The Gathering Storm (The Jacobite Chronicles Book 3)(46)
"Oh, he's adorable!" she said.
"He has my colour eyes," said Caroline. "But otherwise, as I am sure you can see now, he is his father to a T."
"It must be a great consolation to you at this terrible time to know that you will soon have a child of your own," said Beth. "A reminder of your husband to treasure and love."
Anne's hand fluttered automatically to her stomach, which was flat, concave, even.
"Of course," she said with awe, as though realising for the first time that she was pregnant. "It doesn't seem possible, somehow. I can't feel anything happening at all." She looked at Caroline, her eyes brimming. "Oh, do you think he will look like his father, too?" she asked passionately. "That would be wonderful!"
Remembering Lord Redburn's bulbous nose and less than prepossessing features, Caroline was inclined to disagree but was too sensible to say so.
"He won't look like anything unless you start to take care of yourself, Anne," Beth said. "If you continue to lock yourself away in this room with no air or light, and starve yourself as you have been doing, you will miscarry."
Her seemingly brutal words, combined with the angelic picture of lacy babyhood crawling round her skirts, had the desired effect. Anne flinched as though she had been hit.
"I hadn't thought … " she said.
"Of course you hadn't," said Beth consolingly. "You were stricken with grief. You still are. It's perfectly understandable. But you cannot afford to indulge yourself any more, Anne. You are carrying your husband's child. You owe it to Lord … to Stanley, and to your baby, to take the very best care of yourself. You must start eating, or you will starve your baby too."
"And you must try, hard as it will be, to be cheerful. A baby's growth in the womb is adversely affected by the mood of the mother, if she is excessively sad," added Caroline.
"Is it?" said Anne, her eyes widening.
"Most definitely," said Caroline firmly, who had made this fact up on the spot. "A healthy, happy child needs a healthy, happy mother. I will help you, of course. I know a good deal about babies now."
"And Anthony and I will help as well, in any way we can. We are your friends," said Beth. "And you must turn to us. We will be most upset if you do not."
* * *
"She's coming," announced Beth the night before Clarissa's birthday party.
"Why am I no' surprised?" said Alex, who had now fallen back into his dual role and felt no compunction about speaking Scots at home. "I suppose ye're going to regale us wi' the details of the campaign."
"Of course I am," said Beth smugly. "Caroline and I, after several visits, with the help of Freddie, who has behaved perfectly at all times in her presence, the little angel, have managed to persuade Anne that she owes it to her husband to ensure she has a healthy child. And that to do that she must cheer up and re-enter life a little."
"What my wife is trying to say," said Alex to his brothers, and Iain and Maggie, who were all draped in various relaxed poses around the drawing room, "is that she and her crony have terrified the poor woman into believing that if she has a moment's unhappiness between now and April, the bairn will be born with two heads."
"No we haven't!" protested Beth. "What we have done is got her eating again, and looking forward to the future a little. God, the woman was a skeleton! She'd have been dead in a month if I'd left her to Charlotte's tender ministrations. Sympathy is all well and good; encouraging someone to wallow for the rest of their life in self-pity is another thing altogether."
"It sustains Charlotte," pointed out Alex.
"True. But it was killing Anne."
"Well done," said Iain. "Now can ye turn your hand to stopping my wife eating, before she gets so big I canna fit in the bed wi' her?"
"Haud yer wheesht," said Maggie, who since becoming pregnant had indeed developed a prodigious appetite, but had not, in spite of Iain's dire predictions, put on any great amount of weight, although her stomach was starting to round nicely now she was in her fourth month. "I'm eating for the bairn too, remember."
"You must be having triplets then," said Angus cheerfully, moving to take up a supine position by the hearth. Maggie and Beth, both sitting on the sofa, used him as a footstool in perfect synchronicity, then laughed.
"As long as they're no' born on the sixteenth of April, I dinna care if there's ten of them in there," Maggie said.
