You see, I enrolled to become a doctor. Someone once suggested I’d make a good one.
About the Author
Clare Whitfield is a UK based writer living in a suburb where the main cultural landmark is a home store /Starbucks combo. She is the wife of a tattoo artist, mother of a small benign dictator and relies on a black Labrador for emotional stability. She has been a dancer, copywriter, amateur fire breather, buyer and mediocre weightlifter. This is her first novel.
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Paradise
Evaline put both babies in their crib, sat down on the rocking chair and waited for them to settle. She relished these little moments of peace. Looking after babies could be as exhausting by night as it was by day. At just five months old, the twins were already very different. When she put them down in the evening, the little girl, Helen, had quickly learned that grizzling would bring Evaline to her crib again, where the child would immediately forget her deception, laugh and reach out to be picked up. Evaline would comply, but had taken to approaching the crib on her hands and knees to peer in through the bars to see if the little girl had fallen asleep, or was waiting to try her bait and trap game once more.
The little boy however, Thomas, couldn’t have been more different. As Helen grew fatter and more mischievous by the day, her twin appeared to diminish at the same rate. Evaline had to wake him and convince him to feed, which she was sure shouldn’t be the case. She did not dare raise a concern since she had convinced her employers, Lord and Lady Lancaster, she had plentiful experience. It was true she had looked after young children in the past, but not professionally, and never twins. In fact, her fraught experience had been drawn from her own baby boy being only four weeks older than the twins. Evaline knew Thomas should be at least as big as his sister, but whatever tricks she employed Helen was fast leaving him behind.
Evaline adored the babies, and couldn’t help but enjoy the perfect surroundings she found herself living in. When the guilt did creep in, she had to reassure herself that she was doing the best for her own child who languished at the baby farmer’s while she lived in a mansion. It seemed a peculiar cruelty, and yet what choice did she have? She had gone to great lengths to secure the position and craft this new image of herself. She would be the perfect nurse: nurturing, compliant and, most of all, invisible. She had produced a marriage certificate in the name of Mrs Evaline Wiggs, and told her employers she was a widow, her husband having been killed at sea and her own child stillborn. Two bitter blows which made her ripe pickings as a well-educated wet nurse to the Lancasters. Lady Lancaster had shown little interest in her children since birth and had never visited the nursery. The employment of wet nurses was fast becoming unfashionable but Lady Lancaster had been adamant one was required and Evaline had been promised the position of nanny if the nursing months went smoothly.
In reality, Naval Officer Wiggs was no more her husband than the twins were her own babies, though she had come to the assumption he was likely dead – or certainly would be if she ever caught up with him.
Sometimes, with one or both babies in her arms, she would walk around the beautiful, pristine nursery, imagining how wonderful life would be if this were her house, and her little Edwin was with her. If only he could grow up with the opportunities that the Lancaster children would have fall at their feet. Their souls were no more deserving than her own son’s, and yet his life was a source of shame, while the Lancaster children were celebrated and spoiled.
Evaline had waited for Edwin’s father to return or write, or send money, as he promised he would, but nothing had ever come. She hadn’t admitted the true desperation of her situation until she had given birth in the workhouse infirmary in Portsmouth. Only then did she accept she had been abandoned. She was, in the eyes of those who beheld her, a fallen woman. As she had made her way back towards Bristol with her son, begging along the way, she had realised that in order to keep them both alive, she would have to reinvent herself. Evaline would spend her life nurturing the offspring of the wealthy. She would watch them grow and thrive and could only hope that her own son would survive the baby farmer. He was simply another nameless bastard, and there were so many these days.
*
Helen woke her in the early hours. Evaline hadn’t realised she had fallen asleep in the chair; it felt as if she’d only closed her eyes for a second. The sun was rising so she decided to begin the day by feeding and dressing them both. The weather had been fine the day before and she never tired of the privilege of roaming the grounds of Abbingdale Hall. When Evaline reached the crib, the little girl was attempting to pull herself up but couldn’t quite manage, a few more days and she would be there. She felt a pang of concern at the increasing gap between the restless sister and her sleepy little brother.
‘Good morning, Helen, you will leave your brother too far behind for his pride to stand, we can’t have that, can we?’ Evaline whispered. She looked over at Thomas and
