“The babe needs to come quickly,” Marsali told Fergus, with every appearance of calm. Obviously, I hadn’t been as successful in hiding my concern as I’d thought.
She had her rosary with her, and now wound it round her hand, the cross dangling. “Help me, mon cher.”
He lifted the hand with the rosary, and kissed it.
“Oui, cherie.” He crossed himself then, and set to work.
Fergus had spent the first ten years of his life in the brothel where he’d been born. Consequently, he knew a great deal more about women—in some ways—than any other man I’d ever met. Even so, I was astonished to see him reach for the strings at the neck of Marsali’s shift, and draw it down, exposing her br**sts.
Marsali didn’t seem at all surprised, merely lying back and turning slightly toward him, the hump of her belly nudging him as she did so.
He knelt on a stool beside the bed, and placing a hand tenderly but absently on the bulge, bent his head toward Marsali’s breast, lips slightly pursed. Then he appeared to notice me gaping at him, and glanced up over her belly.
“Oh.” He smiled at me. “You have not—well, I suppose you would perhaps not have seen this, milady?”
“I can’t say that I have.” I was torn between fascination and a feeling that I should avert my eyes. “What . . . ?”
“When the birth pangs are slow to start, suckling the woman’s br**sts encourages the womb to move, thus to hasten the child,” he explained, and brushed a thumb unconsciously over one dark-brown nipple, so that it rose, round and hard as a spring cherry. “In the brothel, if one of les filles had a difficulty, sometimes another would do such service for her. I have done it for ma douce before—when Félicité came. It helps; you will see.”
And without more ado, he cupped the breast in both hands and took the nipple into his mouth, sucking gently, but with great concentration, his eyes closed.
Marsali sighed, and her body seemed to relax in the flowing way that a pregnant woman’s does, as though she were suddenly boneless as a stranded jellyfish.
I was more than disconcerted, but I couldn’t leave, in case anything drastic should happen.
I hesitated for a moment, then pulled out a stool and sat down on it, trying to be inconspicuous. In fact, though, neither of them appeared to be at all concerned with my presence—if they were even aware of me anymore. I did, however, turn away a little, so as not to stare.
I was both astonished and interested by Fergus’s technique. He was entirely right; suckling by an infant does cause the uterus to contract. The midwives I had known at L’Hôpital des Anges in Paris had told me that, too; a newly delivered woman should be handed the child at once to nurse, so that the bleeding would slow. None of them had happened to mention use of the technique as a means of inducing labor, though.
“In the brothel, if one of les filles had a difficulty, sometimes another would do such service for her,” he’d said.
His mother had been one of les filles, though he had never known her. I could imagine a Parisian prostitute, dark-haired, likely young, groaning in labor—and a friend kneeling to suckle her tenderly, cupping tender, swollen br**sts and whispering encouragement, as the boisterous noises of satisfied customers echoed through the floors and walls.
Had she died, his mother? In childbirth with him or a subsequent child? Throttled by a drunken client, beaten by the madame’s enforcer? Or was it only that she hadn’t wanted him, hadn’t wished to be responsible for a bastard child, and thus she had left him to the pity of the other women, one of the nameless sons of the street, a child of no one?
Marsali shifted on the bed, and I glanced to see that she was all right. She was. She had only moved in order to put her arms about Fergus’s shoulders, bending her head to his. She had left off her cap; her yellow hair was loose, bright against the sleek darkness of his.
“Fergus . . . I think I’m maybe going to die,” she whispered, her voice barely audible above the wind in the trees.
He released her nipple, but moved his lips delicately over the surface of her breast, murmuring. “You always think you will die, p’tite puce, all women think it.”
“Aye, that’s because a good many of them do, too,” she said a little sharply, and opened her eyes. He smiled, eyes still closed, the tip of his tongue flicking gently against her nipple.
“Not you,” he said softly, but with great assurance. He passed his hand over her stomach, first gently, then with more strength. I could see the mound firm itself, suddenly drawing up round and solid. Marsali drew a deep, sudden breath, and Fergus pressed the heel of his hand against the base of the mound, hard against her pubic bone, holding it there until the contraction relaxed.
“Oh,” she said, sounding breathless.
“Tu . . . non,” he whispered, still more softly. “Not you. I will not let you go.”
I curled my hands in the stuff of my skirt. That looked like a nice, solid contraction. Nothing horrible seemed to be happening as a result.
Fergus resumed his work, pausing now and then to murmur something ridiculous to Marsali in French. I got up and sidled cautiously round toward the foot of the bed table. No, nothing untoward. I cast a quick look at the counter, to be sure all was in readiness, and it was.
Perhaps it would be all right. There was a streak of blood on the sheet—but it was only a bit of bloody show, quite normal. There was still the child’s worrying heartbeat, the possibility of a cord accident—but I could do nothing about that now. Marsali had made her decision, and it was the right one.
