“Ah, my lady,” Count Frescobaldi said, lowering his mustached face to kiss Henrietta’s hand, “I am certain that your husband merely expressed his deepest wishes. As would I, if I had asked you to join me on the dance floor.” His voice was deep and rich as chocolate.
Darby’s fists clenched. But what was the point of hitting Frescobaldi? Henrietta looked a bit taken aback. Perhaps she grasped the implications of Frescobaldi’s deepest wishes.
“I think you underestimate how well we know each other,” Darby said to Henrietta through clenched teeth.
“In what respect, dear husband? Do enlighten us all.”
Darby met the avid eyes of Frescobaldi and Landow and knew that his carefully nurtured reputation for exquisite calm was shattered. A muscle was beating in his cheek. He was near to roaring. And he didn’t give a damn either.
“I think you underestimate your inability to dance.” The musicians had just begun a waltz. Before his wife could move, he pulled her up and away from the gentlemen, into his arms, and onto the dance floor.
Henrietta was too shocked to react at first. He read it in her body, poised stiffly against him, and the way she held back. But he knew her. He knew her body as intimately as he did her own. She was hardly limping tonight. There was only the merest hesitation when she walked. She could dance, God damn it. She could dance with her husband.
He splayed his hand around her slender waist and swept her into the waltz. It was no more than walking, after all. Walking to great gorgeous sweeps of music, walking in a rhythm that reminded him of their bed.
For the first few minutes he didn’t even look at her. He just carried them, thigh to thigh, circled and swept, drawn in circles down the room by the music. When he finally glanced down at his wife, her cheeks were pink and her eyes luminous—not with anger, but with awe.
“I’m dancing,” she whispered, and that shaken little breath touched his heart.
He took her into a breathtaking series of circles as the music curled in the air around them.
“Oh Simon, I’m dancing!”
The music quieted to a languorous One, Two, Three; One, Two Three. “You have spent too much time believing what people tell you,” he said. The truth of it put a fierceness into his voice. “You listened to people who said you’d never marry and said you’d never dance.”
“I am married—”
“To me,” he said, breaking in. “You’re married to me. You are mine, Henrietta. And I am yours. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“You cannot simply throw me back into the stream, like a trout you no longer want,” he said, his voice rasping. “We are one, Henrietta. It’s too late. Don’t you see?”
He couldn’t read her expression.
“I’m not—I’m not a man who would ever betray his wife,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m not—” And then suddenly he saw that her eyes were shining with tears.
“I’m a fool, Simon.” Her hand touched his cheek. “Forgive me?”
He nodded. For a moment they drifted together, lapped in music so delicate that it sweetened the air around them.
“They said you would never marry, Henrietta. You are married.”
She nodded, just a tremulous wobble of her chin.
“They said you would never dance. We are dancing.”
There was a spark of hope in those blue eyes. He could see it.
“And they said you would never give birth. But I know you. I know you want this baby. We’ll go to every doctor in England if we have to. We can find someone who will save the baby. And you.”
“I feel as if you read my heart,” she whispered.
He looked at her, dark hair tumbling over his brow, as beautiful a man as ever walked the earth. “Can’t you read mine, then?”
She swallowed, caught by his eyes, afraid she didn’t understand.
“I love you.”
The music drew to a close, and they stopped dancing, although he kept his arms around her.
“I love my wife,” her husband said, his eyes as urgent as his voice. “And, Henrietta—
“I love you,” she said, her voice breaking with it.
Lady Felicia Saville happened to glance that way and paused. It was a pity that she had already offered Lady Henrietta a voucher for Almack’s. Otherwise, she’d be sorely tempted to refuse. In truth she would. What sort of example was Lady Henrietta setting for young, impressionable maidens by allowing her husband to kiss her so publicly?
Yet there was something about the way Darby held his wife, so fiercely and yet so tenderly, as if she were infinitely precious and dearly beloved, that made Felicia’s vision blur. She turned away with a little moue of disgust.
