Scandal at the Dower House by Marina Oliver Page A

suitable wet nurse for the baby when the time came. Joanna had reacted in horror at the mere thought she might have to suckle the child herself. She insisted to Catarina she would be happy not even to see the child. Then, in the middle of November, she went into labour late one evening.
    Luisa was sent for the midwife, while Catarina tried to recall all she knew about childbirth. She’d thought they would havemore time for preparation, but at least she knew enough to set water to boil and collect as many clean rags and sheets as she could.
    For several hours Joanna wept and railed against fate, then swore she would soon die of agony. The midwife came and looked at her, told her she would be several hours yet, and she had to attend first to another lady who was much closer to giving birth. She would return in the morning.
    Joanna screamed abuse at her, demanded that Catarina find another midwife, or send for a doctor.
    ‘There are doctors who act as midwives,’ she wept.
    By morning Catarina was exhausted. Joanna had wept or screamed the whole night, had clung to her hand with such force when the spasms gripped her that she felt they would never again be capable of holding anything firmly.
    The midwife returned, examined Joanna, and told her, with considerable relish, that her previous patient had given birth to stillborn twins.
    ‘And she did not make nearly so much noise about it as you do, my girl!’
    ‘How dare you speak to me – ow, ow, ow ! I’m splitting apart!’
    ‘Should have thought of that nine months ago. Here, bite on this leather strap, it’ll help.’
    Joanna glared at her, panting. ‘It’s filthy! How many other women have bitten on it? Ow , give it to me!’
    An hour later a tiny girl was born and Joanna subsided on to the pillows with a sigh of relief.
    ‘A good size, even though she came a few weeks early. She’ll do,’ the midwife said, wrapping the child in a sheet and placing her beside Joanna.
    ‘No! Take it away! I won’t have her!’
    ‘Let me hold her,’ Catarina said, and took the baby into her arms. She looked at the tiny face, red and puckered, the pale-blue eyes, the dark curly hair, the tiny fingers curling round her own and fell instantly in love. At that moment she determinedthat her niece would not be given away, to finish up heaven knew where, with some unknown family, or given, when she was old enough, into some kind of service. The baby was of her blood: Catarina had never expected to have a child, married to Walter. Joanna might reject her, but the child could depend on her aunt.
     
    Nicholas wrote to the Quinta das Fontes and received a reply saying Catarina and Joanna had left months ago to visit friends in Lisbon. He was tempted to forget it, assuming they would be home soon, but Staines kept appearing whenever he rode past the Dower House, asking if he had any news.
    ‘Dan’s wife says she had nothing to do with the attack on Ellen,’ he reported one day. ‘She was at home and there are neighbours who support her story. But if Annie’s convicted she’ll be hanged, or sent to that Botany Bay the other side of the world, and she’ll not see her family again.’
    ‘Do you believe her?’
    Staines rubbed his forehead. ‘I believe the neighbours,’ he said at last. ‘And they can’t have got the day wrong, as he was helping us with that barn roof. I wish her ladyship was at home; she’d help.’
    So Nicholas thought of Thomas Winterton, the fellow officer who, wounded when Oporto had been recaptured six years earlier, and unfit for more fighting, had married the daughter of the family who had looked after him, and settled to grow olive trees in the Douro valley. Perhaps he could ask more questions and find a trace of Catarina and her sister.
    He admitted to himself he was concerned, and would have gone to Portugal in search of the girls if he had spoken the language, but he accepted he would be of little use without it.
    All he had from the quinta was the