Then he said: ‘Good Lord.’
He stared at her, and she tried to read his face. He had gone pale. He was feeling some strong emotion, but she could not tell what.
His lips moved as if he was trying to speak. After a few moments he managed to say: ‘After all this time.’
‘They’ve been married nine years.’ She succeeded in keeping her voice steady.
Belinda Goodnight and the town gossips had previously said that Jane was unable to conceive – ‘barren’ was the word they used. They now speculated that Northwood could not sire a child, and that another man must be the real father. The truth was that they did not know anything.
Elsie talked to fill the silence. ‘They’ll be hoping for a boy. Northwood and his father must want an heir.’
Amos said: ‘When is the baby due?’
‘Soon, I think.’
He looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps this will bring them closer together.’
‘Perhaps.’ Northwood and Jane had always spent a lot of time apart.
Amos said: ‘Jane has never tried very hard to hide her dissatisfaction.’
In the last few months Elsie had sensed that Amos did not care about Jane quite as passionately as he once had. She wondered whether something had changed. But that had been wishful thinking. He was evidently moved by this news.
The other theory of the gossips was that the father of Jane’s baby was Amos.
That, Elsie thought, was completely unbelievable.
*
On a field five miles outside Kingsbridge, Kit was teaching five hundred new recruits how to form a square.
Infantry normally advanced in a line across the battlefield. This was a good formation unless they were attacked by cavalry, when riders could quickly go around the end of the line and attack them from behind. The only way to defeat a cavalry attack was to form a square.
A line of soldiers ordered to form a square without further instruction would mill about confusedly for half an hour, in which time they could all be wiped out by the enemy. So there was a standard procedure.
The men were divided into eight or ten companies, each with two or three sergeants and the same number of lieutenants. Those in the centre of the line would stay where they were to form the front of the square. The two wings would wheel back to form the sides of the square, and the elite grenadiers and light companies would run around to form the base. The sergeants had halberds to keep the lines straight.
The men stood a yard apart until there were twenty-five of them in the line. At that point they began to double up. When the lines were four deep, the front two knelt and the back two stood. The officers and medical staff stood in the centre of the square.
For three hours Kit made the men form a line, then change to a square, then form a line again, and change again. By the end of the morning they could form a square in five minutes.
In battle, the front line would fire then run to the back and reload. They were to fire when the cavalry were thirty yards away. Any sooner, and they would miss their targets and be reloading when the cavalry reached them and mowed them down. Any later, and wounded men and horses would crash into them, breaking the line.
Kit told the men that they would be able to resist a cavalry charge if they kept their nerve and held formation. He had no experience of battle so he had to fake a tone of conviction. When he imagined himself standing on a side of the square, facing hundreds of men on powerful warhorses charging at him at top speed, brandishing pistols to shoot him with and long, sharp swords to stick into his body, he felt quite sure that he would drop his musket on the ground and run away as fast as his legs could carry him.
*
The christening of Jane’s baby was a very grand affair. The cathedral bells rang a long, complicated change that Spade and his ringers had been practising. Everybody who was anybody in the county came, in their best clothes. The sun shone brightly through the stained glass, and the nave was full of flowers. The earl of Shiring himself attended, tall but now a little stooped, clearly happy that his bloodline had been continued. There were hymns and prayers of thanksgiving, and the choir sang.
Amos looked hard at Viscount Northwood, getting more like his father as he passed through his thirties, his curly hair beginning to recede, giving him a hairline like the letter M. He appeared so pleased with himself that Amos felt sure the man had no suspicion that he might not be the father.
Amos himself did not know the truth of that. He would haveliked to ask Jane, but he had not had a chance to speak to her. Anyway, she might not tell him the truth. She might not even know the truth. She had told him frankly that she and Northwood made love seldom – butseldomwas not the same asnever. With Amos she had done it only once, but once could be enough. And there was yet another possibility: Amos might not have been her only illicit lover.
Whatever the truth of that, he felt sure that when Jane came to his house in the rainstorm she had wanted him to make her pregnant. And she had wanted to make sure of it, which was why she had been so angry when he refused to do it again. She had not been motivated by affection for him, or even lust; she had used him in the hope of conceiving an heir. She wanted to be the m0ther of an earl.
Jane herself was holding the baby, wrapped in a white shawl of soft wool that looked, to Amos’s trained eye, to be cashmere. She was as well dressed as always, in a fur-trimmed coat, a bonnet tied under her chin, and a double row of pearls around her neck; but she looked drained. No doubt the birth had been an ordeal – birth usually was, Amos understood. She must be relieved, though. Aristocratic wives who failed to produce children were sometimes treated as if they had shirked their responsibilities. She had escaped that fate. Now no one could call her barren.
Bishop Reddingcote performed the ceremony. He carried himself proudly in his liturgical robes, an ankle-length white cope and a long purple stole. He held a silver aspergillum for sprinkling holy water. He seemed to enjoy being the star of the show. In sonorous tones he said: ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, I baptize you Henry.’