44
Expert Advice
Dr. Ortolon knew himself to be the finest accoucheur in London. Nay, in the private recesses of the night, he considered himself the finest in the world. He had a degree from Oxford and trained at the medical school in Edinburgh. He was the only accoucheur to be a member of the Royal College of Physicians. He rarely lost a patient: he wouldn’t allow it.
He was quite aware that his imposing stomach, square jaw, and domed forehead (domed because it housed the superlative Ortolon brain) went a good way toward convincing others of his worth in the world. Moreover, he was blessed with a voice like a barking seal, which undoubtedly helped as well.
“Facts are facts,” he barked at the couple before him. “Facts are the only thing to which I listen. I think of it as drawing scientific truths from the well of ignorance. Now, the facts here are slim. The most relevant one is that you, Lady Henrietta, are carrying a child. I think we may conclude such.”
The lady nodded, obviously awed by the way his voice resonated through the ignorant air.
“The fact that your mother perished while giving birth may or may not be relevant to the issue at hand. She was greatly unfortunate, if you will forgive me for saying so, in that your late father did not bring her to London. Had your late mother been seen by myself, even in the very bloom of my youth, there might be quite a different outcome to her story. In short, she might be sitting by the fire at this very moment, surrounded by an adoring brood of children.”
Ortolon cast a sharp eye on the lady’s husband, who was exhibiting an unseemly tendency to grin. Still, he knew that nervousness sometimes showed itself in an unbecoming levity. He’d seen it in previous instances.
“A brood of children at her knee,” he repeated, jutting his chin a bit further into the air. “The second fact worth noting is that you, Lady Henrietta, suffer from a weakness in the hip joint, as did your mother, although that is not necessarily relevant to the matter of her demise.” He frowned thoughtfully and paced up and down a few steps.
“From my examination of your limbs, Lady Henrietta, I can state unequivacably that while you have weakness in your joint, there is no obvious malformation. I can see no reason why you should not birth this child, undergoing no more than precisely the same risks as any other woman.”
He paused to make certain that his message was understood.
“It is my considered opinion that your mother’s misfortune lay in the circumstances of her confinement, not in the organization of her limbs. In fact, I consider the relevant fact there to be that you, Lady Henrietta, were born in a breech position. I count myself among the very few physicians able to facilitate such a difficult birth, although I have attempted to share my knowledge in my recently published volume, The Management of Pregnant Women, with a Treatise on Love, Marriage and Hereditary Descent.”
Darby let his mind wonder. The old pudding-bag was clearly going to take on Henrietta as a patient, and he seemed to have enough experience to know what he was talking about. Ortolon was curiously reassuring. In fact, Darby had the sense that the physician wouldn’t allow any harm to come to Henrietta, for the simple reason that death might blunt the good doctor’s reputation.
“Yes,” Ortolon wound up, “if I supervise your confinement, Lady Henrietta, you shall su
ffer no ill effects whatsoever, and neither will the Darby heir.” He beamed at them both with such an air of confident self-satisfaction that Darby almost applauded.
Henrietta’s eyes were fixed on Ortolon’s face as if he were the Oracle at Delphi. Darby guessed that Bartholomew Batt and his Rules and Directions had just been dethroned in the Darby household, replaced by Jeremy Ortolon and his Management of Pregnant Women. A grin crept over Darby’s face. It wasn’t that he wanted a child personally, but Henrietta wanted one. And fool in love that he was, he wanted Henrietta to be happy.
Darby wasn’t quite so sanguine seven months later. As they neared the end of an entirely uneventful pregnancy, he grew more and more conscious of a growing unease. There was no clear reason for it. Ortolon’s daily pronouncements on his wife’s condition were pompously approving. The baby was in a proper position, and Ortolon expected no problems.
Their child might be born any moment. That is, if Darby didn’t figure out some way to stop the whole thing.
