Lady Helena comes to Hollybrook on the night before the lying-in.
I am in the principal bedchamber on the second floor. The midwife from Guildford, Mrs. Halloran, has been at the house three days. The Carrow accoucheur, Dr. Margate, came down from town on the evening of the previous day; he is at this hour in the breakfast room with a cup of tea, listening for the bell. The chamber is hot. The fire has been kept up. The two cradles, plain elm, are against the further wall under a linen cover. The midwife's leather case is at the bedside.
I am sitting up at the side of the bed; the pains have come in light intervals since dusk; they are not yet of the kind that signify, but they are coming, and Mrs. Halloran would prefer me upright.
Lady Helena enters the front hall at five and twenty past ten. She comes alone, in a French silk pelisse trimmed in sable — the pelisse, the one she has worn in everyone's nightmares for thirty years — and on her wrist a small reticule of pearled velvet from which the corner of an ivory letter-knife is, the lodge-keeper later swears, plainly visible.
She informs the lodge-keeper that she has come to pay a sick call upon her dear cousin Margaret. She informs the lodge-keeper that she will not be turned away on a matter of family.
The lodge-keeper has been told, by Theodore, that Lady Helena is not to be admitted under any pretext. He stands in front of the door. He is forty-eight years old, country-bred, twice the lady's weight. He is, in the manner of country-bred men, unwilling to be heard refusing a peeress, but he is also unwilling to step aside.
She pushes past him.
She is across the hall and on the stair before either of Theodore's men in the back hall have time to come around. She is up the lower landing before Theodore himself, who is in the morning room with Adrian, has heard the disturbance.
She is on the upper landing when Mrs. Halloran opens the bedchamber door, hears the steps, and steps out to meet them, planting herself at the chamber threshold.
I see, from the bed through the open door, my own portrait at twelve in the framed copies on Mrs. Halloran's broad apron — the one in the corridor — and I see, simultaneously, Lady Helena in the silk pelisse with the reticule already open in her hand.
The corridor lamp catches the ivory of the knife.
"Mrs. Halloran. Move."
"Madam, by your leave, I cannot move."
"You impertinent —"
The pains, by some piece of luck I have only ever heard ladies speak of with embarrassment, have not at this exact moment chosen to begin in earnest. I rise from the side of the bed. I walk to the door. I put my hand on Mrs. Halloran's apron and ease the midwife aside.
I have, on the bedside table, the small pearl-handled pistol Theodore gave my mother on her last birthday. It is loaded. I have, in the last six months, learned to load it on my own.
I do not pick it up. It is on the bedside table for the children, not for Helena.
I face the dowager across the threshold of the bedchamber door, in my nightgown and a heavy shawl, with two infants moving in me, and I say:
"Lady Helena. Put up the knife."
Her face is white. Her mouth has lost a little control at the corners.
"You little Surrey bitch — you have ruined my son — you have ruined my house — you stand there, the size of a stable cat in pup —"
"Put up the knife."
She lifts it.
The hand from behind her closes round her wrist.
Adrian has come up the stair, three at a time, soundless on the carpet. He is bare-headed, his coat unbuttoned, the rain off the gravel of the avenue on his shoulder. He twists her wrist, gently, in the way one disarms a child or a man who has had too much port; her fingers open; the ivory letter-knife drops onto the carpet at the threshold of the bedchamber.
Mrs. Halloran picks the knife up by the blade.
Adrian does not raise his voice.
"Aunt."
"Adrian — Adrian —" Her eyes are wet now, and not from sorrow. From rage. "You stand for her. Against your own house. Against your cousin. Against your aunt. Your grandfather will turn in his grave —"
"Aunt." He has her elbow now, not her wrist. "If my grandfather were to turn in his grave to-night, it would be to put you out of the Dower House by the hair. He would expect me to do it for him. — Theodore. The dowager will be taken to her own carriage in five minutes, and conveyed to the Dower House. She will not be permitted to come within a mile of this place again."
Theodore, who has come up the stair behind him without a sound, takes the elbow on the other side.
Lady Helena does not, when she sees that the two men have her between them, make a further scene. She has not been bred to.
She does, going down the stair, look back at me once, and she sees that I have one hand on the bedside table for support and the other quite steadily on the muslin over my stomach.
She says, only: "It is unjust."
And goes down.
When she has gone — when the hall door has shut and Theodore's man has bolted it — Adrian comes to the door of the chamber.
He does not come in.
"Have you any harm?"
I shake my head.
He looks at Mrs. Halloran. Mrs. Halloran says, in the practical voice of women whose patients have spent the last quarter-hour standing on landings, "She is well enough, my lord, but if her ladyship will return to her bed it will please her midwife considerably."
He does not protest the pronouns.
He looks at me, on the threshold a moment, and there is on his face an expression I have seen in him exactly twice. Once in the carriage sweep at Ashcombe, half a year ago. Once tonight.
"Cecily."
"Yes."
"It is the first time tonight," he says, low, "that I have understood what I have let be done to you these three years. I have understood, twice in the last hour, what you faced alone — at the gallery; at this door — and that you faced it alone because there has been no one beside you. Because I did not stand there."
I sit, carefully, on the edge of the bed.
"My lord, it is exceedingly late for the observation."
"I know."
"But you have made it correctly at last."
I look down at my own hands. They are not shaking.
"Will you," he says, "permit me to stand on the landing tonight."
"You may stand on the landing."
He nods once.
The door of the bedchamber closes between us. I hear him through the panel set a chair on the carpet, sit down upon it, and not speak.
