A Mother's Love (25 page)

Once outside, Clara put herself in command of the situation and ordered them to help Harriet to a bench. ‘She can rest there. It’s only just started. She’s got plenty of time. When the pain dies down, we’ll get her into one of the carriages and get her home. Fred, you can bring it back when we’ve done with it. Someone’ll want it to get home in. Robert, you take another carriage and go for their doctor. I think she’ll need you here, Matthew.’

‘Hold on!’ Annie was stiff-necked. ‘Don’t order my Robert about like that. If anyone’s to tell him what to do, I …’

‘Oh, blow you, Annie! What does it matter? Fred’ll go – I don’t care! S’long as
someone
does.’

‘Would you, Robert?’ Matthew’s quiet, anxious voice intervened.

Robert shook his head, mainly to dismiss the plea. ‘Of course, old man. You stay with Harriet. That’s y’place.’

The pain subsiding, Harriet was helped gently to the carriage, and half lifted into it. Clara got in beside her with Matthew. Robert hurried off to procure a spare carriage to speed off to Dr Horder, while Annie went back into the church to pass the word about being two carriages short and to tell her parents what was happening.

As Harriet’s vehicle started away at a gentle pace so as not to cause her more discomfort than necessary, she heard the joyful peal of bells behind her. John and Lottie were married. Soon they would be coming out of the church after signing the register. But she had other things on her mind. This baby would be born whole and healthy. Nothing else mattered.

All in all it had been going on for thirty-two hours. Harriet, feeling remarkably well and brave, had insisted on getting up and walking about despite the midwife’s warnings to rest in readiness for her labour proper. She had eaten a good lunch and a small dinner. That night she had even slept between her bouts of contractions, slight as ever they’d been through the day. Dr Horder had pronounced her in fine fettle and told Matthew to call him as the pains became stronger and more frequent. He had patients to deal with elsewhere, he remarked jovially, and it could be in inestimable number of hours before she needed to call him again.

The next morning, just after she had enjoyed a moderate breakfast, her labour began in earnest. Bundled into bed, her shrieks had Matthew ordering Ellen to hurry for Dr Horder. He was with her now, hadn’t left the room at all. The day passed agonisingly slowly, and it was now almost dusk, and still her cries rang from the bedroom – beginning to sound exhausted, Matthew was sure.

Dreadful cries. If he could have left the house, to be out of hearing, he would have, but his place was here, as near as possible to her. Not that a woman in labour wanted her husband anywhere near, but he felt that to leave would be a betrayal. If she had to endure such prolonged pain, then so would he endure hearing it.

As dusk faded, Matthew relaxed his vigil and walked the garden in the warm darkness with Harriet’s father, wreathes of smoke from cigarettes drifting up to a star-studded sky on the still air. Her parents had left the wedding reception as soon as they decently could, and Harriet’s mother had made herself busy around the house instructing Mrs Downey on the preparation of an evening meal, though Matthew had hardly eaten a thing. How could he, with Harriet suffering so upstairs? But her mother ate well enough. ‘No point in starving ourselves to death. Harriet will be fine. I know she will.’

He was back inside the house when the midwife came puffing down the stairs. From above, Harriet’s cries sounded more feebly, already causing some anxiety.

‘There are complications.’ Her face was grave as she met Matthew’s apprehensive one. ‘Doctor’s doing all he can. But it don’t look good.’

Unable to take in the full import of what the woman had said, Matthew felt inexplicably angry. ‘Why wasn’t I told before? What complications?’

She looked blank, unsure how to explain to a layman the complication of hydrocephalus, which could occur unforeseen often without any known cause. Ordinary people called it water on the brain, and it was known to be incurable.

‘Doctor never anticipated this sort of complication,’ was all she felt able to confide. ‘He’ll be coming down to speak to you himself about it as soon as he can safely do so, sir. I must hurry back now.’

‘It’s a rum do,’ Jack Wilson rumbled, as the woman puffed her way back up the stairs to the labour room, the anxiety on his usually benign face belying the shallow statement.

Mary Wilson, coming up from the kitchen, saw the looks on the men’s faces and was immediately alarmed. ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

Matthew shook his head, unable to trust himself to speak.

