Livvy noted the smug expression on Mrs Pengelly’s face with a frisson of irritation. She might well have guessed before Livvy had. It didn’t make the news any more welcome. Another poor mite to add to the chaos and, more to the point, another mouth to feed, and another body to clothe. Please God, let it be a boy. At least then they wouldn’t need a season and a dowry, though there was school, and university, and… oh, it was hopeless.
“Do you reckon she even knows where babies come from?”
Livvy sighed and pummelled the bread she was kneading with increasing vigour. “I did try to explain to her, and that there were… methods….”
Gelly snorted. “Bet she took that well, from her unmarried sister-in-law.”
Despite everything, Livvy let out a breath of laughter. “She turned an odd puce colour and told me never to speak of such things again.”
The laugh that burst from their rotund cook wobbled her plump jowls and made her bosom heave rather alarmingly, but Livvy felt some of the tension leave her shoulders.
“Oh, Gelly, whatever are we to do? She swears blind she only bought trifling little gifts for the children for Christmas, but you know what she is, and Charlie can deny her nothing. If only she would economise, we might manage well enough, but he’s no better….”
Livvy blew a lock of hair from her eyes, aware she was whinging and, worse, repeating herself. She had been singing this same hopeless song for at least four years and, no matter how hard she remonstrated, nothing ever changed. Ceci would get herself with child again and spend too much money again, and Charlie would just give his wife an adoring smile and shrug. She can’t help it, he’d say, and then he’d scold Livvy for making Ceci feel bad when she’d not been raised to live in poverty. As if Livvy had.
Gelly shook her head and turned her attention back to the pie she was making.
“What can you do, pet? ’Tis not your fortune, more’s the pity. They’ll run through it till it’s spent and lament once it’s gone, like it were someone else what done it.” The cook fixed her shrewd dark eyes on Livvy. “You’d do best to get out, whilst you can.”
Livvy paused, her fists sunk into the bread dough still. “I’ll not marry that… that odious creature, not for anyone.”
“Don’t blame ye for it, neither, but you’d have a home that weren’t fallin’ down ’bout your ears, and bairns of your own.”
“And what would happen here, I ask you? Who would see to the children if I did not? They’d be feral within a sennight if I did not make some attempt to take them in hand.”
“Reckon,” Gelly agreed, nodding.
Livvy harrumphed and divided the dough in two, setting each half aside to rest in a greased bowl. She washed the flour off her hands in cold water from the pump and looked out of the window at a day that was draped in fog like a blanket of wet wool.
“I wonder what time Charlie will get back? I expected him yesterday, but I suppose he got talking to some old friend and forgot the time. If he comes back for Christmas, I suppose we ought to count ourselves lucky.”
“Nonsense, he’ll be back, now Missus is here. A week apart is all he’ll stand.”
Livvy nodded. That was true enough. Ceci had returned from London a week earlier as she’d been too tired to stay longer, and her brother loved his wife to her bones. She could do no wrong, and no matter how time and too many babies had taken their toll on her lovely features and slender frame, to Charlie she was still the most beautiful woman that had ever lived. Livvy wondered what it felt like to be adored so thoroughly. Livvy suspected she would find such credulous adulation more than a little suffocating. Just as well it was not a problem she would ever have to endure.
Before she could make herself utterly maudlin, the kitchen door burst open with a crash and the children piled in.
“Is it time?” Jane demanded, guileless blue eyes staring at Livvy, bright with expectation.
“Hmmm,” Livvy said, reaching into the pocket in her skirts for the heavy gold fob watch that had been her father’s. It ought to be Charlie’s really, but Papa had left it to her, and Charlie had never