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So beautiful. She hadn’t known it could be so beautiful.
“I want him. I want my son.”
The new mother, her long, dark hair matted with sweat, held out her arms. And as she wept, she laughed, and took the baby into her arms.
“He’s Owen. I have a son. Ah, God! Take him, take him. The pain!”
“Take the young master, Ava. There’s another yet to come. Don’t push yet, dearie. Do the panting now, pant while I see to this.”
“God help me.”
So the beauty became pain with the midwife dripping sweat, and the mother begging it to stop.
So much blood. Should there be so much blood?
Sonya knew what she dreamed now. Marianne Poole, the third bride.
The daughter—Jane, Sonya remembered—was born in blood, her mewling cries like sorrow as her mother lay dying.
“I have to stop the bleeding. Fetch more towels. Fetch the master.”
But it wouldn’t stop, and as it flooded the sheets, Marianne lay pale as death. “Jane. My daughter is Jane. Owen David, Jane Elizabeth. My children.”
Sonya’s breath caught when Marianne’s eyes, glazed with shock, met hers across the room. “My children. You come from them.”
He burst into the room, a man with her father’s eyes, her father’s build, in a loose white shirt and black trousers. He rushed to the bed, took his wife’s limp hand in both of his.
“Marianne, my love. I’m here.”
“We have a son. We have a daughter.”
“They need their mother. Stay for them.” He pressed his lips to her hand. “Stay for me.”
“I’ll stay for them. I’ll stay for you. I’ll just… rest now,” she said, and slipped away.
He wept, her hand clutched in his.
While the sobs racked him, the woman in black came in. Shewalked to the other side of the bed and took the ring from the dead woman’s finger.
“No!” Sonya stepped forward to stop her. “You can’t do that.”
With madness and power in her eyes, Hester Dobbs said, “I can. I have. I will.” She slipped the ring on her finger where another two glinted in the candlelight. “Do you think you can stop me? Stop what I forged in fire and blood? You’re the ghost here.”
Furious, Sonya lunged forward.
And woke standing by her own bed with the dog whining at her feet.
Shaken, she sat on the side of the bed, then gathered the dog up to comfort them both.
“It’s okay. I had a bad dream. Just a bad dream.”
But she could smell blood and candle wax.
She could hear the sound of the voices in her mind. The slight Scottish burr of the midwife’s, the exhaustion in Marianne’s, the grief in Hugh Poole’s.
And the hard, vicious edge in Hester Dobbs’s.
Why had she woken up standing by the bed instead of lying in it?
