Emma’s pregnancy with Daisy

Emma’s pregnancy with Daisy is both a new beginning and a return to an old wound: Emma Harte faces the prospect of motherhood again with the memory of having been rejected by Edwin Fairley and left to bear the consequences of an earlier pregnancy alone. This time, her choices are shaped not only by her love for Paul McGill, but by her determination to protect her child from the stigma and family rupture that followed Edwina’s birth. The pregnancy becomes a struggle over who may claim a child, what a birth certificate can declare, and when a mother can safely change her marital status.

Identity and Background

Daisy is the daughter of Emma and Paul. The pregnancy unfolds while Emma is married to Arthur Ainsley, and before Paul has resolved his own marital situation. These circumstances make the child’s identity a public and legal problem as well as a private fact: Emma intends to have the baby, but she is unwilling to identify Paul as the father on the birth certificate or to let the child be recorded as illegitimate.

Emma’s decisions draw on her earlier experience with Edwina. As a young servant at Fairley Hall, she became pregnant by Edwin Fairley, who did not claim her or marry her. The divide between a working-class servant and the gentry helped determine his response, and Emma left for Leeds to face poverty and raise her daughter’s future without his support. When she later tells Paul about this history, she describes the rejection, hardship, and labor that followed without embellishing them. Her account makes clear why Daisy’s birth is not, for her, simply a private family event: the circumstances recorded at birth may follow a child into the life that comes after it.

Pregnancy and Marriage

Emma tells Arthur that she is nearly four months pregnant and will have the child. She refuses to identify the father, but insists that Arthur will recognize the baby as his. Arthur responds by threatening divorce rather than accepting that arrangement. Emma does not seek immediate freedom from the marriage. She believes that remaining married until the child is born will help give the baby a name and protect against the consequences of an illegitimate birth.

This decision also postpones the formal union Emma and Paul had expected. Paul questions why she has not asked Arthur for a divorce and wonders whether her hesitation reflects doubt about him or the difficulty of his own situation. Emma tells him that she trusts him and will divorce Arthur, but only after the baby has been born, registered, and christened. For her, the sequence matters: she wants the child to have a settled public identity before she changes the marriage that can provide it.

Paul objects that Emma is, in effect, asking his child to be brought up under Arthur’s name. He offers his money as protection from scandal and says he is prepared to adopt the baby; he also wants his name entered as the father. Emma refuses. Her resistance is not a denial of Paul’s paternity or of their relationship. Rather, she fears a future in which the child might turn against her over the truth of its birth, as Edwina had confronted her about her own parentage. When Emma explains this fear, Paul agrees to follow her wishes.

Disclosure and Birth

Before settling the question with Paul, Emma has to explain her past. She tells him about her youth at Fairley Hall, her relationship with Edwin, her pregnancy and his rejection, her flight to Leeds, the poverty and exhausting work that followed, and Gerald Fairley’s attempted rape. The disclosure connects Daisy’s expected birth to the history that has made Emma wary of exposing a child to the consequences of family secrets and social judgment. Paul listens and responds with protectiveness and love; the account changes his understanding of why Emma insists on delaying the divorce and controlling what the birth record will say.

Daisy is born early in May 1925 at a private nursing home in London. Paul waits anxiously during the delivery, takes Emma in his arms afterward, and chooses the baby’s name in memory of his mother. The next day he visits with flowers and gifts and asks to see his daughter. His presence makes the emotional reality of his fatherhood plain, even as Emma continues to manage the child’s legal and public identity according to her own plan.

Aftermath and Significance

In June, Emma takes Daisy to Yorkshire for her christening at a church in Leeds. Paul travels there for the occasion with Frank Harte and Natalie. The ceremony takes place shortly after the death of Arthur’s mother, and the family’s grief leaves Arthur and Frederick Ainsley largely inattentive to the proceedings. Daisy is christened without incident, and Emma returns with her to London the following day. The christening completes the sequence Emma had insisted on before seeking a divorce.

Three months later, after Frederick Ainsley dies and Arthur inherits, Arthur allows Emma to divorce him on the grounds of adultery. His apparent generosity is not freely given: Emma has paid him ten thousand pounds. The settlement shows how she uses money and timing to secure an outcome that social convention and the marriage itself had made difficult to obtain. Once the decree nisi is granted, she brings the twins, Robin and Elizabeth, to live with her, and Arthur does not object.

The pregnancy thus repeats the problem of Edwina’s birth while showing Emma acting with greater power and preparation. Her fear of a child’s future judgment arises directly from her painful confrontation with Edwina, but she does not let that fear erase Paul from Daisy’s emotional life. Daisy grows into the child Emma believes loves and trusts her most, and Emma later describes that bond as unusually deep. The circumstances of Daisy’s birth therefore shape a wider family story: Emma’s attempt to protect her child from stigma becomes part of the intimacy and loyalty that define their relationship.