Lorraine had quickly set about capital ising on his obvious infatuation with her, while he was still naive enough to believe she shared his feelings, still naive enough to adore and worship her.

Less than three months after they had met, they were married. John's family had not been pleased and John could still remember Lorraine's reaction to them when he had taken her home so that he could show off his new bride.

"Ugh... My God, how could anyone live here in all this mud?" she had demanded disparagingly when she had first seen the farm--and in his father's hearing. When his mother had offered to lend her a horse so that they could go out riding, she had shuddered in disgust and exclaimed, "Ride a horse? Certainly not. They smell."

No, she had not endeared herself to his family, nor had she realised at that point that, apart from his grant, he was totally dependent on his father.

"What do you mean your father's stopped your allowance?" she had demanded of him angrily after their return to London.

"What does your father have to do with it? It's your money."

"No, no, it isn't," he had denied quietly, going on to explain his true financial situation to her. He had money in trust, it was true, but he would not have access to it until he was thirty, and then because it was family money, it had already been tacitly agreed that most of it would go into the farm.

"Go into the farm? No, no way at all!" Lorraine had declared furiously.

Ten weeks later, after his parents had made it clear how they felt about his marriage, he and Lorraine were summoned home.

"In view of the fact that you and your wife are expecting a child, I've decided to reinstate your allowance," his father told him curtly.

"I'm still not at all happy about the situation and I still believe that you've behaved recklessly and without proper consideration.

You've always known that. " He had stopped and shaken his head before adding tersely, " I'm not going to say any more. Lorraine is, after all, your wife and soon to be the mother of your child, even if I. "

John could remember even now the sense of shock and disorientation he had felt while listen n ing to him. As soon as he could, he had escaped from his father's study and gone in search of his wife. She had been sitting upstairs in their bed room.

Going over to her, he demanded, "Why didn't you tell me that you're pregnant?"

"I was waiting to make sure," she told him coolly.

"You didn't tell me, but you told my parents?" he continued angrily.

"Your mother's offered me your old pram," Lorraine told him before bursting out angrily, "My God, you'd think that at the very least your parents would offer to equip the nursery. After all, it isn't as though they can't afford it. All they need to do is sell one of their damned fields."

John had listened to her in disbelief. The scales had well and truly fallen from his eyes in the few short weeks of their marriage, and now with her blatantly selfish comment about the field, she had shown him, underlined for him, if it had needed underlining, just how vast the gulf between them actually was, vast and unbridgeable.

That had been the moment when he knew that their marriage was over. It was a mistake he should never have made, and to his eternal shame, the last thing, the last person, he had thought about as he contemplated the trap he had so stupidly set for himself was the child that he and Lorraine had conceived.

On the way back to London, Lorraine had questioned him ceaselessly about his trust fund, complaining that she had heard of umpteen people who had managed to obtain access to theirs.

"I can't," he had protested, 'not without the agreement of the trustees. "

"Then I can't have this baby," Lorraine had told him savagely.

It had taken several minutes for the threat to sink in properly, but once it had, John knew that she meant exactly what she was saying.

Her determination to get access to his trust fund money became a war she waged with merciless aggression over the following weeks, and the day she showed him the appointment card from the abortion clinic, he knew that she had won.

John knew that he would never forget the shame and humiliation, the sense of having let the side down, the family down, he had experienced when he had gone to his father and told him, begged him, to approach the trustees on his behalf. He knew, too, that he would never forget the look of sadness in his father's eyes as he listened to what he had to say.

At his father's insistence, half the money from his trust fund was used to buy a house. The other half went into their joint bank account, which Lorraine proceeded to empty while they were waiting for their divorce.

What he could never forget was that there had been a moment, a heartbeat of time, when he had actually wished that Lorraine had simply gone ahead with the termination of her pregnancy. The baby she was carrying might be his child, but he had felt no sense of having fathered it, no pride or joy, no love, just an immense sense of doom of being burdened by something he didn't want and hadn't planned to have.

