A tiny head, slightly misshapen from being squeezed through the narrow canal. Purple, covered in slimy mucus.
The accoucheur reached forward and gripped the top of the child. The shoulders came out, and he told Anne to push again. Easily and without any difficulty the whole tiny body came out.
There was a sense of everything changing, of rightness, of… perfection as Darcy looked at the tiny child in the doctor’s arms.
Darcy stared at the miniscule creature.
The accoucheur without any delay handed the child to his assistant and with his hand held the umbilical cord.
It did not look like what Darcy had expected, it was thick and endlessly twisted and purple.
He gripped Anne’s hand as the accoucheur tied a silk ribbon around the umbilical cord right above the child’s belly, and then with a swift professional motion he snipped it off with a pair of sharp scissors. His assistant took the child —his child— to the basin of warm water that had been prepared. He cleaned off the child who now wailed and screamed.
Darcy’s chest unclenched at the sound. His child had a lusty loud wail, a healthy sound.
The body was so tiny. It looked so odd covered in purple slime.
The assistant handed the child back to the accoucheur, wrapped in white cloths after only a quick moment — on the basis of his reading Darcy had been most insistent that they would not tightly swaddle the child — the accoucheur offered the bundle to Darcy, saying, “I hope you are not disappointed, Mr. Darcy, but the child is a girl.”
Darcy looked into the girl’s face, and even though it was a girl, it was as though he was looking at the cheeks and facial features of his father and grandfather. His stomach jumped.
How could he be disappointed at such a moment?
His heart was too full of how she was perfect, and she was his.
A daughter.
Not a son and heir to continue the name, but she was precisely everything he could have ever hoped for. He held her in his arms, feeling awkward as the accoucheur ordered him to keep the little head supported. She looked at him with wide eyes, and then stuck her tongue out to lick her lips.
“Ah, the child is hungry,” the accoucheur said. “You have a wet nurse selected?”
Darcy nodded, and Mrs. Reynolds went out without any instructions to call the young mother up.
“Let me see her,” Anne whispered with a croak.
Tears streamed down Anne's face as she beheld their child for the first time. "Oh Fitzwilliam, she is perfect."
“She is.” Darcy could not tear his eyes away from the tiny, scrunched face. Nothing else mattered in the world besides this new life they had created.
Darcy carefully put the baby, who started to cry again, down in Anne’s arms. Anne held her and looked at her through happy watery eyes.
“Now Mrs. Darcy, you must prepare to bear down one last time, so that the placenta might also be delivered,” the accoucheur said.
What followed was a period of twenty minutes of the doctor giving orders to Anne to push, while occasionally tugging softly on the umbilical cord.
As this occurred, the wet nurse came into the room. Nell was the wife of one of Darcy’s upper servants, and her own sonwas ready to be weaned at nearly two years of age. She took the babe from Anne and sat down with her on a chair nearby. Darcy did not want his child to leave the room. He could not stop looking at her, at the tiny delicate nose, face, cheeks, toes.
Nell expertly settled the girl on the breast, letting her begin her first meal.
The accoucheur said, “She quickly begins to feed, that is a good sign — you pressed out the breast? So that the flow would not be too great for the infant?”
The wet nurse nodded, and the accoucheur returned his focus to Anne.
At last, a big bloody thing was expelled out from Anne’s body. The accoucheur said with a smile as it did, “Very good, Mrs. Darcy, and now let us see if — oh my.”
The man sucked in a deep breath.
With a sense of horror, Darcy watched a large crimson stain spreading over the bed linens around Anne that had been changed after the babe had come out.
