The Jane Austen Society (ARC)

by Natalie Jenner

  “I should get going. You need to rest.”

  “Well, make sure you get that drink on your way out.”

  She looked very tired to him, sitting up in bed against the white pillows in her white lace nightgown, her face so pale that he hesitated to leave.

  “Adeline, do you promise to have your mother call me if anything changes, anything at all? I don’t care how insignificant it might seem.”

  “You sound worried.”

  He picked up his medical bag. “No, not worried. I just know how stoic you can be, and I don’t want anything to get missed.”

  “Stoic? Me? But I was such a rabble-rouser with the school board, remember? Couldn’t keep my mouth shut, if I recall correctly.”

  He smiled. “You are not remotely stoical about others, yes, that is correct.”

  “Well, I promise then, but you have to promise to not come flying over here every time my mother telephones. You looked quite unlike yourself when you came through that door.”

  He headed down the stairs, testing part of the old oak banister as he did so, then looked back up when he reached Mrs. Lewis waiting at the bottom with his gin and tonic in hand.

  “Make sure she uses that banister, especially in this last month. Her balance will be off. She is quite large already.”

  Mrs. Lewis passed him the drink and showed him into the front drawing room. “I hope you didn’t tell her that—Adeline can be surprisingly vain.”

  “Oh, I know that,” he said between sips. “She is missed at the school, you know.”

  Mrs. Lewis sat down on a nearby sofa. “Adeline is doing exactly what she wants to do.”

  “I know that, too. But the board was foolish to come down on her so hard.” He sat back against the sofa facing hers. “Will she return to teaching one day, do you think? It would be quite a waste of her talents otherwise.”

  “I have no idea. Right now the baby is all she thinks about, as it should be.”

  “Quite right.” He felt strangely self-conscious under Mrs. Lewis’s gaze, as if he were being told off for something he hadn’t even yet done. Looking about the room for a distraction, he spotted a framed photo from Adeline’s wedding to Samuel the previous winter. “Does she talk about Samuel much?”

  “Why do you ask?” Mrs. Lewis replied curtly.

  “No reason. I just, well, I know how it feels. Although I can’t imagine how it feels when one is expecting.”

  “No, Dr. Gray, you can’t. And you were fortunate—we both were—to have had so much time with our late spouses, to at least give us memories to spare.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat as she kept on talking. “Although sadly I don’t think being briefly married is any kind of insurance against the loss. It’s the hole someone leaves behind that matters most. Adeline and Sam knew each other from the time they were babies—she was his entire world. He spoke about marrying her from the time he could talk. And then they had—what?—all of one week together before he had to return to that god-awful war. One week of marriage. And now a baby to raise all on her own.”

  “She might marry again.”

  “Will you?”

  He smiled and downed the rest of his drink in one go. “No, I am getting old now. Nobody would want me.”

  “Oh, come now, Dr. Gray,” Mrs. Lewis said archly. “You sell yourself short. There’s Miss Peckham, for one.”

  He stood up. He could see where Adeline got both her nerve and her sharp tongue.

  “Promise me you’ll call, Mrs. Lewis, no matter the hour, if anything changes. Anything at all. Especially any new bleeding. Alright?”

  He was in deepest sleep—a second gin and tonic back at home had done the trick, and thinking he had the night to himself, he had collapsed early into bed. So when the phone rang at midnight, it took him a few seconds to pull himself awake and process what was going on.

  When he entered the bedroom behind her stricken mother, he saw the bedsheets covered in blood, and a bucket and towels scattered about the floor, and in the centre of it all lay Adeline, her white lace nightgown shredded and stained as she writhed and screamed in pain, gripping the headboard posts, one in each ash-white hand.

  Dr. Gray felt her abdomen as gingerly yet as thoroughly as possible, watching Adeline flinch at every negligible pressure of his hands. He took out his stethoscope and listened carefully to both her and the baby’s hearts, then turned back to Mrs. Lewis, standing trembling behind him.

