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Lady Felicia Saville happened to glance that way and paused. It was a pity that she had already offered Lady Henrietta a voucher for Almack’s. Otherwise, she’d be sorely tempted to refuse. In truth she would. What sort of example was Lady Henrietta setting for young, impressionable maidens by allowing her husband to kiss her so publicly?

Yet there was something about the way Darby held his wife, so fiercely and yet so tenderly, as if she were infinitely precious and dearly beloved, that made Felicia’s vision blur. She turned away with a little moue of disgust.

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Expert Advice

Dr. Ortolon knew himself to be the finest accoucheur in London. Nay, in the private recesses of the night, he considered himself the finest in the world. He had a degree from Oxford and trained at the medical school in Edinburgh. He was the only accoucheur to be a member of the Royal College of Physicians. He rarely lost a patient: he wouldn’t allow it. He was quite aware that his imposing stomach, square jaw, and domed forehead (domed because it housed the superlative Ortolon brain) went a good way toward convincing others of his worth in the world. Moreover, he was blessed with a voice like a barking seal, which undoubtedly helped as well.

“Facts are facts,” he barked at the couple before him.

“Facts are the only thing to which I listen. I think of it as drawing scientific truths from the well of ignorance. Now, the facts here are slim. The most relevant one is that you, Lady Henrietta, are carrying a child. I think we may conclude such.”

The lady nodded, obviously awed by the way his voice resonated through the ignorant air.

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“The fact that your mother perished while giving birth may or may not be relevant to the issue at hand. She was greatly unfortunate, if you will forgive me for saying so, in that your late father did not bring her to London. Had your late mother been seen by myself, even in the very bloom of my youth, there might be quite a different outcome to her story. In short, she might be sitting by the fire at this very moment, surrounded by an adoring brood of children.”

Ortolon cast a sharp eye on the lady’s husband, who was exhibiting an unseemly tendency to grin. Still, he knew that nervousness sometimes showed itself in an unbecoming levity. He’d seen it in previous instances.

“A brood of children at her knee,” he repeated, jutting his chin a bit further into the air. “The second fact worth noting is that you, Lady Henrietta, suffer from a weakness in the hip joint, as did your mother, although that is not necessarily relevant to the matter of her demise.” He frowned thoughtfully and paced up and down a few steps.

“From my examination of your limbs, Lady Henrietta, I can state unequivacably that while you have weakness in your joint, there is no obvious malformation. I can see no reason why you should not birth this child, undergoing no more than precisely the same risks as any other woman.”

He paused to make certain that his message was understood.

“It is my considered opinion that your mother’s misfortune lay in the circumstances of her confinement, not in the organization of her limbs. In fact, I consider the relevant fact there to be that you, Lady Henrietta, were born in a breech position. I count myself among the very few physicians able to facilitate such a difficult birth, although I have attempted to share my knowledge in my recently published volume, The Management of Pregnant Women, with a Treatise onLove, Marriage and Hereditary Descent.”

Darby let his mind wonder. The old pudding-bag was Fool for Love

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clearly going to take on Henrietta as a patient, and he seemed to have enough experience to know what he was talking about. Ortolon was curiously reassuring. In fact, Darby had the sense that the physician wouldn’t allow any harm to come to Henrietta, for the simple reason that death might blunt the good doctor’s reputation.

“Yes,” Ortolon wound up, “if I supervise your confinement, Lady Henrietta, you shall suffer no ill effects whatsoever, and neither will the Darby heir.” He beamed at them both with such an air of confident self-satisfaction that Darby almost applauded.

Henrietta’s eyes were fixed on Ortolon’s face as if he were the Oracle at Delphi. Darby guessed that Bartholomew Batt and his Rules and Directions had just been dethroned in the Darby household, replaced by Jeremy Ortolon and his Man-agement of Pregnant Women. A grin crept over Darby’s face. It wasn’t that he wanted a child personally, but Henrietta wanted one. And fool in love that he was, he wanted Henrietta to be happy. Darby wasn’t quite so sanguine seven months later. As they neared the end of an entirely uneventful pregnancy, he grew more and more conscious of a growing unease. There was no clear reason for it. Ortolon’s daily pronouncements on his wife’s condition were pompously approving. The baby was in a proper position, and Ortolon expected no problems. Their child might be born any moment. That is, if Darby didn’t figure out some way to stop the whole thing. To be blunt, Darby had realized too late that he had participated in the worst decision of his life. He should never have listened to Ortolon. He should have begged Henrietta to drink the blue bottle. Perhaps he should never have visited Limpley Stoke at all. If the idea of never knowing Henrietta was bleak, the idea of Henrietta losing her life was unbearable. Unease wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t unease he felt, but 342 Eloisa

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fear: gross, unpalatable, and ugly. Gentlemen didn’t experience this sort of thing. Not as a gut-gripping emotion that made one wake up sweating and on the verge of shouting. He felt as if he could burst with the desperation of his wish to turn back time. His nights were marked by dreams in which he found himself laying flowers on a grave and once, with particular horror, on two graves: one large and one small. In his sleep he constantly relived the moment when Henrietta told him she was carrying a child. Once he dreamed that she laughed, lightly, and said it was all a joke. He almost wept with relief.

He started to watch his wife as intently as an artist watches his subject, prowling in the hallway while she was dressing, watching her bathe, barely allowing her to make private trips to the water closet. He pretended that he stayed near her in order to help her from chairs and make certain that she didn’t slip on the stairs. She saw through him—oh, he could see in her clear eyes that she saw through him. But she loved him, and so she said nothing about his absurdities. As the birth drew nearer he began waking in the dark stretches of the night and lighting a candle so he could watch her sleeping. Henrietta was more lovely pregnant than he could have imagined. She shone with the pure, exquisite joy of a madonna, as if all the despairing longing of her youth had poured into thankfulness for the new life growing inside her. Every day she grew more serene, more confident that labor would present no problems. In contrast, Darby couldn’t sit for more than five minutes. He snarled and snapped at the household until maids scurried by him in the hallway with a look of terror. He didn’t give a damn. This could be the last week—nay, the last day—of his wife’s life, and no one else seemed to have noticed. One evening he couldn’t sleep at all. What had he been thinking? He had allowed Henrietta to sacrifice her life for a child who might not live. What would Josie do without his Fool for Love

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wife? The little girl’s motherless state had turned to a fierce adoration of Henrietta. Anabel never made the mistake of calling strangers “Mama” anymore. She knew exactly who loved her best. Could the children survive the loss of another mother?

Finally he stopped trying to sleep and sat up. He breathed in the truth with the chill night air. Imagining a world without Henrietta was like thinking of a world without warmth. She lay beside him, looking leached of color by the gray light, her skin porcelain white as if—as if—

He touched her, softly, on the cheek. She was breathing. At his touch, a little smile curved her lips, and she nestled against his hand, in her sleep. That was Henrietta: so deeply loving of Josie, Anabel, himself, the unborn baby, that it seemed as if love shaped the current of life in her. She opened her eyes and opened her mouth but stopped suddenly, the word dying before it was spoken. Darby’s eyes narrowed. “What just happened?” he said, surprised to hear that his own voice was even. Henrietta smiled at him brightly. But she’d never been any good at keeping secrets.

“That was a labor pain,” he said.

“Perhaps.”