It was on one such unusually active day, Aunt Helen having vomited three times already, that I saw her go green around the gills. Thinking there was no time to wait for a servant, I helped her hasten to the bathroom, where she immediately emptied the contents of her stomach into the washbasin.
Afterward, weakened by the repeated offense against her body, she slid down the side of the cabinet on which the washbasin stood, settling with a thump onto the floor, her skirts spread indecorously around her. I dampened a cloth with water from a pitcher, pressed it gently against her forehead, as she remained there, eyes closed.
I felt dreadful for her. Aunt Helen had never been pregnant before, had never had a baby. I thought of how frightened she must sometimes feel at the prospect of it all, so much bigger than my own fears on the night of my first bleeding, when she had comforted me.
“It seems to me like an awful lot for a woman’s body to go through,” I observed.
“Yes,” she said, “but it will all be worth it in the end. I shall finally have a baby.”
• Thirty-eight •
Richard had employed a Dr. Channing, one of the finest obstetric physicians in London, to attend Aunt Helen in her condition.
“I want only the very best for you,” I heard Richard say to her on more than one occasion.
Dr. Channing had thin brown hair plastered to his skull, as though it had been painted onto his cranium rather than naturally sprouting from that supposedly intelligent site. His bushy eyebrows were more flat than arched, and his thick mustache and beard looked all of a piece. He did smile often, which was reassuring, but his bulbous red nose gave me to believe that he enjoyed his port overmuch when he was not on duty, and the breath that floated out on his exhalations suggested that he sometimes indulged his enjoyment even when he was.
It was six months since Aunt Helen and Richard had returned from their honeymoon, and I was seated in the front parlor when I saw Aunt Helen pass by, accompanying Dr. Channing to the door. In the past few months, Aunt Helen had grown immense and I heard Dr. Channing comment on this as she saw him out.
“If I did not know better, Mrs. Earl, I would swear you were about to deliver this baby any moment now and not in the two months’ time when it is due.” I imagined him tipping his hat. “I shall call in again at the same time next week.”
Even though I had been hearing her addressed thus for some time now, it was still a fresh shock each time I heard it: Mrs. Earl.
I heard the front door close, and a moment later Aunt Helen was in the room with me, her hand supporting the small of her back.
“I didn’t know you were in here,” she said, settling her bulk gingerly on the sofa beside me. She placed her hand over her eyes as though weary.
“Are you all right?” I asked quickly. “Is the baby all right?”
“We are both fine,” she said, eyes still shut. “But could you please find Richard for me? I need to speak with him.”
I found Richard in Father’s private study. It was a habit of his now to spend time there upon occasion, a habit I found odious, and yet I felt I had no right to tell him not to go there.
After delivering Richard to Aunt Helen, I moved to go upstairs, but something stopped me and I assumed my old position as eavesdropper upon the sixth step. It had occurred to me that perhaps Aunt Helen was putting on a good front for my sake and that in fact everything was not fine with her and the baby. Why else would she need to speak with Richard right then? If such was the case, I wished to know about it.
I heard the sound of a kiss, followed by Richard’s concerned voice: “What is wrong?”
It was always odd listening to Aunt Helen and Richard, so different from how listening to Mother and Father had been. The way they spoke with each other, the way they talked, the intimacy there, the words that lurked in the silences—it was like they had known each other all their lives. Like I thought of Kit and me—mates of the soul who had been born into the universe instinctively knowing of the other’s existence, only waiting for the moment of meeting—so I thought of them.
I cannot say it was a happy thought. Something about Richard still troubled me so much.
“He wants to give me chloroform,” I heard Aunt Helen whisper to Richard now.
“And what is wrong with that?” Richard said. “As a matter of fact, I have discussed it with him. He says that Queen Victoria herself used it when delivering Prince Leopold, and, I must say, if it is good enough for the queen—”
“Oh, why is everyone always throwing the queen at me?” Aunt Helen’s tone was exasperated as she cut him off. “What do I care about the queen?” She barked a harsh laugh. “As though we have anything in common.”
