‘A Bough of Cherries’
BERTHA DID NOT KNOCK. SHE WALKED STRAIGHT in and found Cora leaning against the fireplace with her hands outstretched, her face contorted with the effort of not screaming. Sybil was standing next to her with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne.
She was saying to Cora, ‘Please, Cora, let me fetch Mama.’
Cora gasped, ‘No – I – do – not – want – her – to interfere.’ And then the spasm passed and she stood up and saw Bertha.
‘Sir Julius is coming, Miss Cora. He’ll be here soon.’ Bertha would have liked to touch her mistress’s arm, to reassure her, but she felt constrained by Sybil’s presence.
‘Oh, thank God. I don’t how much more of this I can bear.’ She winced as another contraction began.
Bertha said, ‘Excuse me a moment, Miss Cora, I think I know what will help with the pain.’ She rushed down the corridor to the servants’ staircase where she clattered down the uncarpeted stairs to the warren of offices behind the servants’ hall. She knocked on the pantry door where she knew Bugler would be. He was in his shirt sleeves polishing a silver candlestick.
‘Mr Bugler, the Duchess needs the key to the poisons cupboard.’ She held out her hand. As soon as she did so she realised that this was a mistake. Bugler did not like the presumption: the poisons cupboard was his responsibility.
‘Indeed. May I ask why the Duchess did not ring for me herself?’
Bertha swallowed. ‘She is indisposed, Mr Bugler. She does not wish to see anyone just at the present.’
Slowly, Bugler put down the candlestick and motioned Bertha to leave the room with him. She hoped that he would not fully understand the significance of her errand. When he opened the poisons cupboard, which was underneath the cabinet where all the most valuable plate was kept, she walked towards it, hoping to see the bottle straight away, but Bugler was too quick for her. He positioned himself in front of the cabinet, forcing her to ask him for the bottle of Hallston’s patent cough medicine.
He handed it over grudgingly. ‘You will bring it straight back when Her Grace has finished with it, Miss Jackson. I don’t like to leave these preparations lying around. Some of the maids can be very foolish.’ He looked directly at Bertha. But she kept her eyes lowered and took the bottle as respectfully as she could; she found herself even giving a little placatory bend of the knees. It worked, evidently, as Bugler said nothing more, and turned his back to her, making a great show of locking up the cupboard again.
Bertha walked as quickly as she could without actually running along the corridor to the servants’ staircase. As she passed the door to the kitchen, she could hear a clamour of welcome surrounding Jim. He was very popular with the other servants – a local boy who had achieved great things. They would not be so welcoming, Bertha thought, if they knew that she was his sweetheart.
As she scurried crab-like up the stairs – her petticoats wouldn’t let her take them two at a time – she misjudged a step and tripped, the bottle falling out of her hand. For a frozen second she thought it would shatter on the wooden boards but the sturdy brown glass was clearly designed to be proof against trembling fingers and had landed unharmed. The cough medicine was famous for containing large quantities of ether which, according to the legend on the front, dulled all pain and blunted all aches. Bertha had taken some for a toothache when she first arrived in England and had been amazed at the way the sharpness of the pain had been reduced. She had not been tempted to go back for more after the initial pain had faded away but she knew that there were many girls who kept a bottle under their mattress. One of the housemaids had taken so much that, before Christmas, her eyes glassy and her hands wet with sweat, she had dropped a whole tea service on to the scullery floor. The girl’s wages for a year were a fraction of the tea service’s worth so she had been dismissed. When her room was turned out they had found ten empty bottles of Hallston’s patent cough medicine under the mattress. Since then all patent medicines were kept in the poisons cupboard.
Cora was pacing up and down holding on to Sybil when Bertha got back. She wrinkled her nose as she drank the medicine but within a few moments Bertha could see her mistress’s eyes begin to lose their focus. Sybil led her to the chaise longue and once she was lying down, Bertha began to loosen the ribbons and laces of her tea gown and to undo the buttons on the patent kid boots.
When the ether began to wear off, Cora noticed what her maid was doing.
‘Bertha! I want to look nice for my husband when he comes. You will make sure, won’t you?’
Bertha smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that, Miss Cora.’ Cora held out her hand for some more of the medicine.
The arrival of Sir Julius from London some four hours later confirmed the rumours flying around the village that the Duchess had gone into labour. Outside the Square and Compass the long view taken by the clay-pipe smokers was that a healthy boy could only be good news, as money would have to be spent on improving the estate if the heir was to have anything to inherit. They had all heard of the fabulous wealth of the new Duchess but so far they had seen no evidence of it in repairs to their houses, the draining of ditches or the replanting of hedgerows. In the general store, the talk was more short term, concentrating on the new dresses to be worn at the tenants’ dinner traditionally held to celebrate the birth of an heir to the Dukedom. There were mothers who wondered if their daughter might be chosen to work in the nursery and fathers of large families who hoped that their wife might gain employment as a wet nurse. Weld, the stationmaster, anticipated a royal presence at the christening and thought about floral displays, and the churchwarden considered which of his team of bell ringers deserved the honour of ringing in the news.
