The Reckoning (104 page)

‘Perhaps that's what ails her. A woman can never really be
fulfilled until she bears her man a child.'

‘
I don't think Rosamund feels like that, though. She's
never spoken about wanting a child. In fact, she talks very
disparagingly about them – calls them "little brutes" and soon.'

‘
Covering up her feelings,' Héloïse said. 'I thought when
she stayed with us that time, before you went to Scarborough,
that she was a very private person, and very good at
concealing what she felt and thought. And people like that
often suffer the most, poor things.' She looked at Sophie's
grave face, and added cheeringly, 'But her mother will be
back soon, and that will help.’

Sophie looked brighter. 'Yes – I do think she has missed
Aunt Lucy.'

‘
They were becoming real friends, weren't they? I could see
it when they were in Brussels together. It is pleasant for a
mother when her daughter grows up enough to be a friend.'

‘
Did I tell you what Ros is hoping to plan with Aunt Lucy
when she gets back? A special celebration and house party at
Chelmsford House for the Coronation! Everyone's to be
invited – all the family, you and Papa and Polly and the boys, and Jasper and me, and all Marcus's relations, and
all their friends. She says she wants to fill Chelmsford House
to the rafters and have a party no-one will ever forget.' She
folded her hands over her belly. 'I'm so glad the baby is going
to get here in time for me to be able to go. I should hate to miss it.'

‘
It sounds almost too attractive. But two holidays in one
year,' her mother said doubtfully. 'I'm not sure what your
father will think! It was hard enough to persuade him to come
away this once – he thinks the estate will go to rack without
him. He's getting more like Uncle Ned every day.' There was
a silence, and she glanced up at her daughter. 'Sophie? What
is it,
chérie?’

Sophie's eyes were filled with a mixture of alarm and
excitement. 'I don't know because I've never felt it before, but I think –' She broke off with a grunt and closed her eyes for a
moment. 'I think,' she resumed more faintly, 'that the baby is
coming now.’

*

James turned and put himself into his wife's arms, weak with
relief.

‘
There, my James, I told you it would be all right,' she said;
but her voice sounded strained. After eighteen hours of
assuring James that first babies always took a long time to
arrive, quite apart from coping with her own maternal fears,
she was feeling drained.

‘
A girl,' Jasper said, and his face was so transformed with
joy and wonder that Héloïse thought he looked almost hand
some. 'I'm glad it's a girl!'

‘
I am too,' Héloïse said. 'I think you will be a good father to
a daughter.'

‘
Girls are much more difficult than boys to bring up,'
James said, giving his son-in-law a friendly, man-to-man look
across Héloïse's shoulder. 'And then, just when all the diffi
culties are over, they get married and you have to part with
them.’

Jasper grinned. 'If you want me to apologise for marrying
Sophie, I'm afraid I can't oblige you. And I'm not prepared to
give her back, either.’

James smiled back. 'I'll let you have a long lease on her.
Well, can we go in and see her, and the baby?’

It was a shock to him, all the same, to see his little Sophie
in bed, weary from her ordeal, and yet with that transfiguring
smile he remembered from when Nicky and Bendy had been
born. It was a shock to see the white bundle in Sophie's arms,
and realise his little girl was now a mother herself. It was
painful, most of all, to remember Fanny, who had been robbed
of this moment of moments, along with all the rest of her life.

Héloïse and Jasper were on either side of the bed, kissing
Sophie, exclaiming over the . baby – which from where he
stood, at the end of the bed, was just a white cocoon with a
red face. He felt suddenly cold and frightened, haunted by his
memories. He was cut off from the warm precincts of reality
– something he hadn't felt for years now, not since the first
weeks after Ned died. Since then, he seemed to have found his
place in real life; it was bad, at such a moment especially, to
lose the sense of it again.

Sophie looked at him down the length of the bed, and for a
moment she was so like Fanny that it made him shiver.

‘Papa,' she said, 'come and see her. Come and see the baby.’

They were all looking at him now, and he saw the quick
flash of anxiety in Héloïse's eyes as she realised all was not
well for him. Of course, she would always know how he was
feeling, even if she didn't always know why. Well, he must do
his duty, he mustn't upset Sophie. He went up to the
bedhead, bent over and kissed her cheek, said something – in
his daze he didn't know what. And Sophie was lifting the
bundle up, she was saying, 'You must hold her, Papa. Take
your granddaughter.’

He took the bundle; and it wasn't a bundle, of course, but a
real, living, oh such a tiny baby! Straightening up with it, he
looked down into the small, sleeping face. No, not sleeping.
The eyes were shut, but the lips were moving, the eyebrows
going up and down – she was throbbing with the force of the
new life in her. Surely it was too powerful for her tiny body to
contain. Some of it must spill off somewhere, he thought.
Perhaps it was absorbed by everyone who held her for the
first few hours – a kind of radiant halation, like the glow you
sometimes saw round a star.

Sophie spoke again, sounding a little anxious, but mostly
hopeful. 'We thought, if you didn't mind, Papa, that we'd call
her Fanny.’

He felt a jolt of surprise – and yet, deep down, he wasn't
surprised at all. It was what Héloïse was always telling him
about the wheel turning: God's pattern was worked out, if
you only gave it long enough. The baby lay pulsing with new
life in his arms, and all that had ever been taken from him
was being given
_,
back. God's grace on him, His mercy, unde
served and yet freely given. He was forgiven at last,
ransomed, healed, restored. Absorbing the spilled radiance from his granddaughter's new life, he felt suddenly young,
and full of laughter.

‘
Little Fanny Hobsbawn,' he said in wonder.

He laughed aloud, and the baby pursed her lips at him
judiciously; and then he looked up at the others, and saw that
they were laughing too.