“Lucy?” He tried to make his voice urgent, but to him it just sounded like terror. “Lucy?”
Her face was pasty; her lips, bloodless. She wasn’t exactly unconscious, but she wasn’t responsive, either.
“What is wrong with her?”
The midwife hurried to the foot of the bed and looked under the covers. She gasped, and when she looked up, her face was nearly as pale as Lucy’s.
Gregory looked down, just in time to see a crimson stain seeping along the bedsheet.
“Get me more towels,” the midwife snapped, and Gregory did not think twice before doing her bidding.
“I’ll need more than this,” she said grimly. She shoved several under Lucy’s hips. “Go, go!”
“I’ll go,” Hyacinth said. “You stay.”
She dashed out to the hall, leaving Gregory standing at the midwife’s side, feeling helpless and incompetent. What kind of man stood still while his wife bled?
But he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to do anything except hand the towels to the midwife, who was jamming them against Lucy with brutal force.
He opened his mouth to say . . . something. He might have got a word out. He wasn’t sure. It might have just been a sound, an awful, terrified sound that burst up from deep within him.
“Where are the towels?” the midwife demanded.
Gregory nodded and ran into the hall, relieved to be given a task. “Hyacinth! Hya—”
Lucy screamed.
“Oh my God.” Gregory swayed, holding the frame of the door for support. It wasn’t the blood; he could handle the blood. It was the scream. He had never heard a human being make such a sound.
“What are you doing to her?” he asked. His voice was shaky as he pushed himself away from the wall. It was hard to watch, and even harder to hear, but maybe he could hold Lucy’s hand.
“I’m manipulating her belly,” the midwife grunted. She pressed down hard, then squeezed. Lucy let out another scream and nearly took off Gregory’s fingers.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said. “You’re pushing out her blood. She can’t lose—”
“You’ll have to trust me,” the midwife said curtly. “I have seen this before. More times than I care to count.”
Gregory felt his lips form the question—Did they live? But he didn’t ask it. The midwife’s face was far too grim. He didn’t want to know the answer.
By now Lucy’s screams had disintegrated into moans, but somehow this was even worse. Her breath was fast and shallow, her eyes squeezed shut against the pain of the midwife’s jabs. “Please, make her stop,” she whimpered.
Gregory looked frantically at the midwife. She was now using both hands, one reaching up—
“Oh, God.” He turned back. He couldn’t watch. “You have to let her help you,” he said to Lucy.
“I have the towels!” Hyacinth said, bursting into the room. She stopped short, staring at Lucy. “Oh my God.” Her voice wavered. “Gregory?”
“Shut up.” He didn’t want to hear his sister. He didn’t want to talk to her, he didn’t want to answer her questions. He didn’t know. For the love of God, couldn’t she see that he didn’t know what was happening?
And to force him to admit that out loud would have been the cruelest sort of torture.
“It hurts,” Lucy whimpered. “It hurts.”
“I know. I know. If I could do it for you, I would. I swear to you.” He clutched her hand in both of his, willing some of his own strength to pass into her. Her grip was growing feeble, tightening only when the midwife made a particularly vigorous movement.
And then Lucy’s hand went slack.
Gregory stopped breathing. He looked over at the midwife in horror. She was still standing at the base of the bed, her face a mask of grim determination as she worked. Then she stopped, her eyes narrowing as she took a step back. She didn’t say anything.
Hyacinth stood frozen, the towels still stacked up in her arms. “What . . . what . . .” But her voice wasn’t even a whisper, lacking the strength to complete her thought.
The midwife reached a hand out, touching the bloodied bed near Lucy. “I think . . . that’s all,” she said.
Gregory looked down at his wife, who lay terrifyingly still. Then he turned back to the midwife. He could see her chest rise and fall, taking in all the great gulps of air she hadn’t allowed herself while she was working on Lucy.
“What do you mean,” he asked, barely able to force the words across his lips, “ ‘that’s all’?”
“The bleeding’s done.”
Gregory turned slowly back to Lucy. The bleeding was done. What did that mean? Didn’t all bleeding stop . . . eventually?
Why was the midwife just standing there? Shouldn’t she be doing something? Shouldn’t he be doing something? Or was Lucy—
He turned back to the midwife, his anguish palpable.
“She’s not dead,” the midwife said quickly. “At least I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” he echoed, his voice rising in volume.
The midwife staggered forward. She was covered with blood, and she looked exhausted, but Gregory didn’t give a sodding damn if she was ready to drop. “Help her,” he demanded.
The midwife took Lucy’s wrist and felt for a pulse. She gave him a quick nod when she found one, but then she said, “I’ve done everything I can.”
“No,” Gregory said, because he refused to believe that this was it. There was always something one could do. “No,” he said again. “No!”
“Gregory,” Hyacinth said, touching his arm.
He shook her off. “Do something,” he said, taking a menacing step toward the midwife. “You have to do something.”
“She’s lost a great deal of blood,” the midwife said, sagging back against the wall. “We can only wait. I have no way of knowing which way she’ll go. Some women recover. Others . . .” Her voice trailed off. It might have been because she didn’t want to say it. Or it might have been the expression on Gregory’s face.
