Page 43 of The Governess and the Brooding Duke
She had to remember why she was here. It was the children. It was...
Stability? And where is that? Every day here has been painful and confusing. There is nothing stable here. Perhaps you should leave.
No. She was not going to leave. Because that would be admitting defeat.
She would not do that. She was stronger than this. Stronger than errant feelings that meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Tomorrow, she would take the children out for more botany. She would do her job. She would be the person that she had chosen to be.
She did not allow men to decide. All that mattered was what she chose. She was in control.
She had to remember that.
Chapter Nine
She and Mrs Brown had worked out a system for dealing with the absent wet nurse, and the older woman had made it clear she was looking for a replacement so they could release the current girl from her position.
And, until today, the responsibility of the child had yet to fall to Mary.
But as she was readying to move to the next lesson with the children, she could hear the babe begin to cry.
And she was back in Scotland. Eight years ago.
She was exhausted, the life draining from her, as she looked up at the midwife who held a tiny, silent babe in her arms.
Mary had never been so tired in her life. Her whole body was like broken glass. Her heart, and outward. The indignity of all she had suffered, all she had not asked to suffer, from when she had first been forced to the ground by the man who had harmed her, to carrying the babe, and then nature wrenching the child from her body in such a grotesque and terrifying way, and she...a child who had no knowledge of any of it.
Then the babe gave a cry, and Penny took him. A flurry of movement happened around her, words that began to grow frayed at the edges until she could no longer hear. Until she was cold and her vision began to go dark...
Michael and Elizabeth’s mother had died giving birth.
Mary was brought back to the present, to the child before her.
She had nearly lost her life, she understood that now. She had not fully understood then, for she had understood nothing that had happened to her.
She had made a study of it since. In an attempt to turn the bloody horror of that day into something scientific in nature, something she could comprehend.
Once she had learned to read, she had consumed information as if it were nourishment and she was a starving child. In many ways, she was.
In the library at school there were scientific texts on the highest shelves which had explained procreation between men and women, and childbirth. She had read each one five times. Piecing together the violence of what had happened to her that afternoon in the village with her quickening, and the birth after.
She had not understood any of it at the time.
Giving herself the chance to understand in very basic ways what had happened, and why, had given her the ability to hold it at a distance, examine it.
But the crying baby made her think of her son.
No. That baby was not her son.
Her son was happy. He was well cared for. He would be the next leader of Clan McKenzie. He was loved fiercely by the parents who had taken him in as their own.
Though she knew Penny had intended to tell him, when the time was right, that another woman had given birth to him...
Those hours she’d spent giving birth to him did not make a lifetime.
He was not her son, not truly. And yet he was a child born of her body, and so he would never not have a tie to her. A connection.
It would never be that easy.
