Another Heartbeat in the House (27 page)

‘It will be a pleasure to sit here with you of an evening,' St Leger remarked finally.

‘Just think! After a day spent fishing, you can cast off your wet clothes and take your ease in front of a fire, or on the terrace in front of the view. You can sit down to an excellent supper and as much wine as you like. You can choose a book from the library, and we can read together, or play bezique or chess.'

‘I should love to listen to you play after dinner,' he said. ‘Did you include a pianoforte on your list of necessities?'

‘A pianoforte is hardly a necessity, St Leger.'

He frowned. ‘It will be quiet in the winter, and when it gets dark early there is no birdsong. You need a piano, Eliza. I will see to it. Show me the rest of the house.'

I showed him the library, where my empty bookcases stood sentinel on either side of the door, and where my escritoire was tucked between the French windows with their low cushioned seats. I showed him the candle sconces by my fireside chair that I had had fixed to the wall at eye level, so I could read easily. I led him through the main entrance hallway where I had insisted on another fireplace: every visitor to this house, I told St Leger, should be greeted by warmth and light.

Upstairs, the bed had been made up with the finest quality linen from an Ulster mill, and draped in shawls from Kashmir. It was the only item of furniture in my bedroom. Earlier, I had asked the maid to light a fire and set a tub by it. The water was still warm. I added some drops of lavender oil, undressed my lover and invited him to step in. I lit a dozen good wax candles and poured more wine.

In the dusk, beyond the open window, the blackbird was singing.

It was a luxury to sit in my library and write. It was a luxury to have my meals prepared and my fires set and my water drawn and my furniture polished and my bed made. It was a luxury to curl up solitaire in the window embrasure with that vista of lake and hills before me, and from time to time to have the company of my lover to admire it with me. But mostly, it was a luxury to have the pleasure of my company to myself.

Every day I took a quire of paper from my escritoire (it was a thing of beauty, of rosewood, with many ingenious compartments and drawers) and laid it on the Morocco leather inlay of the fold-down lid. Every day I wrote hundreds upon hundreds of words. William had said in one of his letters that he had found a character for a story that he was sure would be amusing, but I would challenge him to find one more amusing than the heroine
I
had dreamed up! Ideas came crowding into my head. They congregated there, jostling for position, before escaping from the nib of my pen onto the paper, with each ‘i' dotted and each ‘t' crossed.

Letters in which William and I compared plots and characters sped to and fro across the Irish Sea.

My heroine is a clever woman, highly accomplished, after the French rather than the English mode
, I wrote.

Mine is a sweet-tempered, uncomplicated girl; sadly, she will be widowed young
, returned William.

I have conjured a demon of a voluptuary!
I told him.

And I, a termagant of an aunt!
came the rejoinder from William.

Between us, a narrative began to take shape. I made my heroine first governess to the children of a lecherous old gentleman, then companion to a peevish old gentlewoman. I had her flirt with a squaretoes and make merry at Vauxhall and elope with a dashing – though rather empty-headed – cavalry officer. Sometimes I spent the entire day at my desk, only realizing how much time had gone by when, on hearing the bell ring for dinner, I looked up to see that the sun had gone down behind the hills.

I did not know what either of the women who had been engaged as my servants made of me, nor did I much care. They were good women, strong and reliable, and I knew that St Leger was right to have insisted on taking on staff from the hiring fair. The wretched creatures I had visited in the hamlet across the lake would not have had the strength to work as these women did. I paid them a decent wage, and was rewarded with excellent service. They were both named Bridget, so I called the cook Old Biddy and the maid Young Biddy.

Young Biddy supplied me with fresh eggs daily and sometimes a chicken from her family farm; Old Biddy made sure that the larder was well stocked, and baked bread for me twice a week. The steward, whose name was Christy Cassidy, dug a fine kitchen garden adjoining the stable yard, and planted it with currants and gooseberries and rhubarb and raspberries and all sorts of vegetables. He built beehives. He cleared a section of forest and planted it with fruit trees. Every so often he brought fish or a rabbit for Old Biddy to serve up; sometimes there was venison, and game birds – quail or pheasant – were plentiful.

