Даниэла Стил - Royal

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“You’ll be going home in a few months, after you have the baby, when you turn eighteen,” her mother-in-law said sadly one night. She couldn’t imagine life without Charlotte now. They sat together by the fire every evening, while she told her stories of Henry’s childhood. Glorianna had a distant look in her eye most of the time now, remembering the two men she had lost. Waiting for Henry’s child to be born was the only ray of sunshine in their lives. And alone in her room, Lucy cried for Henry too. It was a time of loss and sorrow for them all. The countess moved Charlotte to a bedroom close to her own as the due date approached.

The weather warmed slightly in late April, just before Charlotte’s due date in May. Buds began to appear in the countess’s garden. She and Lucy had worked hard to clear away the weeds, and plant some flowers, which were the first sign of spring. Charlotte put them in vases on the table when they had dinner, trying to cheer them all up. All she could think about now was Henry and their fatherless child. He had been much too young to die. It seemed so pointless. She read his letters to her every night.

The Germans had increased their air raids since January, and the bombing of London was severe again. Charlotte wondered if her parents would still let her come home even after her eighteenth birthday, since the bombing was worse again. For once, although she missed her parents, she was glad not to be in London, so her baby could be born in the peaceful Yorkshire countryside, without bombs falling every night among air raid sirens. And in their letters, her parents and sisters sounded busy and anxious about the war. They were relieved that she was safe. But at her end, Charlotte was sad not to be able to share the progress of her pregnancy with her mother and sisters, although her mother-in-law was very kind. She missed her own mother terribly and clung to Henry’s as the only mother at hand.

It was the second week of May when the pains finally began. She had written to her mother the night before, and wished she could tell her about the baby, but knew she couldn’t until she saw her, hopefully sometime in the next few months, and then she would tell her everything that had happened, about marrying Henry and how much she loved him. She was a widow now, and all she wanted was to see their baby and for it to arrive safely.

The countess sent for the doctor as soon as Charlotte told her that the contractions had started. He arrived quickly, and had been concerned for the past several weeks that the baby had grown too large for her tiny body. There was a hospital nearby, and he hoped she wouldn’t need a cesarean section, which was a complicated operation for both mother and child, and one or both frequently didn’t survive it. He had shared his fears with the countess, but said nothing to Charlotte, not wanting to frighten her. Her belly was huge in the final weeks of her confinement. She looked so uncomfortable that at the last Lucy wasn’t even jealous of her, to be having Henry’s child. Until then, it had irked her constantly.

The pains were already powerful when the doctor got there after labor began. Glorianna was sure she’d come through it. She was healthy and young. The doctor sat by Charlotte’s bedside from morning to nightfall, and her mother-in-law stayed with her. It was an arduous birth, and after sixteen hours of hard labor, there had been no progress. The baby appeared to be too large to come down the birth canal, and the countess and the doctor exchanged a worried look. It was midnight by then, and Charlotte was too far gone to move her to the hospital, even by ambulance. Glorianna applied damp cloths to her brow, while the doctor tried to maneuver the baby down. The maids and Lucy could hear Charlotte’s screams throughout the house, and the doctor looked at the countess in dismay twenty-four hours after labor began.

“Charlotte, you have to try harder,” her mother-in-law told her with a sense of urgency now. Charlotte was getting weaker and she couldn’t push anymore. “The baby is big, and you have to push it out. Think of Henry, and how much he loved you. You have to do this for Henry. You have to push the baby out.” Charlotte renewed her efforts, and the physician attempted to turn the baby to ease its passage, which only made Charlotte scream louder. She was doing the best she could, but getting nowhere. Lucy had peered several times into the bedroom where Charlotte was laboring and disappeared just as quickly at the sounds of her agony. It seemed so much worse than she’d expected and it frightened her.

Charlotte renewed her efforts then, and used every ounce of her remaining strength to move the baby down, and slowly, it began to emerge, and the doctor gave a shout of victory when he saw the baby’s head, which made Charlotte try that much harder as she clenched her mother-in-law’s hand and they cheered her on. It took another two hours of agonizing pushing, while Charlotte hung between consciousness and oblivion and felt as though she was drowning, as her baby finally came into the world with the cord tangled tightly around her, which was what had been holding her back. The doctor cut the cord and freed her, and he held her up, cleared her airway with a suction bulb, and the baby gave a hearty cry. Charlotte smiled weakly when she saw her. It was a girl, a very big baby. It was difficult to imagine that a child that size had emerged from such a tiny person, and when they weighed her, she weighed just over nine pounds. Charlotte had slipped into merciful unconsciousness by then, just after the baby was born, and he had given her drops for the pain which allowed him to repair the tears the baby had caused before Charlotte woke up again. She was bleeding heavily, which he assured the countess was to be expected after such a difficult birth, with a baby that large, and he said the bleeding would soon stop.

“What are you going to call her?” her mother-in-law asked her with a gentle smile as she kissed Charlotte’s cheek when she awoke. She had been so brave. A nurse the doctor had brought with him was holding the baby, who had been cleaned and swaddled by then, and was staring at them with wide-open blue eyes, while Charlotte gazed at her with unbridled love, wishing Henry could see her. Seeing her baby now made all the agony worthwhile.

“Anne Louise, after my mother, and one of my great-great-aunts. One of my German relatives,” Charlotte said, in barely more than a whisper. The doctor was observing her closely, relieved that both mother and child had survived, which he had begun to doubt in the last few hours of the delivery. Charlotte was very weak now, and spoke in a whisper as she glanced at her daughter. “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” She drifted off to sleep again then from the drops the doctor had given her. He left an hour later, after checking her pulse several times. It was thready and weak, but it didn’t surprise him after all she’d been through. He told the countess to let her sleep, and said he would be back to check on her in a few hours, and the nurse would check on her from time to time. She took the baby to the room they had set up as a nursery, next to the bedroom Charlotte was occupying, down the hall from her mother-in-law. The countess went to her room to rest too. It had been a frightening night, and like the doctor, the countess had feared that neither Charlotte nor the baby would survive, but was grateful that they had.

The countess lay down on her bed without getting undressed, and fell asleep instantly. She woke up two hours later, and decided to check on Charlotte, to make sure that she was doing well, and not in pain. She opened the door to her room, careful not to waken her, wishing that Henry were alive to see his daughter, and as soon as she entered the room, she saw that Charlotte was ghostly pale, even more than she had been during the birth. Her lips were blue, she was peacefully asleep, but ghostly white, and as Glorianna approached her bed, she could see no sign of Charlotte’s breathing. She reached for her wrist to find a pulse and could find none and saw no sign of movement at all. She pulled back the bed covers instinctively, and saw that Charlotte was lying in a pool of blood. She had bled to death after the delivery, while the nurse was with the baby. Her skin was already cold to the touch. She was dead at seventeen, from a childbirth that her parents knew nothing about. Her mother-in-law’s heart was pounding as she looked at her. What was she going to tell them? Their precious child was dead. She had died giving birth to a baby they didn’t know existed. She called the doctor with trembling hands, and he returned immediately. She had told no one what had happened, and couldn’t believe it herself. First Henry, then her husband, and now this, poor Charlotte, and the poor little girl with no mother now, orphaned at birth.