The visit to London during her early pregnancy in 1863 made wonders to Lady Elizabeth Strallan's mood. Never again during that pregnancy, nor indeed any time at all during her second and last one, did Sir Jonathan wake up to her sobs.
Louisa had somehow managed to say the right things. Maybe it was what she had said about worrying for one's children even after they were born. Because what was the use? There would be no end to it. Bad things do happen, but worrying about them doesn't prevent them from happening.
So Elizabeth made up her mind to try not to worry. She decided that she should just take care of herself as best she could during her pregnancy. Perhaps she would miscarry, perhaps the child would be stillborn, but worrying wouldn't stop any of that from happening. It would only stop her from being happy about the great miracle of life that she was now a part of.
...
Elizabeth had enjoyed very much to see all her relatives in London. She had talked and joked and laughed with her sisters and brothers, and also played with the children. She had missed them all so very much. Before she married Jonathan, and went to Paris with him on their wedding trip, not a single day had gone by in her life without her seeing at least one member of her big family and usually many more.
Elizabeth learnt a happy fact while she was in London. Her father was going to be transferred from India to a post as a civil servant in London. He and her mother were to return to England in the middle of December, so Celia and Christin had stayed on in London after the season and Elizabeth's wedding. It was considered an unnessecary waste of time and money for the two girls to travel back to India. And also, they had both of them met someone, someone who could be a possible husband.
Elizabeth really wished that she and Jonathan could just move to London to live in their London house, or perhaps trade it for a smaller one. But she knew it was impossible. Too much of their income came from the estate, and it had to be looked after on a regular basis. Jonathan had been away from it too much already this year, with their courtship, marriage and wedding trip.
Sir Jonathan was an easy-going man in most aspects of life. But Lady Elizabeth knew that he felt an obligation, a duty, to take care of Locksley. It had been handed down to him through the generations of Strallans, it was much more than a source of income to him. This was a duty that came with his title.
He felt his responsibility towards his parents and grandparents and he also felt his responsibility towards all the people living on and by the estate, the servants as well as the tenants. If he didn't live up to this responsibility, if he mismanaged the estate in any way, many people would be threatened with poverty or even starvation.
This was the main reason that Jonathan had felt that he had to show Elizabeth Locksley before he proposed to her. She understood that, he was bound to this place, and as his wife she would be bound to it also. He couldn't just sell it and move away. It wasn't because he couldn't do anything else, it was just that he was born to take care of Locksley. When late in life he got a son of his own, little Anthony, he tried to implant that sense of duty towards the estate and its inhabitants in the little boy's mind, in the same way it had been implanted in himself as a young boy. In a loving but very serious way, this was important for the boy to understand, and no laughing matter.
...
Jonathan and Elizabeth were invited to a number of dinner parties during that autumn. And all went well, or at least tolerably well, while the dinner lasted. It was sitting in the saloon afterwards, alone with the other women, that Elizabeth dreaded.
Because during the dinner, if she was feeling strange or sad or awkward or unwanted, she could always look around the table to where Jonathan was sitting. Often she would meet his gaze, he spent more time than was really polite admiring his wife during dinner parties. But even if he wasn't looking at her, she invariably felt better just by seeing him there. When she could see him she knew why she was doing this. Why it was all worth while.
Elizabeth had a lot of unusual opinions that she couldn't keep from expressing. She talked about things women were not supposed to know much about, let alone take an interest in. Things like world politics, or history, or science, or new inventions, or medical innovations. And she couldn't stop herself from correcting people, even those higher in rank than her husband, when she knew that they were wrong. That was not the way to get popular, even for a man, and certainly not for a woman.
She often wished she was better at keeping her mouth shut. To smile and agree, or at least to smile and keep quiet.
Elizabeth didn't manage to make friends among the women of the local gentry in Yorkshire. She didn't feel at all at home among them. They found her very unladylike with her great height and all her talk about uninteresting things that no one else had heard about. She found them very shallow, the only things that seemed to interest them were clothes and gossip. And complaining about their servants. Or husbands.
Elizabeth didn't like gossip, other people's private affairs didn't interest her much, and she often found that what was said was quite a bit malicious. And though she got a lot of praise for her dresses from Paris while they were new, she wasn't all that interested in clothes either. She felt no reason to complain about the servants at Locksley either, they were all polite and hardworking and couldn't help that they were born into smaller circumstances than she was. And her husband was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her.
She would have liked very much to have a female friend, someone to laugh with and also talk to about serious things. But no one here seemed to be the slightest bit like her, and it wasn't only because they were all at least half a head shorter than she was. Some of the women were rather unfriendly, one of them even asked her how she had managed to make Jonathan marry her as if she found it very strange that he should want someone like her. Elizabeth found it most polite to ignore that question, silently suspecting that the woman had been hoping to marry Jonathan herself at some point of time, though she was now married to someone else.
...
