Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Anne woke an hour before dawn and knew, before she had opened her eyes, what had happened.
She lay for a moment in the dim room without moving. She listened to the house. A single bird had begun chirping tentatively somewhere in the garden. The curtains fluttered in the half-open window.
She carefully slid a hand beneath the bedclothes.
Yes.
She rested it on her stomach and stared at the ceiling.
The plasterwork there was in the shape of a medallion of acanthus leaves.
She had looked at it a great deal over the past fortnight, at various hours of the day and night, and she knew the pattern now by heart.
One acanthus leaf was a little more deeply cut than the others, on the eastern side, where some long-dead plasterer had evidently pressed his thumb a fraction too hard.
Relief. I ought to feel relief.
She waited for the relief to come. And it did, after a moment. A small cool thing, entering the room like a servant bringing a tray.
You are not dying. You are not going to bleed to death in a bed like your mother. You are not going to leave Celia. You are not going to leave Felicity. You are not going to leave him.
All true. All necessary.
She took the relief in as one takes medicine—gratefully, understanding it to be good for her.
And then, after it, entirely unexpected, came the other thing.
It came in as the bird outside was joined by a second, and then a third.
It came in with the first light of the summer morning against the curtain.
It came in quite quietly, as though it had been waiting in the corridor for a while and had simply walked in now that there was no one at the door to stop it.
Why do I feel this way?
It was not relief. It was the opposite of relief. It was a small, sharp grief, located somewhere just under her breastbone, and it was of such a shape and such a weight that for a full half-minute, she did not recognize it. Then she did.
She turned her face into the pillow. She did not weep, not exactly.
She only lay with her face in the pillow, her breath held, while the thing moved through her, while she understood what the thing was, while she made herself admit it in the grey dawn, in the bed in which she had lain alone for three nights now.
I did not wish to be with child.
That had been true. She had been terrified, and the terror had been true. But somewhere beneath the terror, in some part of herself she had not known existed, she had also wanted it.
She had wanted it as much as she wanted William.
His child. A small child with his dark hair, or her chestnut curls, or some unguessable mixture.
Perhaps a small child with his careful mouth or her quick one, a small child who would come into a house that had a Celia in it and a Felicity in it and would be loved from the first day by every soul within these walls.
A part of her had wanted it. She had wanted it enough that the absence hit her in the chest like a small stone.
I should tell him.
She did not tell him. She did not know how to tell him. She no longer knew how to tell him anything.
She had opened her mouth at dinner the previous evening to say some ordinary thing, perhaps a remark about the weather or a letter from her aunt in Scotland.
Yet, the sentence had died in her throat at the sight of his expression.
It was so polite and perfectly closed off on the other side of the candlesticks.
In the end, she had only reached for the bread.
He had not come to her on the fourth night.
She had counted. Each night, she had told herself that she would not count, that the counting was childish, but then she had counted.
To go to him now and say, “It was nothing, William. I am not with child after all, you may stop avoiding me,” felt foolish.
She could not say it in those words. She could not say anything at all, she suspected, without her face doing something it ought not to do.
At some point over the past three days, she had decided that she would not permit her face to do anything of the sort in front of him.
She had a pride that she had not previously known herself to possess.
It was the pride of a woman who had been turned, however gently, away from a door she had believed open.
So she rose. She washed. She dressed with considerable care in a gown she knew became her.
Not because she hoped to be seen in it, but because putting on a becoming gown was one of the small comforts a woman could lean against. It was a balm for her soul on a morning when very little else was standing up.
She went down for breakfast.
I will face him now.
He was not there. He had taken his coffee into his study, she was told by Mrs. Alderton. He sent his apologies. He had a matter of some urgency concerning a tenant.
“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Mrs. Alderton. Please tell His Grace not to rush on my account.”
“Very well, Your Grace,” Mrs. Alderton answered.
After breakfast, Anne went into the morning room. She sat at the little writing desk by the window and opened a letter she owed her aunt. She dipped the quill in ink and wrote: My dearest aunt,
Then she sat, looking at the parchment as her mind went blank. She did not write anything for what might have been five minutes or twenty. At some point, she became aware that Mrs. Alderton was standing in the doorway.
The housekeeper stood there with her hands folded in front of her apron and a small expression of concern on her face.
“Forgive me, Your Grace. I did not wish to interrupt you at your correspondence.”
“It is no bother,” Anne said softly. “How may I help?”
“I only came to ask whether you should wish the linen in the blue guest room changed for the summer-weight.”
“Oh,” Anne murmured. “Yes. Yes, of course. The summer-weight. Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Alderton.”
