By six o’clock when the household was beginning to stir the pains were more frequent but still quite bearable. One of the maids brought her a cup of tea and biscuits at six-thirty as she’d requested for the last month with her sleep being so disturbed, and she asked the girl to fetch Jinny. Within a minute or two Jinny was with her and as soon as the nursery maid walked into the room, she said, ‘It’s starting, ma’am?’

Rose nodded.

‘Shall I fetch the mistress?’

‘No, not for a bit. I want to enjoy my cup of tea.’ They smiled at each other. Arabella had been like a cat on a hot tin roof the last weeks, panicking at the slightest twinge Rose experienced and hovering close whenever she could. Rose appreciated her mother-in-law’s concern but it was wearing. She had given birth to Betsy without any complications and didn’t see why this confinement should be any different, although she understood that Arabella’s excessive solicitude was a result of her own experience of childbirth, which had been traumatic.

By nine o’clock the doctor had been sent for and Rose was relieved when he walked in the door with his nurse. The pains were coming at regular intervals and they were excruciating. Betsy had come in to see her before she was taken to school and Rose had managed to chat quite normally and reassure her daughter that all was well, but within an hour of the child leaving she would hardly have been able to speak at all with the spasms attacking her every two minutes.

Arabella and Jinny sat at one side of the bed and the doctor and the nurse at the other. Rose had wanted Jinny there but not her mother-in-law; she had known Arabella would be panic-stricken and that proved to be the case, so much so that after a while the doctor had taken it upon himself to usher Arabella from the room, kindly but firmly ordering her to wait downstairs. Arabella, who was now in a state of nervous collapse, did not protest.

The first of the twins was born at eleven o’clock in the morning and his bellow of a cry expressed his indignation at being expelled from the warm safe place where he had been so comfortable for nine months. His brother followed a few minutes later and he, too, was a lusty, healthy baby and a good weight like his twin. In fact, as the doctor remarked privately to his nurse on the way back to his surgery later, it was quite remarkable how Mrs Bembridge had managed to fit both of them into her normally slim frame.