by Lynn Morris
“Are you so certain she loves him, then?” Mirabella asked cautiously. “I’ve tried hard to discern her feelings, but she’s such a private person that it’s been difficult for me to be sure.”
“Lewin and I talked it over, and we both think that she does care deeply for him, although she may not be starry-eyed, somersaulting in love with him as he is with her. We believe that she has reservations, and with good reason. In the first place, Northumberland is so far away from her home, and by all accounts is a cold and dreary county. In the second place—and perhaps I should have named this first and foremost—Mrs. Smythe has already been a right Tartar to Harry about her, and I can fully empathize with a reluctance to face a life with Mrs. Smythe as a mother-in-law.”
“Ugh, how dreadful, poor Josephine. And poor Mr. Smythe. Is he aware of this?”
“Of course. Harry dutifully loves his mother, but he’s flatly refused to countenance her nagging about Josephine, and for once his father has even stood up to Mrs. Smythe. And also, Harry hates Northumberland, too, he’s told me that unless his father entails it, he’s going to sell the whole estate when he inherits and move to one of the south counties. I think that if he and Josephine get engaged, he’ll find some nice estate close and either buy it or lease it, and say a cheery good day to Northumberland, and his mother, too, if she continues to behave so badly.”
“Oh, that would be wonderful, to have our close friends nearby!” Mirabella said excitedly.
“Mirabella, you may box my ears for this, but I absolutely forbid you to go barging around arranging Josephine and Harry’s marriage. Your past record on that is not exactly exemplary.”
“I shall astound you and agree with you, for you’re entirely correct. Anyway, I’m going to be far too busy arranging my own marriage.”
“Yes, about that. What list?”
Giles soon found out all about Mirabella’s list, for it was begun that very afternoon, and was lengthened considerably in the following days. The black swans were first on the list, and in considering them, Mirabella discovered that the moat needed dredging and cleaning, and the stone bridge needed repairs. She toured every single room in Knyveton Hall (much to Mr. Smythe’s astonishment) and openly expressed her horror at the furnishings. “Lewin said the bedrooms looked like a French brothel, and he was right,” she fumed. “I’m not sleeping in that rococo monstrosity, not for even one night. Where are the old beds?”
“In the barn, along with about eighteen other pieces,” Giles replied. “Lewin said my house looked like a French brothel?”
For the next week, Mirabella came to Knyveton, usually so early in the morning that Giles and Harry were still at breakfast. Finally Giles’s elderly butler Pitkin ceased sniffing his disapproval at Mirabella wandering about Knyveton by herself, and his steward, Mr. Leith, grew accustomed to answering to Lady Mirabella as much as he answered to Sir Giles. Within a week Mirabella’s list included obtaining the swans, repairing the bridge, maintaining the moat, repairing and renewing all the old furniture including replacing the upholsteries, constructing a conservatory at the north end of the quadrangle, redecorating one of the guest bedrooms and making it into a nursery, removing the vulgar encaustic tiles in the dining room, and restoring the old oak flooring. These were only the major undertakings of the list, for it also included, as Giles said, approximately ten thousand other minor tasks and details.
Ultimately this was the reason, to everyone’s amazement, that Giles got his wish that the marriage be delayed until Knyveton Hall was more presentable for its new mistress. Mirabella agreed that she didn’t wish to spend the blissful first month of her marriage in a house with four or five crews of laborers. But then she had the bright idea that they could go on a bridal tour to Italy.
“Your dearest wish has always been to return to Florence,” she said to Giles. “This way we could make all the arrangements with the workmen, get married next month, and while we’re away Mr. Leith can attend to everything.”
“No, my dearest wish is to marry you, Bella. And if you think that I want to spend the first month with my new wife on an arduous, boring, cramped, dirty sea voyage with a hundred strangers, you need to think again.”
“There is something to that,” Mirabella agreed reluctantly. “But someday I promise you, we’ll go to Italy.”
“We shall see,” Giles said. “Listen, Bella, would you please add one item to your interminable list? It’s very important.”
“Of course.”
