But Darcy did not reply, he only squeezed her hand tighter.
“So strange, everything seems so strange. I do believe I am floating. The world spins around before me. And I see my daughter, my little child. Name her Emily; I had a doll once who was dear to me who I called Emily.”
She lapsed into silence.
A single look at the expression upon the face of the accoucheur was enough to tell Darcy that there was little hope which remained.
For the next few minutes her breathing progressively weakened, then suddenly Anne began to convulse, her bodywildly shaking up and down, the contractions expelling more globs of blood from her core. All through it Darcy held her hand.
And then, suddenly, the convulsions stopped.
Her eyes were open, glassy and unseeing.
The accoucheur took Anne’s other hand, felt for the pulse, and after waiting a minute frowned and shook his head.
Chapter One
“Pray tell, why are you upside down? Why are you upside down? For what purpose did you invert yourself?”
The little girl grinned and wriggled as Darcy held her out, one hand gripping both of her ankles.
Turning Emily around to face Lord Matlock, Darcy said to his uncle, “I made a fine catch when I was fishing in the pond today. Large and tasty, though oddly shaped for a trout. What species do you suppose it might be?”
Colonel Fitzwilliam rolled his eyes. “It is disgusting the way you dote on her.”
“Is she still delighted?” Darcy asked, as he couldn’t see her face while she was hanging down and facing Lord Matlock.
“Just put her down. She clearly wants to scamper about,” Lord Matlock said. “We have matters to talk about.”
Darcy flipped Emily up, holding her in her normal position cradled against his side and asked, “Em-Em, do you want down?”
The little girl squirmed and threw her weight over Darcy’s arms, so he let her down, lowering her to her feet.
She immediately toddled in her curious wide stride over to the wooden Noah’s ark set, with a big boat and nearly twenty finely carved animals that Lord Matlock had made for Emily to play with when she was in this study. They were made with unpainted, polished wood, as comments in Edgeworth’sPractical Educationon the dangers of children, inevitably, sucking at the lead in the paint on their toys had convinced him to ban painted objects from Emily’s surroundings.
In contravention of what he had been informed was a universal infant tradition, Emily had not, so far as Darcy had ever seen, sucked on anything that she’d received since she’dbegun to walk. She was too enthused by her actual food to bother with the inedible.
“It's made me happy to see how you play with her,” Lord Matlock said. “No standing on your dignity with the child. Just a proper effort to humour her. I’d expected you to be too much like your father.”
“What do you mean?” Darcy replied, not sure whether to be offended by this statement on his own behalf, or on that of his excellent father. “I have forgotten neither my dignity, my pride, nor even my place as a Darcy in the slightest.”
Richard laughed. “Course you have not, old boy. Papa didn’t think anything ofthatsort.”
“I assure you,” Darcy replied, holding his head high and straight, “there is nothing so ridiculous as to think that it is unmanly to make a child laugh, or to show a real concern for the doings of the nursery. I should rather be ashamed to care too much for my horse and my hunting dogs than to show an intent interest in my own daughter.”
As he spoke Darcy kept half an eye on Emily as she picked up the animals one by one before carefully putting them back, all facing the same direction. He worried that she might wander towards the fire grate with its low banked embers kept dangerously hot behind the painted Japanese screens. At present, matters were less nerve wracking than when she’d begun to crawl everywhere during winter, and any time she came within ten feet of a fireplace or stove, no matter how well guarded it was, his mind insisted on imagining how badly she would be burned if she heedlessly hurled herself into the blaze.
“By Jove and Jupiter,” Richard laughed and held his hands up defensively, “The father has an equal interest to that of the mother in the welfare of the child. I know, I know. You have spoken upon the topic with such frequency that I begin to wonder if you mean to convince yourself rather than us.”
“The habits of our present day are in general not sensible, and—”
“Jove,” Lord Matlock expostulated. “I will throw a shoe at your head if you begin to preach about the virtues of raising children according to nature.”
Darcy laughed. “One ought to act both to satisfy the dictates of nature, and of society. But I do not—”
“Rank nonsense, all of it. Just act as you know in your heart you ought to with the child, and that is sufficient.Yousee that.”
Darcy frowned. “I have put a great deal of thought into my management of Emily, and—”