‘Complications,’ Jack Wilson said for him. ‘Midwife just told us.’

‘Oh, dear God – what?’

‘Maybe not as bad as it seems, my dear,’ Jack said hastily. ‘These midwives, they’re scaremongers. Horder’s coming down anyway to talk to us.’

Matthew looked from one to the other. He could hear Harriet, her cries, though markedly weaker, ironically heartening to his ears. At least she wasn’t lost. For one terrifying moment he had thought …

‘Oh, my poor child!’ One hand to her lips, Mary had sunk down on the chair near the door where Matthew was wont to throw his coat when he came home after a day’s work at the journal. In tableaux, the three waited, unsure what to do next. They looked up as one as a movement on the stairs alerted them.

Horder came down quite nimbly for a corpulent man. Taking Matthew by the arm, he guided him into the drawing room, closing the door.

‘I’ll not beat about the bush, Matthew.’ Not prepared to waste time explaining the whys and wherefores when he himself was at a loss for a cause, he went straight on. ‘The child’s head doesn’t come through. I’ve done all I can. Your wife’s exhausted. It’s become a case of mother or child. If I don’t act now, it will be mother
and
child. I needed to warn you.’

William Horder forced himself to meet the husband’s bewildered look. The man knew well enough what he was saying but could not believe it. The question, ‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’ was written all over that face.

‘I’ve done everything.’ He answered the unspoken question. ‘She’s been far too weakened for me to perform a caesarian operation. The shock would kill her, and I doubt it would save the baby.’

Of all the potential difficulties in labour, this was the dilemma he hated most. To save the mother he must kill the child. There was no other way when a fetus became a foreign body within its own mother’s womb, killing her slowly with its inability to be born. It would die even without his crochets and scissors; would putrify, spread poison through the mother’s system – if she didn’t die within the next hour from sheer exhaustion.

He must apply his murderous instruments to the living fetus – the most heartbreaking, gory task imaginable. Then the enlarged head, pierced and drained of its fluids, would come through. The mother’s life would be saved. Would there come a time in the medical world when such terrible, drastic measures would be rendered unnecessary?

He had come into the profession at the time ether was first being used in surgery. These days no doctor would dream of performing any surgical operation without it. So many great leaps had been made in medicine; if only a man might one day be able to peer into the womb so as to see before a child was born whether it was becoming a threat to the mother. But that was asking too much. No stride in medicine would ever achieve such a thing. It would be too like trying to step into God’s shoes, and, no – that wasn’t to be countenanced. To his mind, medicine had gone as far as it ever would. There would always be death in childbirth, and though he might pooh-pooh the belief that death was God’s will, something inside him said that God must have the last word and the humble doctor and surgeon could learn only so much and no more. It was a great pity.

‘I need your answer, Matthew.’ Though he knew the answer; should not have wasted time asking; but as a family doctor – a friend – knew he must.

The husband’s expression wrung his heart. ‘Save her …’

‘If I can.’ He laid a brief hand on the trembling shoulder and hurried from the room, the stricken gaze following him as he mounted the stairs to his task.

William Horder had washed his hands thoroughly and packed away his bloodied apron so that nothing of his deed could be seen. The tiny, mutilated remains had been wrapped up in sheets, well out of sight. The mother, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, would know nothing about it until the next day. Then would come her husband’s part, helping her as gently as he could to face her loss. She would never know the truth of it, of course – only that her child had been stillborn. Aware of the highly strung nature of Harriet Craig, he felt that would be bad enough. But he had worse news yet. Politely he ushered the husband and her parents into the drawing room.

‘Let us sit down.’ He felt he should smile to reassure them that it wasn’t all dire – though it was dire enough for the smile to be solemn.

Matthew immediately thought the worst. His voice rose. ‘She’s not …’

‘She’s sleeping.’ He waited for him to compose himself. ‘I do, however, have something of gravity to tell you. The extent of it, of course, depends on how you view it. But the considerable length of time the head was pressed …’ He stopped, in danger of becoming too technical for everyone’s good. He began again. ‘The crux of the matter is that she has been damaged internally – quite considerably, I regret to say. I doubt she’ll be able to conceive again. If by some chance she does, it could … well … imperil her life.’

