Chapter Forty-Six

London, July 10, 1925

Betty assured Eve that a difficult pregnancy was always followed by an easy birth. “It’s common knowledge,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “Take my word for it.”

So when Eve started to have contractions two days after the due date the doctor had calculated, she was excited and hardly fearful at all. It wasn’t painful at first—just a gripping sensation. Brograve telephoned the doctor and midwife and they appeared at the house within the hour.

“My cake is baked!” Eve greeted them cheerfully. “I’m still not sure how I’m going to get it out, but I believe that’s your department.”

And then the contractions got worse. “I hope it doesn’t go on like this much longer,” she groaned, and saw them glance at each other, a look that told her there was a long night ahead. Soon she was slicked in sweat, and the pains were coming every few minutes. Goodness, it was uncomfortable. “Hurry up, little one,” she urged. Poor Brograve was in the sitting room waiting for news. She hoped he didn’t hear when she gave an involuntary scream.

In the early hours of the morning, Eve heard the doctor whispering to the midwife that the labor was not progressing and she began to get scared. What if the baby was stuck inside her? What if its little heart stopped with all the strain?

Suddenly she remembered the macabre discovery Howard had made in the treasury section of the tomb: a Canopic jar containing the skeletons of two stillborn babies.

“We are assuming they must have been Tutankhamun’s babies with his wife Ankhesenamun,” Howard had told her. “Had one of them lived, it would have changed the entire order of succession in Egypt.”

Eve shivered. What an odd thing to keep in your tomb, and for them to be preserved for millennia. All she could think of was poor Ankhesenamun. “She must have been distraught to lose two babies.”

“Life was more fragile then,” Howard replied, “and loss common, especially since there was so much inbreeding. Ankhesenamun was Tutankhamun’s half sister.”

As she struggled to give birth to her own baby, Eve’s mind kept returning to those stillborn babies. How could any woman bear to go through the whole nine months, and labor too, and be told her baby was dead? She couldn’t shake thoughts of doom, increasingly convinced something was badly wrong.

Twenty-four hours after her contractions began, when Eve felt as if her insides had been torn to smithereens, the doctor finally ripped the baby out of her using a gigantic pair of metal forceps. The midwife caught it—a slippery creature covered in blood and white mucus—and began patting it urgently. The wait seemed interminable. Eve couldn’t breathe, craning her neck to see if her baby was alive, but too scared to ask. And finally there was a mewl, like a kitten, and tears rolled down Eve’s cheeks.

“It’s a girl,” the midwife said.

The doctor was busy between Eve’s legs. Everything hurt. But she was alive, and her daughter was alive, and that’s all that mattered. They gave her a shot of morphine and she slid into a dreamless sleep.

When she opened her eyes, Brograve was sitting by her bedside with the baby in his arms—a perfect child with a fluff of dark hair and a wrinkled face, eyes screwed shut against the light.

“Look what we made,” he said, holding her out, the words catching in his throat.

Eve was filled with a rush of emotions: relief that she had survived and the child was alive after all the trauma; a massive surge of love for her daughter; and awe at this miracle. People had been having babies since the dawn of time, but until now she had never realized quite how extraordinary it was that an entire new person had grown inside her.

From the minute Patricia was born, Eve wanted to keep her within earshot at all times. The cradle stayed in their bedroom until she was six months old, and Eve never left the house without her in those early months. She was overwhelmed by the responsibility for this tiny creature. It was up to them to mold the type of human being she became, and that felt like magic of the most profound kind possible.