Once during her childhood, when he had tried to talk to Estelle, she had turned to him and told him coolly, "It's too late to pretend that you care about me now. Mother has told me everything. I know you wanted her to have an abortion. I know that you didn't want me...."

And he had felt too heartsick to tell her the truth, too afraid of what it might do to her, to tell her that her mother had been the one who had threatened him with the abortion. Neither had he ever been able to bring himself to tell her that Lorraine had, in his view at least, deliberately conceived so that she could use his child as a means of manipulating and controlling not just him but his parents, as well.

He might have been the one who had paid financially for his mistake in marrying Lorraine, but he had never been able to totally rid himself of the suspicion that it had been Estelle, his daughter, his child, who had paid the greater price in emotional and psychological terms.

Lorraine's second husband was shrewd with money, as mean and greedy as Lorraine was herself. More than once on the few brief occasions when they had been obliged to meet, John had had to listen to him boasting about the 'perks' that went with his high-powered job.

He was, Sophie had suggested dryly, the kind of man who despite earning a six-figure annual salary nevertheless experienced an almost orgasmic-like thrill at the thought of using his firm's stationery to save on buying his own.

"They're two of a kind," she had told John observantly after one particularly trying incident involving Estelle's school fees, before adding lovingly, 'and so are we. "

At least Ethian had been able to provide Lorraine with the kind of lifestyle she had always craved, John acknowledged. Ethian's company regularly sponsored charity events, polo matches, balls, corporate days to the Goodwood races and the Chelsea Rower Show and many other activities on the social calendar. And if what he had heard on the grapevine was true, Lorraine invariably appeared at these occasions wearing glamorous clothes and revelling in playing the part of the executive wife.

"She always looks so glamorous and elegant," Sophie had commented ruefully the previous Christmas when a friend had shown her a copy of a Country Life feature with photographs of a ball Lorraine had attended.

"Maybe, but inwardly she's still undoubtedly the same cold-hearted, greedy, self-centred woman she's always been," John had responded before grasping Sophie's arms and telling her softly, "I thank God every day of my life that I've been lucky enough to find you, my Sophie. You are all the things that she isn't, that she never could be. All the things any man could ever want in a woman."

He looked at the phone. He'd give it another couple of hours and then he'd try Estelle's number again. Nothing could ever alter the fact that he hadn't been the father he should have been to her when she had been young. It had taken the birth of his and Sophie's first child, Ian, to wipe out the bitterness and anger, the sense of entrapent and betrayal he had felt at Estelle's conception, and to show him what being a parent, a father, was really all about. He had tried to make it up to her, had tried and was still trying.

She was his first-born child, this daughter of his, but she was Lorraine's child, as well, and deep in his heart of hearts, he knew that was something he could never forget, that it was a barrier between them that had never truly been breached.

What's brought that look to your face? " Janice asked Claudia when she saw the way the younger woman frowned as she suddenly pushed away her desk chair and got to her feet.

"And don't tell me it's the thought of leaving this and us," she added bluntly.

Claudia gave her a forced smile. She had been feeling uncomfortable all day, not in pain exactly just . just. As though just to contradict and spite her, a jagged pain splintered through her body, causing her to gasp and try to catch her breath. She clung to the back of her chair for sup port.

She was five months pregnant another few weeks and she would be stopping work. Garth would soon be leaving the army and they had agreed that he would not take up his new job until after she had had the baby.

Rather unexpectedly. Garth's father had been elevated through the parliamentary ranks and their frantic new lifestyle meant that his parents were going to be out of the country for most of the next twelve months.

"Why don't you move in here?" Garth's father had suggested when Garth and Claudia had told him and his wife about the problems they were having finding somewhere suitable to live, but neither of them had wanted to do that.

"It's a kind thought, but we really need to find somewhere of our own," Garth had explained to his father.

Claudia gave another gasp as a second sharp pain ripped through her body.

"Claudia...?" she heard Janice demanding anxiously and then more ominously muttering under her breath, "Oh my God, someone ring for an ambulance. Quickly. Now! Now!" But Claudia was beyond listening, beyond comprehending anything other than the pain, the agony threatening to tear her body apart.

