The Complete Wideacre Trilogy: Wideacre, The Favoured Child, Meridon. Philippa Gregory
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said not a word until we were seated by the window that overlooked the yard, with a pot of good strong coffee beside us.
‘Now, my pretty tease,’ he said, handing me a cup just as I liked it, without milk and with lots of brown treacly sugar. ‘When are you going to condescend to break the good news to your husband?’
‘What can you mean?’ I asked, widening my eyes at him in mock naivety.
‘It won’t do, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘You forget you are talking to a brilliant diagnostician. I have seen you refuse breakfast morning after morning. I have seen your breasts swelling and growing firm. Don’t you think that it’s about time you yourself told me what your body has already said?’
I shrugged negligently, but beamed at him over my cup.
‘You’re the expert,’ I said. ‘You tell me.’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I think it well we married speedily! I anticipate a son. I think he will arrive at the end of June.’
I bowed my head to hide the relief in my eyes that he had no doubt that I had conceived on that one occasion before our marriage, and no idea that the child was due in May. Then I looked up to smile at him. He was not Ralph. Nor was he the Squire. But he was very, very dear to me.
‘You are happy?’ I asked. He moved from his chair to kneel beside mine and slide his arms around my waist. His face nuzzled into my warm perfumed neck and into the fullness of my breasts – pushed up by the unbearably tight lacing of my stays.
‘Very happy,’ he said. ‘Another MacAndrew for the MacAndrew Line.’
‘A boy for Wideacre,’ I corrected him gently.
‘Money and land then,’ he said. ‘That’s a strong combination. And beauty and brains as well. What a paragon he will be!’
‘And a month early for the conventions!’ I said carelessly.
‘I believe in the old ways,’ said John easily. ‘You only ever buy a cow in calf.’
I had worried about telling him, but no shadow ever came into his mind, not in that first tender moment, nor at any later time. When he discovered how tight I was laced and insisted that I came out of my stays, he merely teased me for my size – he never dreamed that I was five weeks further on in my pregnancy than our lovemaking before the fire would have allowed. All through the icy cold winter when my body was burning at night and so firmly rounded, he merely enjoyed my happiness, and my confident, daring sensuality without question.
No one questioned me. Not even Celia. I announced that the baby would be born in June, and we booked the midwife as if she would be needed then. Even when the long icy winter turned green I remembered to hide my rising fatigue and pretend I was blooming with mid-pregnancy health. And a few weeks after the first secret movement I clapped my hand to my belly to say, in an awed whisper, ‘John, he moved.’
I was aided in the deception by John’s own ignorance. He might have been qualified at the first university in the country, but there were no women of Quality who would allow a young gentleman near them at such a time. Those who preferred a male accoucheur would choose an old, experienced man, not the dashing young Dr MacAndrew. But the majority of ladies and women of the middling sort held to the old ways and used the midwives of the district.
So the only pregnancies John had supervised were those of the poorer tenant farmers and working women, and those only by chance. They would not call him in, fearing the cost of professional fees, but if he was in a Quality house visiting a sick child, the Lady of the house might mention that one of the labourers’ wives was having a difficult birth, or that one of the parlourmaids was pregnant. So John saw births only where there were grave dangers, and only those of poor women. And while he looked at me with his tender sandy-lashed gaze I was able to lie, with all my experience, with all my skill, and with a silly hope of keeping our happiness safe: to keep things as tender and as loving as they were.
Love him I did, and if I wanted to keep his love he would have to be out of the way when the child he thought was his was born, supposedly five weeks premature.
‘I should so like to see your papa here again,’ I said conversationally one evening, while the four of us were seated around the fire in the parlour. Although the blossom glowed in the trees and the hawthorn was white in the hedges, it was still cold after sunset.
‘He might come for a visit,’ said John dubiously. ‘But it’s the devil’s own job detaching him from his business. I nearly had to go and drag him away by the coat-tails in time for the wedding.’
‘He would surely like to see his first grandchild,’ said Celia helpfully. She leaned towards the ever-open workbox, which stood between us, and selected a thread. The altar cloth was half completed and I was employed in stitching in some blue sky behind an angel. A task not even I could spoil, especially since I made one stitch and laid down the work every time I wanted to think or speak.
‘Aye, he’s a family man. He would fancy himself the head of a clan,’ John said agreeably. ‘But I would have to kidnap him to get him away from the business during the busiest time of year.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’ I said, as if the idea had, that second, struck me. ‘Why do you not go and fetch him? You said yourself you were missing the sweet smells of Edinburgh – Auld Reekie! Why not go and fetch him? He can be here for the birth and stand sponsor at the christening.’
‘Aye.’ John looked uncertain. ‘I would like to see him, and some colleagues at the university. But I would rather not leave you thus, Beatrice. And I would rather make a visit later when we could all go.’
I threw up my hands in laughing horror.
‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘I have travelled with a newborn child already. I shall never forgive Celia for that trip with Julia. Never again will I travel with a puking baby. Your son and I shall stay put until he is weaned. So if you want to visit Edinburgh inside two years, it had better be now!’
Celia laughed outright at the memory.
‘Beatrice is quite right, John,’ she said. ‘You can have no idea how dreadful it is travelling with a baby. Everything seems to go wrong, and there is no soothing them. If you want your papa to see the baby it will have to be him who comes here.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said John uncertainly. ‘But I would rather not leave you during your pregnancy, Beatrice. If anything went wrong I would be so far away.’
‘Ah, don’t worry,’ said Harry comfortingly from the deep winged chair by the fireplace. ‘I will guarantee to keep her off Sea Fern and Celia can promise to keep her off sweetmeats. She will be safe enough here, and we can always send for you if there is any trouble.’
‘I should like to go,’ he confessed. ‘But only if you are sure, Beatrice?’ I poked my needle in an embroidered angel’s face to free my hand to hold it out to him.
‘I am sure,’ I said, as he kissed it tenderly. ‘I promise to ride no wild horses, nor get fat, until you return.’
‘And you will send for me if you feel in the least unwell, or even just worried?’ he asked.
‘I promise,’ I said easily. He turned my hand palm up, in the pretty gesture he had used in our courtship, and pressed a kiss into it, and closed my fingers over the kiss. I turned my face to him and smiled with all my heart in my eyes.
John stayed only for my nineteenth birthday on the fourth of May when Celia had the dining room cleared of furniture and invited half-a-dozen neighbours in for a supper dance to celebrate. More tired than I cared to show, I danced two gavottes with John and a slow waltz with Harry before sitting down to open my presents.
Harry and Celia gave me a pair of diamond ear-drops, Mama a diamond necklace to match. John’s present was a large heavy leather box, as big as a jewel case with brass corners and a lock.
‘A mineful of diamonds,’ I guessed, and John laughed.