Page 101 of The Summer Country

“Now?” asked Queenie.

Jenny glanced over her shoulder at the closed door, biting her lip in exaggerated concern. “You know how she is these days. If she says she wants the gown, I’d best have the gown for her. Even if she’s most like to have forgot she wanted it by suppertime. But then again, she might not.”

“Green?” said Queenie.

“Pomona green. You know how particular she gets. If the seam shows, I’ll never hear the end of it. Didn’t we use the last of the Pomona green floss sewing the trim on her pelisse?”

“Oh no,” said Queenie with feeling. She was so young and eager that Jenny almost felt bad about gulling her.

“Never you mind,” said Jenny quickly. “You sit with her. I’ll go to Harrow. Mrs. Boland has a dress of the same color. I’ll wager Nanny Grigg will have the right shade in her sewing box.”

“But it’s so far and so late—it will be past dark by the time you get back!”

“When has that ever bothered anyone?” Jenny tried to sound jaunty, but it was ruined by her wince as another pain struck. At the alarm on Queenie’s face, she said, white-lipped, “Don’t you worry. This baby’s not coming yet. All the same, though, maybe send to Peverills and see if they’ve the thread there? There might be some left from the old mistress. Paris!” She snagged one of the boys who ran errands and delivered messages. “Go to Peverills and ask Mr. Fenty’s groom London to see if they’ve any Pomona green silk floss. Tell him the mistress wants it without delay.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Paris and London had been born in the same year, victims of her father’s fancy to name all the children after cities.

What would Charles name their child? Jenny wondered, and then dragged her mind back to the present, to Queenie holding tight to her arm.

“Maybe you should go to Nanny Bell instead of Harrow?”

“Don’t be foolish; it’s not that far away. And if I’m taken there, well, Nanny Grigg’s as skilled as Nanny Bell. Only don’t let her hear you say that.” Jenny forced a smile. “Don’t you worry about me, Queenie. Just go sit by our mistress and make sure she’s not alone when she wakes.”

The sun was already setting when she set off down the road in the direction of Harrow, just far enough to confound anyone watching. She didn’t, at least, have to worry about the spyglasses; her mistress was too fuddled to use them, and Master Robert was away at what he said was a militia meeting but Jenny knew to be a tryst with his mistress in Bridgetown.

The cane had been felled months ago; the first gang had finished turning the ground and had just begun holing the cane, breaking the fields into large squares, with two young plants in each. Jenny missed the protection of the mature cane, those long fronds shielding her.

The pains were stronger now. She found herself sinking to her knees in the newly turned earth, breathing in the scent of dirt and manure as she struggled not to cry out. She forced herself up to her feet, taking advantage of the space between pains to get as far as she could as fast as she could, her shoes sinking into the soft earth, stumbling and catching herself again, pausing again, nails biting into her fists, her body feeling as though it were breaking apart.

Dimly, she was aware that there was dirt on her face and knees. In between pains, she felt herself again, ashamed of how she gave in to the agony, let it turn her into an animal, stripping her of reason and dignity. She’d heard Mary Anne shouting and crying, had seen her frenzied writhing. How had she not realized it would come to her too?

Because she’d thought herself stronger. But she wasn’t strong, not now, and the pains were coming closer now, closer and harder.

It felt like years before she made it to the mill, a lantern shining through the ruined door. She’d wanted to greet them with dignity, but the pain hit again, rendering her insensible, and she was only aware of arms grasping her forearms, holding her up, arms around her. She shook them off; she hurt, she hurt, to be touched only made it worse. But then the pain was past and it was Charles there, Charles frantic with worry, chafing her hands, her wrists, hugging her as close as he dared, helping her over the threshold, to where a makeshift bed had been prepared with blankets upon blankets. Water boiled over a campfire, and beside it stood a strange woman with Jonathan Fenty’s red-gold hair tucked up underneath a kerchief and some of his brisk and businesslike manner.

Jenny gave herself into the strange woman’s hands, hiding her face as another pain took her, hating anyone to see her like this, hating Charles to see her like this.

“—nothing to worry about,” she could hear the woman saying to Charles. “It takes all women like this.”

“I don’t like this,” Jenny managed.

She heard an earthy chuckle and felt a brisk pat on her side. “My lady, nobody does. It’s the curse of Eve and we all have to bear it.”

Jenny had some choice thoughts about that, but the pain was on her again and there was nothing but the rending of her body, light dancing crazily at the corners of her eyes, the crackling of the fire subsumed under her own moans. She tried to stop the cries, to stop herself, but they came all the same.

“Don’t fight it,” the red-haired woman said, and Jenny snarled at her, actually snarled, baring her teeth, and the woman poked at her stomach and did something undignified to her legs and told Charles to hold her hand or get her some water but at any rate to do something useful and not just stand there blocking her light.

“Push,” the woman told her, and then again, more loudly. “Push. Now.”

Charles was holding her hand and murmuring something to her, but Jenny didn’t hear it, she was crying and struggling and pushing, panting with the effort, and then there was a cry that wasn’t her own, a cry of triumph from the midwife.

“Now! Again!”

With one last, gasping, panting push, Jenny felt the tension release, and before she could quite realize that it had happened, that it had truly happened, the midwife was holding up a red and wrinkled creature covered in slime and blood.

The midwife cut the cord and expertly wrapped the baby in a blanket, delivering it into Charles’s arms. “A girl,” she said. “Hold her while I deliver the afterbirth.”

Jenny craned her neck, trying to see her child, irrationally anxious that Charles should be holding her—what if he took her away?