A Place Called Bliss (4 page)

S
ophia awoke in her own bed and in more pain than she could have imagined. If she could have blinked out into unconsciousness again, she would have gladly. How odd it was to listen to a piercing shriek and know it to be yours, yet have the sensation it was a thing apart, with a mind of its own.

Hugh’s face with its thin nose, high forehead, and deepset eyes, hung over the bed with an expression that frightened her. Grim, that’s what it was. Was she in that much danger? Or—heaven forbid—was Hugh angry?

“Hush now,” he was saying firmly. “If you cooperate, it will soon be over and you’ll have our son in your arms.”

Cooperate? How could she even listen when searing pain was tearing at her loins and gouging at her back? Hazily she felt Kezzie’s hand on her forehead but had no time to wonder about Mary and her condition except to think
Is this what it’s all been about?
and to dimly regret she hadn’t been concerned for poor Mary from the beginning of her labor.

Across her vision floated the bulbous nose and ruddy complexioned face of the ship’s doctor. Was it . . . could it be . . . or
was it distortion of the light . . . but was that a
drop
on the end of the vein-marked nose? Surely this was a nightmare from which she would soon awaken!

“When is the child due?” the gravelly voice was asking.

“We were told we had plenty of time to make land,” Hugh explained shortly, obviously as repelled as was Sophia and yet caught in their need of his services. “But, as you know, we’re considerably overdue on that. I’d say it’s her time or near it.”

Hugh swung his inquiring gaze to Kezzie, who nodded her affirmation.

“What was she going down there for, anyway?” the doctor growled.

“On an errand of mercy, I believe,” Hugh spoke sharply. “She was concerned—we’re all concerned—for Mary Morrison. What seems to be the trouble down there, Doctor?”

“No trouble,” the man reported quickly. “Woman just keeps going to sleep, won’t work at the job properly. If she’d only cooperate—”

Kezzie’s quivering, indrawn breath was enough for her Mr. Hugh. “When we’re done here, Doctor, I want you to get back down there and take care of that situation. Understood?”

Sophia, weary of the talk, thought wildly,
Let the wretch get on down there and keep his hands off me and my child
.

Unspoken in words, the thought was expressed by a wild shriek that was half despair, half fury. Fury for Hugh, for Mary, for herself, and especially for the bumbling man of medicine whose bloated face hung over her and whose hot hands fumbled at her body.

“Get him out of here!” she hissed, threshing her arms and legs and remembering Kezzie’s report of the man’s intimate examination of the inert Mary.

“Hush now,” Hugh said again, soothingly.

“I’ll not!” And Sophia’s voiced objections grew in vigor and clarity. “Kezzie shall care for me! Get that creature away from me!”

“Sophia,” Hugh said, his lips only inches from her ear, “Kezzie has the responsibility of Mary—”

“Well, let this idiot get below to Mary! I want none of him. Kezzie—”

“I’m here, Missy.” Kezzie’s instant response brought the first quiet to Sophia’s wild eyes and arching back. “It’ll go better, Mrs. Hugh, and faster, if you’ll just not fight it. Now—that’s it . . . relax between times. . . .”

Hugh was handing the doctor his bag and turning him toward the door, speaking to him in a low voice, nodding toward the bed, taking out his watch and looking at it, and eventually turning back to the bed.

“This is no place for you, Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie said. “We’ll get along fine, now.”

“But Mary,” Hugh said with concern. “You’ll need to be with Mary.”

“She has Angus, and he’ll send for me if I’m wanted. If you’ll step in here occasionally, Mr. Hugh, I’ll take a run doon there. Now ge’ along wi’ ye!” Kezzie was in charge of her Mr. Hugh, as she had been when he was a small child. That it brought relief to him seemed obvious; Hugh took a deep breath, smiled at his old nurse gratefully, and made his way to the bar and the slow passing of time throughout a long evening and into the night.

Kezzie battled as fiercely as did Sophia. Having heard her beloved Mr. Hugh’s muttered words to his wife and knowing how much having a child of his own meant to him, she gave herself, as always, to fulfilling his wishes.
He should have his child, even at the cost of her own daughter’s pain and suffering, if need be.
It was a wrenching thought, but not arguable; her years of service and accountability to the Galloway family were part of her very fiber.

But hasty trip after hasty trip to the dark hold below brought Kezzie, white-faced and trembling, back to her mistress’s side. Sophia was resting more comfortably between pains, due to the laudanum Hugh had asked of the doctor.

“Take some of it to Mary,” Hugh urged on one occasion when he had been with Sophia while Kezzie was absent, and noting the old attendant’s anguished face when she returned.

“’Twouldn’t do any good, Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie said, sighing. “She couldn’t swallow it. She just lies there like she’s dead, except she breathes slowly and lightly. Looks like the baby is not going to be born at all. Looks like,” Kezzie’s eyes filled with tears, “we’ll lose them both.”

“Kezzie,” Hugh exclaimed, “we can’t just sit by and let that happen! That doctor will just have to do something!”

“He looks in once in a while, that’s all.”

“I’ll see to it,” Hugh Galloway said, and when Hugh Galloway spoke with that imperious tone of authority, lesser beings could but obey. Kezzie had no doubt the doctor would descend to the side of her daughter. But would he be sober, and would he, could he, at this juncture, be of any help?

When an urgent knock came on the cabin door, Kezzie opened it to find a shaken Angus.

“Can you come?” he asked simply.

“Go find Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie responded immediately. “As soon as he gets here, I’ll come.”

Angus disappeared on the run.

