“Nina.”
He nodded. “I am Christian.” Then, with what he hoped was more confidence than he was actually feeling, he said, “We’ll see it done between us.”
Her sigh of relief was short-lived as another spasm of pain tightened her face and made her close her eyes as she cried, “Please, now!”
Quickly he rolled up his sleeves.
Minutes or hours, Christian lost track of how much time passed before he lifted a shriveled and screaming man-child from his mother’s body. In the end there had really been very little he could do but catch the infant as the young mother pushed him into the world.
But the rush of exhilaration and relief he felt at hearing the child’s cry was great. He lifted the tiny boy, who would someday be a man, and as he looked into that wrinkled little face, thanked God for the gift of life with an even deeper reverence than he had each time he had helped a colt or a lamb come into the world.
Rowena stopped dead in the doorway of her cottage and stared.
She could not credit what she was seeing with her own eyes. There stood Christian Greatham with a damp and screaming infant in his two large hands. On the bed behind him lay the limp form of a young woman, her pale face lined with exhaustion. The expression on his own face as he met Rowena’s gaze was at once triumphant and relieved. The same emotions were obvious in his voice as he said, “My God, Rowena. Look at him.”
She shook her head in confusion as she moved to look down into the pink and wrinkled little face. “What has happened here?” She flicked a glance toward the mother, who still did not rouse herself.
There was barely leashed excitement in his voice as he said, “The babe was coming and there was no time to find you or anyone else. I had to…” He seemed overcome with his own sense of amazement.
“You delivered this babe?” She could hear her own incredulity, even as she ran practiced eyes over the infant, listened to the clear, healthy ring of its cry, took in the pink flush of its plump little body and maleness. “He seems fine enough.”
The knight’s face was filled with pride and wonder as he looked down at the tiny boy. “Aye, I believe he is.”
Again she looked to the young woman. So white, so still. A tendril of alarm slithered through Rowena.
Deliberately calm, she said, “Look in the chest beside the door. You will find clean clothes to wrap him in.”
Christian seemed to read her unease even as she moved toward the bed. “What…”
She did not look back, and her heart fell at the sight of the blood that was beginning to soak the bedcover. “Was there much bleeding during the birth?”
The man replied, with obvious surprise, “There was some bleeding, but not an untoward amount.”
Rowena answered with forced calm. “Please, look after the babe. I must see to his mother.”
Obviously Christian had now seen what she had, for he murmured in a tone of horror, “Dear heaven, is she…”
Rowena was already bending down to listen to her heart. “She is alive.” Her own relief was great, but the amount of blood the young woman had lost told her that she must act quickly or it would not be true for long.
With haste born of desperation, Rowena examined the young woman. Then she turned to the knight. “Did you remove anything?”
He stood there holding the infant, his face now dark with anxiety. “Nay, nothing. You came just as the babe…”
She nodded, then quickly scanned the bed once more. Although she had never encountered this complication, she had learned from a midwife in a nearby village that the afterbirth could cause hemorrhage and death if it failed to be expelled.
Rowena took one deep breath and was immediately encompassed by a feeling of intense focus and calm. It was a feeling that often came over her when a situation was most desperate. She did not know from whence this gift originated, but it had enabled her to do what she must time upon time.
The fact that it had not come in relation to tending Christian Greatham had troubled her greatly. Its return now when she needed peace most was all she required to face the task at hand with self-possession.
The young mother was so weak that Rowena could only rouse her with a tone of command. But Rowena did command, telling her that she must find the strength to help herself lest her child be orphaned, and the girl did manage to expel the afterbirth.
Only then did the bleeding ease. Rowena could take little relief in this, though she hurried to prepare a mixture that would help her patient rest as well as strengthen her.
The girl had lost so much blood.
Rowena was aware of the knight as he moved about the cottage, and wondered how he was faring with the babe. She was certain caring for a newborn child was not an accustomed task for him. But he left her to work over the mother, for which she was grateful.
It was not until she had changed the linens, given the young woman a potion to restore her blood, and watched her fall into an exhausted sleep that Rowena took a breath of relief. Slowly, on suddenly trembling limbs, she went to the bench next to the table and sank down upon it.
It was with a start that she felt a large warm hand on her shoulder. She looked up into Christian Greatham’s concerned blue eyes. “I have put the babe in a basket near the fire.” He paused, shaking his head. “That was the most amazing feat I have ever seen. You saved her life.” The gentleness in his tone far overrode Rowena’s awe that he would speak thus to her. It made her long for…what?
She spoke with deliberate restraint. “’Twas no great deed. It is what I have learned to do.”
He frowned. “Nonetheless, Nina is alive because of you. I had no idea that she was not…All seemed to go well….”
Rowena shrugged, but avoided meeting his gaze as she recalled her own fearfulness on first realizing what had gone wrong. The thought of the young mother lying there in all that blood, and what the outcome might have been had the midwife not told Rowena about what could happen with the afterbirth, was overwhelming.
Despite her trembling, she said, “How did she come to be here?”
He shrugged. “I looked up and there she was. She said that a man on the road had sent her here. The folk in her village would not help her because the babe’s father is wed to another.”
“A bastard.” The words were a mere whisper of breath on Rowena’s lips.
Christian obviously heard them, for he spoke with disbelief. “Would you hold the babe’s lack of legitimacy against him?”
She answered roughly, “Never!” She felt a new wave of shaking wash over her.
He seemed startled by her vehemence for a moment, but his voice was filled with concern as he said, “You are trembling.”
She shook her head. “I am—”
Before she could finish, she was being pulled up and into the warm, encompassing strength of his arms. Her face came to rest on the soft woolen fabric over his heart, and she felt the steady and even beat of it beneath her cheek.
Rowena grew very, very still. She did not know what to do, how to behave. For never, in all her wildest secret imaginings, had she thought that something like this would occur.
Yet in spite of her amazement she became aware of a feeling of yearning so intense that it further weakened her limbs and caused her to lean even more fully against this strange but fascinating man. He reacted by holding her even more tightly, stroking a gentle hand over her hair.
For a moment, Rowena closed her eyes. She had one memory only of ever being held this way—by her father, she believed, though she could not be sure. What she was certain of was that the feelings inside her in that memory were nothing