Each time St Leger visited, his saddlebag was full of presents: chocolates, books, ornaments, sheet music, lace handkerchiefs, items of intimate apparel. On occasion there were cut flowers from his hothouse. He brought me a silver gilt inkstand and a tortoiseshell casket and a mechanical bird in a cage; a pair of Limerick gloves, a morning robe of embroidered Chinese silk, a pearl necklet and a fan painted with peacocks. Sometimes he stayed just one night, sometimes two or three consecutively. Sophia did not question him on his whereabouts, for she knew that he was spending time at my house. Indeed, she often enquired after my health. It was an unorthodox arrangement, but it seemed to suit us all. For several weeks it was as if we were living in Voltaire's Best of All Possible Worlds.

Then one day, because the baby had shifted inside me and I suspected it was about to start its journey, I asked St Leger to send for Maria, who was to be rewarded munificently for her complicity. She arrived in his carriage with items I had not thought to buy: squares of flannel and yards of fine linen, tiny woollen caps, soft little blankets, divers unguents, scissors, a wicker bassinet. Her eldest daughter, who had been charged with the care of her siblings in the house in Cork, had made a patchwork counterpane for the new arrival.

Maria told the Biddies that I was suffering from a sick headache, and that while I was indisposed she would take over the running of the house. I don't imagine either of them was fooled, but because they were handsomely paid and treated well, they entered into the spirit of connivance without comment. Maria oversaw the thorough cleaning of my bedchamber and the stockpiling of linen, made sure there was sufficient food in the larder, fuel for the fires and water drawn, then dismissed both women, saying that she would send for them when I was recovered. She unpacked the layette, uncorked a bottle of St Leger's best wine, and together we waited.

During the intervals between cramps, which were initially quite bearable, she entertained me with stories of Lord Doneraile's liaisons with an actress in Dublin, and of the lady's maid who had been discovered bound to some peculiar contraption in Sir Silas Sillery's cellar, and of an uncle of hers who had left his wife and gone to live in India with a punkah wallah. We agreed that men were peculiar, irrational creatures.

She fed me tiny quails' eggs and morsels of almond cake and slivers of crystallized fruit, and when I could no longer eat or drink she soaked a flannel in honey water so that I could suck on it, and rubbed my belly with peppermint oil.

She made and remade my bed, and pummelled my pillows to make me more comfortable. ‘What is this doing under your bolster?' she asked, holding up the knife that I kept there.

‘It is for any man who dares to take me against my will,' I told her.

‘It will come in useful now,' she said, sliding it under the mattress. ‘A knife under the mattress is said to cut the birthing pains by half.'

Some hours later, Maria told me it was time to start work in earnest. She squeezed out the flannel and gave it to me again so that I could tear it with my teeth. She did not give me her hand to hold for she knew I would break the bones, but she supported me when I could no longer endure lying still, and encouraged me to walk up and down the corridor: up and down, and up and down again, and again and again, to bring the baby on.

And finally I squatted in a corner of my bedchamber and forced it out with a howl.

‘What is it?' I asked, as the infant slid between my legs.

‘A boy. It's a boy!' said Maria. She held the tiny thing up to slap life into it, then, at the first cry, she laid it on my belly, reached for the scissors and cut the cord, knotting it with astonishing dexterity. She sat back on her heels, pushed her hair back from her face, and smiled at me. Then she took the baby over to the basin that was waiting by the fire, poured water and wiped it clean.

Slumped against the wall, I waited for the pain to ease at last. But the spasms kept coming and the bloodstain on my nightgown kept spreading and the baby kept crying.

‘Why hasn't it stopped? Maria? Maria!'

Maria glanced over her shoulder as she swathed the child in linen.

‘The afterbirth is coming,' she said. ‘Wait – I'll help you now – let me settle him.' She laid the infant in the bassinet, where it meowed like a cat. ‘It's nearly over,' Maria assured me, hunkering down. ‘Once you've passed the placenta, it's done.'

