The adulteress

Then it should not be difficult. I had been away from home for three weeks. What if I had conceived a short time before I had left, which was possible? No one could question the time of the child's arrival.

The first suspicion had shocked me a little and then I began to glory in the knowledge. I was to have a child. I had longed to be a mother. The fact that I was to become one would lift me out of that terrible depression which parting with Gerard had given me. I knew that if Jean-Louis was aware that he was to become a father he would be so excited that he too would benefit from the news. As for my mother and Sabrina, they would be overjoyed. In their opinion the one flaw in my marriage had been that it was childless.

I should be the only one who would see this as a result of my sin. I had been brazen, shameless ... and now there was to be a result—a child of that illicit union to keep the memory of it green throughout the years.

I had fallen deeper into deceit, and although this news would bring great joy to all my family, I should be constantly reminded of those three ecstatic weeks when I had stepped aside from morality, virtue and all the principles which I had been brought up to revere.

Suppose I confessed what I had done? Suppose I told them who was the father of my child? I would only create unhappiness. No, I must go on living with my deceit for ever and the child would be a living reminder of it.

When I told Jean-Louis he was overcome with emotion.

I said: "I know it is what you have always wanted ... what we have always wanted."

"You are wonderful," he said. "I think always my happiness has depended on you ... and now this... ."

I felt the knife turning in the wound which was my conscience.

My mother and Sabrina were delighted. There was nothing that could please them more than a child in the family.

Dickon shrugged his shoulders and feigned indifference. "Babies can be a terrible nuisance," he declared. "They cry and have to be watched."

"Oh, Dickon, darling," cried Sabrina, "you were a baby once."

"Well, I grew out of it."

"So do we all," Sabrina reminded him.

"Sometimes they get stillborn," he said, "which means they die being born. Some people used to put them out on the hillside to toughen them up. I think it was the Romans or the Stoics or somebody like that. It was good for them. The weak ones died and those that were really strong lived."

"My baby will not be put on the hillside," I said. "He ... or she ... will toughen up very satisfactorily in the nursery."

Dickon glowered. He had never forgiven me for my discovery about the burned barn. That, I remembered, had been the cause of Jean-Louis's trouble. No one had ever mentioned it in that connection. It was the sort of thing Sabrina and my mother would be very anxious to keep from stressing.

The preparations for the baby helped me considerably. I was saved from brooding as I was sure I should have done if I had not had this great event to look forward to.

Often I thought of Gerard, of course. I went over and over our meeting—the strangeness of finding him in the haunted patch and the manner in which he had risen from the ground. Almost uncanny. ... It was as though he had been sent for the purpose of ... what, destroying me? No, never that. Giving me a glimpse of the ecstasy two people could find in each other ... giving me my child.

Then I would think of Uncle Carl sitting there watching me shrewdly, calling me Carlotta. Had he really been wandering in his mind? Did he really see that long-dead girl in me?

Sometimes my fancy wandered on. I let myself believe that I had been possessed. Uncle Carl had said: "She was cut off when she was young ... she never lived out her life ... and she was so full of life." What a fantasy! Suppose she had come back and entered my body ... and suppose Gerard was a reincarnation of that lover whom she had met at Enderby!

It was excuses, really. I was trying to say Yes. I met him, I loved him, I gave way abandonedly. I did so... . But it was not really sensible Zipporah, it was long-dead passionate Carlotta.

Such feeble reasoning must be dismissed as the worthless excuse it was. I had reveled in my lover. It had been no other than myself, a passionate, sensuous woman who had been awakened to what she really was. I knew myself now. I knew I had been vaguely dissatisfied without knowing it. I now realized that I had wanted the sort of love which Gerard had given me.

Be sensible, I admonished myself. Don't shirk the facts. This is you ... wanton adulteress, about to bear the child of a guilty union and pass that child off as your husband's.

It was not the first time such a situation had arisen. But that it should be you... .

It showed how strange life was, how one could never be sure of people and how easy it was to be ignorant of oneself until such circumstances arose to throw a light on that subject.

My baby was a little girl. She was strong and healthy and on impulse I wanted to call her Charlotte.