by Ava Devlin
He turned back to Ruthie, blinking loose another set of tears down his cheeks, and found her stricken, staring at the two of them with enough shock on her face that he felt certain she hadn't made the connection either, until just this moment.
"I didn't know," he rasped, squeezing his eyes shut. "I never knew."
In his mind’s eye, he saw those silver scars on Heloise's hip that he'd traced so casually. He knew what they were now. No accident had caused them. Such were the marks a woman gets as her belly swells with child, her skin straining to accommodate the miracle of life.
What was it he had said to her a few nights prior?
You might have ended up like Abigail Collins.
It was a wonder she hadn't slapped him across the face at that. It was a wonder she would even look at him still. She had been holding this secret against her heart all this time, alone.
"Millie," Ruthie said to the boy's nanny. "Please take Master Reggie up to the nursery. Anne, you will accompany them. I will tuck our Caroline in myself when she is ready for her nap."
Both girls bobbed immediate curtsies, hastening to obey this order, both keeping their eyes downcast. Before they could reach the door to the drawing room, Ruthie added in a voice that was deceptively cool and calm, "I expect you both understand that gossiping is not tolerated in this house."
They both nodded, scurrying out, shushing the indignant arguments of the little lord and allowing the door to snap firmly shut behind them.
Through it all, Callie had stayed still, gazing at Callum with curiosity and clinging to his hand. She pushed her little rag doll forward, onto his knee.
"She helps," the little girl said to him, stroking the doll’s rag-crafted hair. "You can borrow her."
"Thank you, Caroline," he whispered back, holding the little doll to his chest the way he wished he could hold her. “I already feel better.”
She smiled then, dimples in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes, brightening against her bashful nature. She looked so very pleased to have been of assistance, and reached forward once more to clear the tears from his cheeks with the flat of her hand.
He knew it must be confusing for a child, such a little thing, to see an adult crying and smiling at the same time, especially some strange man, doing it by way of an introduction. What else could he do, though? It was too much to learn all at once. The sight of her had filled him with a brimming of so much emotion, he didn't think he could stand it.
Flashes of so many things collided within him. If he didn’t have such a will to remain knelt on the carpet, gazing into her face, soaking in everything about her, committing her to memory, he very well might have passed out from the shock of it.
"Why don't you both come sit," Ruthie suggested softly, a tell-tale glimmer of moisture reflecting in her own eyes. "It appears your acquaintance is long overdue."
Somehow, he had arrived at tea time and stayed until supper, which Ruthie insisted be served in the drawing room, where he'd passed the last several hours.
Getting to know a three-year-old, it turned out, was a sight more complex than his usual social challenges. It wasn't until little Caroline had been prompted by her grandmother to describe the snowman she had built earlier today that her cloak of shyness seemed to slip away.
She had told him her favorite color (yellow), her favorite food (jam on toast), and that she was learning to count (only to ten, though). She had stopped speaking several times to smile and touch his face again, asking more than once, "All better?"
She had been fascinated with him, the way children are with any new novelty, and had chosen to sit upon his lap while they chatted, observed by a mostly silent, possibly weeping Ruthie Somers.
"She picked up the numbers very quickly," Ruthie had interjected, pride apparent in her voice when that particular tidbit had been mentioned. "Any Cunningham worth her salt has a natural talent for sums."
"Cunningham," he'd repeated, glancing over at the dowager. "Is that the name she was given?"
Ruthie had hesitated, looking immediately caught in a snare of discomfort. "She is meant to be a distant relation that I brought with me from Philadelphia," she said apologetically. "We couldn't rightly call her a Somers."
"Or a Laughlin," he'd agreed with a solemn nod. He looked down at the curious eyes of his child, who did not bear his name. "Does my mother know?"
"If she does, she's never breathed a word of it," Ruthie answered. "I don't think Heloise has told anyone, ever."
He was drawn back into conversation about far more important things by his daughter, and did not revisit such boring, adult topics until Callie had begun to lightly snore, her head pressed against his chest, and her hand resting on the doll he still held. The warmth of her little body, limp in sleep, the trust in her even breathing made him want to weep in earnest.
"Tell me how it was," he asked quietly, staring into the fire instead of confronting the woman next to him. "I will ask her, but I don't know that she'll tell me the whole of it. I don't know that she was ever intending to tell me any of it."
There was a beat of silence between them as the past hovered heavily over the room.
"She fled her boarding school for Somerton at the break of spring that year," Ruthie said, "once she could no longer hide her condition. I didn't arrive for over two months after that, for receiving her letter across the ocean and then putting myself right back across is not a rapid thing. By the time I'd returned home, she was almost ready to give birth and seemed well settled into her plight. All I could offer was a feasible story so that we might keep the baby, when she arrived."
He shuddered, chilled by the thought of his child being bundled up and sent to an orphanage. What would they have done with her, if the dowager had not returned?
"Gideon was willing to claim the baby as his bastard, should it be a boy," Ruthie said, anticipating his next question. "For a girl, things are more complex. There is no place in the world for a girl born on the wrong side of the blanket. Even a life in service would have been a challenge."