“But I don’t understand,” Richard said. “Why don’t you want the chloroform? It is my understanding, though I will never have one myself, that bearing a baby is a painful business. Surely anything that can serve to alleviate—”
“Chloroform is a drug, Richard. A person might say anything while under its influence. What if I were to say things it would be best I did not? I might not be able to stop myself.”
While no champion of pain myself, I could see why she felt this way. Childbirth, the whole notion of pushing a baby out into the world, as yet seemed to me a fantastical thing. How did women do it? And it would be undignified, the entire loss of physical control and having others see one thus. To add to that the outrage of being caused to babble senselessly like a madwoman—well, I could see where the thing, when taken as a whole, was more than a bit much.
Then suddenly I saw what Aunt Helen’s real fear was: she worried that while under the drug, she might let slip her true identity. I wished I could tell her that I already knew, that she need not endure unimaginable pain to keep her secret from me.
But I could not tell her that.
Richard was silent for a long moment. Then: “I see what you mean.” He sighed. “What is it you want me to do, though? You cannot very well have the baby without anyone there to attend you. You cannot deliver it yourself.”
“I don’t care who you find,” Aunt Helen said, her voice steel, “so long as it is not a doctor, so long as it is not a male doctor who will insist on giving me chloroform.” She paused before adding, “Find me someone I can trust.”
. . . . .
Mrs. Daggett did not appear to me to be the sort of person who would inspire trust in anybody. In her bedraggled clothes, she reminded me of no one so much as the snaggletooth woman I had glimpsed when Father had taken me to the seamier side of London, so very long ago, to hunt for Aunt Helen—minus the snaggletooth, of course. Other than that minor deviation, the two women were very much the same. Indeed, I had to ask her twice to wash her hands before attending to Aunt Helen.
Mrs. Daggett was the midwife Richard had found to replace Dr. Channing, causing me to think that a liking for port in a physician was not so great an offense.
The baby was arriving two months early.
Aunt Helen’s water had broken at breakfast that morning, leaving behind a mark on the satin cushion of her chair. Richard had promptly sent a servant to fetch the woman he had hired, and that was Mrs. Daggett.
“Where’s the room you’ve chosen for the birth?” Mrs. Daggett demanded with no preamble upon entering.
She was shown to Aunt Helen’s old bedroom on the third story.
“I suppose this’ll have to do,” she allowed. “But look at this mattress,” she said, throwing back the sheets. “Only one? Someone’ll need to find me a second. Also, some oiled silk to put over it or an untanned skin if you have one lying about. Oh, and open the window and light that fire. Isn’t anyone ready to have a baby in this house?”
“Are you sure she knows what she’s doing?” I whispered to Richard, although I needn’t have bothered with the caution. Mrs. Daggett spoke at such a volume I suspected she might be deaf.
He rarely let his displeasure with me show, a feeling I suspected he had often, but he did so now. “Do you honestly think I wo
uld ever do anything to jeopardize your mother’s life?”
I did not. Even I could see the love in his eyes when he looked on her, concern now added to the mix.
“These are her wishes,” he emphasized.
A moment later, Mrs. Daggett kicked him out.
I moved to follow.
“Please stay with me, Lucy,” Aunt Helen said, grabbing tight to my hand. There was a look of fear in her eyes I’d never seen there before; for herself or the baby, I could not tell.
Now, twelve hours later, Aunt Helen lay drenched in sweat on her old bed.
Before having her lie down, Mrs. Daggett had instructed that Aunt Helen put on loose-fitting garments and a cap. Why a cap?
“Perhaps someone else can be located?” I suggested to Aunt Helen when Mrs. Daggett left the room without explanation, a thing she did with an alarming frequency.
“There is no time for that,” Aunt Helen said through gritted teeth.