“Thank you, Your Grace. Is there anything… that I may do for you? Are you feeling well today?”
“I am quite fine, thank you, Mrs. Alderton.”
“Very well.”
Mrs. Alderton lingered a moment longer in the doorway and looked at Anne. Her gaze held the kindness of a woman who had been in service long enough to have seen, and held her tongue about, a great many things. Yet, Anne knew she had something to say.
“Your Grace, if I may be frank…”
“Yes, Mrs. Alderton. Always.”
“Forgive me. You will tell me, Your Grace, if I overstep. But I have been wondering these last days whether you were quite well. You have not seemed yourself, and I know that the physician said there is no cause for concern. But I care for you, and I hope I do not—”
“It is quite all right, as am I.”
Anne looked at the white page with her aunt’s name on it, and then at the window.
“Will you come in?” she heard herself say as her gaze returned to the housekeeper. “Will you… Would you close the door? And sit. Only for a moment.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
Mrs. Alderton closed the door and sat on the very edge of the little chair opposite the writing desk. It was as if sitting properly on a chair in her mistress’s morning room would have been a liberty too far. She folded her hands on her lap.
“My mother died when I was eleven. Of childbirth. Of my little sister’s birth. I was in the house when it happened. I was… I was outside the door,” Anne began.
“Oh, Your Grace. I had no idea. I am so very sorry for your loss.”
“It was a stormy night. I have never quite… I have never been quite right about storms. Or about…” She could not finish the sentence. She gestured vaguely at herself, at the shape of a woman, as though that would do.
“I understand, Your Grace.”
“I have been so frightened, Mrs. Alderton.” Her voice broke on the last word.
She pressed her lips together and looked fixedly at the inkstand.
Mrs. Alderton did not speak at once. She did not reach out.
She did not offer a handkerchief. She merely sat on the edge of her seat with her hands folded in her lap.
She waited, the way a very good nurse waits at a bedside—without impatience, without demands, making her presence a thing the patient could lean upon if they wished to, or ignore if they wished to.
“I thought…” Anne said, after a moment. “I thought I might be… I thought, this past fortnight, that I might be with child. And I was so frightened, Mrs. Alderton. I was frightened out of my senses. I told His Grace that I did not want it. And I have found this morning that I was… that I was mistaken. Though I am not relieved, as I thought I would be. Not only that, but I have found… I have found that a part of me…” She could not finish.
“Wanted it, Your Grace,” Mrs. Alderton said, very gently.
“Yes. And I do not know what to do with that. I do not know what to… I do not know how one…”
“That must be quite difficult, Your Grace. Of course.”
There was a small silence.
Anne wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Alderton said. “May I say a thing. As one woman to another, not as a servant. If you will permit me.”
“Please. I cannot tell you how much your presence in this house has helped me over these last weeks.”
“I did not know your mother, Your Grace. I never had that honor. But I know this, because I have buried a mother myself, and I have been a mother, and I have lost a child.”
“I had no idea…” Anne trailed off.
“I lost my boy Tom when he was two. And I know that there is no mother in this world, no mother that ever drew breath, who would wish her daughter to spend her life frightened. There is not one. Your mother went through what she went through with the last of her strength because she wished to give you a little sister. There is no greater gift than Miss Celia.”
“You are wise,” Anne sniffed.
“She wished for the two of you to have one another. She did not wish that her gift would become a thing you carried around your neck for the rest of your days like an albatross. I know she did not. Because I am a mother, and I know what mothers wish. You can trust me on this, Your Grace.”
“Mrs. Alderton…”
“I should say only one more thing. Your mother would wish you to live. Not only to be alive, but to live. Here, with your sister, and your husband, and your stepdaughter, and whatever other children the good Lord may see fit to give you, or may not, only as He pleases.”
Anne could not answer. She reached across the writing desk and laid her hand over Mrs. Alderton’s.
“Thank you, Mrs. Alderton.” Her voice was not quite steady. “Thank you.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
“I did not know… I did not know I needed to be told that.”
“No, Your Grace. One never does, until one is.”
They sat there a moment longer in the quiet morning room. Then Mrs. Alderton, with the efficient dignity of a woman who understood precisely when a conversation had ended, rose, smoothed her apron, gave Anne one brief, grave nod, then stepped out and closed the door behind her.
Anne sat at the writing desk a long time after she had gone. The quill had dried, and she dipped it again. She looked at the white page, at her aunt’s name on it. She pulled the page toward her and turned it over. On the clean back of it, she began writing something new.
Dear William,
She stopped.
She looked at the words for a while, the letters of her name. Then she dipped the quill and resumed writing, the words coming freely.