He squeezed his eyes shut. What had he been doing at the time of her birth? What frivolous complaint had he been nursing about his status in the world and his discomfort in the barracks? All the while ...
"No one caught wind of her pregnancy," Ruthie said, her voice a flat cadence in the silent foreboding of the room. She spoke as though her explanations would ease the pain that radiated off him, and perhaps silence her own guilt. "She has always been tempestuous, so running away from school and refusing a debut surprised no one who knew her. The scandal of her apparent choices was far preferable to the truth. Caroline calls her Auntie. We were to tell her the truth once she was old enough to understand it."
"I had come here today to speak about Heloise," he confessed, too spent emotionally to remember his anxiety, too tired to turn his head from the comforting chaos of the flames in the hearth. "I was going to ask for your blessing to marry her, if she'd have me. I have been a fool."
"I should have known," Ruthie murmured, a note of misery in her voice. "I should have put it together. It seems so obvious now."
"If you didn't, that means no one else did either," he said flatly. "So, it is just as well."
"All the same," she whispered. "I hope you make a more attentive parent than I. This is not the first time that I have failed my daughter."
The chime and slam of the main entrance startled them both, though the jerk of Callum's body only made Callie readjust her posture, snuggling into his chest with a contented sigh. Both Callum and Ruthie had frozen, though of course they must have both known in the back of their minds that she would eventually return home.
"Mother?" called Heloise through the door as she stomped the snow off her boots in the entryway. "I've had the most wonderful day. It is the first time since the fire that I've truly believed that the township will make a full recovery."
She went quiet for a moment, likely removing her cloak and putting her feet into a pair of dry slippers. Her foo
tsteps drew nearer, her voice still raised as she made her way to the drawing room. "Gideon brought home so many things that have made all the difference," she said, her face bright and merry as she pushed the door open. "I'm only hoping to ..."
She trailed off, her eyes locking onto her child in the arms of that child's father. The color in her cheeks drained away, her hand tightening into a fist around the knob of the door. She looked the way he had felt some hours prior.
She took several fortifying breaths, the silence in the room playing host to the sound of her inhalations. "Callum," she began, though she made no move to come closer, her body leaning against the frame of the door as though it were the only thing keeping her upright.
"Heloise," he answered, his voice even and steady, revealing nothing. He did not want to play this the wrong way. He didn’t want to lose them both, forever.
A frantic pounding on the front door stopped her from whatever speech she might have launched into, her startled posture leaning heavily against the support of the door. "Oh, what now!" she breathed, turning on her heel and pacing out of view.
From their seats, they could hear the howling of the wind as she pried the door open, and the silence that followed it slamming shut again. The voice of the intruder was a frantic one, high-pitched and afraid.
"Lady Heloise, you must come right away," it said.
"I cannot," Heloise attempted to respond, though she barely got the words out.
"You must! Miss Abigail has taken an awful fall and now ... there's blood and ... and water. She hit her head. You must come!"
Heloise hissed in frustration, still out of view, though the weight of her choices fell heavy on those who could hear. "Saddle my horse," she said to the frantic voice. "I will be right out."
She appeared in the doorway again, alight with purpose and panic. She looked angelic, he thought, in the way that angels had once fought great wars against forces of evil. "I am sorry, but I must go," she breathed, her eyes darting between her mother and Callum. "I must."
"Go," he replied. "I will be waiting."
She nodded, setting her jaw against the implications of that, and just as suddenly as she appeared, Heloise Somers was gone again.
19
Another crisis was a blessing, in its own way. What better distraction was there from deep, paralyzing panic than something so dire that one cannot, in good conscience, think of anything else?
Abigail had slipped on the ice outside of the cottage while attempting to bring the laborers some of her mother's freshly baked bread. For all the many preparations they had made for the homes that could be re-inhabited, somehow everyone involved had neglected to clear the rear pathways that connected house to house. It had been a stupid oversight, one that Heloise would never forgive herself for, especially if this accident ended in tragedy.
She arrived at the cottage to find three men hovering worriedly near a basket of overturned, frozen bread and streaks of blood on the ice. They fell into step with her as she approached the house.
The one who had fetched her from the dower house, the youngest of them, said, "Please tell us if there's anything you need, My Lady."
Abby had a lump on her head and was dazed, but at the instruction of Mrs. Collins, the men had carried her inside and laid her back into the bed. She lulled in and out of consciousness, blinking at Heloise with a dazed smile of confusion or perhaps relief.
"Fetch Dr. Garber," Hel had instructed one of the laborers. "Tell him what has happened."
To the others, she asked to stable Boudicea and bring firewood to keep the cottage warm.
She busied herself preparing the room for a birth, taking care to ensure that Abigail remained lucid. There was little else she could do. With the womb water breached by the fall, there was no stopping the arrival of the baby now. She did not wish pain on any of her charges, but tonight she prayed for the contractions to begin, for the shock of them might pull Abby from her addled state.
When the handful of raspberry leaves she'd retrieved from her kit and thrown into boiling water had sufficiently steeped, she scooped up a handful of snow from the windowsill and dropped it into the cup. She climbed into the bed next to Abby, supporting her upright, as she held the lukewarm liquid to her lips and murmured encouragement to drink it all down.
