The Bridgertons Happily Ever After (25 page)

“He left,” the midwife answered. “There was another baby . . . the solicitor’s wife.”

Lucy tried to open her eyes. She wanted to see his face, to tell him that she was fine. Except that she wasn’t fine. She didn’t hurt, exactly; well, not any more than a body usually hurt after delivering a baby. She couldn’t really describe it. She simply felt
wrong
.

“Lucy?” Gregory’s voice fought its way through her haze. “Lucy!” He took her hand, squeezed it, then shook it.

She wanted to reassure him, but she felt so far away. And that wrong feeling was spreading throughout, sliding from her belly to her limbs, straight down to her toes.

It wasn’t so bad if she kept herself perfectly still. Maybe if she slept . . .

“What’s wrong with her?” Gregory demanded. Behind him the babies were squalling, but at least they were wriggling and pink, whereas Lucy—

“Lucy?” He tried to make his voice urgent, but to him it just sounded like terror. “Lucy?”

Her face was pasty; her lips, bloodless. She wasn’t exactly unconscious, but she wasn’t responsive, either.

“What is
wrong
with her?”

The midwife hurried to the foot of the bed and looked under the covers. She gasped, and when she looked up, her face was nearly as pale as Lucy’s.

Gregory looked down, just in time to see a crimson stain seeping along the bedsheet.

“Get me more towels,” the midwife snapped, and Gregory did not think twice before doing her bidding.

“I’ll need more than this,” she said grimly. She shoved several under Lucy’s hips. “Go, go!”

“I’ll go,” Hyacinth said. “You stay.”

She dashed out to the hall, leaving Gregory standing at the midwife’s side, feeling helpless and incompetent. What kind of man stood still while his wife bled?

But he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to do anything except hand the towels to the midwife, who was jamming them against Lucy with brutal force.

He opened his mouth to say . . . something. He might have got a word out. He wasn’t sure. It might have just been a sound, an awful, terrified sound that burst up from deep within him.

“Where are the towels?” the midwife demanded.

Gregory nodded and ran into the hall, relieved to be given a task. “Hyacinth! Hya—”

Lucy screamed.

“Oh my God.” Gregory swayed, holding the frame of the door for support. It wasn’t the blood; he could handle the blood. It was the scream. He had never heard a human being make such a sound.

“What are you doing to her?” he asked. His voice was shaky as he pushed himself away from the wall. It was hard to watch, and even harder to hear, but maybe he could hold Lucy’s hand.

“I’m manipulating her belly,” the midwife grunted. She pressed down hard, then squeezed. Lucy let out another scream and nearly took off Gregory’s fingers.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said. “You’re pushing out her blood. She can’t lose—”

“You’ll have to trust me,” the midwife said curtly. “I have seen this before. More times than I care to count.”

Gregory felt his lips form the question—
Did they live?
But he didn’t ask it. The midwife’s face was far too grim. He didn’t want to know the answer.

By now Lucy’s screams had disintegrated into moans, but somehow this was even worse. Her breath was fast and shallow, her eyes squeezed shut against the pain of the midwife’s jabs. “Please, make her stop,” she whimpered.

Gregory looked frantically at the midwife. She was now using both hands, one reaching up—

“Oh, God.” He turned back. He couldn’t watch. “You have to let her help you,” he said to Lucy.

“I have the towels!” Hyacinth said, bursting into the room. She stopped short, staring at Lucy. “Oh my God.” Her voice wavered. “Gregory?”

“Shut
up
.” He didn’t want to hear his sister. He didn’t want to talk to her, he didn’t want to answer her questions. He didn’t
know
. For the love of God, couldn’t she see that he didn’t know what was happening?

And to force him to admit that out loud would have been the cruelest sort of torture.

“It hurts,” Lucy whimpered. “It
hurts
.”

“I know. I know. If I could do it for you, I would. I swear to you.” He clutched her hand in both of his, willing some of his own strength to pass into her. Her grip was growing feeble, tightening only when the midwife made a particularly vigorous movement.

And then Lucy’s hand went slack.

