October 1765 — Lambton
“That’s it, Mrs. Wickham. Nearly there. Just one more push.”
Amelia screamed as the pain tore through her once again, and this time she cursed her husband—the deviltake him—in her head with such force that she was certain God would hear her.
Let Him. He knows what Frank was.
The midwife murmured something soothing from between her knees. The girl beside her—no more than fifteen—clutched her hand with damp, frightened fingers and offered her a cup of broth she had no desire to drink. A fire crackled in the hearth, warm and steady, and the candlelight above made the wooden beams glow gold.
It was a far cry from the single smoky room in London where she had delivered her first child, Sarah, nearly four years ago. There had been no midwife then. No clean linens. No one but a neighbor with stained fingers and a sharp tongue, and the drunken snores of her husband from the hallway outside.
She clenched her jaw as another wave rolled over her.
Frank Wickham, you miserable, lovely-faced mistake,she thought grimly.You kissed me with faith on your lips and spent the rest of your life breaking every promise. I hope you are burning in hell where you belong.
It had only taken her a few weeks after her elopement to Scotland to understand the enormity of the decision she made. When she returned to her father’s doorstep on the arm of her new husband, the butler had closed the door in their faces.
The next day, his man of business arrived at their squalid lodgings—calm, precise, unforgiving. She had been disowned. No correspondence would be accepted. Her name would not be spoken again in the house of Fitzwilliam. Her dowry, tied with a thousand silk threads of condition and formality, would not be released.
Frank turned from savior to monster in his anger. For the first time in her seventeen years of age, she discovered the damage a man’s fist could cause to a woman’s body.
It would not be the last.
And then Amelia worked. God, how she had worked. Bent over a table twelve hours a day, sewing hems, mending jackets, stitching buttons until her fingers bled. The neighbors—the majority of them prostitutes— called herLady Stitch, half-joking, half-cruel.
Her accent marked her. Her bearing offended them. But at least they had taught her how to prevent falling with child. For thirteen years, it was just her and Frank sharing the tiny, rented room of the boarding house that was more brothel than anything.
But then, like everything else, the illusion of control vanished. Two weeks ill with influenza meant she did not have the stamina to take the usual precautions after fulfilling her wifely duties.
And then, nine months later, there were three of them in the room: Frank, Amelia, and Sarah.
For three years, she fed her daughter at her breast, desperate to prevent conception. But then her courses returned and disappeared once more, and the day Frank died in a drunken brawl at his pub was the day she felt the quickening of her second child.
While she felt relief at her husband’s death, she also felt fear. She had seen what could happen to a woman in her part of town without the protection of a husband, and she knew she was still quite the beauty for her thirty-four years.
So, when a knock came at the door, with a strange man on the other side, she braced herself for rejecting thecarte blanche. Instead, however, the middle-aged, plainly dressed man brought an entirely different offer.
“A house? In Lambton?” she had gasped, unable to understand.
In quiet, reverent tones, the man explained that his employer, a Catholic landowner in Derbyshire, had heard ofher plight through a friend in London. That he knew her family and their cruelty. That he bore no judgment—none—and wished only to do what he could for the widow and children of a woman unjustly cast aside.
Looking around the dark and dingy room she had shared with her now-departed husband, Amy bit her lip. Then her child within her womb had kicked, and Amy acted impetuously for the second time in her life.
The four days of travel to Lambton gave Amelia plenty of time to regret her impulsiveness. Only Sarah’s wide eyes and Amelia’s desperation to save her daughter from rotting morals of the London streets prevented her from fleeing back the way they came.
She expected to find a hovel at the end of her journey, but instead she found a cottage—warm, snug, clean, with a sturdy roof and a view of the trees. There were chickens in the yard. A garden half-planted. A maid-of-all-work named Nora, no more than seventeen but quick and eager and grateful.
She had wept, then.
Wept and crossed herself and knelt before her daughter and promised her a life she would give everything to keep.
“Push, my lady!”
The midwife’s urging forced Amelia’s attention back to the present. For three months now she had been called by her title, something her benefactor had insisted upon once he visited her at her new home. She had since only thrice spoken to the man—Percival Darcy, master of the great estate of Pemberley, which resided in the county next to her childhood home of Matlock.
“Lady Amelia, push!”
She obeyed. The sweat stung her eyes, her heart pounded. She reached out blindly and felt a strong, familiar hand clasp her own.
