Free Belgravia by Julian Fellowes

too well mannered to be openly curious.
    Before they left London, they had arranged that James would find the child a suitable home. Even Sophia knew she couldn’t hope to keep it. The baby must be properly looked after, given a name, educated, but brought up with no awareness of his or her real identity. None of them wanted Sophia’s name to be dragged through the mud, and Anne knew her husband also feared that his own attempts at self-betterment would be dashed by a public scandal. If it had been their son who had fathered a bastard,it might be different, but for a daughter it was a crime with no possible forgiveness. James had acted swiftly, and with the help of the company spies found a clergyman, Benjamin Pope, who lived in Surrey. He was born a gentleman but the living was a poor one and so the extra money would be welcome. More to the point, the couple was childless and sad to be so. Sophia accepted the situation, when it was explained to her—not without a pang, but she accepted it. Armed with this, James made the final arrangements, and Mr. Pope agreed to adopt the baby as the “child of his late cousin.” The Popes would get a generous additional income, which would allow them to live reasonably well, while the child would be educated and a progress report would be sent regularly to Mr. Trenchard’s office for his private perusal.
    Meanwhile, Dr. Smiley enrolled an experienced midwife, made every preparation, and came to the house to supervise the birth. And it should have been fine. Except when it was done and the boy was safely born, the doctor simply could not stop the bleeding. Anne had never seen so much blood, and there was nothing for her to do but hold Sophia’s hand and assure her that everything would soon be mended and that nothing was wrong. She never forgot how she had just sat there, lying and lying, on and on, until her little girl was dead.
    She couldn’t look at the baby for weeks, this boy who had killed her daughter. Dr. Smiley found a wet nurse and a nursemaid and between them they made sure he survived, but still Anne could not look at him. She’d employed a cook and a housemaid when they first arrived, so life went on, with empty days parsed by uneaten meals, but still she could not set eyes on the child. Until one evening Dr. Smiley came to her in the little parlor where she sat by the fire, staring blankly at the book in her hands, and said gently that all she had left of Sophia was her son. Then Anne did allow herself to be coaxed into holding the baby, and having held him, she could hardly bear to let him go.
    Anne often wondered if she had only learned to love the boy sooner, would she have tried to change the plan and insisted on bringing him up herself? But she doubted James would haveallowed it, and since the arrangements were fixed, it would have been hard to renege on them. At last the house in Bakewell was closed and Anne traveled south with the nurse, who traveled on to Surrey to deliver the baby to his new home. The nurse was paid off and life returned to normal. Normal, that is, without Sophia. There was a tearful good-bye to Croft, whose services were no longer needed. Anne gave her a bonus as a farewell, but she was interested that the maid never showed any curiosity as to why her young mistress had died. Maybe she had guessed the truth. It would be hard to hide a pregnancy from a lady’s maid.
    So the years passed. The original plan had been for Charles to be trained for the cloth, and this had continued as a goal while he grew through his teens, but he had early displayed a talent for mathematics, and as he neared the end of boyhood he announced that he wanted to try his luck in the City. It was impossible for James not to feel flattered by this development, as he reasoned it must be his own blood coming out in the lad, but still they had not met him. They could only judge the young man by the reports sent from the Reverend Mr. Pope. In truth, James longed to help his