Aunt Helen’s eyes had gone wild with terror like a frightened horse and then she was scrunching her eyes shut, her two rows of teeth clenched together like warring armies clashing in the middle, her knees pulled up toward her shoulders, her hand holding mine so tightly that I could feel her nails piercing my skin, the blood coming and—
There was a cry in the room that did not come from Aunt Helen, the cry of a new life.
“ ’Tis a girl,” Mrs. Daggett said. “I do hope the mister won’t be disappointed. ’Tis a pretty girl, from the looks of her, with blond hair just like her mother.”
I could see that Mrs. Daggett was right as she placed the baby against Aunt Helen’s breast. The baby did have a downy gold on her head.
“Your mother’s a caution,” Mrs. Daggett said to me. “Why, look at her. She has a baby—an early baby who happens to still be quite big!—and yet she doesn’t make a sound the whole time. I’ve never seen one like her. Most women—all women—they scream their bloody heads off, as if no one else ever had a baby before.”
I looked at the baby at Aunt Helen’s breast: my new cousin.
Aunt Helen looked at the baby, and I looked at both of them.
I was thinking of what Mrs. Daggett had said, that she hoped “the mister” wouldn’t be disappointed at not having a boy.
“Have you thought of any girls’ names?” I asked.
“Yes,” Aunt Helen said. She sighed a contented sigh. “I shall call her Emma.”
• Thirty-nine •
Having a baby in the house changed everything.
The sounds that filled all the rooms, the sight of baby Emma in Aunt Helen’s or Richard’s arms, even the smells—sweet milk and the acrid odor of nappies—were all different. And the rhythm of life was changed too.
At last, across the hall from me, in the nursery that had once been occupied by Aunt Helen when she first came to us, there was a baby.
When I was younger, I used to fantasize about this, and I freely confess: I nearly always imagined it being a girl, a miniature ally in a world almost entirely filled with adults. I pictured her being a subordinate, someone I could subjugate to my will, making her read the books I thought she should read, play the games I wanted to play. I pictured her being a tiny version of me, complete with my hair and eyes, as though she were me, reincarnated in doll form.
But it wasn’t like that at all, not least because she did not look at all like I did, and by now I was nearly as old as Mother was when she gave birth to me.
Giving birth to Emma had changed Aunt Helen too, at least in the aftermath of that event. Having refused to employ a wet nurse for the feeding, she was constantly exhausted, as though the universe had played a grand trick on her body, with great bags under her eyes. And she worried about every little detail. Was Emma sleeping too much? Too little? Why would she not take sustenance more often? Was she growing properly?
“Nanny says that Emma is the healthiest baby she has ever seen,” Richard told Aunt Helen, referring to the woman he had employed to help Aunt Helen care for Emma.
“I don’t like her,” Aunt Helen said. “I don’t think she knows anything about babies at all. You will have to dismiss her.”
“But—”
But Aunt Helen would brook no “buts,” and Richard did what he was asked.
I will say this for Richard: he doted on that baby. Indeed, I had brief sparks of envy in the beginning, because I could not picture my own father ever having doted so on me, at least not until I was old enough to give him a good literary argument.
Then I would hold Emma in my arms, and all such feelings would vanish. She was so vulnerable and so extraordinarily beautiful I wanted to protect her from the world.
But that was not the job of a cousin. It was the job of a mother or a nanny. There was just one problem, two actually: Since having the baby, Aunt Helen had grown sad. And as for the nanny, having dismissed the first, that sad mother seemed no more inclined to approve the second.
“She just sits there while the baby sleeps!” Aunt Helen complained to Richard of that second nanny.
“What do you want her to do when the baby is sleeping?” Richard answered.
But his sensible approach—and his approach did seem sensible, even to me, even given how little I normally regarded Richard’s opinions—did nothing to allay Aunt Helen’s fears.
So Nanny Two departed, and Nanny Three arrived.
“This one does not impress me either,” Aunt Helen confessed when Richard was out of the room. I think she suspected that his patience with her objections to the string of nannies was wearing thin.