Gregory stopped breathing. He looked over at the midwife in horror. She was still standing at the base of the bed, her face a mask of grim determination as she worked. Then she stopped, her eyes narrowing as she took a step back. She didn’t say anything.

Hyacinth stood frozen, the towels still stacked up in her arms. “What . . . what . . .” But her voice wasn’t even a whisper, lacking the strength to complete her thought.

The midwife reached a hand out, touching the bloodied bed near Lucy. “I think . . . that’s all,” she said.

Gregory looked down at his wife, who lay terrifyingly still. Then he turned back to the midwife. He could see her chest rise and fall, taking in all the great gulps of air she hadn’t allowed herself while she was working on Lucy.

“What do you mean,” he asked, barely able to force the words across his lips, “ ‘that’s all’?”

“The bleeding’s done.”

Gregory turned slowly back to Lucy. The bleeding was done. What did that mean? Didn’t all bleeding stop . . . eventually?

Why was the midwife just standing there? Shouldn’t she be doing something? Shouldn’t
he
be doing something? Or was Lucy—

He turned back to the midwife, his anguish palpable.

“She’s not dead,” the midwife said quickly. “At least I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
think
so?” he echoed, his voice rising in volume.

The midwife staggered forward. She was covered with blood, and she looked exhausted, but Gregory didn’t give a sodding damn if she was ready to drop. “
Help her
,” he demanded.

The midwife took Lucy’s wrist and felt for a pulse. She gave him a quick nod when she found one, but then she said, “I’ve done everything I can.”

“No,” Gregory said, because he refused to believe that this was it. There was always something one could do. “No,” he said again. “
No!
”

“Gregory,” Hyacinth said, touching his arm.

He shook her off. “Do something,” he said, taking a menacing step toward the midwife. “You have to do something.”

“She’s lost a great deal of blood,” the midwife said, sagging back against the wall. “We can only wait. I have no way of knowing which way she’ll go. Some women recover. Others . . .” Her voice trailed off. It might have been because she didn’t want to say it. Or it might have been the expression on Gregory’s face.

Gregory swallowed. He didn’t have much of a temper; he’d always been a reasonable man. But the urge to lash out, to scream or beat the walls, to find some way to gather up all that blood and push it back into her . . .

He could barely breathe against the force of it.

Hyacinth moved quietly to his side. Her hand found his, and without thinking he entwined his fingers in hers. He waited for her to say something like:
She’s going to be fine
. Or:
All will be well, just have faith
.

But she didn’t. This was Hyacinth, and she never lied. But she was here. Thank God she was here.

She squeezed his hand, and he knew she would stay however long he needed her.

He blinked at the midwife, trying to find his voice. “What if—”
No
. “What
when
,” he said haltingly. “What do we do
when
she wakes up?”

The midwife looked at Hyacinth first, which for some reason irritated him. “She’ll be very weak,” she said.

“But she’ll be all right?” he asked, practically jumping on top of her words.

The midwife looked at him with an awful expression. It was something bordering on pity. With sorrow. And resignation. “It’s hard to say,” she finally said.

Gregory searched her face, desperate for something that wasn’t a platitude or half answer. “What the devil does that mean?”

The midwife looked somewhere that wasn’t quite his eyes. “There could be an infection. It happens frequently in cases like this.”

“Why?”

The midwife blinked.

“Why?” he practically roared. Hyacinth’s hand tightened around his.

“I don’t know.” The midwife backed up a step. “It just does.”

Gregory turned back to Lucy, unable to look at the midwife any longer. She was covered in blood—Lucy’s blood—and maybe this wasn’t her fault—maybe it wasn’t anyone’s fault—but he couldn’t bear to look at her for another moment.

“Dr. Jarvis must return,” he said in a low voice, picking up Lucy’s limp hand.

“I will see to it,” Hyacinth said. “And I will have someone come for the sheets.”

Gregory did not look up.

“I will be going now as well,” the midwife said.

He did not reply. He heard feet moving along the floor, followed by the gentle click of the door closing, but he kept his gaze on Lucy’s face the whole time.