  “The baby’s heart rate is irregular—and her pain—the bleeding—it’s happening way too fast. Get the hospital on the phone and make bloody sure the ambulance I requested is on its way.”

  Stunned by his tone, Mrs. Lewis rushed out of the room in a panic.

  The minute she was gone, Adeline grabbed wildly at Dr. Gray’s arm. “Is the baby okay?”

  “We need to get you to the hospital right away. You’re not in labour yet, but you’re bleeding profusely, and the baby is feeling the stress.”

  She grabbed his arm even harder. “Am I going to lose this baby? Tell me the truth, Dr. Gray, please, I’m begging you.”

  “We’re going to get you into surgery for a Caesarean section—the baby is too distressed to wait for a natural labour. But I have no reason to believe that he or she can’t be delivered safely that way. Time, however, is of the essence, so I will get you downstairs now, alright?”

  Dr. Gray wrapped Adeline in her housecoat and carried her down the narrow staircase as carefully and as quickly as he dared. By the time they reached the bottom landing the ambulance was pulling up at the end of the garden path. The ambulance driver and the attendant jumped down from the vehicle and rushed up to meet them with the stretcher.

  As the ambulance raced in the night to Alton, Dr. Gray stayed by her side, holding a damp towel to her forehead with one hand while holding her ice-cold hand in his other. He could do nothing else for her.

  Dr. Howard Westlake, the surgeon and a longtime colleague of Dr. Gray’s, was not hopeful and called for additional blood supplies to be rushed over from the Winchester hospital’s new blood depot eighteen miles away, in case transfusion became necessary. Both he and Dr. Gray had learned the hard way over the years to plan ahead whenever local villagers ran into serious trouble, given the distance from the better-prepared urban Hampshire hospital. Dr. Gray asked for a quick second of private consultation as Adeline was prepped for surgery.

  “I think it’s placenta abruption,” Dr. Gray said in a half whisper. “All the signs are there. The bleeding, the uterine tenderness, the fetal heart rate.”

  Dr. Westlake was watching him carefully. “Did you think of trying to deliver the baby right then and there?”

  Dr. Gray shook his head. “The fetus is in too much distress. And besides, they are both in danger, as you know. They needed to be here in the hospital, just in case.”

  He paused to look through the long narrow window to the operating theatre and could just make out Adeline’s long brown hair fanned out behind her head, now obscured by the anaesthesia mask.

  “Howard, you agree with me, that she should be the primary patient, right? All the literature says that—”

  “Benjamin, we’ve talked about this plenty before—you know how I feel. You know you have nothing to worry about there.”

  Dr. Gray nodded but looked so stricken, the surgeon wasn’t sure his words were sinking in.

  “Go home and get some rest, Ben, alright? It’s going to be a long night, and no matter what happens, Mrs. Grover is going to need you on the morrow. We’ll call when it’s over.”

  But Dr. Gray stayed all night at the hospital, unable to sleep. He knew he could make sleep come soon enough, when he wanted it to. Right now he wanted to stand sentinel at the gates of hell and keep Adeline from falling through. She was so young, with so many years ahead of her. This did not have to be the end, for her, no matter what happened—he would do his absolute best to see to that. And with that notion, something inarticulate and grasping stirred inside him, the very esse
nce of life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chawton, Hampshire

  November 1945

  It had been over a month since the loss of Adeline’s daughter, and Dr. Gray had been summoned to her bedside yet again.

  He knew that the degree of her loss was incalculable. It was measured both in reality and in the extinguishing of all the motherly hopes and dreams that had carried her through the earlier waves of grief over Samuel’s death. By holding on to the idea of the baby in order to survive that pain, she had invested all she had left, only to now be left with nothing. From all his years of practice, Dr. Gray knew only one thing for sure: that some of us are given too much to bear, and this burden is made worse by the hidden nature of that toll, a toll that others cannot even begin to guess at.