She stayed conscious all the way through the siren screaming its frantic, wailing message from the office to the hospital. She was still conscious when they rushed her from the delivery room into emergency surgery. And she was conscious long enough to see how much blood she was losing and for her own horror and panic to seize hold of her--long enough to want to suspend her awareness of the searing pain that was savaging her body.

But she was not conscious when the surgeon pronounced her baby dead, nor was she conscious when he made the decision to remove her womb.

"It's either that or watch her bleed to death," he declared bluntly.

By the time they managed to locate Garth, it was all over. He reached the hospital just as they were wheeling an inert and still-anaesthetized Claudia back to the ward.

"What's wrong? What's happened? Claudia...?" he protested as the nurse shook her head and placed her hand on his arm.

"Sister wants to have a word with you, Mr. Wallace," she advised him gently.

Garth didn't bother to correct her, to tell her that officially, at least, he wasn't a Mister but a Captain. After all, what did such niceties matter when Claudia, his Claudia, was lying on that hospital trolley, her face so drained and pale, her body so still that he might have been looking at a corpse? So still. and so flat.

"Sit down, please. Captain Wallace," Sister instructed rather than invited him. She was in her fifties, efficient and brisk with the experience and weight of a lifetime of breaking bad news to patients' relatives behind her, but that never made it any easier.

"Claudia, my wife ... what...?" Garth questioned, refusing her offer of a seat and ignoring the brief firming of her mouth that suggested he should listen rather than talk.

"Your wife, Mrs. Wallace, is rather poorly at the moment," she told him directly.

"She's lost a good deal of blood and, of course, the trauma of the operation causes the body to go into shock and--' " Operation? What operation? " Garth demanded, his own face losing colour. All he had been told was that Claudia had been rushed into hospital with what her colleagues feared might be a potential miscarriage.

"My wife's expecting a baby and..."

Her very stillness and her silence warned him of what the sister was going to say next, but even that warning was not enough to fully prepare him for it.

"I'm afraid that your wife has lost her baby. He was stillborn. It happens sometimes."

It was like having a land-mine go off unexpectedly beneath your feet--only worse, much worse. The pain, the confusion, the awful, sickening fear while you waited to assess the damage, waited in the eerie silence for the sound to begin, the cacophony of men crying, screaming in panic and in fear.

"Claudia has lost the baby." Garth heard himself say the words without knowing why he had said them. After all, the woman had spoken plainly enough.

"Yes. I'm afraid so...." There was another small pause and Garth felt his body tense in response as a sharp tingle of prescient alarm jangled down his spine.

"What is it ... what's wrong...?" he demanded tersely. "What...?" "Your wife was bleeding very badly. Mr. Knowles tried to stern it while he transfused her, but..." The neat, short-nailed, scrubbed hands that she had folded in front of her suddenly twitched betrayingly as Garth waited. "I'm afraid it was no use. m the end, Mr. Knowles had no option other than to remove her womb."

"Remove her womb," Garth repeated. He felt like a diver who had gone

down too deep, like a swimmer trying to fight against a relentlesstide;his body grew heavy and lethargic, his thinking slow and dull."Yes. I'm afraid so," the sister acknowledged."It was either that or..." She stopped and then told him quietly, "There was a risk that without surgery she could have bled to death. It does happen--fortunately infrequently--' " But not infrequently enough," Garth interrupted her savagely.

"Oh, my God... Does Claudia know?" he demanded.

"Has she...?"

"She was conscious--just--when... when the stillbirth occurred," she

told him."But she was anaesthetized for the actual operation, of course."Garth closed his eyes."How long... how long before I can see her.. talk to her...?""Not until morning. She should be out of the anaesthetic before then, but I'd advise--' " I want to be with her. I want to be there when shecomes round. I want to see her now," Garth interrupted peremptorily."I really don't think..." Sister began, but Garth refused to listen."I want to see the surgeon," he insisted and the sister sighed under her breath. If there was one thing she disliked on her wards, it was someone making a fuss, and this man looked as though he knew how to make a fuss to very good purpose, knew how to and was fully prepared to do so.

