“James isn’t arriving until Thursday,” Lorraine said.
“He moved his travel up. Sent a letter yesterday.” Margaret’s eyes crinkled. “Something about not wanting to miss the event.”
“What event?”
Margaret looked pointedly at Lorraine’s belly. “My dear. You are approximately the size of a carriage house. I do not think the event will wait for Thursday.”
Lorraine opened her mouth to reply—something about first babies and long labours and the medical consensus that she had at least another fortnight—and felt a sensation low in her abdomen that was not, in any interpretation, consistent with another fortnight.
“Oh,” she said.
Margaret set down her tea.
Dominic—who had survived Badajoz, commanded soldiers under fire, and faced down two grandparents and an entire legal system—took one look at his wife’s face and went the colour of uncooked pastry.
“Now?” he said.
“Apparently, your daughter shares your disregard for scheduled timelines.”
“You don’t know it’s a daughter.”
“I know it’s a daughter.” She gripped the arm of her chair as the sensation intensified and became, unmistakably, what it was. “Dominic. Fetch the midwife.”
He did not move.
He stood rooted to the terrace, his face blank with terror, his hands—those capable, scarred, battle-tested hands—clenched at his sides in a gesture she had not seen in months.
“Dominic.” Her voice sharpened, threaded with affection and the beginning of real discomfort. “You stormed a fortified city at Badajoz. You can walk to the servants’ entrance and ask Mrs Potter to send for Mrs Aldridge. Go.”
He went. At a dead run.
Margaret Harding watched him go, then turned back to Lorraine with the serene composure of a woman who had given birth in a monsoon in Madras and found Englishmen’s reactions to the process endlessly diverting.
“William was the same way with Anne,” she said. “Calm as a millpond right up until the moment it began, and then he tried to ride to three different surgeons at once.”
“Was Anne—” Lorraine paused, breathing through the tightening. “Was she frightened?”
Margaret reached over and took her hand. The grip was firm, warm—the hand of a grandmother who had crossed an ocean to find her grandson and found, instead, a family.
“She was brave,” Margaret said simply. “As you will be. As you already are.”
***
The baby arrived at half past nine that evening, after six hours of labour that Lorraine would later describe as “educational” and that Dominic would describe as “the worst experience of my entire life, and I include the war.”
He had stayed. He had held Lorraine’s hand through every contraction, let her crush his fingers until the knuckles cracked, pressed cold cloths to her forehead, and whispered things she could not hear over the roaring in her ears but felt, somehow, in the steady pressure of his hands and the rough, unshakeable steadiness of his voice.
When the cry came—thin, furious, the outraged shriek of a very small person arriving in a world considerably colder and brighter than the one she had just left—Dominic made a sound Lorraine had never heard from him. Not a laugh, not a sob, but something between and beyond both, drawn from the place where ice had lived for four years and where now there was only warmth.
“A girl,” the midwife announced. “Healthy, Your Grace. Strong lungs.”
“I told you,” Lorraine managed, exhausted and incandescent, aching in every conceivable place. “I told you it was a daughter.”
Mrs Aldridge placed the baby—red-faced, furious, already exhibiting the determined chin that characterised every woman who would ever inhabit Rovewood Hall—in Lorraine’s arms. She was tiny. Impossibly tiny. Warm and squalling and smelling of something ancient and new—the scent of beginning.
Dominic sat on the edge of the bed. Looked at his daughter. Looked at his wife.
His face, in the lamplight, held an expression she had seen only once before—in the blue guest room, the day he had fought for Thomas and won. The expression of a man discovering that the world contained more goodness than he had believed possible—and that some of it was his.
