Chapter 12 A Summer Shame

By afternoon, the staff of Blaylock House were attended to, quartered with the staff of Starvet House or with a few tenant families that were relations and Elizabeth Darcy collapsed in her bed, thoroughly exhausted. Her rest was short lived when not two hours later, the screams of Lydia Bennet woke everyone resting above stairs, including Mr. Graham Hamilton.

Elizabeth and Jane rushed to their sister’s suite to find a panting Lydia, squatting on the floor and holding a bed post.

“It hurts! It hurts!” She paused in her panted speaking to groan through another contraction. “Help me!”

Jane hustled over to Lydia and wrapped her arms under the younger girl’s shoulders to give her support while Elizabeth left to find Mrs. Buchanan. The house was eerily quiet as almost everyone had been up the whole night. Rushing down the hall of the servant’s area, Mrs. Darcy didn’t care what example she was setting by running. Reaching the housekeeper’s private room, she knocked profusely until the older woman opened the door.

“Gracious alive! Has Mr. Hamilton worsened? Is it fever?”

“No, ’tis Lydia. It’s time.”

Mrs. Buchanan fretted and flustered, wiping her hands on her gown as she spun a few times looking around her room. The woman’s lack of sleep weighed heavily on her mental processes, though in a few moments she spied what she was trying to puzzle out. A quick jot of her pen and she had two messages for the doctor and midwife to hurry.

Giving the messages to the errand boys, Mrs. Buchanan woke up more maids and started the kitchen staff on boiling extra water. Elizabeth left feeling the preparations were well in hand and returned to Lydia’s bedroom. She met her husband and Mr. Hamilton in the hall, one bewildered and the other wearing a face full of shame.

“I say, I did not know you had another sister in residence, Mrs. Darcy. She sounds like the devil be whipping her personally in there. Has anyone fetched the doctor?” Mr. Hamilton stood in the hall, frustrated that his bandaged hands made his otherwise stocky Scottish build feeble and unable to even open a door.

“Come, Graham. We’ll talk in my study.” Mr. Darcy pecked his wife on the cheek before leaving her, the only show of affection he dared to do in company.

“We’ll see her through this, sir.” Elizabeth gave her husband her fiercest look of determination and felt lifted when he gave her a weak, but confident smile. As soon as the men left the hall, Elizabeth opened the door to see Lydia disrobed to just her chemise and Jane trying to coax her to the birthing chair.

“So soon?” Elizabeth rushed forward to help Jane, who shrugged as they lifted poor Lydia away from clutching the now heavily scratched bed post.

“I’m not sure, but I don’t know what to do,” Jane whispered. Elizabeth too was at a loss as neither of them had attended a birth before this. As Jane and Elizabeth managed to get Lydia to the chair, the two ladies quietly tried to work out which one of them would check Lydia’s nether regions when Mrs. Buchanan arrived.

“Oh look at you Miss Lydia! Bringing a dear life into this world! Now there’s a good girl, you close your eyes and push through that pain, one, two, three, four . . .” The older woman rolled up her sleeves and without ceremony reached below to check Lydia’s progress while brightly talking to the soon-to-be-mother.

As Lydia rested between contractions, Mrs. Buchanan turned to accept a towel from the maid and wiped her hands. “Mrs. Darcy, Miss Bennet, may I have a word with you in the hall?” She nodded to the two maids who stepped up to pat Lydia’s brows with a cool towel while the other one spoke calming and cheerful words.

In the hall, the two pale faced ladies held each other’s hands as they waited to hear the wiser woman’s observations. Mrs. Buchanan shook her head slowly. “The babe is early and not turned right.”

“Turned? The baby turns inside?” Jane’s eye widened in horror.

Mrs. Buchanan realized while she had attended scores of births in her four decades on earth, these two young women had nary an ounce of experience for a woman’s lying in.

“A babe moves all about in a mother’s womb until the time nears for the delivery. Then the head comes down, lodging in the woman’s hips, ready for the pushes. Miss Lydia’s babe be feet first, and those babes be the longest and most painful to arrive.”

Elizabeth took in a few calming breaths and asked the question both she and Jane wished most to know. “But they will both survive? Babies do deliver, as you say, feet first?”

The rosy lips of Mrs. Buchanan pressed firmly into a thin line. “It be in the Lord’s hands now. You ladies might get some rest, Miss Lydia has a long time ahead of her and will need you for the final hours. Millie and Susan will assist me until the midwife and Doctor Simpson arrive.”

Trembling, Jane followed Elizabeth to her suite of rooms in an unspoken bond of sisterhood. Neither wished to undress, so in their day gowns they merely cuddled on Elizabeth’s four poster bed like they had for most of their lives at Longbourn.

“Lizzie, what if . . .”

“Pray, Jane. That’s all we can do. Pray.”

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