Page 41 of Introducing Mrs. Collins
Mrs Brooke sat in the kitchen, finishing a large cup of tea and some fruitcake, made the evening before by Mrs Windham, the cook. A mid-morning tea was a ritual they adhered to daily. They had worked together, in this house, for decades now, and such routines had become a necessity. It used to be tea and a gossip, or tea and a joke, or occasionally tea and a cry, but these days, as they were both older, a lot of the dramas of their youth had passed them by. Now, more often, it was tea and an easy silence.
Mrs Brooke dabbed the crumbs from her mouth and rose slowly. ‘Well, I had better get on. Wash day! Where is Sally?’
‘She’s just finishing sweeping.’
Sally was the housemaid, but her routine would be a little different today. Laundry day, every two weeks, was a substantial chore within the household, and all the staff pitched in.
‘Well, I’ll get started. I’ll bring the first pile down after I’ve taken the master his toast,’ said Mrs Brooke.
Mrs Windham chuckled. ‘Mood he’s been in, he’ll praise God for the best butter he has ever tasted. High as a kite these last weeks.’
Mrs Brooke grinned. ‘Make the most of it. Good to have a happy house.’
She deposited Mr Collins’s toast in the study and, glancing through a window, noticed Mrs Collins in the garden. Next, the housekeeper went upstairs to the master bedroom to gatherup the sheets to launder. As she pulled the blankets off the bed, Brooke saw a watery reddish-brown stain on the bedsheet. She let out a small, ‘Oh,’ before pulling the sheet off the bed quickly and taking it down to the washroom. She dumped it unceremoniously in the large tub, then stood there for a minute, considering what to do.
‘Bess!’ she called out, and she heard the cook tutting, drying her hands and coming to her.
‘What?’
Mrs Brooke said nothing but held up the stained patch for her to see.
Mrs Windham looked at it, frowning. Then her expression changing to worry. ‘How far gone is she now?’
‘Coming up on three months,’ replied Mrs Brooke. She had been keeping track, almost as keenly as Charlotte had.
‘You should go and speak with her,’ said Mrs Windham. ‘She’ll be worried, it being her first.’
Mrs Brooke nodded. She put down the sheets and made her way out to the garden. Charlotte was kneeling, performing some end-of-summer pruning and seeming, from this angle, as serene as she had on previous days.
‘Mrs Collins, I have gathered the sheets for washing.’
‘Thank you, Brooke,’ replied Charlotte, smiling politely but not looking at her, still leaning over her plants.
Brooke did not know what to say. Obviously, she could not be explicit. She stood but remained conspicuously unmoving. She was about to leave when Charlotte turned to her.
‘I had a little bleeding last night; you probably saw.’ Her voice was tight. ‘But none today, so I think all will be well. I do not feel anything different. I am sure all will be well.’
But now that Mrs Brooke could see Charlotte properly, she saw that her mistress did not seem as calm as her words implied. Her face was quite pale and blank, but her eyes were busy, darting.
‘Perhaps you ought to have an easy day today, madam. Inside? I could bring you something to eat and light a fire?’
Charlotte nodded limply. She removed her gloves and, placing her pruning shears on the ground, walked calmly, rather primly, indoors.
Mrs Brooke treated her as tenderly as she could. She had seen enough pregnancies in her time to know that Charlotte was quite right – all might yet be well, for blood can come and go sometimes.
Brooke had seen the dried blood of monthly courses on the clothes and sheets of three different mistresses and their daughters. She had seen blood in chamber pots and blood coughed into handkerchiefs. She had seen blood on the sheets after wedding nights and blood let by a physician. Her previous mistress had borne four babies, but only three had lived. So Brooke had come to know the blood of childbirth and the blood of loss.
Not for the first time, she considered how much a woman could withstand in the natural course of her life, and how much of that life was stained with red. She had not been on the battlefield and seen the wounds of soldiers, but what she had seen in the bedroom of this very house could, she thought, rival any man at war.
The next night, Charlotte woke up and found herself wet. It was in the early hours of the morning, and Collins lay asleep beside her. As carefully as she could, she crept out of bed, trying not to wake him, holding up her heavy damp nightgown so it did not drag. As her eyes adjusted to the little light peeping through the curtains, she was able to see the shade of what had saturated her nightgown. It was much darker, and more in abundance, than the previous night.
She did not know what to do. She stood, paralysed, until the tears came to her. She tried not to make a sound, endeavouring to dampen her sobs; she did not feel ready to contend with her husband in this moment. She wished her mother were here.
She wrapped an extra gown around her bottom half and carefully left the room, closing the door quietly, and made her way to the staircase that led to Brooke’s door. She did not feel capable of walking up any stairs. She stood at the bottom, feeling utterly desperate. The household was asleep and, although she urgently needed help, she did not want the attention of all.
She called up the stairs, in a voice she knew, even as she spoke, would be too quiet, ‘Brooke? Mrs Brooke?’ She was sure she would not be heard.
And yet, in what that struck Charlotte as nothing short of a miracle, Brooke opened her door almost immediately, appearing before her fully clothed and carrying a candle. She took in Charlotte’s tear-stained face and state of undress and hurried down her small staircase to her.
