Page 50 of The Secret Word
Chris lifted his head so that he could meet the eyes of his beloved. “I beg your pardon?”
“The midwife believes I am having twins. It is why I am so big. She is certain she can feel more than one baby.”
“Good lord,” said Chris, putting his face back on her abdomen. “You don’t half do things properly, my love.” He grinned at her. “Let’s not tell your father. With any luck, he’ll arrive when it is all over and our two children are with us. Two children! I can hardly believe it. You are a miracle, my love.”
Chapter Twenty
Aunt Fern cameto stay a week later. She announced that Clem needed a woman relative with her through the ordeal to come. Clem, who was trying not to think about the ordeal to come, did her best to be grateful, and when her father turned up two days later, she had cause to be.
“The two of them keep one another busy,” she reported to Chris, when he came back up to the house after a morning in the fields helping with the plowing. “Which is just as well, for I shall kill the next person who asks how I am.”
“And how are you, my love?” Chris asked. She threw her fan at him, and he ducked.
“Hot, uncomfortable, and bad-tempered,” she replied. She had retired to their bedchamber, which was on the west side of the house, and was sitting in the chill breeze from the window, but even the most comfortable chair Chris had been able to find was not comfortable for long when one was approximately the size of a whale, and provided with an internal heat source that made one drip with perspiration even in February, when the day was sunny.
“Shall I massage your feet?” he offered.
Bless the dear man.Sympathy was all very well, but a foot massage was on another plane altogether. She didn’t bother with words but just held up one foot, and he sat down on her footstool and put both feet in his lap.
“No stockings,” he noted. “Too hot?”
Clem sighed. “I shall have to put them on again before I go downstairs,” she acknowledged.
“I don’t see why. I won’t tell if you don’t.”
True enough. Her legs would not show under her gown, anyway. She could wear her lightest slippers and no stockings. She might not be cool, but at least it might help to keep her from feeling so hot!
“The midwife says it is worse for those who carry through July and August,” she commented. “I cannot imagine!” She leaned her head back against her chair and closed her eyes while Chris’s clever fingers pressed and rubbed, until her poor aching feet relaxed and she wanted to purr like a cat.
She must have fallen asleep, for the angle of the sun had changed when she was woken by a sudden cramping in her abdomen that faded even as she became fully aware. She was alone in the room, with a pillow under her head and a light shawl covering her feet on the footstool.
The door to the room opened, and Chris entered with a tray. “You are awake,” he observed.
“How long did I sleep?” she asked.
“About an hour. I went down to get you a tea tray, and to check on your father and aunt. They are plotting a trip to Reading tomorrow. Your father wants to see if the man who sold him those grapes you enjoyed has any more, and Aunt Fern thinks you might be short of what she calls ‘essential nursery supplies’.”
“I must have more baby clouts and frocks than any mother in the history of England,” Clem said. “Help me sit up, darling. I would love a cup of tea.”
Chris offered her his arm, helped her rearrange herself in her chair, poured her tea, and put butter and jam on one of the drop scones that the kitchen had sent up.
While she sipped her tea, she felt another cramp and froze for a moment.
“Is something wrong?” Chris asked. “What is it?”
He was watching her like a hawk. They all were, including Martha and even the least of the maids. If she mentioned the cramp, the whole house would be in turmoil. “Nothing,” she said.
But an hour later she had to admit, if only to herself, that it wasn’t nothing, and an hour after that, she asked Chris to send for the midwife, but not to say anything yet to Father and Aunt Fern. “Not until I know that I am definitely in labor,” she said.
*
Chris sent afootman, and went himself to let their two guests know neither he nor Clem would be at dinner. “Clem is a little tired, and I plan to sit with her,” he said. True enough. But the midwife turned him out of the bedchamber that had been set up as a birthing room. She said he didn’t need to be there while she examined Clem. Aunt Fern found him in the hall outside the birthing room door when she came up to get a shawl, and leapt to the correct conclusion.
“Clem is having her babies!” she said.
Chris cast an anxious glance toward the stairs. “Ssshhh,” he said. “Clem does not want her father making a fuss.”
Aunt Fern narrowed her eyes and glared at Chris. “Then go downstairs and keep Mr. Wright busy. This is not an occasion for men.”