"Your wife has been put in a small side ward," she told him severely.

"As I've already told you, she really is rather poorly."

What she wasn't going to reveal was that she had already detailed one of her nurses to position Claudia's bed so that she herself could keep a watchful eye on her through the night even though officially tonight was her night off. She hadn't liked the look of her as they wheeled her into the ward, and the last thing she wanted right now was an angry, worried young husband pacing her ward and disturbing all the other pa- dents.

Quickly, she made up her mind.

"Very well, then, you may stay in the side ward with your wife.

Captain, but only, only for so long as you remember that this is my ward, and on it my word is law. As you are a military man, I hope you understand me when I tell you that on this ward I am the officer in charge and the commanding officer, and that I expect instant obedience to my orders and instructions. "

She was only a little over five feet in height, but as he looked at her. Garth was conscious of not just her determination but her strength, as well, and oddly, in the midst of all the anguish and shock he was experiencing, he felt a small flash of relief that she was there; that Claudia was in her hands.

The side ward was virtually bare, furnished only with the high-sided hospital bed on which Claudia lay motionless, her chest barely rising and falling with her breathing, and a hard, un comfortable-looking chair.

There was a drip attached to Claudia's arm and pristine sheets covered her inert body, pristine. and flat.

Garth felt his eyes sting sharply with tears. He was stillborn, the sister had said. He. That meant that he and Claudia would have had. should have had a son.

Now his tears were hot, burning his eyes, burning his skin. His son.

His child. His. Gone before he had even had a chance to see him, know him. Deep down inside his body, a new pain flared, a blazing, fierce dark sorrow that he knew would never leave him. His arms ached to hold the small life that should have been. He saw the sister hovering in the doorway.

"The baby, my son," he choked.

"Where... can I...?"

It was normally the woman, the mother, who asked this question and it caught Sister a little off guard that Garth should do so and Sister did not like being caught off guard and unprepared.

He's in the mortuary, she had been about to say but just in time caught herself up.

Stillborn, pre-term foetuses were not normally considered to be 'babies', but St. Chad's was a world leader in the field of obstetrics and very forward thinking. The research they had done there among mothers who had suffered stillborn births had shown that there was a very clear need for such women to know something of the children they had lost. No one with the experience that the maternity staff at St. Chad's had could doubt or deny that even such early still- boms as Claudia's were quite distinctly recognisable as 'babies', their bodies and limbs fully formed--if minute.

Sister had seen herself the comfort that their mothers derived from seeing and even holding these heartbreakingly tiny, lifeless forms, and so the policy at St. Chad's, unlike other hospitals, was not for the stillboms to be quickly and silently disposed of, but for them and their parents to receive rather more gentle and compassionate treatment.

And so instead of giving Garth the stark truth, she caught herself and told him, "I don't have any spare staff at the moment, but in the morning if you wish to see him..."

"To see him?" Garth stared at her.

"Some mothers find it easier to... to accept their loss once they have seen their... their child," she told him quietly.

Garth swallowed. Was that what he wanted? Did he. ought he.

Breaking into his quandary, Claudia coughed. Frowning, the sister shooed him out of the way as she bustled towards the bed.

It was two o'clock in the morning--the death hour--just as his own eyelids were starting to grow heavy and ache, he saw Claudia's begin to flutter into warning wakefulness. She moved in the bed and then opened her eyes and stared at Garth, her gaze unfocused, her face waxy pale in the low night-light from the main ward outside, her eyes bruised with the starkness of her pain. Two o'clock in the morning--the death hour. Her initial keening mourning cry rapidly escalated to rapid-fire, short hysterical screams that brought two nurses running to her side. Sister walked, but she still got to Claudia first, firmly taking hold of her wrist while she checked her pulse.

She obscured Garth's view of the bed while she gave her two nurses low-voiced instructions.

"What's that? What are you doing?" Garth demanded as one of them scurried off to return with a hypodermic.

Tranquilliser," the staff nurse told Garth hardily.