I should be the only one who would see this as a result of my sin. I had been brazen, shameless … and now there was to be a result—a child of that illicit union to keep the memory of it green throughout the years.
I had fallen deeper into deceit, and although this news would bring great joy to all my family, I should be constantly reminded of those three ecstatic weeks when I had stepped aside from morality, virtue and all the principles which I had been brought up to revere.
Suppose I confessed what I had done? Suppose I told them who was the father of my child? I would only create unhappiness. No, I must go on living with my deceit for ever and the child would be a living reminder of it.
When I told Jean-Louis he was overcome with emotion.
I said: “I know it is what you have always wanted … what we have always wanted.”
“You are wonderful,” he said. “I think always my happiness has depended on you … and now this. …”
I felt the knife turning in the wound which was my conscience.
My mother and Sabrina were delighted. There was nothing that could please them more than a child in the family.
Dickon shrugged his shoulders and feigned indifference. “Babies can be a terrible nuisance,” he declared. “They cry and have to be watched.”
“Oh, Dickon, darling,” cried Sabrina, “you were a baby once.”
“Well, I grew out of it.”
“So do we all,” Sabrina reminded him.
“Sometimes they get stillborn,” he said, “which means they die being born. Some people used to put them out on the hillside to toughen them up. I think it was the Romans or the Stoics or somebody like that. It was good for them. The weak ones died and those that were really strong lived.”
“My baby will not be put on the hillside,” I said. “He … or she … will toughen up very satisfactorily in the nursery.”
Dickon glowered. He had never forgiven me for my discovery about the burned barn. That, I remembered, had been the cause of Jean-Louis’s trouble. No one had ever mentioned it in that connection. It was the sort of thing Sabrina and my mother would be very anxious to keep from stressing.
The preparations for the baby helped me considerably. I was saved from brooding as I was sure I should have done if I had not had this great event to look forward to.
Often I thought of Gerard, of course. I went over and over our meeting—the strangeness of finding him in the haunted patch and the manner in which he had risen from the ground. Almost uncanny. … It was as though he had been sent for the purpose of … what, destroying me? No, never that. Giving me a glimpse of the ecstasy two people could find in each other … giving me my child.
Then I would think of Uncle Carl sitting there watching me shrewdly, calling me Carlotta. Had he really been wandering in his mind? Did he really see that long-dead girl in me?
Sometimes my fancy wandered on. I let myself believe that I had been possessed. Uncle Carl had said: “She was cut off’ when she was young … she never lived out her life … and she was so full of life.” What a fantasy! Suppose she had come back and entered my body … and suppose Gerard was a reincarnation of that lover whom she had met at Enderby!
It was excuses, really. I was trying to say Yes. I met him, I loved him, I gave way abandonedly. I did so. … But it was not really sensible Zipporah, it was long-dead passionate Carlotta.
Such feeble reasoning must be dismissed as the worthless excuse it was. I had reveled in my lover. It had been no other than myself, a passionate, sensuous woman who had been awakened to what she really was. I knew myself now. I knew I had been vaguely dissatisfied without knowing it. I now realized that I had wanted the sort of love which Gerard had given me.
Be sensible, I admonished myself. Don’t shirk the facts. This is you … wanton adulteress, about to bear the child of a guilty union and pass that child off as your husband’s.
It was not the first time such a situation had arisen. But that it should be you. …
It showed how strange life was, how one could never be sure of people and how easy it was to be ignorant of oneself until such circumstances arose to throw a light on that subject.
My baby was a little girl. She was strong and healthy and on impulse I wanted to call her Charlotte.
Charlotte, I thought. It’s not quite Carlotta … but near it. Living evidence of that time when I seemed to become another person, when I behaved as my long-dead ancestress might have done.
So my daughter was born, and Charlotte, being, as my mother said, a somewhat severe name, we began to call this adorable creature Lottie.
Revelation in a Barn
TWO YEARS HAD PASSED since the birth of Lottie. I adored her. She was more than a long-wished-for child. She it was who had made bearable those months after I had said goodbye to Gerard. Preparing for her had occupied my time; I had found then that I could shut out almost everything in contemplating the joy her arrival would bring me.
Of course I had moments of deepest depression when I felt weighed down by my guilt; but Jean-Louis’s joy in the prospect of the child soothed me considerably. I could say to myself: But for what I have done this could not be happening now. But that could not make me forget the great deceit, and my conscience, after lying dormant for a few days, would rise up to torment me.
I had not paid another visit to Eversleigh but I was constantly saying that I must do so. I received letters from Uncle Carl and I gathered from them that everything was as it had been when I left. “Jessie takes good care of me,” he wrote, and I could hear him chuckle as he wrote that. He would remember that it was I who had insisted that she be told about the will for his own safety. I believed I had at least done what was best for him.
Jean-Louis was rather concerned about the state of affairs on the Continent, and I paid more attention to the talk about this than I ever had before because of what I believed to be Gerard’s involvement. There was a great deal of speculation about Madame de Pompadour, who was the power behind the French throne. Jean-Louis had engaged a young man, James Fenton, as agent and this was a sign that he could not do as much as he had done previously. James Fenton was a good agent; he had been for a spell in the army and seemed very knowledgeable about the military position. He interested Jean-Louis in it, saying that wars affected us all. We were indifferent in England because the war was not fought on our soil. We had had experience of how devastating that could be during our own civil war, but we felt remote from what was happening on the Continent; all the same, we should remember that England was involved in it.
I wondered often about Gerard. I guessed that the purpose of his visit to England had had something to do with the political situation. No doubt he had been discovering how England would react to events on the Continent and perhaps even assessing the effectiveness of our defenses along the coast and sending messages back across the sea. I would listen avidly to James Fenton, who noticed my interest and was delighted by it. He directed his remarks to me as often as he did to Jean-Louis; and the three of us would become involved in discussions of the rights and wrongs and the possible effects of the conflict.
“The Pompadour rules France,” said James, “not so much because of the hold she has on Louis but because he is too lazy to do so himself. He loves to leave affairs in her hands … which are capable enough … but perhaps not so good for France. She is a clever woman. She holds her sway over the king by seeing to his needs … in every direction. She procures little girls to amuse him in his bedchamber. It is said he has a penchant for young girls. The Parc aux Cerfs proves that.”