Unit3
Desire for a Child Was Nearly Tragic In the small seafaring town on Plymouth Bay there live an attractive young woman named Harriet Magnis. She had an obsession. She wanted a baby for her husband. Above all things on earth, she wanted a baby for Richard. But she couldn’t have one. Obsessions drive people to do all sorts of strange things. Harriet Magnis’s obsession drove her to commit one of the strangest crimes in history. Richard was a gunner in the Royal Navy. Even though he was at sea for two or three years at a stretch, and was home for only a few days at a time, Harriet loved him deeply and her tragic failure to provide him with a child haunted her. To make it worse, she feared that her husband would find some other woman on his travels, a woman who could give him what she could not, and that he would leave her forever. But this day, as she wrote to her husband, she said, “My darling, God has finally smiled on us! I am at last with child! By the time you get home again, our child will have been born and you will be the father you have always wante4d it to be.” Sealing the letter in an envelope, she addressed it to the next port that her husband’s ship would touch, and she took it to the post office. There was only one thing wrong. Harriet wasn’t pregnant. She had lied to her husband for one reason. Her letter would reach him on Christmas. And she wanted to make him happy! Months passed. A letter came from her absentee husband. Had the baby come? Was it a boy or a girl? It would have saved Harriet endless grief had she now told him the truth, but she couldn’t do that. It would hurt him too much. So she said that the baby had come, and that it was a boy. What she would do when her husband came home and wanted to see his son. Harriet apparently had no idea. She worried about it a great deal, then worried a great deal more when she learned that her husband’s ship was coming home in a few days. When Richard’s ship came in, Harriet rushed across to Portsmouth to meet him. “Where is my son?” he shouted. Harriet thought fast. “Oh, my dear,” she said. “I didn’t expect you so soon. The doctor felt the sea air was bad for him, so I took him to stay with his grandparents in Sussex.” She knew perfectly well that Richard would be in port for only a few days, not long enough for him to go to Sussex. So she was safe for the time being. The next time he came home, she had another excuse. Next time, still another. But he was growing suspicious. It didn’t dawn on him that there wasn’t any child at all. He only suspected that she was hiding the child because it was another man’s. So he laid down the law to Harriet. Next time he came home, he would see his son----and no excuse would be accepted. Poor Harriet! Her lies had gotten her into really deep water now. she had succe4eded in deceiving him for three years, but now she knew that she either had to produce a three-year-old boy who looked like Richard, or had to spill the
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