Gregory swallowed. He didn’t have much of a temper; he’d always been a reasonable man. But the urge to lash out, to scream or beat the walls, to find some way to gather up all that blood and push it back into her . . .
He could barely breathe against the force of it.
Hyacinth moved quietly to his side. Her hand found his, and without thinking he entwined his fingers in hers. He waited for her to say something like: She’s going to be fine. Or: All will be well, just have faith.
But she didn’t. This was Hyacinth, and she never lied. But she was here. Thank God she was here.
She squeezed his hand, and he knew she would stay however long he needed her.
He blinked at the midwife, trying to find his voice. “What if—” No. “What when,” he said haltingly. “What do we do when she wakes up?”
The midwife looked at Hyacinth first, which for some reason irritated him. “She’ll be very weak,” she said.
“But she’ll be all right?” he asked, practically jumping on top of her words.
The midwife looked at him with an awful expression. It was something bordering on pity. With sorrow. And resignation. “It’s hard to say,” she finally said.
Gregory searched her face, desperate for something that wasn’t a platitude or half answer. “What the devil does that mean?”
The midwife looked somewhere that wasn’t quite his eyes. “There could be an infection. It happens frequently in cases like this.”
“Why?”
The midwife blinked.
“Why?” he practically roared. Hyacinth’s hand tightened around his.
“I don’t know.” The midwife backed up a step. “It just does.”
Gregory turned back to Lucy, unable to look at the midwife any longer. She was covered in blood—Lucy’s blood—and maybe this wasn’t her fault—maybe it wasn’t anyone’s fault—but he couldn’t bear to look at her for another moment.
“Dr. Jarvis must return,” he said in a low voice, picking up Lucy’s limp hand.
“I will see to it,” Hyacinth said. “And I will have someone come for the sheets.”
Gregory did not look up.
“I will be going now as well,” the midwife said.
He did not reply. He heard feet moving along the floor, followed by the gentle click of the door closing, but he kept his gaze on Lucy’s face the whole time.
“Lucy,” he whispered, trying to force his voice into a teasing tone. “La la la Lucy.” It was a silly refrain, one their daughter Hermione had made up when she was four. “La la la Lucy.”
He searched her face. Did she just smile? He thought he saw her expression change a touch.
“La la la Lucy.” His voice wobbled, but he kept it up. “La la la Lucy.”
He felt like an idiot. He sounded like an idiot, but he had no idea what else to say. Normally, he was never at a loss for words. Certainly not with Lucy. But now . . . what did one say at such a time?
So he sat there. He sat there for what felt like hours. He sat there and tried to remember to breathe. He sat there and covered his mouth every time he felt a huge choking sob coming on, because he didn’t want her to hear it. He sat there and tried desperately not to think about what his life might be without her.
She had been his entire world. Then they had children, and she was no longer everything to him, but still, she was at the center of it all. The sun. His sun, around which everything important revolved.
Lucy. She was the girl he hadn’t realized he adored until it was almost too late. She was so perfect, so utterly his other half that he had almost overlooked her. He’d been waiting for a love fraught with passion and drama; it hadn’t even occurred to him that true love might be something that was utterly comfortable and just plain easy.
With Lucy he could sit for hours and not say a word. Or they could chatter like magpies. He could say something stupid and not care. He could make love to her all night or go several weeks spending his nights simply snuggled up to next to her.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered because they both knew.
“I can’t do it without you,” he blurted out. Bloody hell, he went an hour without speaking and this was the first thing he said? “I mean, I can, because I would have to, but it’ll be awful, and honestly, I won’t do such a good job. I’m a good father, but only because you are such a good mother.”
If she died . . .
He shut his eyes tightly, trying to banish the thought. He’d been trying so hard to keep those three words from his mind.
Three words. “Three words” was supposed to mean I love you. Not—
He took a deep, shuddering breath. He had to stop thinking this way.
The window had been cracked open to allow a slight breeze, and Gregory heard a joyful shriek from outside. One of his children—one of the boys from the sound of it. It was sunny, and he imagined they were playing some sort of racing game on the lawn.
Lucy loved to watch them run about outside. She loved to run with them, too, even when she was so pregnant that she moved like a duck.
“Lucy,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.
“They need you more,” he choked out, shifting his position so that he could hold her hand in both of his. “The children. They need you more. I know you know that. You would never say it, but you know it. And I need you. I think you know that, too.”
But she didn’t reply. She didn’t move.
But she breathed. At least, thank God, she breathed.
“Father?”
Gregory started at the voice of his eldest child, and he quickly turned away, desperate for a moment to compose himself.
“I went to see the babies,” Katharine said as she entered the room. “Aunt Hyacinth said I could.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“They’re very sweet,” Katharine said. “The babies, I mean. Not Aunt Hyacinth.”
To his utter shock, Gregory felt himself smile. “No,” he said, “no one would call Aunt Hyacinth sweet.”
“But I do love her,” Katharine said quickly.
“I know,” he replied, finally turning to look at her. Ever loyal, his Katharine was. “I do, too.”
