Royal(17)

The earl’s health deteriorated from the moment Henry died. He’d had a bad cough for weeks, which rapidly turned into pneumonia, and three weeks after they learned of his son’s death, George Hemmings died too. They were all in shock, with one death on the heels of the other. It left the earl’s widow and Henry’s to console each other. Glorianna Hemmings had lost a husband and a son, and Charlotte her husband and the father of her unborn child. She was less than two months from her due date when her father-in-law died at the end of March, and a widow at seventeen when Henry died in February. Lucy heard her sobbing in her bed at night, and Charlotte looked ravaged. She wrote to her parents of the countess’s grief and how sad they all were, but it never occurred to them and she never said that she was grieving for Henry too, and that he had been her husband and the father of her unborn baby. It infuriated Lucy that the countess was aware of the baby and didn’t seem to mind. She was even pleased about it.



* * *



—

“You’ll be going home in a few months, after you have the baby, when you turn eighteen,” her mother-in-law said sadly one night. She couldn’t imagine life without Charlotte now. They sat together by the fire every evening, while she told her stories of Henry’s childhood. Glorianna had a distant look in her eye most of the time now, remembering the two men she had lost. Waiting for Henry’s child to be born was the only ray of sunshine in their lives. And alone in her room, Lucy cried for Henry too. It was a time of loss and sorrow for them all. The countess moved Charlotte to a bedroom close to her own as the due date approached.



The weather warmed slightly in late April, just before Charlotte’s due date in May. Buds began to appear in the countess’s garden. She and Lucy had worked hard to clear away the weeds, and plant some flowers, which were the first sign of spring. Charlotte put them in vases on the table when they had dinner, trying to cheer them all up. All she could think about now was Henry and their fatherless child. He had been much too young to die. It seemed so pointless. She read his letters to her every night.

The Germans had increased their air raids since January, and the bombing of London was severe again. Charlotte wondered if her parents would still let her come home even after her eighteenth birthday, since the bombing was worse again. For once, although she missed her parents, she was glad not to be in London, so her baby could be born in the peaceful Yorkshire countryside, without bombs falling every night among air raid sirens. And in their letters, her parents and sisters sounded busy and anxious about the war. They were relieved that she was safe. But at her end, Charlotte was sad not to be able to share the progress of her pregnancy with her mother and sisters, although her mother-in-law was very kind. She missed her own mother terribly and clung to Henry’s as the only mother at hand.



It was the second week of May when the pains finally began. She had written to her mother the night before, and wished she could tell her about the baby, but knew she couldn’t until she saw her, hopefully sometime in the next few months, and then she would tell her everything that had happened, about marrying Henry and how much she loved him. She was a widow now, and all she wanted was to see their baby and for it to arrive safely.

The countess sent for the doctor as soon as Charlotte told her that the contractions had started. He arrived quickly, and had been concerned for the past several weeks that the baby had grown too large for her tiny body. There was a hospital nearby, and he hoped she wouldn’t need a cesarean section, which was a complicated operation for both mother and child, and one or both frequently didn’t survive it. He had shared his fears with the countess, but said nothing to Charlotte, not wanting to frighten her. Her belly was huge in the final weeks of her confinement. She looked so uncomfortable that at the last Lucy wasn’t even jealous of her, to be having Henry’s child. Until then, it had irked her constantly.

The pains were already powerful when the doctor got there after labor began. Glorianna was sure she’d come through it. She was healthy and young. The doctor sat by Charlotte’s bedside from morning to nightfall, and her mother-in-law stayed with her. It was an arduous birth, and after sixteen hours of hard labor, there had been no progress. The baby appeared to be too large to come down the birth canal, and the countess and the doctor exchanged a worried look. It was midnight by then, and Charlotte was too far gone to move her to the hospital, even by ambulance. Glorianna applied damp cloths to her brow, while the doctor tried to maneuver the baby down. The maids and Lucy could hear Charlotte’s screams throughout the house, and the doctor looked at the countess in dismay twenty-four hours after labor began.



“Charlotte, you have to try harder,” her mother-in-law told her with a sense of urgency now. Charlotte was getting weaker and she couldn’t push anymore. “The baby is big, and you have to push it out. Think of Henry, and how much he loved you. You have to do this for Henry. You have to push the baby out.” Charlotte renewed her efforts, and the physician attempted to turn the baby to ease its passage, which only made Charlotte scream louder. She was doing the best she could, but getting nowhere. Lucy had peered several times into the bedroom where Charlotte was laboring and disappeared just as quickly at the sounds of her agony. It seemed so much worse than she’d expected and it frightened her.

Charlotte renewed her efforts then, and used every ounce of her remaining strength to move the baby down, and slowly, it began to emerge, and the doctor gave a shout of victory when he saw the baby’s head, which made Charlotte try that much harder as she clenched her mother-in-law’s hand and they cheered her on. It took another two hours of agonizing pushing, while Charlotte hung between consciousness and oblivion and felt as though she was drowning, as her baby finally came into the world with the cord tangled tightly around her, which was what had been holding her back. The doctor cut the cord and freed her, and he held her up, cleared her airway with a suction bulb, and the baby gave a hearty cry. Charlotte smiled weakly when she saw her. It was a girl, a very big baby. It was difficult to imagine that a child that size had emerged from such a tiny person, and when they weighed her, she weighed just over nine pounds. Charlotte had slipped into merciful unconsciousness by then, just after the baby was born, and he had given her drops for the pain which allowed him to repair the tears the baby had caused before Charlotte woke up again. She was bleeding heavily, which he assured the countess was to be expected after such a difficult birth, with a baby that large, and he said the bleeding would soon stop.