In the house itself, the servants were being pulled between the activity necessary for the imminent arrival of the Duke and the natural desire to congregate in the kitchen and interpret every call for hot water or clean linen from the Duchess’s bedroom. Much of this discussion was theoretical as neither the cook nor Mrs Softley had ever given birth – the title of Mrs was an honorific bestowed with the office, and the maids were, of course, unmarried. Mr Bugler had had to come in more than once to remind his staff that their master was expected any moment and there was still no fire lit in the music room.
Upstairs in the Duchess’s apartments there were periods of quiet punctuated by screams that became progressively closer together as the evening drew in. The screams might have been louder if Sir Julius had not been a keen supporter of anaesthesia in childbirth. He held no brief for the argument that physical suffering was a necessary part of labour – a punishment visited on women since Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit – and neither, in his experience, did his aristocratic clients. He had never attended a birth where a woman had refused the blessed relief of chloroform.
The Duchess’s labour was progressing slowly, but that was to be expected in a first delivery. He was a little uneasy that the Duke was not present. In case of difficulty it was imperative to have the husband’s consent to any procedures that might be necessary. The Duchess of Buckingham, the famous Double Duchess, had already hinted to him that the Duke wanted an heir ‘above all else’ but Sir Julius had attended enough noble births to know that the mother-in-law’s wishes might not always be that of the husband. He sincerely hoped that there would be no choice to make. He liked the American Duchess. When he had told her about the hospital he was building so that poor women could give birth safely, she had listened carefully and had pledged a sum that had made all the difference to his plans. He had other patients, ladies with money and position who had organised whist drives, bazaars and even concerts in aid of the hospital, but he suspected that they did so as much for their own social ends as out of any great devotion to philanthropy. Certainly the sums raised bore no relation to the effort expended or the numbers of frocks that were ordered. So he had appreciated the Duchess’s straightforwardness when it came to money, very much.
The evening was drawing in, and there was still no sign of the baby or of its father. Cora was lost in a twilight world punctuated by pain. She would swim towards consciousness on a contraction and then the sweet smell of the chloroform would knock her back into blankness. Finally she woke to a pain so intense that she imagined for a moment that she was being cut open, and then she heard Bertha telling her that it was going to be all right, and then nothing.
As she came round again, snatches of conversation sank into her emerging consciousness.
‘…the Maltravers nose, definitely.’
‘…difficult delivery, I had to use the forceps…’
‘He’s dark, just like his father.’
And then a different sound, one that jerked her into full wakefulness, the thin, clear cry of her baby.
She opened her eyes and saw her mother-in-law, like a great blue crow, holding a white bundle. Cora struggled to sit up and there was Bertha on her other side putting a pillow behind her back.
She tried to speak but her voice was scratched and hoarse.
‘My baby…’ and she put out her arms. The Double Duchess looked across the room at Sir Julius and lowered the baby so that Cora could see him.
‘Here he is, the Marquis of Salcombe.’ Cora tried to take the baby from her but the Duchess drew back a fraction.
‘Don’t you want to recover a little, Cora?’ she said tightly.
Cora shook her head, ‘Give him to me,’ she whispered.
The Duchess again looked across at Sir Julius and he said, ‘I am delighted to tell you, Duchess, that you have a healthy baby boy.’ And then he gestured to Duchess Fanny so that she had no choice but to put the child into Cora’s arms.
Cora looked at the tiny wrinkled face, the milky unfocused eyes, the surprisingly abundant hair and she folded him to her.
The light had gone and Cora was in a half sleep, the baby lying in the crook of her elbow. The Double Duchess had left and now there was only the nurse Sir Julius had brought with him, busying herself over the carved and gilded bassinet that Mrs Cash had sent the week before. Cora could hardly resist the downward droop of her eyelids when she heard the first bells. The noise carried so clearly over the valley that Cora did not hear the door open; she brought the baby closer to swaddle him against the clamour and then she felt a hand on her cheek, and there was Ivo kneeling beside her, his lips brushing their son’s head.
‘You have a son,’ she said.
He took her free hand and kissed it. She saw at once that his face was soft with tenderness. There was no trace of anger or constraint there. He had come back to her. He would be the husband she had known on her honeymoon, and now the father to her son. All the waiting was over. She forgot everything, all the worry and anxiety, as she recognised the tenderness in his face. She wanted to give him something in return.
‘I thought that the baby should be called Guy, after your brother.’
He said nothing and then he stood up and turned his face away from her towards the window. For an awful moment she thought she had blundered. Ivo hardly talked about his brother but she sensed that he was always somewhere in his thoughts. She had wanted to show him that she understood his loss, but all she had done was to remind him of his grief. She was about to call his name when he turned round. His face was in shadow and she couldn’t quite make out the cast of his countenance, but there was no mistaking the tone of his voice.
‘Thank you, Cora, now I have everything I want.’
And he lay down beside her and at last she could breathe him in.