A Place Called Freedom - Ken Follett [141]
She could not talk to Jay about it. At first he had been angry. He had railed at Lizzie, vowed to shoot Dr. Finch and threatened to have Mack flogged; but his rage had evaporated when he learned the baby had been a girl, and now he acted as if Lizzie had never been pregnant.
For a while she talked to Mack. The birth had brought them very close. He had wrapped her in his cloak and held her knees and tenderly handled the poor baby. At first he was a great comfort to her, but after a few weeks she sensed him becoming impatient. It was not his baby, she thought, and he could not truly share her grief. Nobody could. So she withdrew into herself.
One day three months after the birth she went to the nursery wing, still gleaming with fresh paint, and sat alone. She imagined a little girl there in a cradle, gurgling happily or crying to be fed, dressed in pretty white frocks and tiny knitted boots, suckling at her nipple or being bathed in a bowl. The vision was so intense that tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face, although she made no sound.
Mack came in while she was like that. Some debris had fallen down the chimney during a storm and he knelt at the fireplace and began to clear it up. He did not comment on her tears.
“I’m so unhappy,” she said.
He did not pause in his work. “This will not do you any good,” he replied in a hard voice.
“I expected more sympathy from you,” she said miserably.
“You can’t spend your life sitting in the nursery crying. Everyone dies sooner or later. The rest have to live on.”
“I don’t really want to. What have I got to live for?”
“Don’t be so damned pathetic, Lizzie—it’s not your nature.”
She was shocked. No one had spoken unkindly to her since the stillbirth. What right did Mack have to make her even more unhappy? “You ought not to talk to me like that,” she said.
He surprised her by rounding on her. Dropping his brush, he grabbed her by both her arms and pulled her up out of her chair. “Don’t tell me about my rights,” he said.
He was so angry she was afraid he would do violence to her. “Leave me alone!”
“Too many people are leaving you alone,” he said, but he put her down.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said.
“Anything you like. Get a ship back home and go and live with your mother in Aberdeen. Have a love affair with Colonel Thumson. Run away to the frontier with some ne’er-do-well.” He paused and looked hard at her. “Or—make up your mind to be a wife to Jay, and have another baby.”
That surprised her. “I thought …”
“What did you think?”
“Nothing.” She had known for some time that he was at least half in love with her. After the failed party for the field hands he had touched her tenderly and stroked her in a way that could only be loving. He had kissed the hot tears on her face. There was more than mere pity in his embrace.
And there was more in her response than the need for sympathy. She had clung to his hard body and savored the touch of his lips on her skin, and that was not just because she felt sorry for herself.
But all those feelings had faded since the baby. Her heart was empty. She had no passions, just regrets.
She felt ashamed and embarrassed to have had such desires. The lascivious wife who tried to seduce the bonny young footman was a stock character in comic novels.
Mack was not just a bonny footman, of course. She had gradually come to realize that he was the most remarkable man she had ever met. He was arrogant and opinionated too, she knew. His idea of his own importance was ludicrously inflated, and it led him into mischief. But she could not help admiring the way he stood up to tyrannical authority, from the Scottish coal field to the plantations of Virginia. And