We had got away from Bridgerule in the nick of time, for within a few weeks of the wedding anyone could see that I was with child.
And miserably so. I had heard women speak of morning sickness, had seen Mrs Kingdon go through a time of waxy sallowness when she was carrying the Elizabeth who was my god-daughter. There were many mornings when, leaning over the basin, cold with nausea, I wept with regret and remorse. At those times I believed in hell as I’d never believed in heaven. But I struggled through many afternoons as well, and at night I lay unable to sleep, hungry yet sickened by food. Did this mean the child was sick too, dying as I felt I must be? That would be a nasty trick for life to inflict on me, after all that rosemary choked down.
The four or five months I had to get through before the child would be born seemed an eternity stretching in front of me. The birth itself I could not begin to imagine. Mrs Kingdon had never got as far as explaining anything of what to expect in childbed. I suppose she felt that when the time came would be soon enough, and we had not asked, being in no hurry to find out. Of course we knew it would hurt, but how exactly? Like a broken leg? We knew women died, but how precisely? Quickly, or by inches? And by what miracle could an entire baby squeeze out from that small place?
Anne was the eldest of eleven, she told me, which was good to hear as it meant she must know what I did not: how to care for a baby. Her father was a labourer who had been employed from time to time by my father. She could not read, nor write beyond an uncertain version of her own name, and was an awkward clumsy girl, and frankly I dismissed her as a person of not much account.
I hoped she was discreet. She had her own place in the servants’ quarters, but still there was not much she did not know about the way Mr and Mrs Macarthur got on with each other. Or how they had come to be Mr and Mrs Macarthur. All Bridgerule knew that, I was sure. So I held my head up and was perhaps cooler with Anne than necessary, perhaps playing the lady more than came naturally.
Until the day she appeared with her hair singed on one side and a glossy red ear.
– Why Anne, I said, whatever have you done?
– There was a moth flew in my ear, madam, she said. Driving me dilly with moving around in there, so I held a candle up, thinking, you know, it would be drawn to the light?
She looked at me sideways, biting her lip, afraid I would scold I suppose, but at the picture of this solemn girl holding a candle up to her ear I laughed for the first time in many weeks.
– Oh you clever silly girl, I said.
Gave her some salve to put on the ear and blessed Mrs Kingdon, who had chosen so well as to find a girl whose unpromising exterior concealed a certain eccentric practicality.
I was not far from Bridgerule and Bridie, but as the new Mr and Mrs Macarthur had spun away from the church in the borrowed gig, I knew that a shutter was coming down between me and that world. Bridie and I exchanged notes now and then. On both sides, though, was the reserve that came from knowing they might be read by everyone in the vicarage parlour. Oh, how much I missed our whispered conversations in the high bed we had shared! On paper our friendship was reduced to description of life at a barracks on my side, and mild news of our mutual acquaintances on hers.
There was the wife of a Captain Spencer whose quarters at the Holsworthy Barracks were large enough for two or three ladies to take tea together, and these few women became my society. Mrs Spencer was a pretty little woman, but bony and trembling like a whippet, as if her husband—so corpulent that he had to walk back on his heels to accommodate his belly—had sucked the flesh out of her. Her friend Mrs Borthwick, wife to Captain Borthwick, was an assured, well-put-together older woman, with a habit of tweaking her mouth up at the corners, a conscious appearance of cheer that overlaid I knew not what real feelings.
They were tea-party acquaintances, not true friends. A barracks was not a village. Nothing went deep, nothing had a past or a future. Still, they were good to me, ignorant girl that I was. Dry toast for the morning sickness, they said. Dry toast, and tea with plenty of sugar. I nibbled the toast, drank the tea. The sickness did not abate, not by any fraction, but I was comforted that there were people in the world who cared enough to try to help me.