She left her only when she could answer simple questions, slipping her back onto her pillows and returning her feet to the uneven wooden floor to resume her work. She opened the window again and packed more snow into a thin pouch made from a sheep's bladder. She placed it on the lump that had formed on Abigail's forehead, instructing Mrs. Collins to hold it in place as she busied herself around the cottage, preparing for the inevitable.
"Keep her awake," she instructed. "Talk to her, engage her. She must not fall asleep."
Her preference was to manage birthing on a chair, so that the aid of gravity and the necessity of staying upright both assisted the mother with the difficult task ahead of her. However, with this particular mother currently dazed from her fall, she did not wish to risk it. The babe, by the mercy of God, seemed well, despite the abrupt nature of the onset of labor.
The child's body was fully turned and ready to descend, and the blood that had been present from the rupture of Abigail's water had been perfectly normal, though she was certain this information had been cold comfort to the men who'd found her and lingered at the house until Heloise arrived.
The first cry of pain that ripped from Abigail's throat flooded Hel with so much relief that she thought she might burst into tears. Upon inspection, the dilation process had begun, though barely, and nothing yet seemed amiss with the arrival of this child. Still, just to be safe, she applied the primrose oil from her midwifery kit and massaged the stomach the way Meggie had taught her to when labor must be induced or otherwise encouraged. She wanted to take no chances.
Beyond the bump on her head, Abigail had skinned the flesh from her elbow and bruised one of her thighs rather badly. Aside from some slapdash bandaging, Heloise could not spare the attention to those injuries, and hoped that they were minor. She could not give laudanum or willow bark to Abigail for fear of thinning her blood, and instead simply refreshed the presence of snow against the wounds as she waited for the doctor's arrival.
It was a blissful buzz of necessity that drowned out the bone-chilling shock she'd had upon walking into that drawing room. She blinked to dispel the memory of it, forcing herself to put her mind into the present moment. To do anything else would be akin to cracking the lid on Pandora's box, and she simply could not afford to do so until her work here had been completed.
She kept an ear turned to Abigail and her mother, talking in low voices of frivolity and memories and plans for the future as she gathered towels and linens and rags to assist in the things still yet to come.
She flew to the door the instant she heard a rap upon it, and pried it open, expecting to find Richard Garber and his medical kit at the ready. Instead it was only that weary laborer she'd sent on the errand. "Where is the doctor?" she demanded.
"He won't come," the man responded, shuffling his feet in obvious discomfort. "He says it ain't proper."
Heloise blinked at the man, too stunned by the stupidity of that statement to reply, and by the time her wits had returned to her, he had already gone. She stood in the doorway, getting coated with the lazy drift of snow, with no choices but to go retrieve the man herself or to make do without him.
She made herself shut the door, dust off her skirts, and walk back to the bed, her face likely drawn with discontent. It wasn't until she saw both Abigail and her mother that she realized their talking had stopped completely, and both were staring at her, their hands clasped together.
"He wouldn't come, would he?" Abigail said softly, in a way that wasn't really a question. "I thought when the moment arrived, he might finally come, but he won't. He's not coming."
"Perhaps once the babe arrives," Mrs. Collins offered, with no real conviction in her voice, as Abi
gail began to cry.
"No, he won't," she argued, her voice cracking. "He hasn't so much as looked at me since I found out, and the one time I attempted to confront him ... well, you know what happened, Mama."
"What happened?" Heloise asked, careful to keep her voice gentle and without judgement. She crossed the room and sat on the side of the bed opposite Mrs. Collins, taking Abigail's other hand. "What did he do?"
"Nothing," Abigail said miserably, a deep sob racking her body. "It was all my fault, and if I tell you, you're like to tell the constable and they'll take my baby away."
Heloise raised her eyes, bewildered, to Mrs. Collins, who simply shook her head and averted her eyes, unwilling to reveal anything that her daughter didn't wish to be known. She stroked the short, brown tresses of Abigail's hair, allowing her to cry as much as she needed to. Lord knew she wished she could cry like that too, just now.
The next contraction interrupted her misery with a sharp gasp of pain, her eyes flying open in surprise as her knees came up from the bed. When it released her, she seemed to have regained some sense of control, though perhaps trading one pain for another was not the best way for such things to happen.
"I won't let anyone take your baby away from you," Heloise said to her. "You have my word. No matter what has happened."
Abigail shook her head, reaching forward for the sheet to press the tears from her eyes. "You'll hate me."
Heloise hesitated, her heart pounding in her chest with indignation and anger and fear and sadness. She knew she ought not say a single word, especially with how delicate the situation currently sat back at Somerton, but instead she reached forward to tip Abigail's face toward her, looking hard into those sweet, brown eyes. "Abby," she said. "I have a child too."
She ignored the gasp from Mrs. Collins and the way the older woman's hands flew up to cover her mouth. She didn't care anymore. Why should she enjoy the shroud of protection from her family when Abigail had done nothing more than she had, and was shunned? They were the same, were they not? Victims of their own desire and the plight of women in an unjust world.
