Page 32 of The Secret Word (Twist Upon a Regency Tale #10)

A unt Fern came to stay a week later. She announced that Clem needed a woman relative with her through the ordeal to come. Clem, who was trying not to think about the ordeal to come, did her best to be grateful, and when her father turned up two days later, she had cause to be.

“The two of them keep one another busy,” she reported to Chris, when he came back up to the house after a morning in the fields helping with the plowing. “Which is just as well, for I shall kill the next person who asks how I am.”

“And how are you, my love?” Chris asked. She threw her fan at him, and he ducked.

“Hot, uncomfortable, and bad-tempered,” she replied.

She had retired to their bedchamber, which was on the west side of the house, and was sitting in the chill breeze from the window, but even the most comfortable chair Chris had been able to find was not comfortable for long when one was approximately the size of a whale, and provided with an internal heat source that made one drip with perspiration even in February, when the day was sunny.

“Shall I massage your feet?” he offered.

Bless the dear man. Sympathy was all very well, but a foot massage was on another plane altogether. She didn’t bother with words but just held up one foot, and he sat down on her footstool and put both feet in his lap.

“No stockings,” he noted. “Too hot?”

Clem sighed. “I shall have to put them on again before I go downstairs,” she acknowledged.

“I don’t see why. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

True enough. Her legs would not show under her gown, anyway. She could wear her lightest slippers and no stockings. She might not be cool, but at least it might help to keep her from feeling so hot!

“The midwife says it is worse for those who carry through July and August,” she commented. “I cannot imagine!” She leaned her head back against her chair and closed her eyes while Chris’s clever fingers pressed and rubbed, until her poor aching feet relaxed and she wanted to purr like a cat.

She must have fallen asleep, for the angle of the sun had changed when she was woken by a sudden cramping in her abdomen that faded even as she became fully aware. She was alone in the room, with a pillow under her head and a light shawl covering her feet on the footstool.

The door to the room opened, and Chris entered with a tray. “You are awake,” he observed.

“How long did I sleep?” she asked.

“About an hour. I went down to get you a tea tray, and to check on your father and aunt. They are plotting a trip to Reading tomorrow. Your father wants to see if the man who sold him those grapes you enjoyed has any more, and Aunt Fern thinks you might be short of what she calls ‘essential nursery supplies’.”

“I must have more baby clouts and frocks than any mother in the history of England,” Clem said. “Help me sit up, darling. I would love a cup of tea.”

Chris offered her his arm, helped her rearrange herself in her chair, poured her tea, and put butter and jam on one of the drop scones that the kitchen had sent up.

While she sipped her tea, she felt another cramp and froze for a moment.

“Is something wrong?” Chris asked. “What is it?”

He was watching her like a hawk. They all were, including Martha and even the least of the maids. If she mentioned the cramp, the whole house would be in turmoil. “Nothing,” she said.

But an hour later she had to admit, if only to herself, that it wasn’t nothing, and an hour after that, she asked Chris to send for the midwife, but not to say anything yet to Father and Aunt Fern. “Not until I know that I am definitely in labor,” she said.

*

Chris sent a footman, and went himself to let their two guests know neither he nor Clem would be at dinner.

“Clem is a little tired, and I plan to sit with her,” he said.

True enough. But the midwife turned him out of the bedchamber that had been set up as a birthing room.

She said he didn’t need to be there while she examined Clem.

Aunt Fern found him in the hall outside the birthing room door when she came up to get a shawl, and leapt to the correct conclusion.

“Clem is having her babies!” she said.

Chris cast an anxious glance toward the stairs. “Ssshhh,” he said. “Clem does not want her father making a fuss.”

Aunt Fern narrowed her eyes and glared at Chris. “Then go downstairs and keep Mr. Wright busy. This is not an occasion for men.”

The midwife opened the door at that moment, and nodded at what Aunt Fern said. “Your wife is asking for you, Mr. Satterthwaite. You may speak with her briefly, and then leave her to us. The babies are impatient to be born, and the next few hours will be women’s work.”

If Clem had asked, Chris would have stayed. “Go and keep Father company, Chris,” she said, instead. “Aunt Fern and Mrs. Greene will look after me and the babies.”