Fergus had resumed his suckling. I stepped quietly out into the hall, and swung the door half-closed, to give them privacy. If she did hemorrhage, I could be with her in a second.
I still had the jar of raspberry leaves in my hand. I supposed I might as well go ahead and make the tea—if only to make myself feel useful!
Not finding his wife at home, old Arch Bug had come up to the house with the children. Félicité and Joan were sound asleep on the settle, and Arch was smoking his pipe by the hearth, blowing smoke rings for a rapt Germain. Meanwhile Jamie, Ian, and Malva Christie seemed to be engaged in an amiable literary argument regarding the merits of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and . . .
“Ovid?” I said, catching the tail end of one remark. “Really?”
“So long as you are secure you will count many friends,” Jamie quoted. “If your life becomes clouded you will be alone. D’ye not think that’s the case for poor Tom Jones and wee Perry Pickle?”
“But surely true friends wouldnae abandon a man, only because he’s in some difficulty!” Malva objected. “What sort of friend is that?”
“Rather the common sort, I’m afraid,” I said. “Luckily, there are a few of the other kind.”
“Aye, there are,” Jamie agreed. He smiled at Malva. “Highlanders make the truest friends—if only because they make the worst enemies.”
She was slightly pink in the face, but realized that she was being teased.
“Hmp,” she said, and lifted her nose in order to look down it. “My faither says Highlanders are such fierce fighters because there’s sae little of any value in the Highlands, and the worst battles are always fought for the lowest stakes.”
Everyone dissolved in laughter at that, and Jamie rose to come to me, leaving Ian and Malva to resume their wrangle.
“How is it wi’ the lass?” he asked quietly, dipping up hot water from the kettle for me.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Fergus is . . . er . . . helping her.”
Jamie’s eyebrows went up.
“How?” he asked. “I didna ken there was much a man had to do wi’ that business, once he’s got it properly begun.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” I assured him. “I certainly was!”
He looked intrigued by this, but was prevented from asking further questions by Mrs. Bug’s demand that everyone leave off talking about wretched folk who get up to no good in the pages of books, and come sit down to eat.
I sat down to supper, too, but couldn’t really eat, distracted as I was by concern for Marsali. The raspberry-leaf tea had finished steeping as we ate; I poured it out and took it to the surgery—rapping cautiously on the door before entering.
Fergus was flushed and breathless, but bright-eyed. He could not be persuaded to come and eat, insisting that he would stay with Marsali. His efforts were showing fruit; she was having regular contractions now, though still fairly far apart.
“It will be fast, once the waters break,” Marsali told me. She was a little flushed, too, with a look of inward listening. “It always is.”
I checked the heartbeat again—no great change; still bumpy, but not weakening—and excused myself. Jamie was in his study, across the hall. I went in and sat with him, so as to be handy when needed.
He was writing his usual evening note to his sister, pausing now and then to rub the cramp from his right hand before resuming. Upstairs, Mrs. Bug was putting the children to bed. I could hear Félicité whining, and Germain attempting to sing to her.
Across the hall, small shufflings and murmurings, the shifting of weight and the creak of the table. And in the depths of my inner ear, echoing my own pulse, the soft, rapid beat of a baby’s heart.
It could so easily end badly.
“What are ye doing, Sassenach?”
I looked up, startled.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Ye’re staring fit to see through the wall, and it doesna seem that ye like what ye’re looking at.”
“Oh.” I dropped my gaze, and realized that I had been pleating and repleating the fabric of my skirt between my fingers; there was a large wrinkled patch in the fawn-colored homespun. “Reliving my failures, I suppose.”
He looked at me for a moment, then rose and came behind me, putting his hands on the base of my neck, kneading my shoulders with a strong, warm touch.
“What failures?” he asked.
I closed my eyes and let my head nod forward, trying not to groan with the sensations of pain from knotted muscles and the simultaneous exquisite relief.
“Oh,” I said, and sighed. “Patients I couldn’t save. Mistakes. Disasters. Accidents. Stillbirths.”
That last word hung in the air, and his hands paused in their work for a moment, then resumed more strongly.
“There are times, surely, when there’s nothing ye could do? You or anyone. Some things are beyond the power of anyone to make right, aye?”
“You never believe that, when it’s you,” I said. “Why should I?”
He paused in his kneading, and I looked up over my shoulder at him. He opened his mouth to contradict me, then realized that he couldn’t. He shook his head, sighed, and resumed.
“Aye, well. I suppose it’s true enough,” he said, with extreme wryness.
“That what the Greeks called hubris, do you think?”
He gave a small snort, which might have been amusement.
“I do. And ye ken where that leads.”