Chapter 16 Choices #2
If James’s absence is a slow bruise, work is pressure applied to stop the bleeding.
Patients begin to return, cautiously at first. Lady Markham sends her daughter with monthly pains and a note so formal it might be wearing stays.
Mrs. Davies comes through the front door this time instead of the servants’ entrance, cheeks red with both embarrassment and determination.
Lady Pemberton writes that anyone endorsed by Princess Charlotte and nearly murdered by “cowardly hirelings” deserves better than whispering cowards.
I frame that sentiment mentally and hang it in the part of my brain labeled Useful Rage.
Kitty becomes indispensable by accident and then by appointment.
On the fourth morning, she appears with a basket of clean cloths, a list of names, and three pieces of gossip that turn out to be more diagnostically useful than half the medical texts in James’s library.
“Lady Henderson’s maid says her mistress faints after breakfast most days,” Kitty says, counting on her fingers. “Mrs. Davies’s husband don’t like her coming here, so she’ll say she’s visiting the milliner. And the boy from the apothecary waters the peppermint tincture.”
I stare at her.
She stares back. “What?”
“How would you feel about employment?”
Suspicion arrives instantly. “Doing what?”
“Assisting me. Properly. Washing linens. Keeping notes. Watching patients. Learning to read pulses. Reading, also, if you’ll let Beatrice teach you.”
Kitty’s face goes blank in the way people go blank when hope is too dangerous to show.
“You’d pay me?”
“Yes.”
“With money?”
“That is generally how employment functions.”
“And not send me off if I make mistakes?”
My eyes sting.
“I will correct you if you make mistakes,” I say. “I will not throw you away.”
She looks down at the basket.
When she speaks, her voice is sharp enough to cut thread. “I ain’t wearing a cap.”
“Negotiable.”
“And I don’t curtsy to rude ladies.”
“Aspirational, but we may have to workshop that.”
Beatrice, from the doorway, is smiling so hard she looks in pain.
Kitty sniffs. “Then I’ll try it.”
Which, from Kitty, is basically a sonnet.
So we begin.
I teach her to count pulse beats with the clock, to note skin temperature, to ask when pain started instead of simply where it is.
I teach handwashing until she complains her skin will come off.
She learns quickly, fiercely, with the concentration of someone who has never been allowed to believe her mind might be a tool instead of a weapon.
For a few hours at a time, I stop waiting.
Almost.
* * *
The royal messenger comes at dusk on the sixth day.
I know before Molly says it.
Something in the house changes. Footsteps quicken. Voices drop. Mrs. Finch appears in the doorway with her face arranged in its most controlled expression, which means disaster has arrived wearing polished boots.
“Miss Hartford,” she says. “A messenger from Carlton House.”
My whole body goes cold.
Beatrice rises.
Kitty, at the table with ink on her fingers, looks between us. “Is it the princess?”
The messenger is waiting in the hall, rain shining on his coat. He bows and presents the sealed note.
My fingers do not want to work.
I break the seal.
Her Royal Highness’s pains began yesterday. Progress has been slow. Miss Hartford is requested to attend without delay.
Slow.
Pains began yesterday.
Without delay.
My mind becomes a room where every warning bell is ringing at once.
“How long since the first pains?” I ask the messenger.
He shifts. “Near thirty hours, miss, by what I heard.”
Thirty.
Beatrice’s hand flies to her mouth.
Kitty whispers a word Mrs. Finch would not approve of but I mentally endorse.
I am already moving.
Clean apron. Extra linen. Soap. Scissors boiled and wrapped. Thread. Laudanum, carefully labeled and locked. Vinegar, not because it is magic but because it is what we have. Broth concentrate. Honey. Every scrap of useful nothing that might become something in the right hands.
“Send to Ashbourne Park,” I tell Beatrice. “Tell James I have gone to Carlton House. Tell him—”
What?
Wait for me?
Come back?
I love you?
There is no time for the sentences that matter.
“Tell him Charlotte’s labor has begun.”
Beatrice nods, pale and steady. “I will.”
Kitty grabs the medical bag before I can. “I’m coming.”
“You are not.”
“You hired me.”
“For linens and notes, not royal obstetrics.”
“Then I’ll carry linens and take notes in a palace.”
I look at her thin face, the stubborn chin, the fear she is pretending is insolence.
There are a thousand reasons to refuse.
I hear Charlotte’s voice: Everyone speaks of the child. The nation. The succession. Duty. Hope.
You are not a door.
“Stay where I put you,” I say.
Kitty’s eyes widen.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Oh, that is alarming.
The carriage ride to Carlton House is a blur of rain, wheels, and arithmetic.
Thirty hours of labor. Exhaustion. Dehydration.
Obstructed delivery? Malposition? A large baby?
A pelvis that cannot do what politics demands of it?
In my time, this would be monitors, IV fluids, operating room readiness, blood products, fetal heart tracing, an entire team moving with practiced urgency.
Here, it is candles, boiled water if I can bully someone into it, hands I do not trust, instruments I fear, and men who may prefer tradition over a living woman.
Carlton House is blazing with light when we arrive.
Too much light. Too many servants. Too many hushed voices. The building looks less like a palace than a body trying to pretend it is not in crisis.
Prince Leopold meets me at the stairs.
That alone tells me enough.
He is pale, perfectly dressed, and terrified down to the bones.
“Miss Hartford,” he says. “They say all proceeds naturally.”
“Does it?”
His composure fractures.
From somewhere above us comes a cry. Not dramatic. Not literary. Human. Raw. Then silence follows too quickly.
Every hair on my arms lifts.
“How long since she slept?” I ask.
Leopold’s throat works. “I do not know.”
“Has she eaten? Taken broth? Water?”
“Little.”
“Has anyone examined the child’s position?”
He looks toward the stairs.
Not enough, then.
I grip the handle of my bag until my fingers ache.
History is upstairs, sweating and exhausted in a bed, surrounded by men who think waiting is wisdom.
I start climbing.
By the time I reach the chamber door, I already know the truth.
This is not a confinement.
It is a countdown.