The two ladies merely stared at him. Lisa screamed.
“The Peninsula,” he said. “I was a cavalry officer. There was a peasant woman. There was a surgeon, too, but he had just been shot through the right hand. He instructed a private soldier and me. The private held her and I delivered.”
Lisa was quiet again, and the marquess turned grimly back to the bed.
“Raise your knees,” he told her, “and brace your feet wide apart on the bed. The next time the pain comes, I want you to bear down against it with all your strength. This little fellow wants to come out. Do you understand me?”
Through the fog of weakness and pain, the girl seemed to turn instinctively to the note of authority and assurance in his voice. She looked up at him and nodded, positioning herself according to his instructions. And then the fright came back into her eyes and she began to pant again.
“Now!” he commanded, and he pushed his hands forward against her knees through the sheet that still covered her to the waist while Lady Birkin and Pamela, one on each side of her, lifted her shoulders from the bed and pushed forward. Lisa drew a giant breath and bore down with all her might, pausing only to gasp in more air before the pain subsided again.
“Send down for hot water,” Lord Lytton said while Lisa relaxed for a few moments. “Go and give the instruction yourself, Pamela, but come right back. Someone else can bring it. But wait a moment. She needs us again.”
He was going to forget something, he thought as he pushed upward on the girl’s knees. He would forget something and either she or the child was going to bleed to death. Or there was going to be a complication, as there had not been with the Spanish peasant girl. This girl was already weak from a long and hard labor. Soon- perhaps after the next contraction-he was going to have to take a look and pray fervently that it was the child’s head he would see. He could recall the surgeon’s talking about breech births, though he had given no details.
And then between contractions, as he was about to draw the sheet back, there was a quiet voice from the doorway. It almost did not register on his mind, but he looked over his shoulder. He had not been mistaken. The quiet gentleman was standing there.
“I am a physician,” he repeated. “I will be happy to deliver the child and tend the mother.”
Anger was the Marquess of Lytton’s first reaction. “You are a physician,” he said. “Why the hell have you waited this long to admit the fact? Do you realize what terrors your silence has caused Lady Birkin and Miss Wilder in the course of the day?”
“And you, too, my lord?” The quiet gentleman was smiling. He had strolled into the room and taken one of Lisa’s limp hands in his. He spoke very gently. “It will soon be over, my dear, I promise. Then the joy you will have in your child will make you forget all this.”
She looked calmly back at him. There was even a suggestion of a smile in her eyes.
But the marquess was not mollified. Relief-overwhelming, knee-weakening relief-was whipping his anger into fury. “What the hell do you mean,” he said, “putting us through all this?” He remembered too late the presence in the room of three women, two of them gently born.
The quiet gentleman smiled and touched a cool hand to Lisa’s brow as she began to gasp again. “How could I spoil a Christmas that had promised to be so dismal for everyone?” he asked, and he moved to draw the sheet down over the girl’s knees. “The blood will probably return to your head faster, my lord, if you remove yourself. The ladies will assist me. Have some hot water brought up to us, if you will be so good.”
Lord Lytton removed himself, frowning over the physician’s strange answer to his question. Lady Birkin and Pamela, moving back to their posts, puzzled over it, too. What had he meant? Christmas might have been dismal but was not? Because of what was happening?
“Set an arm each about her back to support her as you lift her,” the quiet gentleman said. “Your labors, too, will soon be at an end, ladies, and you will experience all the wonder of being present at a birth. Ah.
I can see the head, my dear. With plenty of dark hair.”
“Ohhh!” Lisa was almost crying with excitement and exhaustion and pain.
But all sense of panic had gone from the room. Both Lady Birkin and Pamela were aware of that as the physician went quietly and efficiently about his work and Lisa responded to his gentleness. Her son was born, large and healthy and perfect-and crying lustily-early in the evening.
They were all crying, in fact. All except the doctor, who smiled sweetly at each of them in turn and made them feel as if it were not at all the most foolish thing in the world to cry just because one more mouth to be fed had been born into it.
Lisa was exhausted and could scarcely raise her arms to Tom when he came into the room several minutes later, wide-eyed and awed, while Lady Birkin was washing the baby and Pamela was disposing of bloodstained rags. Lisa accepted the baby from Lady Birkin and looked up with shining eyes into Tom’s face while he reached out one trembling finger to touch his son. But she had no energy left.
“I’ll take him,” Lady Birkin said, “while you get some sleep, Lisa. You have earned it.”
“Thank you, mum.” Lisa looked up at her wearily. “I’ll always remember you, mum, and the other lady.” Her eyes found Pamela and smiled. “Thank you, miss.”
And so Lady Birkin found herself holding the child and feeling a welling of happiness and tenderness and… and longing. Ah, how wonderful, she thought. How very wonderful. She acted from instinct. She must find Henry. She must show him. Oh, if only the child were hers. Theirs.
Word had spread. Everyone was hovering in the hallway outside Lisa’s room. The birth of a little bastard baby was the focus of attention on this Christmas Eve. The ladies oohed and aahed at the mere sight of the bright stripes of the shawl in which it was wrapped. But Lady Birkin had eyes for no one except her husband, standing at the top of the stairs close to the Marquess of Lytton and gazing anxiously at her.
“Henry,” she said. “Oh, look at him. Have you ever seen anything so perfect?” She could hear herself laughing and yet his face had blurred before her vision. “Look at him, Henry.”
He looked and smiled back up at her. “Sally,” he whispered.
“He weighs nothing at all,” she said. “How could any human being be so small and so light and so perfect and still live and breathe? What a miracle life is. Hold him, Henry.”
She gave him no choice. She laid the bundle in his arms and watched the fear in his eyes soften to wonder as he smiled down at the baby. The child was not quite sleeping. He was looking quietly about him with unfocused eyes.
Lord Birkin smiled. What would it be like, he wondered, to look down like this at his own child? To have the baby placed in his arms by its mother? By his wife?
“Sally,” he said, “you must be so tired.” She was pale and disheveled.
He had a sudden image of how she should be looking now, early in the evening of Christmas Eve, immaculate and fashionable and sparkling with jewels and excitement and ready to mingle with their friends far into the night. And yet he saw happiness now in her tired eyes-and breathtaking beauty.
The ladies wanted to hold the baby. And so he was passed from one to another, quiet and unprotesting. He was cooed over and clucked over and even sung to, by Miss Amelia Horn. The occasion had made even the Palmers magnanimous.
“Well,” Mr. Palmer said, rubbing his hands together and looking not unpleased. “I never did in all my born days.”
“I mean to tell Mr. Suffield,” Mrs. Palmer said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “that we are not even going to charge ’im for the room.”
No one saw fit to comment on this outpouring of incredible generosity.
The Marquess of Lytton reached out both hands to Pamela when she came from the room. She set her own in them without thought and smiled at him. “Have you seen him?” she asked. “Is he not the most beautiful child you have ever set eyes on?”
“I’m sorry,” he said to her, squeezing her hands until they hurt. “I ripped up at the physician for keeping quiet so long, and yet that is exactly what I had been doing all day. You and Lady Birkin were wonderfully brave. I am sorry my own cowardice made me hide a fact that might have made your day less anxious.”
“I don’t think,” she said, gazing up into his eyes, her own filling with sudden tears, “that I would change one detail of this day even if I could. How glad I am that it rained!”
His eyes searched hers. “And so am I,” he said, raising both hands to his lips and continuing to regard her over them. “More glad than I have been of anything else in my life.”
