would be happy to have you call me Dora.”
“Dora,” he said. “The sea air must agree with you. You look remarkably well.”
“Did you hear what she said, Everard?” Lady Havell asked. “She is with child. She and Agnes both. How very happy I am.”
Dora linked an arm through hers and led her up the steps to the house. “Let us take you up to your rooms,” she said. “You must be weary.”
George exchanged a slightly sheepish look with Havell and followed them inside. All was going to be well, he thought. One never knew for sure when one encouraged people to take a course of action they were reluctant to take on their own—even when it seemed the right thing to do.
“Congratulations are in order, then,” Havell said.
“Thank you,” George said. “I am indeed feeling rather proud of myself.”
* * *
There was no real decision to make, Dora discovered after that remarkable scene on her mother’s arrival. She had not planned anything like it. She had even wondered beforehand whether sh
e would shake her mother’s hand or merely incline her head in a polite greeting. She had certainly not thought she would be so overwhelmed with emotion at seeing her mother again and then so disconcerted at the realization that she was about to curtsy to them that she would rush down the steps to hug her and blurt whatever chose to come out of her mouth without first being filtered through her brain. She had even told her mother that she was expecting a baby.
She was a little embarrassed to have behaved without any of the refined dignity one might expect of a duchess, and she apologized to George afterward for having embarrassed him. He laughed and assured her that he actually took great delight in having the world informed that he was to be a father at the age of forty-eight.
But it was impossible to go back and greet her mother and Sir Everard any other way, and on the whole Dora was glad of it. Why decide if she ought to forgive her mother or not? One could not change the past anyway. Why let it blight the present and the future?
Her mother was clearly happy to be here, and Sir Everard did not seem unhappy. He appeared to enjoy tramping about the estate with George while Dora went over the plans for the ball with her mother and showed her the ballroom and the other state rooms and took her to meet Barbara Newman at the vicarage. Her mother and Sir Everard were introduced to a number of other people after church the Sunday following their arrival, and if anyone knew their story—Dora did not doubt that everyone did—no one either made reference to it or showed any reluctance to curtsy to them or shake their hands. Sir Everard, of course, Dora remembered from long ago, was capable of great charm, as was her mother.
Sir Everard went with them when they called upon Mr. and Mrs. Clark one afternoon—George had some business with his steward to attend to. The Clarks had been early visitors at Penderris, but it was only now that Dora was returning their call, having promised after church that she would do so.
She had not warmed to Mrs. Clark during her visit to Penderris. She had found her manner just a little too obsequious, especially to George, though Dora did concede that the poor woman had perhaps simply been awed. Today both she and her husband made a great effort to please. Mr. Clark drew Sir Everard into a discussion of the relative merits of town living versus country living, while Mrs. Clark and her daughter were all that was amiable as they talked with Dora and her mother about fashions and bonnets and the weather and their health. Dora might have felt comfortable after all had Mrs. Parkinson not also been present and had it not been clear that the two ladies were friends and that the latter had been invited.