To be blunt, Darby had realized too late that he had participated in the worst decision of his life. He should never have listened to Ortolon. He should have begged Henrietta to drink the blue bottle. Perhaps he should never have visited Limpley Stoke at all. If the idea of never knowing Henrietta was bleak, the idea of Henrietta losing her life was unbearable.
Unease wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t unease he felt, but fear: gross, unpalatable, and ugly. Gentlemen didn’t experience this sort of thing. Not as a gut-gripping emotion that made one wake up sweating and on the verge of shouting.
He felt as if he could burst with the desperation of his wish to turn back time. His nights were marked by dreams in which he found himself laying flowers on a grave and once, with particular horror, on two graves: one large and one small. In his sleep he constantly relived the moment when Henrietta told him she was carrying a child. Once he dreamed that she laughed, lightly, and said it was all a joke. He almost wept with relief.
He started to watch his wife as intently as an artist watches his subject, prowling in the hallway while she was dressing, watching her bathe, barely allowing her to make private trips to the water closet. He pretended that he stayed near her in order to help her from chairs and make certain that she didn’t slip on the stairs. She saw through him—oh, he could see in her clear eyes that she saw through him. But she loved him, and so she said nothing about his absurdities.
As the birth drew nearer he began waking in the dark stretches of the night and lighting a candle so he could watch her sleeping. Henrietta was more lovely pregnant than he could have imagined. She shone with the pure, exquisite joy of a madonna, as if all the despairing longing of her youth had poured into thankfulness for the new life growing inside her. Every day she grew more serene, more confident that labor would present no problems.
In contrast, Darby couldn’t sit for more than five minutes. He snarled and snapped at the household until maids scurried by him in the hallway with a look of terror. He didn’t give a damn. This could be the last week—nay, the last day—of his wife’s life, and no one else seemed to have noticed.
One evening he couldn’t sleep at all. What had he been thinking? He had allowed Henrietta to sacrifice her life for a child who might not live. What would Josie do without his wife? The little girl’s motherless state had turned to a fierce adoration of Henrietta. Anabel never made the mistake of calling strangers “Mama” anymore. She knew exactly who loved her best. Could the children survive the loss of another mother?
Finally he stopped trying to sleep and sat up. He breathed in the truth with the chill night air. Imagining a world without Henrietta was like thinking of a world without warmth. She lay beside him, looking leached of color by the gray light, her skin porcelain white as if—as if—
He touched her, softly, on the cheek. She was breathing. At his touch, a little smile curved her lips, and she nestled against his hand, in her sleep. That was Henrietta: so deeply loving of Josie, Anabel, himself, the unborn baby, that it seemed as if love shaped the current of life in her.
She opened her eyes and opened her mouth but stopped suddenly, the word dying before it was spoken.
Darby’s eyes narrowed. “What just happened?” he said, surprised to hear that his own voice was even.
Henrietta smiled at him brightly. But she’d never been any good at keeping secrets.
“That was a labor pain,” he said.
“Perhaps.”
“I’ll send for Ortolon,” Darby snapped, swinging his legs out of bed.
Henrietta tried to grab his arm. “No, Simon, I want to wait. I barely felt anything at all. It was a mere twinge.”
“Nonsense.”
It turned out there was nothing Ortolon could do. In fact, he was wildly ineffective from Darby’s point of view, only saying a few nonsensical things about how well things were going and heading back to his club.
Darby followed him to the door and took his arm in an ungentle grip. “I shouldn’t drink anything at your club, Ortolon.” He didn’t care how rude he was being. He had half a mind not to let the physician leave the house at all.
Ortolon shook him off, and barked, “Pull yourself together!” and left.
Henrietta went back to bed. The pains didn’t seem to bother her much.
“You know, Simon,” she finally said rather sleepily, “I am used to living with a certain degree of discomfort.” And to his utter shock, she fell asleep again.
