10
It was coming slowly to light that Victoria did not enjoy being pregnant very much.
Not that she would ever bring such up in conversation. Certainly not with her mother, who despite likely sharing the sentiment would scold her for resenting her wifely duties. Not with any of the old women she'd once known from church, who now cooed over her in the village square and offered their congratulations and winking advice on how best to enjoy her fertile years. Not even with Victor, who in his quiet and stumbling way seemed thrilled at the prospect of fatherhood and couldn't imagine any downsides to it.
It seemed to her, of course, that there was little to like about rising each and every morning sore as if with fever, and feeling constantly tender and slightly ill. It wasn't as though she didn't love her daughter. She'd known for a long time now that she did, the bright light of life reaching out curiously from within her to writhe and kick at the imminent world. Emily, they were going to name her. It was really a lovely name.
It was just a simple fact that if little Emily was not born by the end of November, Victoria was going to go utterly mad.
She woke on the morning of October 31st with her head pounding and swinging like a clock's pendulum, her mouth full of cotton and an aching nausea in her throat. She fell immediately back into the pillows when she tried to raise her head, and ended up lying half-awake in pain for what seemed like a very long time before Mrs. Hall knocked on the door.
"Mister Van Dort?" she called, strangely. The housekeeper was usually tactful enough to address Victoria as the only occupant of the room, whether she knew otherwise or not.
The young woman took a deep, hard breath and coughed harshly. "It's o-only me," she managed to say. The housekeeper entered the room with a characteristically concerned look on her face.
"Missus Victoria," she said. "How do you feel?"
"Not so well, I'm afraid," Victoria said quietly, sitting up in bed. She stared down at her hands atop the quilt, bleached white in a stripe of morning light. The young woman half-recalled her time in the garden yesterday, a big dark bird and a butterfly on the gate, but after that, things became muddled and black. "I do remember there was a reason I didn't want opium."
"Well, you needed it," Mrs. Hall said bluntly, pushing open the drapes so that the sliver of sunlight on Victoria's fingers turned into a great glowing plane across the bed. "Are you well enough to rise, or would you like breakfast here?"
Victoria winced as she tried to shift in bed. "I'll be fine," she said thinly, throwing back the covers. Every last bit of her ached. "I'll be fine," she said again, her voice much quieter this time.
"I'll draw you up a bath, if you'd like," said the older woman as she cracked open the window. The air was sweet and shockingly cold.
"Thank you," Victoria said, smoothing her nightgown with a small smile and a cough. "I'd like to have breakfast with Victor, if possible." She imagined he must be sick with worry for her. It was the least she could do to show him that she was still functional. The housekeeper slowed slightly in her movements toward the wash room.
"Has he been in this morning?" she asked with a strange inflection.
"Hmm?" Victoria asked. "No, I haven't seen him. I just woke up."
"Ah," said the older woman, stopping and then shaking her head. "No reason to worry. He may have gone down to the square this morning."
"You haven't seen him?"
"No," said Mrs. Hall. "I'm sure he'll be back soon." She offered Victoria a thin smile which was likely meant to be comforting, though it looked alien on her face. "Rest," she encouraged the young woman as she tried to rise from bed. "I'll be back in a tick."
Victoria abhorred the idea of staying in bed all day, but it was hard to deny that climbing out of the depths of the feathery mattress in her condition was going to be quite a lot of work. She breathed painfully and looked toward the window, outside of which the tops of a few pines could just barely be seen at the edge of the sill. The sky was white and the weather was calm, but her daughter was as restless as she was at the idea of rising to see the day.
"Hush," she said to the room out loud before self-consciously covering her mouth. She felt unduly embarrassed. The Ladies' Book of Etiquette seemed to be staring her down from the night table; there was most probably a line within that read, "It is always improper for a woman of any fair birth to speak to her children before they are born, indicating an imbalance of the mind that an infant still in the womb should be able to hear her admonitions or praises. Grace forbid that this unfortunate habit ever manifest in the pleasant company of one's social betters!" It was very much like having her mother by her bedside at all times.
Maybe Victor had been right in suggesting that it be thrown in the fireplace.
At one o'clock in the afternoon, Victoria had long since bathed and dressed and broken her fast, but Victor was yet to be seen in the house. The young Mrs. Van Dort found herself idling in the drawing room with her stitching, far more of her attention being paid to the window's view of the street than to what her fingers were doing with the needle. It was silly of her to be concerned, of course – what on earth could he have reasonably gotten up to? – but it wasn't as though he'd never disappeared without warning before. Perhaps he was calling on his parents, or making amends with the pastor in hopes that he would be willing to christen the baby when she was born. Really, the time in their lives in which they'd been occasionally whisked off to the Underworld was long past. The most exciting thing that happened to them these days was the occasional grease fire in the kitchen, and with that, Victoria could be quite content. Her daughter, however, seemed not to be, and was keeping up such a persistent fuss that Victoria thought several times that she might be ill. Overall, this had not been her most healthful day, and the worry on her mind wasn't helping at all.
She pricked her finger slightly as the clock chimed half an hour past one. Now on top of everything else she was bleeding, and not a single person had come down the street toward the Van Dorts' house since long before noon.
Suddenly, Victoria knew she couldn't bear it any longer. It just wasn't like him not to leave a note, not to tell anyone where he was going or what his intentions were. She rose from the armchair by the window with a shuddering cough and set aside her sewing basket. Mrs. Hall could be heard in the kitchen at the other end of the house, but Victoria felt an aching need to move. Maybe, just maybe, he had come home without anyone noticing.
