Bring Forth a Fire (Book 1)

Epilogue - May 1895

It was a warm spring day, warmer than it had been in a week. Two-year-old Peter Haywood toddled next to his nanny, holding onto her hand. Every so often, he would see a furry brown creature in the garden, its ears erect and staring at them with one wide brown eye.

"Bunny," he said, pointing at it. He'd learned that word just recently, when his father had brought home some dead ones. But this one was alive, and as they stopped to watch, a second rabbit joined the first. Both turned their wiggling noses towards them.

"Two of them, isn't that special?" said the nanny, picking the boy up and settling him on her hip.

"Mummy like bunny," he said, and grinned. He'd managed to use most of the words he knew in one sentence.

"Are you sure she meant the live ones, dear?"

Peter blinked, not completely understanding the question. She'd said so, hadn't she? Just the other day, when she'd been sitting on the sofa and trying to get comfortable with his unborn sibling in the way? In his toddler mind, he'd only noticed Mummy growing bigger around the middle. Not to mention she was tired, sore, and cranky a majority of the time.

When they got back up to the house, Peter and Nan were startled to hear the rattle of a carriage and the drum of hoofbeats. Nan skidded to a stop seconds before the carriage came into view, the horse shiny with sweat and foaming at the mouth. The coachman pulled the horse to a stop haphazardly at the front door, and only had time to jump down and open the coach door before Christopher Wellington tumbled out, clothes dishevelled and hair sticking to his damp forehead.

"What's the hurry, milord?" said Nan, letting Peter down and leading him by the hand to the coach as he straightened himself out.

"The baby!" he exclaimed, waving a torn telegram at them. "It's coming!"

Then he was gone, hurrying inside.

"Hear that, Petey?" Nan squeezed Peter's hand, making him look up at her. "Your sibling's going to be here soon."

||

Christopher hardly believed his luck. After the years of hardship and pain that were Benedict Huntley's height of power, he'd never thought happiness could be found. And yet here they were, six years later, and his beautiful Emma was about to give birth to another child. When she lost one, back in the first months of their marriage, he had seen her descend to the deepest depths of despair. She blamed it on herself, losing the child. He knew that it wasn't her fault. The fates had seen to it that the right child came to them.

He looked down at the telegram again, thrown onto his desk in a hurry at the Order by a very flustered Mr Jergens.

Baby coming STOP, it said. Contractions started already STOP Summoning the doctor STOP Her Ladyship requests that you come home immediately STOP Says she has some things to say to you STOP Sincerely Mr Lowell.

Christopher grinned to himself. Yes, Emma had vacillated between thanking him and cursing him for giving her a second baby. He knew she would be happy once it arrived, but she made her discomfort known to him almost every day as the baby grew larger. And as he watched her, holding her lower back with one hand and rounding the other over the bump as she stood up, he told himself she'd forget all of it the first time she looked into the baby's eyes. A baby tended to have that effect.

||

The contractions started that morning at breakfast. At first, Emma believed they were just normal pregnancy contractions, the ones she'd felt for the last month or so. But as she dragged herself up from the table, the pain sliced through her like a knife. She clutched at her belly, and then the table edge, as another one came.