The White Dove. Rosie Thomas

father had undertaken the same proud, slow walk at the Coronation of Edward VII, and his great-grandfather, in the last month of his life, at Victoria’s. There had been a Lovell marching as the King’s Defender at every coronation since the title had been bestowed on the first Lord by the Black Prince on the battlefield at Crécy. The family had clung proudly to the title ever since, refusing any grander ones.

      ‘That is the end,’ Gerald said, as he came out into the sunshine again. ‘There won’t be any more, after Airlie.’ In that stricken moment he had forgotten his wife as completely as if she had never existed. The son he had begged her for while his tears stained the pink silk of her dress was forgotten with her.

      Adeline was lying on the day bed in front of her open bedroom window, and she saw her husband walking back from the church like a man at the onset of paralysis. Since the moments under the cedar tree she had barely seen him, and although she had waited patiently and prayed that he would turn to her with his grief, he had never come.

      They had been the loneliest days she had spent since the first weeks of her marriage.

      Now the awareness of something other than loss was beginning to force itself on her attention. Adeline heaved herself upright on the day bed to ease the pain in her back, and at once felt a corresponding tightening across her belly.

      ‘Not long now,’ she whispered into the heavy afternoon heat. She lay back against the satin pillows, pushing the heavy weight of her hair back from her face and looking out into the sunshine. The park was deserted once more. Gerald had shut himself away again, alone.

      ‘It will be a boy,’ Adeline promised the sultry air. ‘It will be another boy.’

      On the fourth day, the outside world intruded itself into the silence that shrouded the house. Early in the morning the local doctor’s little car chugged up the west drive from the village, and the doctor and his midwife were discreetly ushered upstairs. Almost immediately afterwards, Amy and Isabel in the schoolroom heard the purr of another car as the chauffeur drove his lordship’s big black car down to the station to meet Lady Lovell’s fashionable doctor off the fast London train.

      The two doctors met at last at opposite sides of the bed, the London man in a morning coat and striped trousers, his wing-collar stiff against his throat, and the overworked local practitioner in the tweed jacket and soft collar that he hadn’t had time to change before the urgent summons came. The two men shook hands and turned to the patient. For all the differences in their appearance, they were agreed in their diagnosis. The baby was not presenting properly. Lady Lovell was about to suffer a long and painful labour and a breech delivery.

      ‘There now.’ The London doctor straightened up, smiling professionally. ‘You’ll be perfect. Just try and rest between the pains, won’t you?’

      ‘The baby.’ Her face was white, with dark patches under the eyes. ‘The baby will be all right?’

      ‘Of course,’ he soothed her. ‘We’ll get you your baby just as soon as we can.’

      The morning cool under the trees in the park evaporated, and the sun rose in the relentlessly blue sky. The clockwork smoothness of the household arrangements ticked steadily on through the morning, occupying everyone from the august Mr Glass in his pantry to the humblest maid, but everyone was waiting. Mr Rayner the chauffeur, coming into the kitchen for his lunch, reported that neither of the doctors had ordered his car. Up in the nursery Bethan Jones helped Nanny with the children’s lunch, and shook her head in the privacy of the kitchen cubbyhole. Her mother was the village midwife back in the valley, and she knew the signs.

      Gerald Lovell sat on in the library. He didn’t seem to be either waiting or listening, but simply suspended in immobility.

      As the afternoon wore on it grew more difficult for the household not to listen. Miss May took the little girls as far from the house as possible for their afternoon walk so that they might not hear their mother screaming. Up in Lady Lovell’s room the two doctors had discarded their distinguishing jackets. They worked side by side in their shirtsleeves.

      By the evening the screaming had stopped. Lady Lovell seemed barely conscious except when her head rolled to the side and the pain wrung out an almost inaudible gasp. The midwife and a nurse bathed her face and held her arms. Her eyes were sunk deep into their sockets.

      The village doctor leant over for the hundredth time to listen to the baby’s heartbeat.

      ‘Still strong,’ he said. ‘It’ll make it. If she does.’

      ‘She’ll make it,’ said the other doctor grimly.

      Then, at a few moments before midnight, they told her that it was time. ‘Push now,’ the midwife whispered to her. ‘It’s almost over. Push now, and the baby will be here.’

      And Lady Lovell struggled back into the black, pain-filled world and pushed with the last of her strength.

      At two minutes to midnight the baby was born, feet first. It was a healthy boy.

      They held him up for her to see, and she looked at the bright red folded limbs and the mass of wet black hair. Adeline smiled the tremulous smile of utter exhaustion. ‘A boy,’ she murmured. ‘Please. Tell my husband now.’

      The nurse rang the bell, and within seconds Mr Glass tapped at the door. The London doctor put his morning coat on again, fumbled to straighten his collar and went out to him.

      ‘Would you be so kind as to take me to his lordship? I am sure that he will want to know he has a fine son.’

      The library was lit only by a single green-shaded lamp. Gerald Lovell took his head out of his hands as the doctor was ushered in.

      ‘Congratulations, my lord. A healthy boy.’

      Gerald stood up, frowning and trying to concentrate on the seemingly unintelligible words. He had been looking at photographs. A double row of stiffly posed boys with cricket bats resting against their white flannelled knees stared up at him from the desk top. In the middle of them was Airlie in the Eton eleven of 1915.

      ‘A boy. My son?’ he asked.

      The doctor smiled. ‘Yes. Lady Lovell had a difficult time and is very tired, but she will recover with rest. The baby is well.’

      Gerald was on his way, past the doctor and out of the room, the stiffness of his movements betraying how long he had been sitting, hunched over his grief, in the silent library. He took the photograph with him.

      Adeline opened her eyes when he came into her room. Gerald was shocked to see the exhaustion in her face. The hovering nurse backed discreetly away and he sat down at the edge of the bed, putting the photograph down on the fresh sheet with its deep lace edging. He covered her hands with his.

      ‘You’re all right,’ he said softly, and for a moment Adeline thought that after all, they might recover.

      ‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it would be. Look.’

      She pointed to the white-ribboned cradle at the side of the bed. Gerald leant over it, slowly, and turned back the cover.

      This crimson skin and pucker of features, then, was his son? These clenched, helpless hands and unseeing eyes?

      No. Oh no. Airlie was his son. He had no memory of Airlie ever being like this, so tiny and so barely human. His head was full of vivid recollections: of Airlie running across the grass to his first pony and flinging himself across its bare back, of Airlie striding down the pavilion steps with his bat under his arm, of Airlie proud in his uniform with the brass buttons shining. But none of a baby.

      Now Airlie was gone, and this little creature wasn’t him. Nor could he ever be. Adeline couldn’t give him his son back. Not Adeline, not anyone.

      Gerald smoothed the cover over the baby again and turned back to his wife. Without taking her eyes from his face, Adeline pushed the photograph away from her, further away until it hung at the edge of the bed, and then slid to the floor. Gerald bent at once to retrieve it and she turned her head away