There was another one – a little girl, smaller than her two brothers but still able to make her presence known as she cried loudly, her tiny wrinkled prune of a face screwed up in protest at being expelled from her nice warm place beside her siblings. Pandemonium reined for a few moments, but once the cord was cut, Bridget wrapped the baby in a blanket and placed her in her mother’s outstretched arms. ‘Is she all right?’ Sophy whispered dazedly to the doctor.
‘She’s quite wonderful.’ He was clearly as surprised as they were. ‘She’ll need to be kept very warm for a few weeks and fed more often than the boys, but she’s breathing well and there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all. She must have been lying behind the other two. Triplets. Good grief. This is a first for me.’
‘And me,’ said Sophy with a weak giggle.
Bridget looked at her and then began to laugh, and Harriet and Sadie who had been too shocked to say a word, grinned at each other. Even Dr Palmer, in between saying several times, ‘Triplets. Good grief. Triplets,’ was chuckling. It was only Kane who was quiet, but the look on his face as he gazed down wonderingly at her and his baby daughter made Sophy reach out her hand to him.
‘We’ll need another crib,’ she murmured, smiling.
‘She can have anything she needs,’ he said huskily. ‘Anything at all. She’s exquisite, like you.’
After a minute or two Dr Palmer checked Sophy and the babies over and then went downstairs with Sadie who had offered him bacon and eggs and a warm drink before he left. Harriet changed the bed while Bridget helped Sophy wash and put on a clean nightdress, and then they too left the room so Sophy and Kane could have some time together.
Kane opened the curtains as Sophy sat back against the pillows, her daughter cradled in her arms. It was eight o’clock on a cold winter’s morning and dawn was breaking, the mother-of-pearl sky streaked with charcoal and rivulets of pink, and the fresh white world beneath quiet and still after the storm of the night before.
Kane brought his sons over to the bed, little cocoons in the crook of each arm, and the proud parents examined their children’s minute faces. They were the most beautiful things Sophy had ever seen. The boys were identical and ridiculously like their father, her daughter tinier, more feminine.
This was what she had been waiting for all her life. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the little downy foreheads, the small snub noses, the tiny mouths and chins. They were hers, her family, hers and Kane’s. She felt a truth being pressed upon her from somewhere outside herself, and as she did so the root of aloneness, the feeling of being on the outside looking in, of not belonging, melted away. She knew who she was, she recognised these little people, she had known them from the beginning of time and loved them for as long.
She glanced again at the window. Dawn had broken. It was a new day.