Page 98 of All I Want for Christmas

‘How’s it going with the mystery woman?’

‘She’s becoming slowly less mysterious.’

‘Yeah? Tell me,’ he said, taking another deep glug of his wine; almost half the glass.

Darcy sighed, weary. Did he really want to know? ‘Well, I know now that she went to live with the Madsens from 1915, so I’ve been doing a deep dive through the family’s photographs and diaries, which is at least giving me some insight into her teenage years with them.’ To her ongoing frustration, there was no sign Lilja had kept a diary herself. It was Lotte, as her best friend and companion, who was proving to be the best source of information on her movements and whereabouts.

Darcy looked at Aksel thoughtfully. ‘Actually, you might be able to shed some light on something for me.’

‘Again?’ he smiled. ‘I’m going to start billing for consultancy.’

She laughed, although she wasn’t actually sure he was joking. ‘So it appears my mystery woman had a baby boy in August 1919, and there are alotof medical bills pre-andpost-partum. They seemed to be getting through huge quantities of potassium bromide...What would that be for?’

‘Well, that was the standard protocol for treating epilepsy back then.’

‘Really?’ she asked interestedly.

‘Yes. It had other applications too, of course. You’ve probably heard the British Army famously gave their troops bromide tea to calm sexual excitement on the front line? Everyone knows about that.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘But it was the principal treatment for epilepsy till the 1910s, 1920s. We still use it now to treat epilepsy in dogs.’

‘Right,’ she murmured, thinking hard.

‘Didn’t you say she drowned? Perhaps that’s how it happened? She had a seizure in the bath?’

‘No, it wasn’t her who was epileptic.’ Darcy shook her head. ‘I think it was the baby.’

Aksel winced. ‘Ah.’

‘Yeah, seems it was pretty bad. There were all these prescriptions that started after the birth and suddenly stopped at exactly the same time the baby died, at seven months old.’

‘How sad.’

‘I think it was devastating for her. The birth seems to have been traumatic anyway. I saw something in one of the entries referring to eclampsia.’

‘Oh, well, that explains it. Eclampsia is very dangerous. Leads to all sorts of complications for mother and baby. She likely went into premature labour...Sounds like she was lucky to survive.’ He took another sip of his wine.

‘I’m not sure if lucky is a word I’d apply to her, sadly,’ Darcy frowned. ‘So why do some women get it and others don’t?’

‘Eclampsia?’ He shrugged. ‘There are a number of risk factors – diabetes, obesity, twin pregnancies, age—’

‘Age?’

‘Yes, if you’re sitting at the extremes for child-bearing years, it’s more likely.’

‘Such as? What’s the range?’

He considered. ‘Younger than seventeen. Older than thirty-five—’

‘She would have been very young. I don’t know her exact age, but going by photographs at the time and her being a contemporary of Lotte, I’m estimating that she was about fourteen.’

Aksel winced again. ‘Mm. Adolescent pregnancies can be high risk. Depending on the individual, the body just isn’t ready and may not be fully developed. The pelvis can be too small...Pregnancy is a massive strain on all the organs and systems and effectively a child’s body can’t cope with it.’

Darcy sat back, seeing how one event had triggered a chain of disasters, each connecting to another: adolescent pregnancy. Eclampsia. Epilepsy.

A baby dead because it had been born too soon, to a mother too young.

She sighed, dropping her head as she tried to remember Viggo’s calm perspective on Lilja as a child bride:Different times, Darcy.

But it still made her angry.

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