Oh, how she wished he would have enfolded her in his arms and kissed her, not minding her filthy and bedraggled condition, and then carried her inside his town house and bathed her with his own hands.
“YOU HAVE SUCH LOVELY HAIR, Miss Welles,” Mary said admiringly as she poured a pint of porter through her mistress’s curls. “And this will make it shine all the more,” she added, referring to the mixture of heavy dark beer and water.
“Perhaps it is foolishness to have accepted his lordship’s offer at all. To go riding with him, I mean.” C.J. inhaled the soothing verbena scent of the water in which she bathed. “For one thing, should we be recognized, Lady Charlotte will pitch a proper fit. For another, I don’t expect that many ladies in my . . . condition . . . would ever think about getting astride a horse.”
“In my village, we were too poor to have horses. The beasts fetch a dear price. My mother rode our donkey while she carried a babe within her, and she was delivered of six of us, bless her soul. I lost my four brothers,” the maid said matter-of-factly, “but it had naught to do with ridin’.”
C.J. gently placed a wet hand on Mary’s arm. “I am sorry about your brothers.”
Mary shrugged off the touch. She was hardier than C.J. imagined. “I should not have spoken of my brothers. Forgive me, Miss Welles. We do not want to hex the babe.”
It was quite possible to lose the baby, C.J. knew. An excursion on horseback was tempting the fates, but stillbirths and the infant mortality rate were also extraordinarily high, even among the aristocracy. Not to mention dying in childbirth. She shuddered and tried to lower herself farther into the hip bath.
“I have been thinkin’,” Mary said as she rinsed the beer from her mistress’s hair, “that I should like to apprentice myself to a midwife so that I may learn how to deliver your babe, Miss Welles. But I know it would never do. A girl like me is lucky enough to have a situation as a lady’s maid, and were it not for your kindness—and that of his lordship and her ladyship—I would not even have that.”
“Mary!” The notion was a bit overwhelming. C.J.’s eyes began to brim with tears. And this was the timid child who not too many weeks ago refused to use the word pregnant. What a long way she had traveled!
“I wanted a way to thank you for everything you have done for me. You have taught me my letters, got me to think for myself . . . and this is one of my thoughts!”
C.J. regarded the little maid. “Why are you crying, Mary?” she asked gently.
“Because, Miss Welles, I should very much like to have something I can call my own . . . to make myself truly useful in this world . . .” She fought for words. “I want ever so much to learn to be a midwife, but you and her ladyship have been so kind to me, and you are so very dear that I shouldn’t want to leave Lady Dalrymple’s employ. Servants never give notice anyways, ’less they’re gettin’ married and goin’ away.”
“Mary.” C.J. raised a sudsy hand to the girl’s face and gently touched her cheek. “I am heartily sure that her ladyship—with her unusual opinions—would no doubt be the first to acknowledge that a woman should find a purpose in life . . . and a profession. Imagine! You will be able to earn your own way and be your own mistress!”
The encouragement was bittersweet. “I suppose I want it so much . . . to be a midwife, I mean . . . for a selfish reason. It was you, Miss Welles, what—that—put the notion in my head, though I can’t say as you knew anything about it. Perhaps,” Mary added in a small, hopeful voice, “even after I become a midwife, you will consider engagin’ me as the babe’s nanny.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
An eventful chapter, in which a pleasant midday excursion becomes a dramatic ride, with disastrous consequences; while one young woman languishes, another flourishes; Lady Dalrymple bestows an extraordinarily magnanimous gift; and our heroine receives a mysterious note.
DESPITE THE FACT that she had been arrested, imprisoned, tried, nearly committed to a lifetime of indentured servitude, publicly jilted by the man she loved, and, most recently, incarcerated in a madhouse, C.J. had come to feel, in a most inexplicable way, that she really belonged in 1801. All her life she had felt like a fish out of water. In fact, her late adoptive father used to call her Guppy. One day he and his wife had found a confused and frightened toddler wandering around the streets of Greenwich Village. Years later her adoptive mother told her that at first she wouldn’t speak, so they had thought she was a mute, or retarded. They had taken her to the local precinct, where the police looked through all the missing persons reports but found no match for her. Because Mr. Welles was so well respected in the community, the state granted his petition to allow him and his wife to keep C.J. until her birth parents came forward to claim her. But no one ever did, so after a few years they legally adopted her. C.J. herself had no memories of anything before she was found by the Welleses.
To be sure, there had been enough mishaps and ugliness to make one question the sanity of her decision to remain in Bath. However, there was the occasional unalloyed delight that had