He directed his gaze straight at the husband. ‘It will be up to you – the responsibility of making certain she is never put in that danger. I’m sorry.’

Matthew rose without nodding his understanding. He looked neither at Horder, nor at his wife’s parents. ‘May I go up and see her?’

‘Of course.’ Horder also rose, prompting the others to get up too. ‘I shall send a nurse to take care of her. She should be here within an hour.’

‘I can take care of her,’ Mary put in, but he shook his head.

‘She will need care for quite some weeks from someone with expert knowledge of nursing, Mrs Wilson. But there’s no reason why you may not help look after your daughter if you wish.’

He walked towards the door. His bag stood outside, together with another hastily procured from the basement by the midwife some while back.

‘I shall return in the morning to check upon your wife.’

Matthew was still standing in the middle of the room, looking at none of them, his gaze trained sightlessly upon one of the brocade easy chairs. ‘What was … the baby?’

Horder stood with one hand on the door handle. He had expected this question, knew he must answer it without circumlocution.

‘It was a boy.’

Matthew’s face creased. He took in a great breath to control himself, then straightened, but still without looking at any of the faces regarding him anxiously. ‘May I see him?’

Horder had anticipated this request too. Any father would want to gaze at least once at his dead son. But in this case, it had to be denied, at least for the moment. The sight of the tiny bandaged head, bloodied matter still seeping into the cloth, would only add pain to pain.

‘I think it better not to, Matthew. Later, perhaps.’

At last the eyes focused, so filled with knowledge that Horder almost recoiled. Then they fell away.

‘Thank you for all you’ve done, Doctor.’ His voice was utterly flat.

‘I’ll return in the morning.’ Horder opened the door, said his goodbyes to the older couple and hurried out, gathering up both bags before the housemaid let him out into the night.

In the mortuary, the tiny body would be cleaned up, made safe to look upon in swathing lace robes and a heavy lace cap over the tight bandages. Matthew could see his son without fear before the little body was laid to rest at the foot of another’s coffin, being unbaptised.

While Jamie stayed at home as a comfort to his mother, Sara was sent away to spend the school summer holiday with everyone else in the family but her mother and father. Her father didn’t think it a good idea, but her mother’s poor health prevented him arguing about it.

So Aunt Annie had her for one week and Aunt Clara for another, which was quite nice as she could play with her cousins. Then there were two weeks with Nanna and Grandad, who treated her like a baby but spoiled her utterly, which was very enjoyable; and two weeks with her godmother, Great-Aunt Sarah, who treated her exactly like a grown-up rather than a six-year-old, which was a very special feeling.

‘As you can expect,’ Great-Aunt Sarah said as they took a walk in Victoria Park in the hot late August sunshine, her papery complexion shielded by a cream sun umbrella, ‘your mother will seem to behave strangely for quite some time to come. You must expect that. You see, when a woman has a baby and loses it just as it is being born – what is usually called stillborn – it leaves her in great shock. It is in fact bereavement. Do you know what bereavement is?’

Sara shook her head, walking very upright beside her. Everyone said she was tall for her age. She believed them; she was already up to this small woman’s armpit. If Great-Aunt held her arm straight, Sara could only just stand erect beneath it, and more and more that arm was having to be raised a fraction to accommodate her. She guessed that in this family of small people she probably took after her grandfather, who was large, or her father. His parents were tall too, she recalled from the only time she’d met them, though she couldn’t think whose colouring she had – dark hair, blue eyes – no one in the family she could think of.

‘A bereavement,’ Great-Aunt was saying, ‘is when someone very dear to you dies. A loved one. It makes everyone terribly sad, and those nearest to the dead person feel the loss almost like a pain inside. It’s called mourning. Not like
this
morning – it’s spelt differently. It means you feel miserable and upset and terribly empty.’

‘But if the loved one is going to heaven,’ Sara argued, feeling very grown-up, talking like an adult with this woman, ‘shouldn’t their families be pleased that the loved one is happy in heaven?’