The White Dove. Rosie Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ the family vault. Even that was denied to Airlie. Bitterness rose like nausea in Gerald Lovell. There could be no burial service here for Airlie as there had been for Gerald’s father, as there would be one day for Gerald himself, with the family in heavy mourning in the big, square, screened-off family pew, and the church filled with neighbours, tenants and estate workers paying their dutiful respects. The letter from Airlie’s commanding officer following the telegram praised him for his heroism. Airlie had died beneath Thiepval Ridge and was buried with his comrades. ‘A soldier’s grave for a fine soldier,’ the captain had written as he must do in an attempt to comfort the families of every one of the men dead under his command. There was no comfort in it for Gerald. There could be no fittingly solid coffin for Airlie, made from one of Chance’s own oaks and heaped with flowers from the scented July borders. Airlie had been hastily huddled into the ground with the mutilated bodies of a hundred, perhaps a thousand others.

      Gerald lurched against a pew end, the pain like a living thing inside him. His head arched backwards, and over his head he saw the dim, greenish-black folds of an ancient banner. He reached up with a curse and tore the cloth from its staff, the fibres splitting into tiny, dusty fragments that drifted lazily around him. The gold-thread-embroidered letters were tarnished with age, but still legible.

      ‘Regis defensor,’ Gerald said loud. ‘The King’s Defender.’ His sudden laugh was shockingly loud in the silent church. ‘Is that what he was doing, defending the King? I could have done that just as well. Why wasn’t it me? Oh God, Airlie, why not me instead?’ He lifted his hands above his head and tore the black banner in two, and then again, letting the shreds of it fall around him until only the gold thread remained, and then twining that around his fingers and pulling it so tight that his fingers went as white as candles. Then, just as suddenly, the fit of rage left him and he dropped the thread, turning away from the debris and walking out of the church as if it didn’t exist.

      The last time he had held the banner had been the proudest moment of Gerald Lovell’s life. As the trumpets sounded he had stepped forward from the ranks of peers and knelt to wait for the procession. When he lifted his head he saw the slow approach of the archbishops and the bishops, and the swaying canopy held over the King’s head. And he had stood up, and led the long procession forward to the empty throne, the symbolic jewelled gauntlet clasped across his chest ready to throw down as a challenge to anyone who might threaten the King’s safety and happiness. Gerald Lovell’s father had undertaken the same proud, slow walk at the Coronation of Edward VII, and his great-grandfather, in the last month of his life, at Victoria’s. There had been a Lovell marching as the King’s Defender at every coronation since the title had been bestowed on the first Lord by the Black Prince on the battlefield at Crécy. The family had clung proudly to the title ever since, refusing any grander ones.

      ‘That is the end,’ Gerald said, as he came out into the sunshine again. ‘There won’t be any more, after Airlie.’ In that stricken moment he had forgotten his wife as completely as if she had never existed. The son he had begged her for while his tears stained the pink silk of her dress was forgotten with her.

      Adeline was lying on the day bed in front of her open bedroom window, and she saw her husband walking back from the church like a man at the onset of paralysis. Since the moments under the cedar tree she had barely seen him, and although she had waited patiently and prayed that he would turn to her with his grief, he had never come.

      They had been the loneliest days she had spent since the first weeks of her marriage.

      Now the awareness of something other than loss was beginning to force itself on her attention. Adeline heaved herself upright on the day bed to ease the pain in her back, and at once felt a corresponding tightening across her belly.

      ‘Not long now,’ she whispered into the heavy afternoon heat. She lay back against the satin pillows, pushing the heavy weight of her hair back from her face and looking out into the sunshine. The park was deserted once more. Gerald had shut himself away again, alone.

      ‘It will be a boy,’ Adeline promised the sultry air. ‘It will be another boy.’

      On the fourth day, the outside world intruded itself into the silence that shrouded the house. Early in the morning the local doctor’s little car chugged up the west drive from the village, and the doctor and his midwife were discreetly ushered upstairs. Almost immediately afterwards, Amy and Isabel in the schoolroom heard the purr of another car as the chauffeur drove his lordship’s big black car down to the station to meet Lady Lovell’s fashionable doctor off the fast London train.

      The two doctors met at last at opposite sides of the bed, the London man in a morning coat and striped trousers, his wing-collar stiff against his throat, and the overworked local practitioner in the tweed jacket and soft collar that he hadn’t had time to change before the urgent summons came. The two men shook hands and turned to the patient. For all the differences in their appearance, they were agreed in their diagnosis. The baby was not presenting properly. Lady Lovell was about to suffer a long and painful labour and a breech delivery.

      ‘There now.’ The London doctor straightened up, smiling professionally. ‘You’ll be perfect. Just try and rest between the pains, won’t you?’

      ‘The baby.’ Her face was white, with dark patches under the eyes. ‘The baby will be all right?’

      ‘Of course,’ he soothed her. ‘We’ll get you your baby just as soon as we can.’

      The morning cool under the trees in the park evaporated, and the sun rose in the relentlessly blue sky. The clockwork smoothness of the household arrangements ticked steadily on through the morning, occupying everyone from the august Mr Glass in his pantry to the humblest maid, but everyone was waiting. Mr Rayner the chauffeur, coming into the kitchen for his lunch, reported that neither of the doctors had ordered his car. Up in the nursery Bethan Jones helped Nanny with the children’s lunch, and shook her head in the privacy of the kitchen cubbyhole. Her mother was the village midwife back in the valley, and she knew the signs.

      Gerald Lovell sat on in the library. He didn’t seem to be either waiting or listening, but simply suspended in immobility.

      As the afternoon wore on it grew more difficult for the household not to listen. Miss May took the little girls as far from the house as possible for their afternoon walk so that they might not hear their mother screaming. Up in Lady Lovell’s room the two doctors had discarded their distinguishing jackets. They worked side by side in their shirtsleeves.

      By the evening the screaming had stopped. Lady Lovell seemed barely conscious except when her head rolled to the side and the pain wrung out an almost inaudible gasp. The midwife and a nurse bathed her face and held her arms. Her eyes were sunk deep into their sockets.

      The village doctor leant over for the hundredth time to listen to the baby’s heartbeat.

      ‘Still strong,’ he said. ‘It’ll make it. If she does.’

      ‘She’ll make it,’ said the other doctor grimly.

      Then, at a few moments before midnight, they told her that it was time. ‘Push now,’ the midwife whispered to her. ‘It’s almost over. Push now, and the baby will be here.’

      And Lady Lovell struggled back into the black, pain-filled world and pushed with the last of her strength.

      At two minutes to midnight the baby was born, feet first. It was a healthy boy.

      They held him up for her to see, and she looked at the bright red folded limbs and the mass of wet black hair. Adeline smiled the tremulous smile of utter exhaustion. ‘A boy,’ she murmured. ‘Please. Tell my husband СКАЧАТЬ