Kezzie reached her daughter’s side to find the doctor rolling up his sleeves, wiping his sweaty face with his hands, and drying his palms on his soiled breeches. He threw back the blanket and bent to his task. Kezzie knelt and cradled the head of the unconscious woman in her arms. Unconscious or already dead, for Mary’s head lolled with the doctor’s savaging of her body, and her hand remained limp in Angus’s grip.

Like a rag doll she was tossed about as the doctor struggled by sheer muscle power to wrench the living child from the dead or dying womb. Torn free at last, the bloody scrap was all but tossed Kezzie’s way.

Sympathetic hands held out a blanket, and Kezzie wrapped the baby in it even as the doctor was pulling a blanket up over
the face of Mary, wiping his hands on the corner of it before he let it go.

The baby clutched to her, Kezzie fled the scene. Inside the Galloway cabin, leaning for a moment, white of face, on the door at her back, it was to find herself thrust into another birth scene, for Sophia was groaning and pushing, obviously swept into the bearing-down contractions from which there was no escape. Mr. Hugh’s face lifted to Kezzie with relief, only to blanch at the spectacle: Kezzie in disarray and blood-spattered, a stained bundle in her arms.

Somewhat dazedly, Kezzie laid the newborn aside and turned her attention to the woman on the bed. Sophia’s face was red, her eyes were screwed shut, and from her twisted mouth issued animal-like sounds as her body made its decision to expel its temporary inhabitant.

“I’ll take over from here,” Kezzie said briefly, and Mr. Hugh made a hasty and obviously glad escape.

So busy was Kezzie for the next half hour that she had no time to give to the grief that waited, just outside the door of her heart, ready to rip and rend, as the invading fingers of the brutal doctor had ripped and torn at the flesh of her only child. Nor was there time for her grandchild, except to take a rag and wipe mucous and blood from the tiny face.

Though to Kezzie it seemed but a few minutes, enough time elapsed for Hugh Galloway to make another check on the situation. He could see immediately that the birth was imminent. But his attention was caught by the small, blanket-wrapped figure on top of the goods in an open steamer trunk where Kezzie had laid it. Struck, perhaps, by the coincidence of two births, he leaned over the baby, and before hurrying to the head of the bed, Hugh touched the thatch of black hair that even as it dried, showed evidence of a curl, and caressed the soft cheek.

Sophia, caught in the desperate toils of nature’s relentlessness, could no more have stemmed the forces at work in her body than to hold back the tide itself, and knew not, or cared, that Hugh was present. The indignity of the moment was
beyond concern. Like an animal caught in a trap, she fought to be free.

Kezzie watched the crowning, the emergence of the narrow shoulders, and with the slippery rush of expulsion, reached, and caught her Mr. Hugh’s own child. Another Galloway. Another favored and blessed human for whom life would be generous in a world of deprivation and cruel want; gentle, when to the masses it was harsh and uncaring. Blessed, favored baby.

Gasping, sobbing with a sound between relief and joy, Sophia fell back in Hugh’s arms, only dimly aware that Kezzie was giving the baby rigorous spanks, eventually clearing its breathing passages, wiping it, wrapping it in a blanket.

“Oh,” Sophia was crying with relief. “It’s over . . . it’s over, and my baby . . . give me my baby!”

“It’ll be a moment, Mum,” Kezzie spoke from the other side of the cabin.

“What is it, Hugh?” Sophia asked, turning her splotched face up to her husband.

“Why—a boy,” Hugh responded, tenderly smoothing the tumbled hair. “Am I right, Kezzie?”

Kezzie was a moment in answering. In a daze of weariness and tears she looked down, down on two faces wrinkled and red, two heads misshapen from difficult births, two heads covered with black hair, bloody and matted. Gently she touched a small hand of each.

“Kezzie?”

Drawing a deep and quavering breath, “Girl, Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie said. “It’s a girl.”

“Oh, Hugh!” Sophia said. “It doesn’t matter!”

Hugh cradled his wife, eyes on his old nurse. “Did you say girl, Kezzie?” he asked over Sophia’s head.

Kezzie turned and faced him, her eyes ablaze in the half light. “It’s a girl, Mr. Hugh.”

With a soft touch of her lips to the forehead of each child, Kezzie took up the softly mewing baby, walked to the bed and
the man she adored and served, and laid the small bundle in his arms.

Blinded with tears, Kezzie watched as her Mr. Hugh studied the small face, then, turning his attention to the expectant face of his wife, transferred the child into her waiting arms.

“Here, my dear,” Hugh said gently, “is your child.”

F
rom weakness or happiness, perhaps a bit of both, Sophia’s tears ran down her face, spotting the clean gown Kezzie had put on her after sponging her weary, wracked body. Kezzie had also bathed the baby and dressed her in clothes dredged from the depths of the trunk, clothes they had been assured would not be needed “aboard ship.”

But now it was over. Her child was here,
safely
here, she added, giving a thought to poor Mary. A euphoria never known in all her life flooded Sophia’s heart. Turning back the blanket she let her hungry eyes feast on the tiny face and dark patch of hair, and she caressed the perfect wee hands that tended to wave aimlessly in their first taste of freedom.

Hugh stood silently looking down on the wrapped baby still in the steamer trunk. Too still, it was. Too silent.

“Dead.” Hugh’s eyes misted; his gaze went from the dead infant to the live one, safe and loved in Sophia’s arms.

“Did it live at all, Kezzie?” he asked softly.

“Never took a breath, Mr. Hugh.” Kezzie stood by her Mr. Hugh, also weeping. In an unexpected gesture Hugh Galloway put his arm around his loved nurse, and together they mourned the passing of one they had not known, would never know.

“Both gone,” Kezzie said in a thick voice. “Mother and babe. It’s just as well, Mr. Hugh. If Mary had to go, it’s just as well the wee’un went with her.”