Prelude to Heaven (23 page)

He left the library, shaking off Henri's restraining hand with a violent curse, and went upstairs to Tess’s room. When he opened the door, his gaze skimmed past Jeanette, who was seated by the foot of the bed, to Tess. She was sitting up, leaning back on the pillows piled against the headboard, Leonie beside her, holding her hand. He opened his mouth to ask if she was all right, but the question died on his lips as he looked into her face. She didn’t look all right. She looked tired, vulnerable, and completely overwhelmed.

“Alexandre,” Jeanette’s impatient voice cut in before he could say anything, “you shouldn’t be in here.”

“I’m well,” Tess said as if to reassure him, but he knew it was a lie. When she smiled at him, it was a wan smile that ended in a grimace. “Another one's coming,” she said, her hand clutching Leonie's like a lifeline.

Jeanette rose from her chair and lifted the sheet to look beneath. Past her shoulder, he watched Tess's body arch and twist, and he heard her cry of pain. His mind raced, wondering how much longer she would have to endure this, and what he could do to help. There had to be something.

Jeanette's voice rang out sharply. “Don't push! Tess, don't push. It isn't time yet.”

Alexandre circled the bed to Tess’s other side, reaching for her free hand.

She wrapped her fingers around his, squeezing his hand with a strength he hadn't known she possessed. After a few moments, the pain ebbed away, and Tess fell back against the pillows, sucking in air and letting go of his hand. “How much longer?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Soon,” Jeanette answered, lowering the sheet. “The pains are very close together.” She looked at Alexandre. “There's nothing you can do,” she told him. “Go back downstairs.”

“No.”

“Alexandre, don't argue with me. This is no place for a man. Go.”

“I'm not leaving.” Their gazes locked. Three years ago, he had been ordered to stay away. He had obeyed, and Anne-Marie had died. “Not this time.”

Jeanette scowled at him. “Oh, very well,” she said crossly, “but for the love of heaven, stay out of the way.”

Another pain hit Tess, and there was no further discussion. Alexandre held her hand, bathed her face with cool water, and tried not to think about what might happen. It seemed an eternity before Jeanette finally lowered the sheet with the words, “It's time.”

Leonie jumped to her feet, and Alexandre watched helplessly as the two women moved Tess to the side of the bed, spread her bare legs apart, and put her feet on the sheet-covered floor. Jeanette moved her chair directly in front of Tess, while Leonie stood nearby with a pile of clean linens.

“Push when you hit the peak of the pain,” Jeanette told her. “Not before, not before!”

Alexandre watched as Tess nodded. She leaned back on her elbows, bracing, and when the next pain hit and she cried out, it felt like a knife through his heart.

For what seemed like hours, Alexandre took on each pain as if it were his own, wishing it were. He mumbled frantic, whispered prayers. He sat on the edge of the bed, leaning across it to hold her hand, bathing her face whenever she fell back exhausted against the mattress, watching her grow more and more weary with each contraction.

When Jeanette told her for what seemed like the hundredth time to push, he felt as frustrated as she when she mumbled, “I can't, I can't do it anymore.”

“Tess, you have to.”

Tess shook her head and refused to sit up. “Can't...too tired.”

Jeanette shot Alexandre a worried glance over Tess’s prone body. “She can't stop now.”

Alexandre didn't pause to think. He moved to sit beside her, nudging Leonie out of the way and bracing one foot on the floor. He pulled Tess up into her half-sitting position, supporting her with his other leg folded against her back and one arm around her shoulders. “Tess, you must push,” he told her.

She shook her head again. “I don't want to do this anymore. It hurts too much.”

“I know it hurts, but you must have courage.”

“I'm tired. I can't.”

“You have to,
petite
.” Tenderly, he wiped the sweat from her brow with one sleeve.

She shook her head and when the next contraction hit, she cried out and tried to lie back down, but he held her firmly. “Push,” he ordered.

“I can't.”