He came close to her and looked down into her eyes. “Would you please wear that satin blue dress and your sapphires for our wedding? In my life I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. When I thought you were lost to me, I’d think of you in that dress and your sapphires, and tell myself that maybe such an exquisite creature wasn’t meant to belong to a mortal man at all.”
She put her arms around his neck. “You were wrong. I was meant to belong to you.”
On October first they were married, and the small parish church, St. John’s, was filled to overflowing. Practically every person from Camarden attended, of course, and many of Mirabella’s and Giles’s friends from London came, too. Denys Aldington attended, with Mr. and Mrs. Smythe and Miss Smythe; Mrs. Smythe alternated between beaming at Denys and glowering at Harry and Josephine. She had another reason, although not an excuse, for her ire, for in the previous month Harry had leased Reynes Parva from Lord Camarden for a life tenancy, and had moved in two days after the arrangements had been made.
It was a very good thing that Giles had talked Mirabella out of traveling to Italy. In January Mirabella knew with certainty that she was expecting, and it would have been dangerous indeed for her to travel home by sea. The new year was happily greeted for another reason, too, for Harry and Josephine became engaged, and were married in June.
Mirabella had an easy and ecstatically happy pregnancy, insisting from the first that she knew it was a boy, and his name would be Giles William Edmund. She was correct. On August first she gave birth to a boy with black hair and blue eyes.
Mirabella and Giles knew that something was wrong in the first moments after his birth. Josephine’s brother-in-law, Dr. Tarver, attended Mirabella. As soon as baby Giles was born, Dr. Tarver’s face grew grave. After cutting the umbilical cord, he took the baby by the heels, suspended him upside down, and lightly spanked his bottom. Only then did the baby make a sound, and the cry was so weak it could barely be heard. After cleaning him up and swaddling him, Dr. Tarver gave the baby to Mirabella. “He’s very small,” she said quietly. “And his skin is tinged yellow.”
“Yes, my lady,” the kind, bespectacled doctor said. “He is jaundiced. But that’s not too uncommon with newborns. It’s possible that once he has mother’s milk in him to cleanse his blood, the jaundice will disappear.”
But baby Giles would not eat. Mirabella and Giles tried a wet nurse, cow’s milk, goat’s milk, even heavy cream with molasses added to it, but to no avail.
Three days after his birth, Dr. Tarver said sadly, “I’ve seen this condition before, and we have no explanation for it, we’ve never discovered any disease or defect that causes it. Sometimes babies are born, and it seems that the Lord in His infinite wisdom decides to take them home soon.”
“How soon?” Mirabella whispered brokenly.
“It’s very difficult to know, but I think perhaps a week at the most.”
That very night Mr. Rosborough came and baptized baby Giles in Mirabella and Giles’s bedroom. Josephine and Harry stood as godparents. Tears streamed down Mr. Rosborough’s face during the entire ceremony, and Josephine and Harry had a very difficult time with the responses, for they kept choking up. Mirabella and Giles, both as pale as parchment, held hands and kept their eyes locked on baby Giles.
Mirabella and Giles moved the rocking chair into their bedroom, and virtually lived there. They took turns holding Giles and rocking him, all day and all night. He slept; he rarely opened his eyes, and then for only a few moments. He never c
ried, and he hardly moved. At dawn on the ninth of August, in his sleep, little Giles simply stopped breathing.
The next days were dismal blurs to them. Mirabella’s mother was at Knyveton, of course, and to Mirabella’s vague surprise, Clara came and stayed. She never bothered Mirabella and Giles, she spoke to them only when they spoke to her, she made sure that they had meals served to them wherever they were, and she ran the entire house with her ruthless efficiency.
Giles and Mirabella buried their son, and exhausted, they went to their bedroom, fell onto the bed in their mourning clothes, and held each other. After a time Giles began to weep, and then to sob. Mirabella held him as if he were a small child. “Oh, Bella, Bella, how shall we ever bear it?” he groaned.
