In the end, it was a normal birth. Disappointing, almost. As an artist of the profession, Ortolon rather enjoyed the violent race against death offered by a difficult birth.
“Quite commonplace,” he told his patient.
She looked up at him. It was a familiar picture. Her hair was dark with sweat and plastered to her forehead. She was white with exhaustion, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
But her eyes shone as she looked at the little bundle in her arms, a bruised ugly little lump of humanity who was already suckling with some enthusiasm.
“What will you call the boy?” Ortolon said, washing his hands once again and preparing to leave.
“Call him?”
Lady Henrietta appeared to have lost track of his question as she traced the little whorls of her baby’s ear.
The baby’s father answered. “John,” he said. “His name is John, for the poet, John Donne.”
Naming a child after a poet! What a heathenish idea. Dr. Ortolon was horrified to see that the man’s eyes were shining with tears. He snapped shut his black bag and left as quickly as possible.
46
For Love of Johnny
Henrietta could hear the girls coming all the way down the hallway. Their voices were echoing off the walls, as excited little girls’ voices had a tendency to do. Anabel shrieked with laughter, and then she heard Millie saying, “Now calm down, girls, do. You don’t want to frighten your little brother half to death. He’s only a babe, after all.”
The babe had just drunk so much milk that his little stomach was stretched tight as a drum. He lolled in the crook of her arm, looking as drunk and pleasured as a sailor on leave.
His father strode in from the adjoining dressing room just as Anabel and Josie burst into her chamber. Anabel was an unsteady runner, but what she lacked in stability, she made up in speed. She made it to the rocking chair first.
“Mama!” she shrieked.
“Don’t wake the baby!” Josie scolded, but it was too late.
John Darby opened his eyes and looked around in a dazed sort of way. He had just begun recognizing people’s faces. The girls hung over him, bumping heads as Josie crooned, “Johnny! Johnny! Smile for me! Smile for me!”
So he did, of course. Who could not? There were his two sisters, their faces shining with joy and pride. His belly was full. And his mother was near. He even heard a deep voice saying something or other—and he recognized that voice as well.
He opened his mouth into a joyous, toothless grin—and burped. He kept smiling as a small torrent of milk poured from his mouth.
He was a little surprised when the two faces above him whisked away and the air filled with squealing. But his mama patted him dry.
“It’s just a little bit of spit-up,” she said, and then the person with the deep voice came and picked him up.
John tried to focus his blurry vision, but there was no way a babe could take in the elegance of the man holding him.
“Oh Darby, don’t!” Henrietta said in some anguish. “Not when you’re wearing court dress, darling! You know that—”
“Nonsense!” Darby said, dropping a kiss on his son’s plump little nose. “John just burped, didn’t you? He’s all done with that foolishness now.”
“I doubt it,” his mother observed. “And I’ve been meaning to inform you that this is entirely your fault. No one in my family was given to vomiting on a regular basis.”
“I did!” Anabel shouted, hopping up and down next to the bed.
“You still do!” her sister retorted.
Insulted, Anabel broke into a howl.
Henrietta smiled at her. “Your stomach has been quite settled for the past six months, hasn’t it, Anabel? That problem is in your past.”
“Anabel was well over a year old by the time her stomach settled,” Josie said, demonstrating the sharp intelligence that was already challenging her governess. “That means that Johnny has months and months of this behavior ahead of him. Yuck!”
Simon Darby grinned at his little sister, and turned to his wife. “I should leave,” he said. “The Regent has—”
But at that moment, John felt an uncomfortable pressure in his throat. He blinked and opened his mouth. A strange dry cough emerged.
“Simon!” Henrietta said warningly.
“Oh shit,” John’s father barked.
Out came milk, slightly curdled by now, emerging with the force of a cannonball and stopping only when it encountered a waistcoat embroidered with gold leaves.
His mother was laughing; the girls were screaming; his father was swearing. Milk dripped from a coat lined with silk and trimmed with cherry floss.
John frowned. His stomach felt empty. Hungry. His little brows drew together into a frown and he let out a bellow.
“Don’t you think it’s rather unfair?” Henrietta said.
Darby handed her the child and raised an eyebrow, delicately shaking drops of milk from his lace cuffs. “What’s unfair? The fact that my man just spent forty-five minutes dressing me for court and now must begin from scratch?”
“No. The fact that John clearly inherited both Josie’s voice and Anabel’s weak stomach.”
Her husband bent down and tucked a curl behind her ear. “He has your sweet eyes,” he said, his lips just touching hers.
Henrietta’s heart thumped. “I love you,” she whispered.
Darby ran a finger down her cheek. “Not as much as I love you.”
A Note on What to Expect in
the Toddler Years, Circa 1815
I used to believe that the age of parenting best-sellers began with Dr. Spock. I certainly grew up with the idea that Spock was the greatest expert on children who ever lived. One of the many-times retold tales of my family is the night my father attended an anti–Vietnam War rally and found himself in the same jail cell as the great doctor himself. Family legend has it that my excellent sleeping habits stem from this brief imprisonment, during which my father extracted advice on how to make his baby daughter sleep.
But, in fact, Dr. Spock’s child-rearing books are merely part of a long tradition. As far back as the Renaissance, books advising all sorts of child-rearing practices have gone into multiple editions. Barthélemy Batt’s The Christian Man’s Closet (full of helpful advice for fathers) and Thomas Tryon’s A New Method of Educating Children, or Rules and Directions for the Well Ordering and Governing Them During Their Younger Years, were two early best-sellers in the tradition. Perhaps the best advice of all came from the dissolute second Earl of Rochester, who lived from 1647–1680. “Before I was married,” he reportedly said, “I had six theories about how to bring up children. Now I have six children and no theories!”
And One Final Note,
For those of you who are planning to advise me, with reference to Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, that children do not spit up after the first three months: Anabel’s afflictions are taken from life. My daughter Anna is ample proof that weak stomachs can last well over a year.
Acknowledgments
I am most grateful for the help I received while writing Fool for Love. Frances Drouin and Melissa Lynn Jones answered my desperate queries for historical information with aplomb. Pete Dennett and the Hanne-ford Family Circus, and Tony Usher and the Knutsford Ornithological Society were particularly helpful in response to specific queries.
About the Author
Author of four award-winning romances, Eloisa James is a professor of English literature who lives with her family in New Jersey. All her books must have been written in her sleep, because her days are taken up by caring for two children with advanced degrees in whining, a demanding guinea pig, a smelly frog, and a tumbledown house. Letters from readers provide a great escape! Write Eloisa at
[email protected] or visit her web site at www.eloisajames.com
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
FOOL FOR LOVE. Copyright © 2003 by Eloisa James. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub Edition SEPTEMBER © 2008 ISBN: 9780061798290
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Eloisa James, Fool for Love
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