Every stitch he set was for Pauline.
CHAPTER 13
By the time the hack reached the house in Berkeley Square and Pauline ran up the steps and rapped loudly with the knocker, Augusta was in full labor.
“It’s the countess,” Pauline told Allsop, the elderly butler, “Get His Lordship!”
After a moment of confusion, Allsop left his post and moved more quickly than Pauline had ever seen him move. In seconds, Bridlington was running down the stairs two at a time, straight outside and to the hack. How he did it Pauline didn’t know, with his club foot. He reached in and lifted Augusta out, carrying her back up and into the house, limping but strong.
Pauline followed Phyllida in, dropped her cloak on the floor of the hall and ran up the stairs.
“Happen I might need some help with Her La’ship,” Phyllida said. “And then you have to keep the earl out of her room. It won’t be no help if he’s there.”
The two of them went up after the earl and reached Augusta’s room almost at the same time he did.
Bridlington laid Augusta down on the bed and stood by running his hands through his hair and turning around in alopsided circle. Pauline realized he didn’t even have his cane with him.
“My Lord, me and Miss Carp will help Lady Bridlington get more comfortable, and you need to go out of the room now.” Pauline boldly took hold of Bridlington’s hand and dragged him away, pushing him out the door and shutting it behind him.
Then Phyllida and Pauline helped Augusta out of her clothes and into a shift and settled her in bed, pausing to let her breathe between her increasingly intense pains.
“They’re coming quicker,” Pauline said. She’d witnessed her mother give birth enough times that she knew more or less what to expect.
“The doctor better get here soon!” Phyllida said.
The door opened, but it wasn’t the doctor, it was the earl looking wild-eyed with distress. Pauline ran to him and pushed him out again, this time going out with him. “I better keep him out here,” Pauline said.
“I must go in! She needs me!” Bridlington ran for the door again. Pauline got there first, though, and wouldn’t let him open it.
“There’s nothing you can do. It’s natural. Only time will help now.”
“Where is the doctor!” he fairly screamed.
“He’s here My Lord,” Allsop said, leading the way as the doctor came hurrying up the stairs, followed by the nurse. Neither of them did more than nod at Bridlington. Augusta’s moans had turned to suppressed screams and could be heard loudly through the door.
“Why don’t you and me go down to the library and have a tot of something,” Pauline said, once more taking Bridlington’s hand and drawing him away from his wife’s bedroom door. “It’ll be a long time yet, My Lord, and you won’t want to stand for hours and hours.”
At first he resisted. He gave in eventually, though, and let Pauline lead him away to a room where he wouldn’t hear his wife’s screams so clearly.
The first thingPauline did when she awoke sometime later, having stretched out on the sofa in the library at Lanyon House, was look at the clock on the mantel.
Nine o’clock! The sun streaming in through the windows told her that it was nine o’clock in the morning, not the evening.
Only an hour until the deadline for the order. She would miss it. It wasn’t important, was it? Nothing was more important than a new life! If Augusta had managed it. How could anyone blame her for not fulfilling a completely unreasonable order at the best of times, let alone with everything that had happened since the evening of December twenty-third?
She sat up. Someone had spread a blanket over her, and the fire in the grate had obviously been kept going all night. Something else was different, though. She breathed deeply.Ah! It’s Christmas!She thought, filling her nostrils with the fresh scent of evergreens. Servants must have come in and draped fir boughs over the mantel while she slept.
But where was the earl? She’d failed at that too, then. She was supposed to keep him away and calm. They’d tried to play cards, but neither of them could concentrate. So Pauline read aloud to him for a while, until her yawns became so frequent that he begged her to stop.
Pauline stood and folded the blanket that had covered her. Had the baby been born, or was Augusta still suffering? At that moment the door opened and Phyllida Carp entered, looking exhausted but wreathed in smiles.
“It’s a little girl!” she said and hurried forward to embrace Pauline—something she’d never done in her life before.
Without understanding exactly why, Pauline began to weep. “Don’t mind me, I’m just so happy for Lady Bridlington.” But that wasn’t all it was.
She shed tears over her disappointment with Jimmy.
She shed tears over her inability to bring what was admittedly an insane project to fruition.
