Margaret is made welcome

Margaret put on her most winsome smile, but it did not have the same effect on Gunnilda as it had on her father.

She tried, “Bok-​bok?”

Gunnilda grumbled, “Cheep-​cheep is more like it, little chickie. Now just get you back to bed, and I’ll pretend I never saw you.”

There was little hope from that quarter. Margaret poked her head out of the alcove and cried, “Hetty!”

Gunnilda flung her arm up across the gap. “Oh, no you don’t!”

“Hetty!” Margaret wailed piteously. “Oh, Hetty! Gunnie won’t let me see you!”

Gunnilda grabbed her and stooped to hold her eye-​to-​eye and triumphant smirk to fierce smile. Squeeze her arm though she might, Gunnilda was nevertheless forced to admit Margaret had won—at least for now.

Hetty called out tenderly, “Meggie! Are you in here?”

“Just how long have you been in here?” Gunnilda asked.

“Only a minute!” Margaret pleaded.

Hetty was shuffling barefoot across the floor to meet her, but her slow, stooping, splay-​legged progress was disquieting. Gunnilda looked capable of shooing Margaret out of there before Hetty ever arrived. And Hetty looked capable of dropping that baby right on the floor.

“Father was in my room,” Margaret explained, “and Edith came to tell him and I followed them! Wasn’t I in my bed, Edith?”

“You sure were!” Edith agreed, nodding until her ponytail swished her neck.

“And so may I stay?” Margaret asked.

Hetty stopped shuffling. Her expression turned more tender still, but it was the gentle pity of an adult for a child about to be disillusioned.

Gunnilda, however, was possessed of no pity at all. “Certainly not!” she said. “The only child allowed in a birthing room is the one about to be birthed—and as soon as he arrives, the party breaks up in no time!”

The women laughed. Only Hetty did not—and she tilted her head towards her lopsided braid and sighed at Margaret.

“I am sorry, dear…”

“But I’m not a child!” Margaret protested. “I’m a woman!”

She had hoped it would not come to this, but there it was.

“I just got my flowers two days ago!” she declared, growing more truculent with every word. “I’m wearing a belt right now, and if you don’t believe me, I shall show you! I’m a woman too!”

Face by face, she glared at everyone in the room, defying them with every fiber of her being—except for her traitorous lip, which she could not stop from quivering.

But she had silenced them. Then she noticed that Hetty’s lip was quivering, too. Gwynn had warned her Hetty would be heartbroken to learn she had not been told.

“Oh—Hetty—I was going to tell you—”

She put up her arms and jerkily tried to invite Hetty into a hug before she remembered that Hetty was somewhat occupied at the moment. But Hetty pulled her close and gave her a proper hug anyway.

“Well, how do you like that timing?” Gunnilda demanded. “If I thought it could be done, I would have said you chose the date on purpose, little mistress!”

Margaret certainly wished it were possible. She would have chosen a date several years hence. She could only hope she could convince Hetty not to tell her father.

“Oh, Meggie!” Hetty gave Margaret such a hug that she squeezed herself breathless. “I am so happy for you!”

In ordinary times Margaret would have at least rolled her eyes. But standing in Hetty’s embrace, with her face pressed against Hetty’s damp neck and her body wrapped in Hetty’s trembling, flannel-​clad arms, she was glad to think she had done something that made her stepmother happy. Even if it was something disgusting and unintentional.

“I was going to tell you,” she explained, “after the baby came, so I wouldn’t trouble you.”

“Ach, Meggie!” Hetty released her and gave her a mournful look.

Gunnilda said pointedly, “Well, for someone who didn’t want to cause any trouble…”

Margaret pointedly ignored her. “But Gwynn helped me,” she told Hetty. “She let me borrow a belt and showed me what to do and told me everything you told her about being a woman.” Fearing Hetty would feel superfluous, she added, “At least, everything she remembered.”

Edris sauntered in from the back. “Pray tell,” she said.

Margaret put on the childish smile that had worked so well on her father. “You know,” she said. “About how to take care of myself, and special feelings, and getting married, and lying close together in the bed.”

Margaret managed to repeat all this with a straight face, but it was more than Edris could listen to without breaking into giggles. The maids burst out laughing, and even Hetty turned sheepish and smiled.

But Gunnilda was implacable. “And on the basis of special feelings and lying close together you want to attend a birth?”

Margaret asked innocently, “Isn’t that how babies are made?”

Hetty pleaded, “Ach, Meggie!” but she was giggling behind her hand, as she did when she knew she oughtn’t laugh with the girls, but simply couldn’t help it.

And Edris laughed shamelessly and hugged Margaret with one arm.

Margaret glowed. She was winning. She wondered whether it would be better to ask again, or simply stick around and call no further attention to the fact that she was being suffered to remain.

But before she could decide, Hetty stopped laughing and reached blindly behind her, whimpering, “Ach, Hattie! I need you!”

Margaret was transfixed. She remembered that scream. Was something about to happen?

Hattie came clucking and cooing to help Hetty shuffle around the room, as she had been doing when Margaret followed her father in. Margaret wondered what the purpose was. Did it help the baby work its way down?

Gunnilda interrupted her musings with an ungenerous offer: “Why don’t I walk you back to bed, little chick, and tuck you in and explain a bit about what’s going to happen in here tonight?”

Edris scoffed, “Oh, let her stay!”

Startled, Margaret grinned up at her champion.

One never knew with Edris. On ordinary days she would get in a huff over the pettiest crimes—a between-​meals bite to eat, or a bout of giggles in the middle of the night—but on these unlooked-​for extraordinary days she was just as likely to throw off her shoes, hike up her skirts, and join the children in whooping and splashing in a puddle. And Emma had observed that the Countess seemed especially frisky lately.

Gunnilda grumbled, “She doesn’t even know what she’s staying for.”

“How else shall she learn? Ach, let her, Gunnie. It was her mother who explained matters to me when I attended Prince Harold’s birth. I can tell her some of the things her mother would have told her.”

Edris caressed Margaret’s hair. Margaret was sorely tempted to stick out her tongue at Gunnilda, but she was canny enough to put a mournful, motherless look on her face instead.

“And if she gets scared?” Gunnilda asked. “Or gets bored?” she added, glaring down at Margaret as if it were the most likely and least honorable possibility.

“Piddle!” Edris said. “It isn’t as if we’re setting out to sea! If it’s too much for her we can send her back to bed at any time.” Finally she called back behind the screen, “Hetty, may Meggie stay?”

“May I, pretty please?” Margaret begged, blinking her eyes like Gwynn. “I’ll carry water or hold your hand or do anything, and I promise I won’t get in the way or get sick or swoon! Please?”

Hetty called back in a thin, quavering voice, “But do you think her father…?”

“Ach! Her father!” Edris dismissed the diminutive Duke with an airy wave of her hand. “Her father is a man! What does he have to do with anything?” She pounced on Margaret, pinching and tickling. “He doesn’t even know she’s been warned about special feelings!”

Gunnilda laughed. Margaret knew then that she had won for good.

Edris said, “He’s probably gone to his study to puzzle out a story to tell her in the morning. How we ever came upon a baby tonight, when the farmers have just plowed up the cabbage patch!”