Her ascent of the servants' stairs wasn't an easy one, but she felt she needed to make absolute certain again that he wasn't in the master bedroom, or the powder room (why would he be in there?), or even in the back garden, sketching in secret so that she might not be tempted to join him and feed another attack like yesterday's. As she'd expected, though, less than five minutes' searching confirmed that he was nowhere in the upstairs, so she returned to the ground floor with a deeply sick feeling in her chest and a throat that seemed suddenly more prone to irritation than ever before.
She searched the drawing room that she had just left and the dining room with no hiding places, coughing all the while. At the back of her mind, she knew she was working herself up into a fit, but she certainly couldn't rest as if nothing was wrong. He wasn't in the washroom and he wasn't hiding under any cabinets, like an errant book or shoe. She felt on the verge of tears in her search, though whether it was genuine distress or just another unenviable side effect of being with child, she couldn't say.
When she finally threw open the study doors, it was to be greeted with a shocking gust of cold air that stung her lungs and sent her doubled-over with coughing. In perfect time to contribute to her misery, the baby gave a sharp twist, and she dropped to her knees in the doorway with a moan. "Oh, Lord," she whispered as she knelt above the floor, no longer mindful of the judgmental advice she was sure her etiquette book would have had in store for her. "The sooner you're born, the better." She wasn't sure how enthusiastic she was going to be about having a second child after this.
When the shuddering pain had finally passed, she let her shoulders drop and her eyes drift upward across the floor. The study was a mess, and it was little wonder why; the window on the east wall was standing wide open, and the wind had scattered the papers Victor normally kept so meticulously stacked atop the desk and shelves. A candle stub had been knocked onto the floor, and dozens of pages lay curled beneath chairs or swept back up against the far wall. Victoria took a shallow breath to calm herself and presently rose, carefully smoothing her hair and skirts back into their pre-wheezing arrangements. She didn't have control over many things in life, but she did at least have charge of her appearance, and consumption would not take that away from her.
She moved slowly across the room, gathering charcoal and quills and bits of parchment where they had fallen. There were sketches here, many of them of butterflies, some of herself (she was always silently pleased by Victor's interpretation of her features, much kinder than any she'd ever heard from her mother or father), and a few of things she'd never seen – of long views over the rooftops of a spindly city, and of a branch, or perhaps a skeletal hand, reaching up from out of the ground. Here and there were pages of writing as well, mostly scientific observations of insects, but a few that might have been journaling. She caught a snippet every few pages or so – "Wingspan of nearly six inches (!)", "proven that maggots aboveground do not speak in the least", "happy for a short while was a joy to me, and I would give anything to insure" – but for the most part she respected her husband's private thoughts enough not to pry.
The papers were deposited in an orderly pile atop the desk and held secure with a full inkwell before Victoria turned to the window to attempt to close it. Considering how often Victor used the study, he did not do a reliable job of keeping the window's hinges oiled. Victoria grunted and heaved, once, twice, before managing to pull it closed with a slam, sending the drapes fluttering and a thousand motes of dust drifting into the air. She waved them away and coughed into her hand, dreading the deep, shredding sensation that always accompanied a truly bad fit. Once again, she felt a hard twist deep in her abdomen, leaving her gripping the windowsill for a moment as she groaned and coughed and gritted her teeth. It had really been a mistake to leave bed this morning. Perhaps she ought to just go back to sleep until December came.
From the entrance hall, she could hear an echoing knock on the door. Standing upright with a hand on her chest, she swallowed deeply and checked herself once again for orderliness before leaving the study. Mrs. Hall was already in the entrance hall when she emerged; Victoria felt her heart leap for a moment at the idea that it might be Victor at the door, but was disappointed to see a red-haired young boy on the step instead, wearing an acolyte's cloth.
"How can I help you?" Mrs. Hall said to the young man, none too friendly. Victoria hung back slightly by the stairs. If he wasn't looking for her, she wasn't quite in the mood to talk.
"My apologies, ma'am," said the boy, who looked all of twelve years old and terrified by the tall gray woman blocking his entrance to the house. "P-Pastor Galswells said he, um, wouldn't be seen on the stoop of sinners..."
"What on earth are you talking about?" asked the housekeeper, sounding a bit aggressive.
"I'm sorry," the boy squeaked, backing down a step. "The pastor found these in the church. He – I was told these are yours," he finished abruptly, shoving a bundle into Mrs. Hall's hands and scampering away. "ThankyouforyourtimeGodbless!" Victoria heard him call from the street before the housekeeper closed the door and unfurled the cloth she'd been handed with an angrily perplexed look on her face.
"What is this rubbish?"
"Wait -" Victoria heard herself saying.
The bundle in her hands was made of brown wool.
As the neatly-tailored jacket unrolled toward the ground, a heavy pewter something fell from its center. The cup rolled toward Victoria with a purr against the floor, exposing its red-stained mouth with a sort of indecency. She stared as Mrs. Hall made a small oath.
"Is this -?" she began.
"I think so," said Victoria, stepping forward to take Victor's jacket from her. "And they found it in the church…?" The older woman bit her lip, but Victoria could feel an indignant heat beginning to radiate off of her. She said nothing. Surely it didn't mean anything.
This was surely no more extraordinary than a bad day or a grease fire. Victoria was sure of that.