“I will tell you how, my beloved husband,” she said quietly. “We will grieve, yes, but we will rejoice, too. For a long time I thought that children were the greatest blessings God could bestow, but I was wrong. The best, most loving, most precious gift that the Lord has given us is marriage. I am bone of your bone, and flesh of your flesh. We are one person, and there is no force on earth that is as strong as the bond between a man and a woman that God has joined together. Our love is so powerful that together we will bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things, and we will rejoice that we have each other until we die and join Him in heaven.”
* * *
The summer ended, then a crisp bright fall turned into a cold wet winter. Giles and Mirabella struggled, every day, with their loss; but each day the pain lessened, just a little, and each day they gained a little more strength.
In December, Mirabella seemed to brighten up considerably. Although she and Giles still consoled each other in a hundred different ways every day, she said nothing to him about her sudden buoyancy of spirit.
On the fifteenth Josephine and Harry came to Knyveton, for they visited there often, but this time Mirabella especially wanted to plan a special Christmas party for friends and family. She had often teased Giles about converting the dining hall into a Tudor great hall, and on this Christmas she thought it would be a marvelous idea to have a Tudor Christmas party, complete with head table, two thrones (for her parents, of course), a gigantic wassail bowl, big turkeys as the only roasts of the evening, the Yule log, and fragrant evergreen rushes on the floor.
Josephine was smiling, but her gaze was sharp. “You’re certain, then, dearest, that you feel like giving a party for thirty or so people?”
“I’m certain,” Mirabella replied. “You see, I think—I’m fairly sure that I have some very good news. It’s early days yet, but…” Her voice trailed off, and her sapphire-blue eyes sparkled, for the first time in four months.
Josephine said excitedly, “You mean—can you mean that you think you’re pregnant?”
“Yes!”
“That’s marvelous, dearest! And now—now I feel I can tell you—so am I!”
Giles and Mirabella had some anxious moments in the months that followed. But together they decided that they would not now, or ever, let fear ruin their lives. “Perfect love casts out fear,” Giles said to her. “God’s love for us is perfect, and may His perfect will be done. And my love for you, Bella, may not be perfect, but I love you as much as mortal man will ever love a woman, now and forever.”
Exactly a year to the day after their son died, Mirabella gave birth to a healthy, hearty baby boy with the same straight thick black hair and sky-blue eyes as his older brother and his father. “We’ll name him Giles, for that’s my favorite name in the whole world. He won’t mind, you know,” she said. “When he went to his real home, the Lord gave him his real name. It will help me to remember him with joy.”
Two days later Josephine gave birth to a baby girl. Scarcely a week later, both women were feeling well enough to visit, and Mirabella and Giles took baby Giles to Reynes Parva.
“Josephine, Harry, she is absolutely gorgeous, just like a little dolly,” Mirabella said. “What is her name?”
Josephine and Harry exchanged glances. “We wanted to name her Mirabella, but both of us felt that was a little too haut ton for us commoners,” Harry said, grinning boyishly. “And so we’ve named her Bella.”
With delight Mirabella looked at the two babies in their cribs. “Giles and Bella, how perfect,” she said. “Surely they will be great friends.”
“Hm,” Giles said thoughtfully. “‘History, with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.’”
Harry said with bewilderment, “What does that mean? I never know what old Giles means with his deep and dark quotes.”
Tentatively Josephine said, “It’s Lord Byron, isn’t it? Childe Harold?”
“Pay no mind to Giles,” Mirabella told Harry. “He’s just showing out, as usual. It’s that old cliché—history repeats itself—but Giles is too intellectually superior to all of us to say it simply.”
Giles was staring at the two babies, side-by-side in their cribs. He slid his arm around Mirabella’s waist and said, “We shall see, my love. In a few years, we shall see…”
Epilogue
Sixteen years later, in the merry month of May, the Smythe family and the Knyvet family gathered together for the May Day holiday. It was their long custom for the two families to spend holidays together. In the early years of their marriages, Harry and Josephine had traveled the eleven miles from Reynes Parva to stay at Knyveton Hall, but as the families grew, Knyveton Hall proved to be entirely too small, so Lord and Lady Camarden, still hale and hearty in their seventies, happily invited everyone, from the ever-growing Rosborough clan to Clara and Philip, to holiday at Camarden.