He knew he had to make her finish this, and he said the first thing that came into his head. “Tess, if you don't start pushing, I shall round up that donkey and give her back to that peasant farmer who owned her before.”

“You wouldn't do that.”

“Oh, yes, I would.”

She turned her head to look into his face, and in her expressed was disbelief mingled with exhaustion. Another pain came and she grunted, making a halfhearted attempt to bear down.

“And then,” he continued, unimpressed by her paltry efforts, “I shall wring that damned goose's neck, pluck it, and roast it.”

“I don't believe you,’ she said, panting.

“With stuffing,” he added. “And I'll give Augustus to Jeanette and Henri. They can take him to little Chantal. She'd love a kitten.”

She was furious now, glaring at him as if he’d become the devil incarnate. “Don’t you dare give my animals away!”

“If you don't want me to do it, then push.”

Her jaw tightened as the pain came again, and she groaned through clenched teeth, pushing with all her strength.

“Push,” he told her. “Push. Damn it, Tess, push!”

“I am pushing, damn you!” she shouted back at him, infuriated.

“The baby's coming,” Jeanette said. “I see the head. Just a bit longer, Tess. You're doing very well. Keep pushing.”

It was with a final, heart-wrenching scream that Tess pushed one last time, and Alexandre glanced up as a bloody, squirming bundle was lifted in Jeanette's hands.

“It's a girl,” Jeanette pronounced. “A beautiful, healthy girl.”

Alexandre studied the wet, slippery, grayish-pink thing that now rested on Tess's belly with a hint of alarm. The baby didn't look healthy at all. To him, she looked quite sick. But then she opened her tiny mouth and let out a wail that sounded very healthy—and very loud—and he let out his breath in relief.

As they watched Jeanette cut the cord and handed the baby to Leonie, he pressed a kiss to Tess’s damp hair. Then he pulled back so that he could look into her face, and he was glad to see that in her expression there was no pain, only relief. But when she met his gaze, a frown knit her brows and her eyes narrowed a fraction. “Don't you dare do anything to my animals.”

“I won't,” he promised, reaching out to brush a sweat-soaked lock of hair back from her face. “How do you feel?”

Her frown vanished. “Better now,” she answered with a touch of humor. “Tired.”

“Here we are,” Jeanette said, and placed a squirming, linen-wrapped bundle into Tess's arms. Alexandre watched the lines of exhaustion that had been etched into her face vanish as if by magic, replaced by wonder and awe, and he felt tightness squeeze his chest.

She picked up one of her daughter's hands, and as he watched her tiny fingers wrap around one of Tess’s, his throat went dry, and he couldn’t seem to breathe. Never had she looked more beautiful than she did at this moment.

“She's beautiful,” Tess whispered. “Oh, Alexandre, isn't she beautiful?”

“Yes,” he managed to answer. “Just like her mother.”

In the days following the birth, Jeanette insisted that Tess do nothing but rest. Though she had hoped to nurse the baby herself, Tess’s milk did not come in fast enough, and the baby had become impatient with the lack of adequate nourishment, crying and fussing and leaving Tess unable to get any sleep, so Jeanette again put her foot down, insisting that Leonie act as wet nurse and moving the nursery up to a chamber beside Leonie and Paul’s rooms. Tess, exhausted, did not argue. That state of affairs lasted until the baby was a week old.

“She wants to do what?” Alexandre tossed down his paintbrush and turned to Jeanette, not sure he’d heard correctly.

“She insists on getting out of bed. I advised against it, for I think she needs a few more days of rest, but she’s quite determined. And she asked me when she would be able to resume her duties as housekeeper.”

“What, scrubbing floors and climbing ladders? Not while I breathe air.” Alexandre reached for a rag to wipe paint from his fingers. “Where is she?”

“Still abed for the moment. I left her with the excuse that I would find Leonie to help her dress.”

Alexandre tossed aside the rag, strode past his sister-in-law out of the studio, and went down to Tess’s bedchamber. When he knocked on her door, he barely waited for her permission to enter before coming in.

