3 January 1895 — Ford's Room, Bartonburg

Roughly a month had passed since the incident, and the third floor of the Greengrass house had achieved an uneasy equilibrium. Ford worked long days and juggled debts in his ledger book each evening, doing the annual dance to try and make Christmas work. He was cordial to Jemima when he saw her. He asked perfunctory questions about her day and she answered them and returned them. He didn't ask how are you, or anything like it. He didn't ask any real questions. Nothing that could start a deeper and less comfortable conversation. They were pleasant strangers now, the way they had been in the first few weeks of their marriage. Under the circumstances he couldn't regret the shift; all things considered this was better than he deserved, he thought. She would have been within her rights to hate him. Maybe she did, somewhere below all that, but she was masking it well enough to keep up appearances even when it was just the two of them.

There were moments, sometimes, when they happened to be alone. Moments where their eyes would catch on each other's and he would see a glimpse of real emotion on her face and he would have the impulse to say something — something real, something sincere. He inevitably bit it back, thinking don't make it worse, and the moment would pass and he'd swallow down whatever it was he'd almost said. It was better this way. It was, at any rate, safer this way.

He'd been sitting at the small desk in his room when she knocked and he went to the door. Jemima asked if they could talk. Ford was immediately panicked but tried to mask it as he stepped back to let her in; his response veered far too bright and chipper as a result. If she'd bothered to come to his room when the door was closed then this wasn't a spontaneous conversation, and he knew there wasn't any version of a planned conversation that would be comfortable for him. But he supposed he'd earned that, being uncomfortable.

There weren't enough places to sit in his bedroom for both of them, unless one of them took the bed. That seemed a treacherous idea. Ford left the chair at his desk for her, if she wanted it, and stood awkwardly by the foot of the bed. "So, what's — what are we talking about?"

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Jemima Greengrass

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Set by Lady!

She had been trying to gather the courage for this, but as the days passed by the prospect had seemed to grow more daunting rather than less. She hadn’t told anyone yet. She had been keeping her distance from her own family, so that they would not make note of her drastically changed mood since then. It was easier to lie in letters – happiness easier to invent on the page. In the following weeks, Jemima had known that if she went home, someone would read her despair in a heartbeat, and she would fall apart on them.

Instead she had put all her efforts into putting on a brave face and lying to the Greengrasses as if it were her full-time profession, busying herself however she could, and only letting down her guard when she had finally closed the door to her room.

Ford was in his room now; she had heard him come upstairs a while ago, and had sat perched at the end of her bed, trying to force herself to move. But there, she had done it: knocked on the door, asked to talk, stepped in. The chair at his desk was angled as if someone ought to sit there, and Ford was standing guard at the end of his bed. It didn’t matter: she felt too restless to sit anywhere, so she shifted her weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, expression fraught, her gaze drifting around the corners of his room for a moment as if she would find something to save her there. No. Just Ford. Ford, waiting for her to say something.

“Did you want to sit? There’s something I have to tell you,” Jemima said, rushed and a little high and off-pitch from the surge of nerves that came up whenever she so much as considered it. “And I know it won’t – help – anything.”

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If there was any more room for panic the way she lead in to the conversation would have triggered it. Something she had to tell him, and it wouldn't help anything. Anything was unhelpfully broad — there were a lot of things the matter with them, and now Jemima knew what they all were, so she could really have meant anything. She had made a resolution of some sort, he guessed — something she had determined that he wouldn't like. He braced himself for it, hoping he could keep whatever his immediate reaction was off his face. He didn't have a right to object to whatever she had decided, after everything, and they both knew it.

He didn't want to sit. Particularly not while she was hovering there, like she would rather be anywhere else (probably not a far cry from the truth — the last time she'd been in his room was when she'd found him and Tycho together. Was that what was going through her mind now as she eyed the corners of the bedroom? Wondering what else had happened in here that she hadn't been privy to?) But she had asked, and now he wasn't sure of a graceful way to refuse, so he nodded and went to the chair at the desk.

"It's alright," he said, preemptively and uncertainly. It had feeling of someone putting their foot out on ice, testing to see if it would crack under the weight. Could he just insist that he was fine with whatever she was about to say and make it true? He supposed they were both about to find out. "Whatever it is, it's alright."

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Set by Lady!

Jemima wasn’t sure how much of her spiking anxiety was from the current situation, and how much was just an echo of last month’s events, some flashback of that nightmare just sparked by crossing the threshold of his room.

She couldn’t afford to think about any of that right now, in the face of this – everything she had learned that night only made this that much worse, whatever Ford said to her face today. And Jemima had had time to think about this, as obliviousness to her symptoms turned to frantic denial and then to – well, a growing panic.

“Is it?” she echoed, although a small part of her was grateful he was already trying to talk her down, without knowing their predicament. If only she could believe it. Instead, she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, forcing herself to get it out while she had the words prepared. “Because I’m having a baby, Ford. We’re having a baby.” And for all her considering, she couldn’t see how this was going to work, because they didn’t have any money and they didn’t have any trust and they were barely a we at all. Jemima hadn’t even been sure if she was prepared to be pregnant or to be a parent before all this – but she certainly wasn’t ready to do it alone.