“What is wrong with this one?” I asked Aunt Helen, taking care not to sound as though I was criticizing, for Aunt Helen had become very sensitive and would cry at the slightest offense, real or imagined.
“I just do not trust her,” Aunt Helen said. “Do you see the way her eyes are always darting about? She is like a rodent looking for the cheese.”
“I think she is just watchful,” I said, “to protect Emma.”
“No, I don’t think that is it.” Aunt Helen chewed on a finger until her cuticle became ragged, and I was tempted to bat her hand away from her mouth, beg her to stop hurting herself.
Then a light came into her eyes.
“What about you, Lucy?”
“What about me what?”
“Cannot you take care of Emma, just until I am feeling stronger?”
“Well, I don’t know that—”
“Please, Lucy, I beg of you. There is no one I trust more.”
It was a bit much on the face of it. What did I know about taking care of babies? But then, I thought, when had Aunt Helen ever asked anything of me? True, she had asked me to stay with her the day Emma was born, but I had not minded that; apart from seeing Aunt Helen in so much pain, it had been rather interesting, illuminating in a scientific sort of way. And I saw now that I did not mind this either. If I were to be called once more into the breach, as though one of Henry V’s men, I would do my duty.
“All right, Mother,” I said. “I would be happy to help out.”
. . . . .
We took Emma to the church to be christened.
Mr. Roberts, the new vicar, had replaced Mr. Thomason, who had finally died three months earlier. It was said that Mr. Thomason had been writing a sermon one day when his pen just stopped midsentence and that was that.
Mother, Mrs. Carson, Father, Aunt Martha, now Mr. Thomason—all dead. Sometimes I felt as though we had stumbled into Hamlet, and I wondered who would remain living at the end of the play.
Mr. Roberts was the antithesis of Mr. Thomason: impossibly young where the other had been ancient, stern where the other had been kind.
Still, despite the creeping sense that Mr. Roberts expected us all to go to hell, as he read the liturgy I could not help but feel a proprietary satisfaction. Emma was more my daughter than my cousin now, and I could not help but delight in the belief that her soul would be saved.
. . . . .
It was not such a
great burden caring for Emma.
Indeed, I received immense rewards for my efforts: a beatific smile at just a few weeks, an attempt at my name at six months. Regarding the latter, she could not get her mouth around the L, so for the longest time I was simply called by the sound of my second letter: “Oo.”
I did not mind that either. Indeed, it made me feel as though I had a name that was unique in the world.
One thing I did mind—no, “mind” is not the right word; “miss” is more like it—was the company of others closer to my own age; Kit, in particular. When he would call at the door right after Emma’s birth, he was turned away because Aunt Helen feared the baby having contact with outsiders was unhealthy. And since then, he had been turned away because I was too busy caring for Emma. As a result of this, I now had a new appreciation of Minerva Clarence. Previously, I had not quite grasped how helping to take care of her younger sisters should occupy so much of her time.
Despite that most babies were introduced to the outdoors at an early age, with the exception of the brief visit to church for the christening, Aunt Helen had been adamant about Emma not leaving the house.
Aunt Helen worried about everything—that the air would be too cold or hot for Emma, that someone would steal her from the perambulator, that an overzealous bird would peck out her eyes. While I certainly did not want to see Emma harmed in any way, I did think that some of these concerns—all right, all of them—bordered on the insane. And I further attributed this madness to the extended condition of fatigue and gray fugue state Aunt Helen occupied following Emma’s birth. But now Aunt Helen’s spirits seemed at last to be lifting, her worry and madness suddenly disappearing altogether one day as though God were a portrait artist who had whipped the cloth off the easel, revealing a startling picture of the sun, and I thought it might be a good time to ask again.
“The park! Why, what a clever thought!” Aunt Helen said, as though no one had ever suggested anything more brilliant. “Let me change first.”
“I don’t mind confessing,” Richard said, once she was out of the room, “that in the beginning, I did not think much of you.”
The Twin's Daughter Page 25