As Jeanette had told him, she was still in bed, though she was sitting up, the baby in her arms, the morning sun that poured through the window glinting on her coppery hair.

“What’s this I hear about you wanting to resume your duties?” he demanded.

She pressed her finger to her lips, then gestured to the sleeping baby. “Well, for the moment, I simply want to get out of bed,” she said in a low murmur.

“You have an objection to being waited on?”

“Fussed over, you mean.”

His intractability on this issue must have shown in his face, and she sighed. “Alexandre, this lying-in business is driving me mad. I’m bored. As for the rest, I feel perfectly well, and I see no reason why I can’t resume the lightest of my duties and supervise Leonie for the remainder.”

“You have enough to do with the baby.”

“Such as what? I can’t feed her myself, and new babies don’t do much except eat and sleep.”

He glanced at the baby in her arms, and she perceived it, beckoned him forward. “Come in and see her, if you like.”

He hesitated, then crossed to the bed, surprised by the hammering thud of his heart. A week ago, when he'd seen her for the first time, she hadn’t seemed quite real to him. His attention had been primarily focused on Tess. But now, as he studied the round head nestled against the soft cotton of her mother’s nightdress, the baby seemed like a person in her own right. Small, helpless, and very real. And also his responsibility.

How could he be responsible for them? How could he take care of them? Hadn’t he already been proven hopelessly inadequate at that sort of thing?

He reached out as if to touch her, then pulled his hand back, not wanting to wake her. “Have you thought of a name for her?”

Tess nodded, her gaze falling to the baby. “I shall call her Beatrice.”

“Beatrice? Bah!” That exclamation clearly conveyed his distaste for that name. It was so...so
English
.

“Beatrice,” she repeated firmly. “Beatrice Elizabeth, after my mother.”

“It doesn’t suit her,” he said even as he reminded himself he had no right to offer his opinions on the matter. “She is a beautiful baby, she should have a more beautiful name that Beatrice.”

Tess gave an exasperated sigh. “What would you suggest then?”

He glanced at the baby, who was still sleeping, oblivious to their conversation. “Madelaine?”

She shook her head in refusal. “Victoria?”

Still too English. “Vivienne?”

Tess wrinkled her nose. “Too sophisticated.”

Both of them fell silent, trying to come up with just the right name. Alexandre stood up and walked over to the window, looking at the shimmering blue of the sea in the distance. She ought to have a name that spoke of sunshine and poetry and beauty, all the things she would become.

He would paint her. There, on the cliff, overlooking the sea, with the wind in her hair. He and Tess would take her to the Meadow of the Fairies for picnics. He would teach her to paint. In the evenings, he and Tess would talk about her, sometimes with pride, sometimes with concern, always with love.

He thought about the days ahead, watching her grow into a woman as beautiful as her mother. Would she have Tess's expressive eyes, her smile, her glorious copper hair? He could imagine the two of them in a few years, walking along the rocky coast below, hand in hand. Tess would stop and kneel beside her daughter, an arm around her waist, pointing out the birds flying overhead, the crabs crawling along the shore, and the fishing boats in the distance.

He imagined it as a starving man imagines a tantalizing meal. He felt a hunger just as strong. He wanted it, all of it, for the rest of his life. That was why the baby’s name mattered so much—because he wanted the baby to be his. He wanted Tess beside him as they watched their daughter grow up. He wanted the future he could see in his mind to become a reality. Most of all, he wanted Tess. He loved her. But it was nothing but fantasy.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, the scene he’d imagined was gone, but the desire for it still remained. “Suzanne,” he said as he turned away from the window. “I think her name should be Suzanne.”

“Suzanne,” she repeated, considering, then she nodded. “I like it.”

She gave him a radiant smile, and suddenly, the sight of her there, smiling at him, with the baby in her arms was too much to bear. It made him happy in a way he hadn’t dared to be happy in a long time. He blinked and looked away, walking to the door. “Rest,” he told her. “At least a few more days.”