Page 82 of The Mistress of Ashmore Castle

‘I’m so glad to see you!’ Kitty cried, embracing Nina. ‘We never seemed to have any time together in Town. Now we can talk and talk and talk! You can tell me everything you’ve been doing in London.’

‘Aye, there’ll be a lot of telling in that!’ said Mr Cowling, genially. ‘What with being presented to the King, she’s been the mad success of the Season. We’ve hardly had an evening at home ever since.’

‘Rachel was the mad success of the Season,’ Nina corrected.

‘But you came a close second,’ Richard assured her solemnly.

Embarrassed, Nina turned to Kitty. ‘You’re looking really well.’

‘I feel well,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come now, because by next month I shall be too heavy to move around much. Now, you must come up and see my baby.’

‘Aye, and I want to see your fancy new bull, Master Richard!’ said Cowling.

‘Oh, it’s a beautiful creature,’ Richard said. ‘Easily as handsome as little Lord Ayton, though a lot bigger. And my new herdsman is quite as much in love with it as Kitty is with her baby.’

Kitty took Nina’s arm up the stairs and, a little breathless, said, ‘Why do we shut the children away at the top of the house? Nurseries should be on the ground floor.’

‘I don’t suppose many people would agree with you,’ Nina said.

‘But you’d want to see your child all the time, wouldn’t you?’ Nina didn’t answer, and she said timidly, ‘You would like to have children?’

‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

‘Oh, but you mustn’t give up hope,’ Kitty said fervently, and then she stopped, and blushed scarlet. A horrible doubt had entered her mind. Nina had married an old man (Mr Cowling seemed so to her) and perhaps old men couldn’t father children. She knew very little about the subject – all her mother had told her before marriage was that her husband would want to do strange things to her in bed, but she must never resist and never, never cry. (As it turned out, she had liked the strange things very much.) Children had duly followed. Did Mr Cowling not—? No, she couldn’t even think the question, far less ask it. Nina was her dear friend, but it simply was not possible.

She forgot all about it when they entered the nursery, and Louis’s face lit with delight at the mere sight of her. ‘Mama, Mama!’ he exclaimed, and took half a dozen steps towards her before descending to hands and knees. He walked for pride, but crawled for speed.

‘Goodness, he’s grown!’ Nina exclaimed. He was such a handsome child, still fair, with blue eyes and a look of Giles about him, especially when he smiled. She felt a sudden pang in her stomach, like a cramp of hunger. Though Kitty had always wanted babies, Nina hadn’t much cared about it; but perhaps, she thought, women were designed to want them at last. And, of course, if they were Giles’s babies . . . No, she mustn’t think like that.

Louis reached his mother, rose to his feet, and with one hand clinging to her skirt, he patted the maternal bulge with the other hand. ‘Baba,’ he said. ‘Baba dere!’

Kitty laughed, and swooped him into her arms. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s a baba in there. Your little brother.’

Nina smiled. ‘You’ve decided to have another boy, then?’

‘It’s my duty,’ Kitty said. ‘Two boys for the family. Then perhaps I might have a daughter for myself. Would you like to hold him?’

‘No, that’s all right,’ Nina said, unconsciously folding her arms in denial. It was hard enough just seeing a baby that looked like Giles.

Louis, ensconced on Kitty’s hip, wanted to chat. It was mostly babble, interlarded with the words he had mastered. Kitty thought about her little brother Peter, who had been ‘her baby’ long ago when she was a little girl. She had watched these milestones before – the first wobbling step, the first proper word, the growing intelligence. Peter had died when he was four, and Kitty had known her first heartbreak. She gave Louis a sudden squeeze, making him grunt, and then chuckle. She wished Nina a baby as hard as she could wish.

Richard took Mr Cowling in the large trap, pulled by Dexter. ‘You see we’ve cleared those two fields and we’ve started grazing them. The Six Acres was rather more work, because of the bracken, which is poisonous. We mowed it, then ploughed it to expose the roots, and put the pigs on it – they eat the rhizomes, you see.’

‘Rhizomes, is it?’ Cowling said, amused.

‘Granted I didn’t know the word a year ago, but a man can learn,’ said Richard, with dignity. ‘When the pigs finished with it, we re-seeded, and we’ll take a crop of hay off it and start grazing it in the autumn. Though we’ll have to keep an eye on it, in case the bracken creeps back.’

‘Aye, I see it’s a long business after all,’ said Cowling. ‘I don’t know much about cattle – sheep lore I got from my father – but sheep must be smarter than cows, because they won’t touch bracken.’

‘They may be smarter, but they don’t give near as much milk,’ Richard said. He pulled Dexter to a halt. There was a gap where they had a view down the hill towards the road that ran along the near side of the Ash. ‘You see down there,’ Richard said, ‘all that activity? That’s one of our gangs of men, mending the road. We’ll have to keep it in decent repair from now on, if the milk dray is going to get round all the farms in time. When I first looked at it, there were so many holes we’d have had butter, not milk. ’

‘Ah,’ said Cowling. ‘You bought a dray, then, did you?’

‘Had one adapted. And bought two good horses. If we expand further up the valley, we’ll probably have to invest in another. One won’t be able to do the journey in the time between the milk being ready and the train leaving. But we solved the problem of getting the dray up to the farms. The farmers bring the churns down to the road, so the dray just has to go straight along the road from one gate to the next. Farmer Whitcroft had the idea of building a wooden platform by the side of the road to stand the churns on and stop them falling over, and the others are doing the same now. And we’ve had to make some improvements to the farmers’ milking-sheds, particularly the floors. You can’t have the cows paddling about in lakes of liquid manure and splashing it into the buckets. And I’ve never yet met a cow that could resist dipping its tail into the stuff and swishing it about.’

‘It sounds as if you’ve had to lay out a lot of money to get going,’ Cowling commented, as they drove on.

‘So far it’s been all expense. The bull wasn’t the half of it. All expense and no income.’