"It'd be an awfu' bonny twenty-first present for me if they were," said Angus.
"Not for me it wouldna," said Maggie, wiggling her toes blissfully in the warmth of the fire. "I've nae intention of lying in my bed alone screaming wi' birthing pains, while you lot are all roistering away down here."
"I wouldna be!" said Iain indignantly. "I'd be with ye. Well, in spirit anyway," he amended, remembering with relief that men were not allowed in the birthing chamber. He put his arm around his wife's shoulder.
"Aye, it's the spirits I'm worried about," said Maggie
"Will ye be calling it Angus, then, if it's born on my birthday?" persisted the footstool.
"Only if it's a girl," replied Maggie. "I'd be too afraid of it turning out like you, else." She reached across to the plate on the table for the last biscuit, only to have it snatched from under her fingers by Duncan, who broke it in half, throwing one piece with perfect accuracy into his younger brother's open mouth, and munching happily on the other.
"It's all that excess fat, Maggie," Duncan said. "It's making ye slow." He ducked as a cushion sailed harmlessly past his head, glancing over his shoulder as it hit the wall behind him.
"See what I mean?" He grinned, turning back in time to receive the second one full in the face.
"Have the MacGregors no shame at all," said Beth amidst the general laughter. "Taking the bread from an innocent unborn child's mouth?"
"Speaking of the innocent, and gullible," said Alex. "I can see how ye got Anne tae eat again, but how the hell did ye talk her into going to a dinner party and the opera?"
"That's thanks to you," said Beth. "Once you told me that you couldn't come, because you're meeting with Sir all-the-double-u's … "
"Sir William Watkins Wynne," supplied Alex.
"Yes, him. And Sir John Cotton and the Earl of Barrymore, I realised that I would have no partner."
"I have to go, Beth," Alex said. "Wynne lives in Wales and rarely comes to London. If I dinna see him now, I'll have to travel two hundred miles to do it."
"No, it's perfectly all right. I'm glad, in fact." She was, for two reasons, only one of which she went on to reveal. "It means that I was able to persuade Anne that I needed her company if I was not to be the odd number at the party. Especially because Caroline won't be there. She's got to entertain some MPs to dinner that night. Edwin's parliamentary star is rising, it seems, and she's got to play her part. She's even looking to engage a nurse for Freddie, on a part-time basis."
"And Anne actually believed that you're so lacking in confidence you're afraid of attending a family dinner without me?" Alex said incredulously. "Christ, woman, if I dinna stop ye, I've nae doubt ye'll lead the MacGregors into battle single-handedly when the time comes."
"No, she willna," said Duncan. "She'll be at St. James's talking Geordie into believing that Hanover's particularly pleasant at this time of year, and helping him to pack his bags."
"That wouldn't exactly be a challenge," said Beth. "He spends more time in Hanover than he does in England as it is. I don't know why he persists in being king, when he obviously hates the place he's king of. Now if I could persuade his sons to go as well, and Cumberland to drown himself on the way across the Channel, that'd be more like it."
"Teach me some of your persuasive ways, then," said Alex. "If I can convince Wynne, Cotton and Barrymore to commit themselves to us, ye'll have nae need to persuade Geordie or his sons to go home. They'll be running as fast as their German legs can carry them."
"You're on your own there, I'm afraid," replied Beth. "You don't need any help from me, anyway. I learnt most of my devious ways from you. But persuading Anne to do things isn't very difficult. She could be talked into almost anything at the moment. It's up to us as her friends to make sure she's only pushed into doing the things that are right for her, until she's got the strength to make her own decisions."
* * *
Clarissa's birthday dinner was a success, although on a personal level Beth had not thought it was going to be at first. The table was set with the finest damask linen, delicate pink and white flowered china, and impressive displays of white chrysanthemums. The chandelier blazed with light, casting rainbows around the room, and the food promised to be at least edible, the Cunninghams having engaged a new and competent cook to replace the one who had run off with the French chef.