  She had grabbed at his arm that very day, pulling hard on the sleeve of the suit jacket he always wore, as if to keep her back from some invisible brink.

  “I just want the pain to end. You have to help me.”

  “I know, Adeline, I know. But it will ease, somewhat, with time, I promise you.”

  “Don’t lie to me—you of all people know it won’t.” She turned her face away from him and let his arm drop hard, almost hostilely. “How can it, when I’ve lost everything—everyone—that I’ve ever loved? What would that say about me, if I could just go on?”

  He stared down at the back of her head. “No one will ever judge you for trying to be happy again.”

  “I don’t care what others think,” she said harshly. “I gave everything I had to Samuel and then to our baby, every last bit of me. I did it knowing how much I could get hurt—I took my chance and I was wrong.” She gave a strange, bitter laugh.

  “You speak as if you could have held back somehow, from life.”

  She turned back to look at him.

  “Can’t I? Don’t you? You certainly act like you do.”

  He shifted his weight a bit under her gaze. “We’re not talking about me, Adeline.”

  “Maybe we should be.”

  “Adeline, you have every right to be angry and upset. But I don’t think it’s appropriate to direct it at me, as your doctor and, I hope, your friend—do you?”

  She turned her head away from him again. “Appropriate. Fine. I’m sorry. Just give me something, please, anything to help me sleep. Please, just for a bit. Just this once.”

  He reached into his black bag and took out the tiny vial he had filled back in his office, knowing she would ask for it again, knowing he would not be able to say no. He prayed she wouldn’t ask him for anything more.

  He placed the vial down on the bedside table without a word, then left the darkened bedroom just as silently.

  Emerging into the purple dusk of early winter, Dr. Gray walked the half-mile home weighed down by both Adeline’s loss and his own futility in the face of it. He had been so panicked and distraught that terrible night at the hospital, and weeks later he continued to feel a pervasive helplessness where Adeline was concerned.

  Worst of all, he had just left medicine with Adeline that—like him—was doing nothing to help. All that the morphine was doing was helping her not to live—to avoid what she must endure—to deafen the voices inside. That was all he could do for her now: keep her alive by letting her kill the very essence inside her. He could not stop the pain, he could not give her a reason to live—he could not heal the trauma in her brain. As he thought back on all of this, he struggled to think of what recompense a good doctor got for having to face such life-destroying failure. He struggled at the best of times to figure that out; tonight he couldn’t even try.

  His nurse had gone home for the day—as usual, he entered a quiet and lonely house. Throwing down his coat and bag on the old deacon’s bench in the front vestibule, he walked slowly into the examination room and back through to his office, shutting the door behind him.

  The rest of the bottle still sat on his desk. He had not locked it away earlier as he was supposed to; he just made sure to leave only enough for one dose. Then he had shut his office door unlatched behind him, as if hoping someone would steal the bottle while he was away.

  He sat down at his desk, staring at the clear, slow-moving liquid. He always tried so hard, always came up with a thousand reasons not to. And then always, always, came up with one or two really good ones why. He could hear all the voices in his own head, not yet deafened—those of his late wife, his medical colleagues like Dr. Westlake, Reverend Powell to whom he had confessed. But the thing that no one warns you about, when the pain is too great—when the pain is so great that you’d rather die than face another day of it—is that the pain becomes bigger, and more real, than anything else. It’s like that circle of grief which is not supposed to shrink, even with time, but also not to grow—it’s as if it is still expanding with the pain, feeding on it, infecting everything else around you. A calculating, inextinguishable darkness that covers everything, even the few things that you were promised would remain outside the grief, by all those well-meaning people who simply had not yet experienced a grief as bad as yours.

  You feel so trapped, with no way out, and you stop caring about the best way to be. About the proper way to live, the smart way. For if merely living becomes the sole end game, then what does it matter what you do to sustain it?