As they had done so many times, Mirabella and Giles and Josephine and Harry were having afternoon tea in the conservatory, which may not have looked quite as polished and organized as when it had been Mirabella’s realm, but was still a lovely, congenial arbor. The four of them had changed very little. Harry, still bright-eyed and eager, looked ten years younger than he was. In the last years Josephine had grown slightly plump with childbearing. She and Mirabella often talked of how their youthful figures had been wasted wearing frocks with Empire waists. Now that the natural waist, with an hourglass figure, was stylish, they mourned the never-seen twenty-inch waists of their teens and twenties. Still, Mirabella had remained tiny and dainty. She had some silver streaks, but they showed very little in her strawberry-blonde hair. The smile creases at the corners of Giles’s blue eyes had deepened, and he had a dashing sprinkle of white hair at the temples, but otherwise he too showed little sign of aging.
On this day the conservatory was crowded. Harry and Josephine had seven children, four boys and three girls, from sixteen-year-old Bella, who resembled her mother but had her father’s exuberant temperament, to their youngest, Clifford, a lively two-year-old. Mirabella and Giles had had three more children after Giles: next was Audrey Josephine, twelve years old, Tirel was nine years old, and Edmund, their youngest child, was a six-year-old boy who was so like Mirabella, in a masculine way, that it was almost uncanny.
Not all eleven of the Knyvet and Smythe children were in the conservatory, for Bella and Giles, who had always been great friends, had disappeared. However, there were actually eleven children racketing about. Alexander, Lord Tirel, was twenty-two now, had just finished with a first at Oxford, and was taking a short holiday before he joined the army. Tiberius, a serious, intelligent young man who planned to become a clergyman, had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday and was on holiday from Cambridge. The younger children were delighted at the two older boys’ presence, for Alexander and Tiberius had made up several battlefields out of potting crates, as their Aunt Mirabella had taught them, and landscaped them, and were now gathering up watering cans to inflict terrible storms on the battlefields. Alexander had brought his old set of forty tin soldiers, and the fact that they could not be split up evenly among the nine children had caused much strife, including shameful amounts of shouting, arguing, pushing and pulling, and tears. Tiberius had fi
nally settled it mathematically, giving each child four soldiers and forming a rotation of troops so that everyone would have the opportunity to have five soldiers. The battles commenced, and they were in some ways like real battles, for they were short, confusing, and very very loud.
“I can barely hear in this din,” Harry grumbled. “Why are our children so loud, Josephine? I’m not loud. You’re not loud. It must be some sort of inherited trait I’ve passed on to them from my mother.”
“For shame, Harry, she’s been a perfect angel ever since Bella was born, and I’ll hear nothing against her,” Josephine said severely.
“She’s been angelic because ever since Bella drew her first breath she’s been planning to marry her off to some unfortunate nobleman, preferably at least a viscount, since she succeeded in entrapping a baron for Barbara.” Miss Smythe and the Honourable Denys Aldington had been married fifteen years ago, and now they were Lord and Lady Aldington. They had never had children, so Mrs. Smythe had directed all of her energies to her schemes to marry off Harry’s children, all seven of them.
“Never mind, Harry, my three children are making fully as much noise as your six, and besides, it sounds to me as if Alexander is the loudest of them all, with his wild war whoops and shouting orders at the top of his lungs,” Mirabella said.
Just then General Lord Tirel shouted, “No, no, Cliffie, that’s not a battlefield—” They heard a loud crash, and then two-year-old Clifford Smythe came running around from behind a tall mass of plants and flowers and trees, holding a blood-red geranium that still had its roots attached, and another broken bloom trailing limply. “Flower thank you Mamma,” he said proudly to Josephine.
She took the muddy mess gracefully. “No, you say, ‘This flower is for you, Mamma,’ and I say, ‘Thank you.’”
“Weckome.” He ran back on short fat legs to rejoin the battle.