Elizabeth actually felt very much more at home with the tenants' wives at Locksley, but she knew they didn't really feel at home with her. She was their boss, or rather, her husband was their husbands' boss; that was a fact that it was never quite possible for them to ignore. She often had the feeling they were very much relieved when she left their homes. They had more important things to do than the idle aristocratic women, but that was of course part of the reason they didn't want her around. Because they had work to do, and felt that they had to stop their work to be polite to her.
So she felt lonely. She had Jonathan, she had a baby growing inside her. She knew she wouldn't trade the life she had got here for anything, but it didn't stop her from feeling lonely at times.
Jonathan never noticed Elizabeth's loneliness. After all, he saw her chatting away happily enough during dinners, how was he to know she regretted half of what she was saying afterwards. And a lot of the married women were from other parts of the country and had themselves been new to Yorkshire at one time or another, Elizabeth had no reason to feel like an outsider. Besides, when she was with him she was always happy and cheerful, except for the two times she had cried in bed in the morning, and that had nothing to do with feeling lonely.
Jonathan was far more busy than Elizabeth was, but she didn't want to ask him for something more to do. Because in half a year's time their baby would be born, and she wanted to give that baby all the time and all the love she could manage. She would be almost thirty-six when this child was born, she knew that a woman's fertility often decreases when she is getting nearer forty. So she knew that this child was quite possibly the only child that she would ever get.
She had something else to look forward to, something more than the baby. All her relatives were invited to spend the Christmas at Locksley, and they had all accepted to come. So at least she would soon see all of them again. And she would soon see her mother and her father also, there were many months since she had last seen them, and so many important things had happened in her life since then. She felt very happy about that - she would get her mummy, as she had wished, while she was still pregnant.
...
One evening, after they had made love, Elizabeth surprised Jonathan by telling him that this had been their hundredth time.
He looked at her incredulously.
"Really? I didn't know you were counting. I think it would have made me nervous if I had known."
"I am a strange sort. My sister was right when she warned you about that", she said apologetically, somewhat regretting that she had told him this.
"You are. But I wouldn't want you any other way", he said softly, caressing her cheek. "I love you so much!"
"I'm counting my blessings!" she said then with a mischievous smile, instantly comforted. "But I will probably stop now, after a hundred."
"That is a pity. Because if you only let me rest a little while, I think I will be ready to give you another one to count. That is if you want to. Number one hundred and one."
...
Later that evening, after making love a second time, they resumed their conversation.
"A hundred and one times, fancy that!" Jonathan said. "I wonder if we have even been married for a hundred days."
"We haven't", Elizabeth said, without a moment of hesitation. "But we will have soon, on Friday, one week from today."
He laughed. She was wonderful. So funny and so adorable. And so very much her, different from all other people he had ever known.
"Well, I guess I could have counted on you for knowing that!" he said while he drew her close to him and settled into a comfortable position for sleeping.
...
One day Elizabeth's books and things had arrived from India. Her parents had packed them and sent them before they knew that they would return to London themselves.
Jonathan had freed some shelves for her to put her books on. Because when her books were added to the library at Locksley, it got some new sections on entirely new subjects, the most important one being mathematics. Her novels she put in alongside his. There were quite a lot of them that he already had, so they decided to move one copy of these to London.
While sorting through her books she happened to see the book in German that she had found in the bookseller's booth in Paris. Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers. She looked up the word Ätiologie in her dictionary, the rest of it she understood. Ätiologie ment the cause of a disease, according to her dictionary.
This book was really interesting and important, but it was more than 500 pages, she would have to start reading it soon. So there was a Profylaxis for childbed fever - a way to prevent this dreaded disease to hit the new mother. She must find out how to do. Reading a book like this was the good way to worry - to prevent bad things from happening.
And she was very sure that praying was not the best method for that.
She put the book down on a small table by the sofa, together with her German-English dictionary. She would start reading it in the evenings, when she had finished her book-keeping. She knew this could very well be a matter of life or death for her.
...
As Elizabeth's belly grew larger and began to show, it started to get easier for her to talk to the tenants' wives. At least with those of them who were themselves expecting babies, or had ever done that, which was the majority of them. She noticed a genuine interest in their eyes, almost a fondness, when they looked at her protruding belly. And they were only too eager to share the stories of their own pregnancies and deliveries with her. The more dreadful the story was, the more keen the woman was to tell it.
All women are in a way alike when it comes to childbirth. Not even the Lady of the estate can have someone else do it for her. Not even the Queen can have that. She has to go through it herself, like everybody else. The fundamental conditions for the most essential aspect of life, the giving of new life, is the same for all of us.
Elizabeth felt that there was nothing like one big belly each to make two women feel connected. There was nothing that could wipe out the boundaries of class in quite the same way as that could. The fears and the delights were the same, or at least very much alike, for every expectant mother.
...
AN: Thank you for reading! Thank you so very much for reviewing! I'm very happy about your kind reviews to last chapter, telling me you still enjoy this somewhat whimsical story, so I will keep going for some time yet.
That book in German really exists, perhaps some of you already know of it. It was printed in 1861, so Elizabeth could very well have found it in a second-hand bookstall in Paris in 1863. There will be a lot more about that book later on, so I leave it like this for now.