“Lucy,” he whispered, trying to force his voice into a teasing tone. “La la la Lucy.” It was a silly refrain, one their daughter Hermione had made up when she was four. “La la la Lucy.”

He searched her face. Did she just smile? He thought he saw her expression change a touch.

“La la la Lucy.” His voice wobbled, but he kept it up. “La la la Lucy.”

He felt like an idiot. He
sounded
like an idiot, but he had no idea what else to say. Normally, he was never at a loss for words. Certainly not with Lucy. But now . . . what did one say at such a time?

So he sat there. He sat there for what felt like hours. He sat there and tried to remember to breathe. He sat there and covered his mouth every time he felt a huge choking sob coming on, because he didn’t want her to hear it. He sat there and tried desperately not to think about what his life might be without her.

She had been his entire world. Then they had children, and she was no longer everything to him, but still, she was at the center of it all. The sun. His sun, around which everything important revolved.

Lucy. She was the girl he hadn’t realized he adored until it was almost too late. She was so perfect, so utterly his other half that he had almost overlooked her. He’d been waiting for a love fraught with passion and drama; it hadn’t even occurred to him that true love might be something that was utterly comfortable and just plain easy.

With Lucy he could sit for hours and not say a word. Or they could chatter like magpies. He could say something stupid and not care. He could make love to her all night or go several weeks spending his nights simply snuggled up to next to her.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered because they both
knew
.

“I can’t do it without you,” he blurted out. Bloody hell, he went an hour without speaking and
this
was the first thing he said? “I mean, I can, because I would have to, but it’ll be awful, and honestly, I won’t do such a good job. I’m a good father, but only because you are such a good mother.”

If she died . . .

He shut his eyes tightly, trying to banish the thought. He’d been trying so hard to keep those three words from his mind.

Three words. “Three words” was supposed to mean
I love you
. Not—

He took a deep, shuddering breath. He had to stop thinking this way.

The window had been cracked open to allow a slight breeze, and Gregory heard a joyful shriek from outside. One of his children—one of the boys from the sound of it. It was sunny, and he imagined they were playing some sort of racing game on the lawn.

Lucy loved to watch them run about outside. She loved to run
with
them, too, even when she was so pregnant that she moved like a duck.

“Lucy,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.

“They need you more,” he choked out, shifting his position so that he could hold her hand in both of his. “The children. They need
you
more. I know you know that. You would never say it, but you know it. And
I
need you. I think you know that, too.”

But she didn’t reply. She didn’t move.

But she breathed. At least, thank God, she breathed.

“Father?”

Gregory started at the voice of his eldest child, and he quickly turned away, desperate for a moment to compose himself.

“I went to see the babies,” Katharine said as she entered the room. “Aunt Hyacinth said I could.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“They’re very sweet,” Katharine said. “The babies, I mean. Not Aunt Hyacinth.”

To his utter shock, Gregory felt himself smile. “No,” he said, “no one would call Aunt Hyacinth sweet.”

“But I do love her,” Katharine said quickly.

“I know,” he replied, finally turning to look at her. Ever loyal, his Katharine was. “I do, too.”

Katharine took a few steps forward, pausing near the foot of the bed. “Why is Mama still sleeping?”

He swallowed. “Well, she’s very tired, pet. It takes a great deal of energy to have a baby. Double for two.”

Katharine nodded solemnly, but he wasn’t sure if she believed him. She was looking at her mother with a furrowed brow—not quite concerned, but very, very curious. “She’s pale,” she finally said.

“Do you think so?” Gregory responded.

“She’s white as a sheet.”

His opinion precisely, but he was trying not to sound worried, so he merely said, “Perhaps a little more pale than usual.”

Katharine regarded him for a moment, then took a seat in the chair next to him. She sat straight, her hands folded neatly in her lap, and Gregory could not help marveling at the miracle of her. Almost twelve years ago Katharine Hazel Bridgerton had entered this world, and he had become a father. It was, he had realized the instant she had been put into his arms, his one true vocation. He was a younger son; he was not going to hold a title, and he was not suited for the military or the clergy. His place in life was to be a gentleman farmer.