Читать книгу The Sons of Adam - Harry Bingham - Страница 7

Whitcombe House, Hampshire, 23 August 1893

The beginning?

To hell with beginnings. Beginnings are excuses, apologies for failure. If things turned out disastrous – and they did – then that had everything to do with the way three young men chose to behave, nothing to do with the way things started out.

On the other hand, people are only human. Once a ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop it. A beginning is a beginning, and on this occasion, the beginning wasn’t just bad.

It was awful.

It happened like this.

A small boy, a seven-year-old, stands in a kitchen. He’s building himself a blackberry pudding as big as his head. The cook stands by, face red in the firelight, managing pots of water boiling on the stove, a newly made pot of coffee steaming to the side. The scene is domestic, quiet, happy.

Upstairs, the little boy’s mother, Lady Pamela Montague, is in labour for the fourth time. Of her first three children, only one – the blackberry-pudding-guzzling Guy – survived more than a few weeks. She and her husband, Sir Adam, are understandably anxious this time, but everything is proceeding normally. The doctor and midwife are in attendance.

So far, so nothing.

No births. No deaths. No hatreds. And best of all: no beginnings.

But, in a second, that changed.

All of a sudden there was a bang at the door, the jiggle of a latch, a blast of cool air. A tiny girl flitted in, as though blown by the wind. A sweep of rain washed the step behind her.

‘Please miss, please sir, please help.’ The tiny girl bobbed and curtsied, desperate with anxiety. ‘My ma’s ill. She’s having a baby, only it’s got stuck, and she says she can’t, and she’s gone as white as anything, and my dad said to run to the big house for help as fast as I could, and please miss, please miss, please miss.’

Mrs White, the cook, brought the girl further into the light.

‘Are you Jack Creeley’s little girl, dear?’

‘Please, miss. Yes, miss. Sally Creeley, and my ma’s having a baby and –’

‘Well, dear, it never rains but it pours. You just pop yourself down while I go and speak to Sir Adam. If you want you can –’

Guy stopped her.

It wasn’t a big interruption, but it was a decisive one. He raised his hand, like a man stopping a horse.

‘No need, Cookie. I shall tell him myself.’ He lifted his pudding, the coffee for his father, then turned to the little girl. ‘You can go back home and when the doctor is no longer wanted here, he can come to you. For the time being, he’s required here.’

He set off up the stairs. As he did so, he muttered to himself, ‘Oh, and it’s five guineas the visit, by the way, and someone to take care of his horse.’

Once upstairs, he set down his trophies. Coffee for his father, blackberry pud for himself. He said nothing about Sally Creeley. He said nothing about the little girl’s mother. In the seven years he’d been alive in the world, Guy Montague had learned that there are two sorts of people: those who can afford doctors and those who can’t. It seemed like a simple lesson, the most obvious thing in the world.

He finished his pudding, concealed a belch, and went to bed.

That night, after a twelve-hour labour, Pamela Montague gave birth to a healthy baby boy, a bawling little bundle with lungs like steam-bellows. The birth proved to be perfectly simple. No complications. No difficulties at all.

The same night, in one of the short rows of cottages that housed the estate workers, a young man, Jack Creeley, was forced to watch as his wife screamed through the night, helped only by a couple of untrained girls from the village. In the end, Creeley himself ran up to the big house and begged to speak to Sir Adam. As soon as Sir Adam heard the man’s story, he sent doctor and midwife racing across to the cottages.

Too late. A simple breech birth, which any doctor or any midwife could have simply and speedily corrected, had exhausted the mother and complicated the baby’s position. The doctor, acting quickly, made the incisions that enabled him to deliver the baby by Caesarean section. The doctor was a good one, skilled and decisive. A baby boy was delivered, healthy and screaming, into the little cottage bedroom.

Healthy but motherless.

Poor Betsy Creeley, just twenty-six years old, was exhausted even before the operation began. She lost too much blood and never recovered consciousness. By the time dawn broke on 24 August, the little boy’s mother was dead.

And there it was.

Two births.

One death.

One selfish act with terrible consequences.

A beginning.