with fright as she looked him over. He was Chinese, that was her first thought, seeing the straight black hair, the slightly tilted eyes, squeezed shut now, the mouth wide with his cries.
“Why, there’s nothing wrong with him at all,” she said, breaking into a grin. “He’s as sound as a dollar.”
The amah bent and pulled open the cloth wrapping the baby. Lydia glanced down. His hands were balled into fists, his little legs were kicking furiously....
Her heart sank. “A girl,” she said. She could hardly credit her eyes. She’d prayed so much, she’d been so certain. “It’s a girl.”
In the next moment she was overcome by a wave of shame. She had been so long with the Chinese that she had begun to think like them. As if it mattered to her! It was a baby, her baby, and she loved it.
As for Ke Loo, she’d make him see, it couldn’t matter that much to him. After all, when the peasants put their daughters out to die, it was because they couldn’t afford to feed and raise a girl, just to see her go off to work for someone else, but Ke Loo had no worries over money. He could afford a girl child just as well as a boy. She’d make him understand.
She wrapped the blanket around her daughter again, and hugged her close.
My daughter, she thought, my own child. For the first time since she had been betrayed by Peter MacNair, she felt joy in her heart, and was glad to be alive.
“I shall call you...,” she said aloud, and paused. She had been about to call her Sarah, after her mother; but she couldn’t, not a child fathered by Ke Loo, who had left her mother to die.
A gentle breeze brushed her cheek. “I shall call you April,” she said, laughing with delight. “April, my child of the spring.”
There was a noise in the garden, and Ke Loo came in. Lydia’s joy faded as she saw his face; he knew already.
He barked a command and the amah fairly snatched the baby from Lydia’s arms, rushing to take it to the father. Ke Loo threw the blanket to the floor, holding the infant up for his inspection.
He swore aloud and shoved the baby back at the amah. “Drown it,” he said.
“No,” Lydia cried, struggling up from her bed.
Ke Loo ignored her, signaling the amah to carry out his instructions. She started for the garden with the screaming baby.
Lydia staggered after her for a few steps but she was too weak to run, and even should she reach her, the amah had no choice but to obey Ke Loo.
“Stop it,” Lydia cried. She looked around and saw the midwife’s knife lying on a table near the bed. Without pausing to consider, she snatched it up and held it to her throat.
“Stop it, I say, or I’ll kill myself!”
The amah stopped in her tracks, looking from Lydia to Ke Loo. The midwife gasped with horror.
“I mean it,” Lydia said, speaking to her husband in Chinese. “If the baby dies, I shall die too.”
She had no way of weighing the effect of her threat. Ke Loo had not visited her bed in months, because she was pregnant, and she had no way of knowing whether she was anything more than a novelty to him, whose appeal might already have faded. He glowered angrily at her. The knife point cut into the flesh of her trembling throat.
At last, with a dismissive gesture, Ke Loo swore aloud again. “Give her the child,” he barked, turning on his heel and striding angrily from the room.
The Chinese women broke into excited chatter, laughing nervously as they discussed the marvel of a woman defying her husband’s direct orders.
Lydia went to the amah and took her daughter in her arms. Almost at once April ceased her shrill screams.
“That’s better, my darling,” Lydia murmured, holding her close. “You need have no fears. Your mother will take care of everything, wait and see.”
And she would take care of everything too, she vowed it. Before, the only thing she had had to live for had been her oath of revenge upon Peter MacNair. Now, however, she had something else that mattered, something that mattered more to her than anything else.
She had her daughter. And her daughter would not grow up a slave, a prisoner in a Chinese harem. She had defied Ke Loo to save the child. She would defy anyone, anything, to ensure her daughter’s wellbeing.
“You shall be rich and beautiful,” she murmured, touching her daughter’s chin with the tip of one gentle finger. “You shall have everything your heart desires, the finest clothes, the finest jewels, the finest perfumes. Your mother swears it.”
She strolled into the garden, averting her eyes from the pool in which April had nearly been drowned. Beyond the wall towered the great mountain range of northern China; and there, far, far to the east, lay America.
“Someday,” she said, hugging the baby still closer, “somehow, I swear it, we shall go home.”
“Home.” She repeated the word in a whisper, and felt the sting of tears in her eyes.
Her own land, her own people, so very far away. It would soon be a year since she had been betrayed by Peter MacNair; already it was difficult to recall exactly her parents’ faces. She ate and lived and spoke Chinese.
She must see that her daughter spoke English as well as Chinese. She must see that her beloved April grew up knowing who and what she was. It would not do for the child to feel like a foreigner when at last they reached America.
When. She would not say, “if.” She would not even let herself think “if.”
Always, it must be “when.”
PART TWO
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