Will You Love Me in September

Once more we spent Christmas at Enderby. Damaris told me that she thought the great-grandparents were getting too old to preside over the festivities; and she and Priscilla both thought that Enderby would be a good place to have them.

We did all the traditional things, and the days flew past. We returned to London on the sixth of January. Aimee was due at the end of the month.

She was catching the coach from York and traveling to London, and we would meet her at the coaching inn and take her to Albermarle Street from there. We had planned that we would stay in London until the birth of the child.

I was excited at the prospect of having my sister to live with us. Looking back, I realized I knew very little about her, and what I had discovered at Hessenfield had been submerged beneath the importance of my later meeting with Dickon.

We were waiting at the inn when the coach arrived, a lumbering vehicle, leather-covered and studded with nails, windows covered by leather curtains, with a rounded roof and an outside seat over the boot.

The guard alighted first, hampered by the blunderbuss which he carried as a protection against any highwayman encountered on the road, and the horn, which he would blow on passing through a town or village. Then came the postilion, who had been riding on the foremost of the three horses. He was dressed in a green coat laced with gold and wore a cocked hat.

The passengers finally emerged, and among them was Aimee. She looked different from the others, and even a long and uncomfortable journey on rough and muddy roads could not destroy her innate elegance. She wore a woolen cloak, navy blue in color, over a dress of the same material, and she had on one of the latest fashions in cocked hats, which was blue and trimmed with touches of red. The garments were plain but in the best of taste. I could never understand whether it was the manner in which her clothes were cut or the way she wore them which gave them distinction. She had made them herself, I discovered later, for she had been apprenticed to a couturiere in Paris when she was a young girl.

She embraced me with great affection and gratitude. She treated Lance with reserved respect and thanked him warmly in that accent with its foreign touch, and I was delighted to see that they immediately liked each other.

Our coach was waiting to take us the short distance through London to Albemarle Street, and during the journey Aimee talked a little of the impossibility of her life in the north and her losses in the South Sea Company.

"Here you have a fellow sufferer," I said.

"You too, Clarissa?" she said in some alarm.

I shook my head. "Poor Lance," I replied. "As a matter of fact, I did rather well out of it, unwittingly.”

I told her what had happened.

She leaned toward me and pressed my hand. "I am so glad for you. How ironical that this South Sea business should profit you, who are not in the least interested in taking a chance.”

"It did, precisely because I was not interested.”

"How perverse of fate! And there were we ..." She glanced at Lance ... "trying so hard to make the most of what we thought was a God-given opportunity ... and we came to grief.”

"The fate of most gamblers," I said.

"You see," said Lance, "I am an inveterate gambler. Clarissa deplores it.”

"My husband was the same ... with what dire results. But for the South Sea Bubble I should not be in these straits now.”

"We'll forget the Bubble," I said. "We have plenty of room, haven't we, Lance?-and we are delighted to have you stay as long as you wish. I am thrilled about the baby.

What do you want, a boy or a girl? We shall have to see about engaging a midwife.

We thought it would be better to stay in London until after the birth.”

Aimee turned to me with misty eyes. "You are making me feel very welcome," she said gratefully.

Aimee's coming wrought a subtle change in the household. I suppose the birth of a child is such an important event that it must i . * dominate all else. We engaged a midwife who was recommended by a friend of Lance and eventually she came to stay in the house. Aimee and I-before she became too large-shopped to buy clothes for the baby. We visited mercers in Cheapside, Ludgate Hill and Gracechurch Street. We took great delight in ribbons and laces, and I was determined that my little nephew or niece should have the best of everything.

Jeanne was good with her needle, but we hired a seamstress to come to the house.

Those three months before the birth were taken up with plans for the baby.

I had thought Jeanne and Aimee would get on well together, being of the same nationality, able to prattle away in French. What could be better? I spoke French tolerably well, and now that Aimee was with us I spoke it more frequently than I had with Jeanne.

Oddly enough, there was hostility between them.

"Jeanne is inclined to be insolent," said Aimee.