The Devil's Workshop

“You can’t?”

“You’re blocking the way. That’s my tea shop.”

Day smiled. “Ah, very good, sir. Then you have the opportunity to clear up a small mystery for me.”

“A mystery?”

“Do you have anyone working for you here? Small fellow named George Hampstead? A bit jumpy?”

“No.” The man pulled himself up to his full height. “I’ve never had anyone working here except me. Never a need. What’s going on here?”

“Well,” Day said, “it’s all a bit complicated. Do you have a few minutes to spare?”

21

The contractions were coming every few minutes, and Claire didn’t know what to do. She curled up under the coverlet and hugged her knees and closed her eyes and tried to imagine the tiny life inside her. One day that life would be a person. One day that life would be a policeman or a housewife, a mother or a father, a living breathing human being. But right now, that life wanted to come out.

Claire reached under the edge of the mattress and brought out her diary. She unsnapped the catch and opened it and looked over the last entry she had made. Nothing much. Nothing that made her proud. Just a jot about feeling lonely and having trouble getting the buttons right on Walter’s shirts. There ought to be something more there. What if she died in childbirth? It was more than possible. Dr Kingsley told her not to think of such things, told her she was safe and healthy and that he would do his all for her. But he didn’t know. He’d never felt a contraction, he’d never given birth.

She turned a page and took her pencil and bit her lower lip. Another contraction hit and she grimaced, almost made a sound, but didn’t. At least there was that. She felt like pushing back against that pressure, but she was afraid of what might happen if she did.

Instead, she thought of her baby and what she could tell it. Her eyes closed, she felt the room moving, and she remembered skipping rope when she was a girl and hadn’t worried about dying. She thought about what it was like to be a child, and she hoped that she would be able to make her baby feel the way that she had when she was young. She opened her eyes and she wrote in her diary:

My skipping rope,

It passes over and it passes down.

My skipping rope,

She couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with down. She felt dizzy and unconnected, so she concentrated harder on the words. She crossed out the second line and wrote It passes under and it passes up. This posed the same problem. Cup? What did that have to do with skipping rope? Pup? Maybe the child was skipping rope with a dog? That seemed unlikely.

She tossed her diary aside and lay watching the ceiling swim around above her. There were more than enough nursery rhymes for children. She didn’t need to write her own.

Another contraction hit. She clenched her teeth and moved to her hand to her stomach. And then she felt something warm and wet moving under her bottom and up to the small of her back, and she pulled aside the blanket and there was liquid soaking into her fresh linens, a whole day’s work undone by her rebel body. Tears sprang to her eyes and she wiped them away.

Another contraction, this one the worst yet. Terrible pain, and why was it necessary to feel such pain when childbirth was such a common thing? She tensed up into a ball in the wet spot, but it wasn’t a spot, it was an ocean, and she clenched her hands into fists and thought about her horse, the little horse her father had given to her on the occasion of her thirteenth birthday, and she wondered if that horse was still galloping about somewhere on her parents’ land wondering why she didn’t visit it anymore. Why didn’t she take it apples and ride it anymore?

The pain passed, although she could still feel it, a faint drumbeat like her pulse somewhere far away. She sat up and looked down and there was blood in the bed, blood mixed with something clear and viscous, flecking the coverlet and soaking into her nightgown.

“Fiona!”

She licked her lips and concentrated on not panicking, except that everything felt wrong. Her body was somebody else’s body and it didn’t fit her properly, hadn’t been hers to begin with. She gasped and closed her eyes; again there was a twinge low in her belly, a soft strum of muscle and grit, and she screamed as loud as she could.

“Fiona!”

22