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She didn't believe him. He didn't believe himself, either. Probably he wouldn't have been able to reassure her regardless of what it was she wanted to say, with things the way they were between them at the moment, but then the word baby hit the air and he went very still. This was certainly not something he could smooth over with placating reassurances. He had known this was a possibility, obviously. Even if he hadn't been thinking about it from the day they married, Cash's situation over the summer and then into the autumn would have made it an unavoidable consideration. But just as he'd known it was a possibility, he'd known all along that he wasn't ready — that he would have to be ready someday, probably, but he wasn't there yet. He needed Clementine settled, he needed another year to pay down debts. He needed — well, he probably needed a wife who would have more than superficial conversations in passing, which he had been in possession of up until a month ago when that had been ruined.

That was another quite dire point of consideration. He had known this was a possibility, and he had been thinking of it as an inevitability too, because there were things they could have done to prevent it that he had never discussed with Jemima. He had assumed she wanted a baby, sooner or later — that she wanted a family. Having already deprived her of her agency in choosing a husband and much of her good standing in society, he had thought it wrong to interfere here. He owed her as much of a life as she could still reasonably have. But that had been before, and now he had to consider not just whether it was likely Jemima wanted children, but whether it was likely she wanted them with him. It seemed unlikely the answer to the latter question was yes — so now here they were. Another terrible thing he had inflicted on her.

"Oh," he said eventually. "And are you... alright?"

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Set by Lady!

Jemima had expected more of a reaction, but he seemed to have frozen. And she never knew what he was thinking nowadays. She had thought him easy to read at first, but of course she’d been wrong about a great many things; and if Ford telling her everything had finally laid his motivations bare, this last month she had spent retreating from him, locked up in her own head, hadn’t helped her much as much as she supposed with reading him.

She only wished the time to think had been any help whatsoever in understanding herself. But he asked if she was alright, and Jemima blinked at it, because she had thought the obvious answer was no. Did he mean well, physically? “I – mean, I feel tired all the time, and sick, and my bladder’s somehow always full and my breasts are sore,” she blurted out, with a beseeching look. And her heart was hurting and she was terrified, and she couldn’t seem to work out how else she felt or where they stood anymore.

And Ford, was he – actually calm about this? Did he care? She eyed him, baffled. “Are you alright?”

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From the way she blinked at him Ford guessed that asking if she was alright had been the wrong response, but he didn't know what the right one would have been. Surely given all she knew now, she wouldn't have expected him to be pleased. A month ago if she had given him this news he would have faked it, but he would have already been frantically planning in his head, deciding how they might best convert the empty bedroom into a nursery and how they could rebalance the budget to afford a nurse. What was the point of faking it now? They both knew how dire this was.

He hadn't expected to be met with a steam of physical symptoms, though. A full bladder and sore breasts was more information than he had ever wanted about someone else's body, and he couldn't fathom why she was telling him.

"Jemima, that's not what I meant," he said, sidestepping the question of whether he was alright (he never was; what else was new?) Maybe he'd phrased it too broadly for her to know what he was actually asking. Obviously neither of them were going to be delighted by the timing of this, but putting that aside he wanted to know how she felt about... the future, he supposed. Sharing a child with him. They couldn't have a baby together the way things were between them now, but he wasn't sure she was at all inclined to change them.

"I'll do whatever I have to to make this work," he said, which she probably already knew. She knew what lengths he'd gone to for his sisters. But removing the sore breasts and the lack of money from the equation, what he really needed to know was whether the prospect of this still filled her with dread. "Are you alright?"

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Set by Lady!

Oh – did he actually want to know how she was, emotionally? Because Jemima did not think that that answer would be any better than her physical state.

She thought she would have been happy, had that night in December not gone the way it had, if she had still been oblivious. Because Jemima had always wanted that happily ever after, of course she had – and it had always included a husband, and a house, and a happy family of her own.

“I –” Jemima stammered, because once again she felt the pressure of this conversation not only for the present, but for their whole future. This was a bad time for a baby, they could both agree on that. But they had not gone to bed together since before that night, and, frankly, who knew if they ever would again, so – what if this was the only chance at a child she ever had? A child might be nothing to Ford but another burden, yet another source of stress and duty to contend with, but at least they would be something to pour her time and energy and love into. Was this selfish of her to think? If she couldn’t have a husband who loved her, perhaps a son or daughter would be enough to make her feel less alone?

Pathetically, she wished Ford would stand up and hug her, even though she had just asked him to sit. She wrapped her arms over her stomach, though there wasn’t much of a visible bump yet to protect. He would do whatever he had to, he said. “I’m scared,” Jemima admitted. “And I don’t want this to make things harder when we aren’t even –” Happy? Together? On speaking terms? Not that this had been a choice; and although for the last few weeks she had been trying diligently to stay away from him for both of their sakes, he had preferred that she stayed, hadn’t he? – “...but I don’t think I can raise a baby alone.” Maybe she would find that she was capable of it, if they could not repair things enough for this to find a way to work in the long term – but he had already said he would do what he had to, and Jemima didn’t want to raise a child alone.

(She also didn’t much want her child to grow up under the shadow of debts or with a criminal or otherwise deviant father, but Ford had promised to fix things and besides, fixing those problems seemed like rather too much to ask for in an instant. So she would have to settle for a father who hopefully would care a little and wouldn’t outright resent his child, to start.)

But if she didn’t want to do this alone, did that mean she had to somehow forgive him?

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