Katharine took a few steps forward, pausing near the foot of the bed. “Why is Mama still sleeping?”
He swallowed. “Well, she’s very tired, pet. It takes a great deal of energy to have a baby. Double for two.”
Katharine nodded solemnly, but he wasn’t sure if she believed him. She was looking at her mother with a furrowed brow—not quite concerned, but very, very curious. “She’s pale,” she finally said.
“Do you think so?” Gregory responded.
“She’s white as a sheet.”
His opinion precisely, but he was trying not to sound worried, so he merely said, “Perhaps a little more pale than usual.”
Katharine regarded him for a moment, then took a seat in the chair next to him. She sat straight, her hands folded neatly in her lap, and Gregory could not help marveling at the miracle of her. Almost twelve years ago Katharine Hazel Bridgerton had entered this world, and he had become a father. It was, he had realized the instant she had been put into his arms, his one true vocation. He was a younger son; he was not going to hold a title, and he was not suited for the military or the clergy. His place in life was to be a gentleman farmer.
And a father.
When he’d looked down at baby Katharine, her eyes still that dark baby gray that all of his children had had when they were tiny, he knew. Why he was here, what he was meant for . . . that was when he knew. He existed to shepherd this miraculous little creature to adulthood, to protect her and keep her well.
He adored all of his children, but he would always have a special bond with Katharine, because she was the one who had taught him who he was meant to be.
“The others want to see her,” she said. She was looking down, watching her right foot as she kicked it back and forth.
“She still needs her rest, pet.”
“I know.”
Gregory waited for more. She wasn’t saying what she was really thinking. He had a feeling that it was Katharine who wanted to see her mother. She wanted to sit on the side of the bed and laugh and giggle and then explain every last nuance of the nature walk she’d undertaken with her governess.
The others—the littler ones—were probably oblivious.
But Katharine had always been incredibly close to Lucy. They were like two peas in a pod. They looked nothing alike; Katharine was remarkably like her namesake, Gregory’s sister-in-law, the current Viscountess Bridgerton. It made absolutely no sense, as theirs was not a blood connection, but both Katharines had the same dark hair and oval face. The eyes were not the same color, but the shape was identical.
On the inside, however, Katharine—his Katharine—was just like Lucy. She craved order. She needed to see the pattern in things. If she were able to tell her mother about yesterday’s nature walk, she would have started with which flowers they’d seen. She would not have remembered all of them, but she would definitely have known how many there had been of each color. And Gregory would not be surprised if the governess came to him later and said that Katharine had insisted they go for an extra mile so that the “pinks” caught up with the “yellows.”
Fairness in all things, that was his Katharine.
“Mimsy says the babies are to be named after Aunt Eloise and Aunt Francesca,” Katharine said, after kicking her foot back and forth thirty-two times.
(He’d counted. Gregory could not believe he’d counted. He was growing more like Lucy every day.)
“As usual,” he replied, “Mimsy is correct.” Mimsy was the children’s nanny and nurse, and a candidate for sainthood if he’d ever met one.
“She did not know what their middle names might be.”
Gregory frowned. “I don’t think we got
’round to deciding upon that.”
Katharine looked at him with an unsettlingly direct gaze. “Before Mama needed her nap?”
“Er, yes,” Gregory replied, his gaze sliding from hers. He was not proud that he’d looked away, but it was his only choice if he wanted to keep from crying in front of his child.
“I think one of them ought to be named Hyacinth,” Katharine announced.
He nodded. “Eloise Hyacinth or Francesca Hyacinth?”
Katharine’s lips pressed together in thought, then she said, rather firmly, “Francesca Hyacinth. It has a lovely ring to it. Although . . .”
Gregory waited for her to finish her thought, and when she did not he prompted, “Although . . . ?”
“It is a little flowery.”
“I’m not certain how one can avoid that with a name like Hyacinth.”
“True,” Katharine said thoughtfully, “but what if she does not turn out to be sweet and delicate?”
“Like your Aunt Hyacinth?” he murmured. Some things really did beg to be said.
“She is rather fierce,” Katharine said, without an ounce of sarcasm.
“Fierce or fearsome?”
“Oh, only fierce. Aunt Hyacinth is not at all fearsome.”
“Don’t tell her that.”
Katharine blinked with incomprehension. “You think she wants to be fearsome?”
“And fierce.”
“How odd,” she murmured. Then she looked up with especially bright eyes. “I think Aunt Hyacinth is going to love having a baby named after her.”
Gregory felt himself smile. A real one, not something conjured to make his child feel safe. “Yes,” he said quietly, “she will.”
“She probably thought she wasn’t going to get one,” Katharine continued, “since you and Mama were going in order. We all knew it would be Eloise for a girl.”
“And who would have expected twins?”
“Even so,” Katharine said, “there is Aunt Francesca to consider. Mama would have had to have had triplets for one to be named after Aunt Hyacinth.”
Triplets. Gregory was not a Catholic, but it was difficult to suppress the urge to cross himself.
“And they would have all had to have been girls,” Katharine added, “which does seem to be a mathematical improbability.”