I do not, when the pains begin in earnest at half past one, hear him move.
The children are born under heavy snow on the twenty-fourth of January, 1818.
The elder, by seven minutes, has her grandmother's small round chin and a cry like a tradesman calling the muffin-man down a quiet street at six in the morning. The younger, when the midwife lifts her, has her fists already closed; she does not cry; she frowns at the candle as if attempting, on first acquaintance, to take its measure.
I am not, I had thought, a woman who weeps. I find I am wrong.
Mrs. Halloran lays the younger in the crook of my left elbow and the elder along my right. There is a moment in which the nine months of plotting, of evidence-gathering, of carriage rams and pamphlets and bedside ledgers, becomes very small and a great way off, as if it were a portrait one had been looking at very closely and is now able, at last, to lower from the wall.
The doctor cleans his hands. The midwife counts toes. I count two heartbeats, separately, against my collarbone.
I name them.
The elder is Philippa — Pippa, to her household — Hollybrook. The younger is Persephone — Posy — Hollybrook. The P, my mother says, was unintentional on my part; I do not contradict her, because, even so far gone in the matter, one does not gainsay one's mother.
Adrian is on the landing when the chamber door is opened.
The chair has not moved. He has not slept. He has, the door tells me, been sitting in his shirtsleeves for some hours; his coat is folded over the back of the chair.
Mrs. Halloran says, mild: "My lord, you may come in."
He comes in.
He does not, at the door, attempt to come to me; he stops three paces from the bed, looking only.
The midwife says: "Will my lord hold the elder?"
He puts his hands behind his back. He does not, for a half-second, speak.
"My hands are cold."
It is the truth. He has been in his shirtsleeves on the landing for nine hours.
He goes out without a word. He goes down the back stair to the basin in the housekeeper's pantry. The housekeeper later swears he stood with his hands in the basin until the water had run hot through the kettle three times, and that when he came back up the stair his hands were red to the wrist.
He sits at the bedside.
The midwife places the elder in the crook of his arm. He does not — I watch carefully — adjust the wrap, or attempt the elaborate, hopeless dance of a man who has never held an infant. He merely sits with her. He looks at her as if she is, herself, a small holograph codicil whose terms are precise and binding and which it would be unwise to misread.
Pippa, with the practical efficiency of the elder, opens both eyes and considers him.
I see, then, on his face, the second expression of the small night.
He is not, plainly, a man who has expected to be permitted to look at his own child.
"Cecily."
"My lord."
"They take their mother's name."
I had thought I should have to fight for it.
"Yes."
"At the christening I shall stand as the father, and in the parish register at Hollybrook the name shall be set down Hollybrook for both, with myself acknowledged. — I shall make the public declaration to the family. The children take their mother's name. Anyone with an opinion may bring it to me."
I look at him.
"It will cost you at Ashcombe."
"Yes."
"It will cost you at White's."
"Yes."
"It will cost you at Almack's."
"Yes."
"And you will absorb it."
"Yes."
"My lord, why."
He looks down at Pippa.
"Because in three years I gave you nothing the world could see. I find I will not, in the matter of their name, also give you nothing."
I do not, at this, speak.
The christening, three weeks later, is at the small Hollybrook chapel in Surrey, not at the Carrow parish church. The font is plain Surrey stone with a copper basin. The rector is my mother's old friend. The Carrow family — Sir Henry, two cousins, Adrian — sit on the right of the aisle. The Hollybrooks and Vances sit on the left. Mrs. Halloran sits behind me. Pippa wails into the rector's surplice. Posy regards the proceeding with the solemnity she has, since birth, applied to candles.
When the parish register is brought, the rector lifts the pen and looks at Adrian.
Adrian rises from his pew.
He does not speak in the chapel; he speaks in the porch, where, the chapel door open behind him, the Hampshire cousins are in earshot.
"The children take their mother's name. Anyone with an opinion may bring it to me."
The deaf Carrow cousin, who has been brought down for the day, makes the noise that in his vocabulary signifies finality.
It is the same noise that closed Julian's case at the gallery.
It is now the noise that closes the matter of the name.
Late in the afternoon, after the small family dinner, Adrian comes to the door of the nursery where I am sitting up with both girls in the low chair by the fire.
He has a folded sheet in his hand.
"This is the deed I had drawn up. A trust for each of them, in their own names. Not under the Carrow estate. Under their own. Mr. Pell countersigns. The income is theirs upon majority; the principal cannot be diverted, not by me, not by the Carrows, not by Helena's line, not by any future husband. I would like — if you will permit — to settle them on the girls."
I read it through.
I sign at the bottom my acceptance for their benefit.
He hesitates at the door.
"Cecily."
"My lord."
"Might I — be permitted — to come to see them, in days to come."
"You may come, on the days set down in writing, in the company of a witness. Mr. Pell will draw up the schedule with your man."
"Of course."
He stands at the door a moment longer.
"And — Cecily — may I —"
He does not get to the end of his sentence.
"Speak, my lord."
He looks at me as if standing in front of a magistrate.
"May I, in time, ask leave to court you afresh."
I look down at Posy in my lap. She is asleep. Pippa is in the cradle, one fist out from under the wrap.
"You may ask, my lord."
He lets out a breath he had not, perhaps, been entirely aware of holding.
"But — Cecily —"
"I am under no obligation to answer."
He laughs. It is a quick small laugh, very tired, with not much amusement in it.
"No. — No, you are not."
He goes.