  The bottle sat before him, promising something that no one—that nothing else—could give him. He defied his Lord to judge him—he was past caring what would happen if he got caught. If he did end up caught one day, at least it would mean he had survived longer than he had thought possible.

  He reached out for the bottle, and just like poor Adeline, all alone in her own bedroom, curtains pulled against the light of day, he took his first sip and let deliverance—however temporary, however illusory—wash over him, too.

  Adam Berwick was home early from work, now that the harvest season had ended and the days were becoming increasingly short. By the middle of the afternoon he could feel night waiting impatiently to descend in the sudden silence of the songbirds and the long shadows of the sun. With his ploughing almost done for the year and the stable chores limited to feeding the livestock, he looked forward to the upcoming seasonal respite.

  For one thing, it would give him plenty of time to read. Adam needed that because he now spent every winter rereading the collected works of Jane Austen; sometimes he even read Pride and Prejudice twice.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table with a strong cup of coffee and his well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice before him, enjoying the first botched proposal scene with Mr. Darcy, astonished every time at the man’s insensitivity. Adam was nothing if not sensitive—perhaps too much so. Reading as Mr. Darcy unknowingly dug a bigger and bigger hole for himself—“Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”—Adam always found himself practically yelling out loud to Fitzwilliam Darcy to stop and save himself from further humiliation at his own hands.

  Adam loved being in this world, transported, where people were honest with each other, but also sincerely cared for each other, no matter their rank. Where the Miss Bateses of the world would always have a family to dine with, and the Harvilles would take in the grief-stricken Captain Benwick following the loss of his fiancée, and even the imperious and insensitive Bertrams would give Fanny Price a roof above her head. And the letters people sent—long, regular missives designed to keep people as close to one’s heart and thoughts as possible, whatever insurmountable distance might be between them at present. He wondered at the solicitude in that, the deep and unwavering caring, and what he could do—at as little risk socially as possible—to experience any of that in his own, stymied life.

  “Queues were awful again today—one orange per customer, and only the bitter ones at that. Then I run into Harriet Peckham at the post office—no mail for us as usual, by the way—and she tells me Adeline Grover’s not doing so well,” hi
s mother announced almost triumphantly as she walked straight past him into the kitchen and threw her ration book, small string bag of groceries, and a rolled-up newspaper onto the counter. She went over to put the kettle on, still not having looked over at Adam. “Just as I’d feared, of course.”

  Adam knew best to shut his book.

  “Tells me the poor girl can’t get out of bed. That Dr. Gray is beside himself with worry, for all he apparently botched that delivery—has taken to checking in on her so regularly, you’d think she was his only patient.’

  “Maybe right now she’s his most important one.”

  His mother turned about at the stove to stare pointedly at him. “Now there’s a pretty young thing. Why didn’t you ever have your eye on her?”

  Adam pushed the book a little farther away from him.

  “Adam, my boy, one has to be on the lookout for these things. You need to find someone to take care of you. I won’t be around forever, you know.”

  He did know—she reminded him regularly. He hated when she talked like this. To him it felt the opposite of caring. It wasn’t helping him find the key to those happier worlds he read about in books; it only made him feel trapped and desperate and even more alone.

  “Adeline Grover’s never going to be interested in the likes of me, Mother. And now’s surely not the time to discuss it.”

  “Suit yourself. Just know the village is always speculating about you, whether you want to discuss it or not, ” she said with a shrug, then went and cut herself some bread and butter on the counter. Sitting down across from him with her tea, she glanced at the book before him.

  “Didn’t you just read that?”

  “Last winter.”

  “You read too much. You read her too much. You should be out, go to Alton more.”

  “I go to Alton.”

  “You go to the movies. You sit alone in the movie house, watching some romantic silliness. Or reading it,” she added, with an insolent nod at his book. “Your nose always in a book, just like your father.”

  He took another sip of his coffee, then stood up.