But when Chris got back downstairs, Wright was gone. “He heard that the midwife had arrived, and he ordered his carriage,” the footman reported.

What on earth is the man up to ?

Chris could only wait. With no news from upstairs and no anxious grandfather to keep him company, he paced from the window in the study that gave him a glimpse of the stable yard, through the hall that held the stairs up which his wife was working to bring forth his children, to the window in the parlor where he could see the carriage drive.

He was interrupted once, by a message from the school asking for news of “Mrs. S. and the babies”.

He sent back to say there was none. There was no word from upstairs.

Even the maids, who passed him in the hall carrying buckets of hot water and clean cloths, could tell him nothing except that the mistress appeared “well enough, considering.”

At last, Wright’s carriage came through the gates and proceeded along the drive. Chris rushed back to the study, where he watched Wright descend, followed by the London doctor whom Chris had ejected from their townhouse months ago.

That cunning old man! He must have had the man waiting at the local inn.

Chris met them both as they came into the house from the stable-yard door. “Wright, Doctor. Come through to the parlor, and I shall pour you both a drink.”

Wright puffed out his chest and jutted his chin. “The doctor needs to see his patient.”

“The doctor does not have a patient in this house,” Chris said. “But he has been good enough to come all this way, so I am offering him a drink.”

“My grandson…” Wright began.

“My wife and my children are above stairs, in the care of a highly-regarded midwife, who was recommended to us for her excellent record of live infants and mothers,” Chris replied.

“I have every right to protect…”

“This is my house, sir, and these are my wife and children. I respect your concerns for them, but I will not have Clem bothered while she is giving birth.”

The doctor was looking from one of them to the other like a man at a tennis match.

“Brandy, Doctor?” Chris asked, and led the way to the parlor.

“You are taking a serious risk, young man,” the doctor said, as he accepted his brandy. “In general, midwives are ignorant old women, practicing old wives’ tales that put women at risk. When there are problems, they do not know what to do.”

As opposed to doctors, some of whom were ignorant old men , Chris thought. “The midwife says that Mrs. Satterthwaite is healthy and strong, and that at least one of the babies is well positioned for the birth,” he said. “My wife is having twins, Doctor.”

The doctor shook his head, dolefully. “Twin births are complicated,” he said. “Midwives are not trained to handle the difficulties that can arise.”

“Can arise,” Chris pointed out. “The village doctor is standing by, and Mrs. Greene has promised to call him in if she is concerned about the progress of the confinement.”

Wright, who had been brooding, broke in at that point. “We won’t need the village doctor. My accoucheur is right here.”

It was a fair point. “That seems reasonable. If he is needed, and if Clem agrees to his attendance.” One thing would be a sticking point for Clem. “She will not want to be bled.”

The doctor sniffed. “I have found bleeding to be most efficacious in preventing the fevers that kill many mothers.”

Chris wondered how the man had counted the numbers who lived or died, and to what records he compared them. He forbore to argue. “We were about to have dinner when Clem decided that she needed the midwife,” he said. “Would you gentlemen care to eat?”

Presumably, the kitchen would be able to produce something fit to serve. He left the two men to their brandy and went to make the arrangements for meals to be taken up on trays to Clem’s attendants and served in the dining room for him and the two men.

After that, he climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of the birthing room. Martha the maid opened the door, but only enough to look at him through the crack.

“Everything is going well,” she said.

“May I speak with my wife and Mrs. Greene?” Chris asked, feeling both mildly outraged to be kept outside of a door in his own house and out of his depth in this essential feminine ritual.

“A moment please,” said Aunt Fern’s voice, and Martha shut the door in his face.

It was longer. Perhaps three or four minutes.

But then the door opened again, this time wide enough for Chris to step inside.

His eyes went straight to the bed, then searched the room.

Clem was walking to and fro by the window, arm in arm with Aunt Fern.

She wore a robe, at the neck of which he could see the strings of a chemise, and her feet were bare.

Her hair had been redressed into long plaits and these had been wound about her head, though some strands had escaped to droop around her face.