* * *
For the remainder of their voyage, she slept beneath his hammock. James never found out. Although she took her blankets when she made the move to Christian’s cabin, James didn’t ask anything about the marriage. His only concern was her pregnancy, he said, and this worried James to no end.
Before they’d left Nootka, he’d traded his musket for a huge supply of native foods. For weeks they’d eaten dried salmon, venison and blackberry cakes until they’d gotten to San Blas, where he’d managed to finagle a nanny goat, seven bags of oranges and a crate of naval provisions intended for a Spanish man-of-war. All of this food James intended for Ravenna’s unborn baby and all through the voyage, he paid strict attention to what she ate and when she ate it. When the stores began to get low, he often made her eat his share.
As a result, his clothes hung on his frame. From his labors under their fanatical captain, James was always tired, but soon he began to look unhealthily so. In Boston he got them on a ship bound for Portsmouth and in the company of Englishmen, he finally began to put on weight. They were well fed and looked after on that English ship. James promised its captain that once they’d reached England, he’d pay for the total amount they’d incurred. The captain agreed. He even gave them money for the coach from Portsmouth Harbor, once they’d finally arrived on land.
The roads were littered with potholes during the final leg of their journey home. Ravenna kept telling herself that at least she wasn’t in danger of washing overboard, that the constant jouncing was better than drowning, and by the time they reached Wolvesfield, she thought she’d never see so lovely a sight as her own bedroom with four-poster, fireplace and a housemaid to bring her plate after plate of apple tart.
Thus ensconced, she took to resting immediately. Christian went to Launceston, and when he returned in a carriage laden with trunks and boxes, he told her the mansion was uninhabitable. The roof had leaked in his two-year absence. While the repairs were carried out, he felt certain Ravenna would rather live at Wolvesfield than take shelter in the servant’s wing of his own pitiful house. “James will allow it,” he muttered.
So it was at Wolvesfield that, within two weeks of having left the sea, she gave birth to Paul’s son. She went into labor near eleven-thirty in the morning. Christian had just left to visit his friend Richardson, and James was out in the fields with his tenants. When Sarah had determined that the baby was really coming, that it wasn’t merely a false alarm, she sent someone to fetch James who in turn sent out two carriages, one to retrieve Christian, the other to Plymouth to bring a midwife and several doctors with whom James had already arranged the delivery.
She waited all day for those doctors to arrive. They did come eventually, having been delayed by a broken axle.
Christian, on the other hand, never showed up.
There didn’t seem to be much reason for the doctors to come sooner. The contractions strengthened then dissipated in succession, yet Ravenna still didn’t have the baby. James read Voltaire aloud to pass the time and distract her from the pain. None too concerned about pain herself, Sarah made wedding plans. She asked Ravenna’s opinion about dinner plate, the number of guests and whether or not there should be dancing. As Ravenna gritted her teeth and waited out the hours, she made a mental note of the way Sarah fawned over her fabric samples. Sarah, too, was pregnant at the time. Didn’t she understand that soon it would be her lying there in agony? That Ravenna would make a special point of fawning over something when the time came for Sarah to deliver James’s child?
When finally the midwife arrived at dusk, Ravenna was beyond worrying about Sarah. Everyone was sent out of the room—James, the maid, the wet nurse hired to help care for the baby, everyone but the doctors, and realizing she’d be alone with these people, that James wouldn’t be there to hold her hand or take action should something go wrong with the delivery, she panicked. She shouted at the midwife. She made threats and screamed curses worthy of a sailor’s tongue.
In the end, the midwife decided it was easier to ignore the taboos of the day and allow James to stay. By that time Ravenna was nearly hysterical, the doctors were groping her as if she were a farm animal, and bruising James’s hand, it was only a few moments before she bore down in a painful rage and Paul’s son finally came into the world.
The urgency she felt after the birth was overwhelming. The cord was cut, the baby wiped off, and when she heard his weak little cry, the only thing she could think of was to make certain he was all right, to count every one of his fingers and toes.
Yet even after all those months at sea, he was a perfect, healthy little boy. His tiny, dried-apple face was slightly blue. His fingers seemed disproportionately long, as if he’d grow up a better pianist than his father. But what Ravenna couldn’t have foreseen was the color of his soft, wet hair—Paul’s son was as blond as a summer-bleached wheat field.
That’s OK, she thought hazily. People will believe he’s Christian’s son, but I’ll know the truth.
Lying back in a sweat on the sheets, saying a prayer half aloud to Paul, she watched as James carefully took the baby from the midwife. Bent over her son with his face obscured, James spoke softly and Ravenna couldn’t make out the accent to his voice nor see his distinctive profile in the dimness. Her thoughts drifted easily. Staring at the length of his jet-black hair, she relaxed the focus to her eyes until gradually black lightened to brown and James’s arms seemed bigger, his voice more Irish.
To her exhausted, miserable senses in that moment, it seemed Paul sat there, Paul come back from heaven for his son, to protect us with his presence at last.