He lay on his side, watching her face. She wasn’t all that beautiful. She didn’t have a classically beautiful Roman nose. But every pulse in his body was tied to hers: to her blunt little English nose, and to those blue eyes that couldn’t hide a thought.
Every once in a while she frowned, and discomfort shot across her face. In the middle of the night, she woke and said his name, groggily.
“I’m here.”
“What on earth are you doing awake?”
“Thinking about the poem you used in that absurd love letter.”
“The John Donne poem,” she said, smiling up at him. “How could I forget the poem I used to trap you into marriage?” She squeezed his hand rather hard. “Goodness, that seems to be—oh, it’s gone.”
“I’ll send for Ortolon.”
“There’s nothing he can do, Simon. We simply have to wait. Why are you thinking about the Donne poem?”
“Just remembering it. Sweetest love, I do not go, for weariness of thee,” Darby said, gathering her close. “You see, the poet is afraid because he has to leave his beloved: When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not wind, but sigh’st my soul away. Because if something should happen to her, his soul is in her keeping.”
Henrietta blinked. “Nothing is going to happen to me! Haven’t you been listening to Ortolon all these months?”
Darby ignored her. “He says, Thou art the best of me. And that’s true. Thou art the best of me.”
“I thought I wrote the love letters in this family,” Henrietta whispered, turning her face up to his.
His mouth touched hers. “He tells his lover to pretend that the time they spent apart is just a long sleep. Oh God, Henrietta, if anything happens to you, my life would be nothing more than a sleep.”
“Sleep? You look awful, Darby!” She peered at him. “Haven’t you slept?”
He ran a hand through hair that was already on end. “No.”
“Why not?” She winced and clutched his hand again. “My goodness. These pains are getting stronger. Why didn’t you sleep?”
He said it into her hair. “If I sleep, I might miss an hour or two with you. And—” he couldn’t finish.
“Nonsense!” But she turned it into a kiss. “I’m not even feeling all this terrible pain that women complain about. I think it’s because I’m so used to discomfort. I truly think, Simon, that I won’t even feel very much pain at all—”
Her hand tightened, and she blinked.
“OW!”
45
Uncivilized Behavior r />
Dr. Ortolon didn’t know what was the most difficult: the labor itself, or the husband. Of course, it was often that way. As the premier accoucheur in London, he’d found that men could be quite as troublesome as their wives. But this husband outdid the entire gender, even the royal dukes, who combined sentimentality with bullheadedness.
Mr. Darby had seemed a logical man throughout the pregnancy. He appeared rational during those consultations at which he appeared, expressing a measured level of concern for his wife.
But in the last week or so, the man had come unhinged. In fact, he had apparently changed his mind about the pregnancy.
“It’s a bit late for that,” Dr. Ortolon said with a rusty chuckle. Of course, he laughed alone. Mr. Darby was pacing the entrance hall like a wild animal. And when Ortolon headed up the stairs, the man raged at his side uttering threats and generally impolite remarks.
And then he followed Ortolon straight into the birthing chamber!
Lady Henrietta was in some discomfort by that stage, although she was controlling herself well. Mr. Darby barged to the head of the bed and began speaking to his wife. When Ortolon suggested that Mr. Darby leave so that he could conduct an examination, the man swung around with one of the most uncivilized expressions Ortolon had ever seen on a gentleman’s face.
“Don’t even suggest it,” he snarled.
Ortolon fancied he could see bared teeth. He gave in. It did seem to distract his patient to have her husband in the room, and that was all to the good.
The labor progressed nicely while Lady Henrietta scolded her husband for his rudeness and general indecency for remaining in the chamber.
Later, as labor grew more acute, his patient amused herself by shrieking at her husband. Normally the mothers-to-be had a tendency to berate the attending doctor, and Ortolon always found that this disordered his nerves. Yes, he thought to himself, husbands could be quite useful in the lying-in chamber, if one could just get around the impropriety of the whole affair.