I felt a twisting inside me, like a great snake. I got onto my forearms and knees, tugging at the cuff of my sleeve with my teeth and pushed with all my strength. Something else slid out of me. Completely spent, I fell with my face against the floorboards.

‘Is it finished now? Is it over? Is it over now? Please say it's over, Maria.'

She said nothing. I twisted my head around to look.

Maria's hands were clamped to her mouth. Still crouched between my legs, she raised her eyes to mine and stared at me; her brow was furrowed, her hair damp, her face smeared with my blood. Then she reached for the scissors, fumbled and held something aloft. It wasn't the placenta. It was another baby.

For me there had only ever been two possible outcomes to the status quo I had engineered, neither of which involved my direct participation. The birth of a boy would have meant a journey to the wet-nurse who had been engaged by Sophia, whence the child would be borne away to its adoptive parents. Had it been a girl, she would have been spirited off to the foundling hospital in Cork. Either way, I should have been rid of an encumbrance, and free to resume my life as lady novelist and mistress of Lissaguirra. But this! This was a card I had never foreseen as being part of the hand dealt me.

As I lay curled upon the floor of my bedchamber, I watched Maria busy herself. She was efficiency personified. She made up the bed with fresh sheets, stoked the fire and stripped me of my soiled linen. She washed me, put me to bed in a clean gown, fetched me hot negus, and combed my hair. She opened the window to let in fresh air, and then she set the bassinet of sleeping babies beside me on the bed.

‘What do you want me to do with them?' I asked.

‘You worked hard enough to bring them into the world; it would be churlish not to bid them farewell.' Maria picked up her shawl, and made for the door.

‘Where are you going?' I called after her.

‘To harness the pony. I shall need to get the boy to the wet-nurse post haste. He's a puny little thing.'

And off she went.

From downstairs I heard the clock chime: four, five or six, I could not tell. How long had I been in labour? How many hours had passed since yesterday evening, when I had been childless and carefree?

Now I found myself shored up in bed with two babies I had never met before. They were hideous little things: like the organ grinder's monkeys I had seen once in Vauxhall. Which was which? It would be easy to find out, but Maria had swaddled the pair so expertly I did not dare touch them. Their skin was the same plum shade as the dining-room wallpaper, and the same texture as the gloves St Leger had given me – the ones so fine they could be packed into the shell of a walnut.

One of the babies yawned, making its aspect even more hideous: like the gargoyle on the corner of Notre-Dame in Paris, which had fascinated me as a child. The other one's face was all puckered, like the toothless old beggar man who had used to importune me for alms in Chiswick. The one who had yawned made a mewling sound, and I peered more closely at it. It started scrabbling around, its tiny fingers like bats' claws, and then it scraped the face of the other one, and woke it up. It blinked, its eyes all squinty, like Sir Silas Sillery's after too much claret.

Now they appeared to be looking at each other. How strange, to be seeing for the very first time someone you'd been cooped up with for nine months! The blinking one started mewling in harmony with its sibling. They must be hearing each other for the first time, too! A funny little song, it was. I supposed they must be hungry. I joined in – a half-hearted la-la-la. Then Blinky's little hand clenched, as if it was shaking its fist, and it landed a thump right on the other one's nose. It made me laugh. It made me laugh so hard I had to wipe tears from my eyes. All in all, the babies were the silliest, ugliest things I had ever seen.

When Maria came back with a dish of raspberry tea, I had unwrapped both of them, and had one at each breast.

‘I had thought the one with the flailing fists to be the boy,' I said, conversationally, coaxing a nipple into a tiny mutinous mouth. ‘But it turns out she's the girl. I'm glad she has a pugnacious streak. She's going to need it.'

‘I'm sure St Leger will see to it that she's well taken care of,' Maria assured me, taking a peek under the shawl draped over my shoulders. ‘The orphanage is as susceptible to bribes as any other so-called charitable institution. With a sweetener from her father she'll fare better than most of the poor bastards there. Which one's which?'

‘This is St Leger's boy,' I said, indicating the infant on my right breast, ‘and this is the girl.'

‘Dear God they're ugly, aren't they? You'd think that such handsome parents could have managed to produce a more comely pair of babes.'