“I shall try.”

“You will come to see me again. Bring any letters, any papers. We will work on them together.”

“Would your doctors allow that?”

“My doctors know that fate has decided to immobilize me to a certain extent. I must learn to adjust myself and any time I spend in mourning for what I have lost can bring me no good. That is something we must remember. Like a good general I must re-form my forces and go on with the battle. You will help me, Jane.”

“I will do everything I can.”

“Come then tomorrow and we will talk business. You will see how quickly I will recover then.”

So I went each day to the hospital while he was there and I took with me any letters that came; there were also books and catalogues which we looked over together.

These sessions were salvation to us both.

And then the suspicions which had been with me for some time were confirmed.

I was pregnant.


* * *

In due course Mr. Sylvester came back to the house. He had already regained a little use in his legs and could manage to hobble very slowly on a crutch. This was great progress. Enquiries were still going on as to how he had come to be shot and from whose gun the fatal bullet had been fired, but there was no satisfaction in this. The inference seemed to be that it was a case of accidental shooting, not the first of its kind by any means.

The household settled back into a slightly new routine which soon became normal. Instead of Mr. Sylvester’s going away, guests came to see him. They often came for dinner and sometimes stayed for a night or two. I was housekeeper, hostess, and secretary, which kept me busy. I was grateful for that.

Joliffe wrote twice more. The first of these letters implored me to come to him. In the second which came two weeks later I sensed his desire for me to do so was less urgent. He was going to “move heaven and earth” he wrote to free himself; then all would be well.

He was constantly in my thoughts yet I felt that I was seeing him differently. In my unworldly eyes when I had been blindly in love with him I saw a perfect being, but now I saw a new Joliffe, a young adventurer, not always sure of himself, taking chances, not always strictly honorable… I saw Joliffe the sinner. It was as though I had been looking at a painting through a veil which made it mystic but wonderful and when the veil was removed the flaws began to show themselves. I did not, I think, love him less. I knew that I could still be charmed, but I saw him differently and I wanted to look more and more deeply into what was there.

Strange as it seems I was glad of the respite. It may have been that my body was changing and my needs changed with it. A new life was growing in me and this in itself will always be a miracle to the woman to whom it happens, commonplace occurrence though it may seem to the rest of the world.

In the first few days when I became certain, the wonder of what was to happen obscured all else. I was glad therefore to be by myself, to think of what this meant. I could not at this stage look at the practical side. I could only think of the wonder of having a child of my own.

Then I began to ask myself how my child would be born. I was not a wife so how could I with decorum become a mother?

There was something uncanny about Mr. Sylvester Milner. It had always seemed so. He would sit in his chair with that inscrutable smile on his face and I often thought when he turned his eyes on me that he was looking straight into my mind.

It seemed this was so because he said to me one day: “Am I right in thinking that you are with child?”

The blood crept up from my neck to the roots of my hair.

“Is it… obvious?” I asked.

He shook his head. “But I guessed.”

“I was not sure myself until a few days ago. I should not have thought…”

He lifted a hand. “It was a certain serenity in your demeanor, a certain peace, a kind of contentment… I cannot describe it. You see it in the women’s faces in some of the later Chinese pictures. An indefinable quality but these artists caught it. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I have looked so much at these portrayals that I recognize it.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am going to have a child.”

He nodded.


* * *

It was a few days later. I had dined in the servants’ hall because there were no guests and on these occasions Mr. Sylvester took his meals in his own room.

Mrs. Couch was talking about the way things had changed. She knew now about Joliffe’s marriage. It was impossible to keep that secret from them and it had been the great topic of conversation in the hall, although when I was present the matter was not discussed. I had grown used to the sudden embarrassed pause when I entered a room.

Mrs. Couch shook her head and occasionally referred to Joliffe as though he were dead. Then her eyes would sparkle at the memory of him. “He was a one,” she would say, “and my word, didn’t he like my sloe gin!”

She would sit at the table with her hands folded and purr over the cards, her face assuming innumerable expressions as she read out the warnings.

“Hearts, ah, I always did like them. Good fortune and wedding bells. A handsome dark man… ha, here he is… looking straight at you.” But when the spades turned up a shudder would reverberate throughout the kitchen. She prided herself on seeing things coming. She had seen my mother’s death. “It was there in the cards as much as a year before she died.” She had seen, but then she hadn’t liked to say it, that my relationship with Joliffe meant tears. “There they were as real as you are sitting there. I could have told you that.” And now Mr. Sylvester’s accident. “Plain as a pikestaff. I saw it as death… well, he did come near it and it was that heart card that saved him.”

I could smile at her always and wondered what she would say she had seen in the cards when she knew of my condition.

She was just preparing to lay the cards, as she called it, for me, when Ling Fu slipped quietly into the kitchen.

Mr. Sylvester was asking if I would go to his room.

I went up at once.

“Ah Jane,” he said, “there is something I want to say to you. I have been thinking this over for some little time and I’m now going to put a suggestion to you. Of course you may think it ridiculous, absurd, but at least I think that, in your circumstances, you should consider it.”

I waited curiously.

“You have, I am sure, thought carefully of your position. You are to have a child but you are an unmarried woman. I know that you were deceived and this is no fault of yours, but the fact remains. This as the years go on could create an embarrassing situation not only for you but for the child. It is for this reason that I have decided to put this plan before you.”

There was a pause and he looked at me as though he was considering how best to put this suggestion which I might think ridiculous.

“When your child is born you cannot be known as Miss Lindsay. That would create an impossible position for you. You can of course call yourself Mrs. Milner, but you will in fact have no right to this name. You are in a difficult position. But for the child you could have put this experience behind you and started a fresh life. With a child it will not be possible.”

He seemed as though he were talking round the subject. It was not like him. He showed no outward embarrassment but I sensed it was there.

He paused for a moment while he regarded me gravely. “You could, of course, become Mrs. Milner in truth by… marrying me.”

I was astounded. It was the last thing I had expected. I really could not believe that I had heard him correctly.

I was silent and he said ruefully: “I see the idea is repugnant to you.”

Still I could not speak.

He went on: “It seemed to be a… solution.”

My voice sounded unnaturally high as I replied: “Would you consider marrying to provide a solution for someone else’s difficulties?”

“It is not entirely so. You have been wronged by a member of my family. You believed yourself to be married and there is to be a child. If you married me that child would be called Milner. I would see that he or she was brought up as my son or daughter. You would have no financial anxieties. That is your side of the case. Mine is that I have always wanted a son or daughter of my own. I never married. Perhaps I sometimes felt I might… but somehow it never happened. Now my accident has made it impossible for me to beget a child. The doctors have told me that. If we married I would regard your child as mine. I should have your companionship… your help in my work. You see the advantages are not all on one side. What do you think?”

“I… I’m afraid I can’t think very clearly just now. I want you to know that I appreciate your goodness to me… and to my mother. From the moment we came here we found security. She was very grateful to you.”

He nodded. “You have qualms. You do not see me as a husband. Do understand that I should not be a husband in every sense of the word. You know my disabilities. It would be a marriage of friendship, companionship, you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Think about it. You would be mistress of this house, your child’s future would be secure. He or she would have the best of educations and a comfortable home. For myself I should have someone to look after my house, and be a companion to me, someone who shares my interests and could help carry on my business. I need that help now, Jane. You are the only one who could give it. You see it would indeed be a convenient marriage for us both.”