Page 40 of The Fortunes of Ashmore Castle

At last she said, ‘I’m so glad you’re not dying.’

Sebastian said, ‘I’m glad the prince insisted on your seeing a physician. Congratulations, by the way, Usingen. I’d say let that be a lesson to you, Maudie, but I can’t immediately think what the lesson would be.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Maud rebuked him. And to her sister, who was moist about the eyes, ‘I look to you to tell the rest of the family, and to tell them that I forbid any fuss. And now I’m going home.’

‘But, Maud,’ said Sebastian, urgently, as she turned away. ‘You are pleased, aren’t you?’

She turned and met his eyes with a look of utter perplexity. ‘It was not what I expected,’ she said at last. ‘It will take time to understand.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘Usingen is pleased.’

He took her hand and drew it through his arm, beamed at her, and called her his herzliebste Frauchen.

‘Yes, I should think he is,’ Sebastian said.

Maud could not bear to talk to anyone. She could hardly bear to be in the same house as another soul. She was uncertain, wrong-footed, and riven with embarrassment – emotions she was not accustomed to in her rigidly controlled life.

Despite the fact that Usingen, having married her, wanted to affirm his passion for her far more often than she would have chosen, it had never occurred to her that she might conceive. She was over fifty, and her Monthly Visitor had been irregular for some time. Most of all, she had had no intention of having more children – and such was the force of her character that what she willed always came to pass..

The nausea, general feeling of unwellness, and then the swelling in the abdomen, were symptoms she recognised from a close friend of her mother whom she had witnessed die of a growth on the liver. Lady Wendell’s death had been a grim backdrop to a period of her life that had culminated in her mother’s death in childbed, and was engraved on her mind and her heart. In the grim watches of the night Maud had faced and come to terms with the prospect of her own dissolution. Fergus’s wedding celebration gave her the excuse to return to London without telling Usingen – she could not face his anguish – and once there, she would stay to the end, which she assumed would not be long coming. Lady Wendell had lived only a few months: the disease took its victims rapidly.

She’d had no intention of telling anyone until the very end, when it would become obvious anyway. Above all things, she hated talk about health matters. But arriving at Ashmore, miserably uncomfortable and tired from the long journey, Stainton’s annoying remark about her looking well had been the last straw and she had barked out that stupidly melodramatic statement.

And then came the long, exhausting scene with Usingen, at the end of which she had agreed to see a doctor. He had made it impossible for her to refuse. He had raged, and wept, pleaded his love for her, demanded in wounded tones how she could shut him out from something so vital, asked what she thought he must be feeling, claimed wildly that there was always hope. Hope, that insidious poison. Despair she knew could be coped with; but hope would kill you.

And now she was in this dreadful position, where she had told everyone she was dying when in fact she was harbouring new life. It was horribly, scaldingly embarrassing. She did not know how to have any conversation that was likely to arise. And at the end of it – a baby. Usingen was delighted, of course, and she was glad enough to please him. But to bear another child at her age? She’d had more than enough of that in her marriage to Willie Stainton. She was too old, she was too tired. She didn’t want to do it. But there was no choice in the matter.

Most of all, she didn’t want to talk about it. A convent at the top of a mountain where the nuns had taken a vow of silence – that was where she would have chosen to spend the rest of her pregnancy.

If only, if only she had not blurted out that she was dying! One moment’s lapse had led to all this trouble. She had lived her life by suppressing all natural reaction, and lectured her children on the virtue of iron self-control at all times. Now, once people had got over the surprise of the news, they would be laughing at her behind her back. The pains of childbirth were as nothing beside the anguish of feeling foolish.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sebastian, at the piano, saw a flicker of movement at the door, and lifted his head to say, ‘Don’t go! Come in and listen.’

Dory reappeared doubtfully. ‘I mustn’t.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘There’s no harm in listening to a bit of music.’ Still she hesitated, and he said beguilingly, ‘I’ll play you Chopin – the piece you like.’

‘Just for a moment, then.’ She came in and stood to the side of the door where she couldn’t be seen from outside. He let his hands transition through some chords and arpeggios until they found the opening notes of the Berceuse. She folded her arms round the silk counterpane she was carrying – she was the sewing maid and repaired all the most delicate things in the house – and gazed at the empty air as she listened.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, when he had finished and slid into another piece so as not to leave a gap she might depart in.

‘It’s the counterpane from Van Dyck. The one with tropical birds and such. The thread’s badly worn in places. Her highness likes to rest on top of the bed, but she ought to have Miss Taylor take it off first.’

‘Would you like me to tell her?’

Her eyes opened. ‘What – and let her know I’d spoken to you about it?’ And then she realised he was joking, and smiled. ‘You shouldn’t tease me.’

‘You take your work so seriously.’

‘It’s the only way to do any work, isn’t it?’

‘You’re right, of course. “Do the work as best you can, Though it’s hard at whiles, Helping when you meet them, Lame dogs over stiles,”’ he quoted.

She frowned. ‘That’s not how it goes.’

‘I paraphrased to fit the occasion.’

‘Anyway, why would you help a lame dog over a stile? Dogs go under stiles – I’ve seen ’em.’