Authors: J. Jay Kamp
Instead, she felt only the slightest softness of his mouth against her tear-stained cheek.
When the reverend announced them earl and countess, Ravenna was too stunned to move. She stared at Christian. Christian ignored her. He wouldn’t even acknowledge her, much less risk a glance as they signed the registry, thanked their hosts, and once their names had been duly recorded, he left the room in a hurry.
In the coach, he gazed off over the cane fields through the whole of their journey back to the ship, and in the brooding silence amidst the four of them, she knew.
He was ashamed of having made her marry him.
* * *
That night at dinner, James was inconsolable.
He’d bought a small bottle of Bajan rum and now he drank it, arguing vehemently with no one in particular about the avarice of the plantation owners and the injustice in not only slavery as a whole, but in the fact that from the comfort of their English estates these repulsive landlords didn’t even witness the suffering they caused among their slaves.
By the end of the meal, James had downed the entire bottle of rum. He didn’t appear drunk, or at least he wouldn’t have in the company of strangers, but Ravenna and Sarah knew him too well. They all understood what really concerned him. Watching her follow Christian out of the cabin, James looked as if he fully expected never to see Ravenna again.
And had Christian not already shown her the kindness of withholding a kiss that by law was his, Ravenna might have been near madness herself when she was led into Christian’s room. With the door shut, in the darkness she clasped her hands together, looked up toward Paul’s heaven where she hoped he was.
Forgive me
, she thought, imagining his face.
It’s you I love, and I’ll love you forever
.
Christian lit the lantern, and as soon as the flame took hold, he turned his back on her and slipped out of the jacket so generously given to him by the plantation owners. “How pathetically old-fashioned.” He threw the coat down. “Should it please God so much to torment me with perpetual misfortune? Even my wedding day is a joke to Him.”
Then he did something remarkable. Glancing down at where he’d thrown his jacket on the hammock, he picked it back up. He turned to Ravenna with blatant displeasure. “I suppose my lot has been relegated to the floor?”
For a few seconds, she merely stood there. She didn’t believe what she’d just heard. When he glared at her impatiently, she managed to put aside her racing thoughts and sputter an answer. “I’ll take the floor.”
“Good, then you can fend off the rats.” He started to unbutton his shirt, but when he saw her stupefied expression, he stopped what he was doing. “Oh, come now, you didn’t seriously think I’d find your corpulence arousing, did you?”
She shook her head. His eyes lowered to her pregnant belly. “Even if I did,” he said, “I wouldn’t subject my manhood to share the company of
his
spawn. Either one or the other of us would surely shrivel and die from the contact.”
Ignoring his tone, her thoughts lingered instead on his release of her, on the wedding and that look of humility she’d glimpsed in his obsessive stare. “You would’ve let me go today, wouldn’t you?”
Christian resumed with unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ve no intentions of negating your promise.”
“But you thought about it, didn’t you?”
“As soon as you give birth to that Hibernian bastard—,” and he pointed loosely at her stomach, “—you can be certain I mean to collect on our agreement. By then, you’ll appreciate the trouble I’ve taken to be with you. You’ll have forgotten about
him
.”
Pain flared in his eyes as he spat out the word, turned to the hammock and threw back the blankets. His hand closed on something, a small and shiny object, and Ravenna felt a surge of fear, for roughly, vindictively, he grabbed her wrist. “Here,” he said, shoving the object in her grasp. “Consider it a wedding gift from your precious Paddy.”
When she opened her hand, she found Paul’s watch shimmering in the lamplight.
She gaped at it, feeling the cool silver against her water-swollen fingers. She remembered that last night on
Discovery’s
deck when Paul had checked the time beneath the tumult of a rainstorm, and she could still see his clumsy, lumbering steps as he approached the taffrail, his burly chest glistening with rain and the wet fabric of his trousers clinging thickly around his hips.
How I miss you
,
do you know how much? Do you know what I’m going through, wherever you are?
Feeling the corners of her eyes fill with tears, she looked up timidly. “Thank you,” she said.
But Christian had already turned away, begun removing his buckled shoes with a scowl. “Take him, then,” he muttered, dropping the first shoe. “He’s ruined everything for me.”
* * *
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
.
* * *
That night she floated in and out of dreams, visions of Paul living and breathing. Voices from the corridor awakened her only once, the housekeeper’s voice as she scolded Christian for roaming about on the eve of his son’s birth, Christian’s voice as he threatened to have the housekeeper fired.
She thought of Paul, always Paul, as Christian came in and without a lamp, got undressed. He lay rigid as a mummy next to her in bed, and without the whine to his voice or the sight of his blondness, Ravenna was free to imagine the warmth of his elbow in her back was Paul’s.
Curled around her baby, listening to the peculiar sound of his tiny breaths, she pictured Paul’s stocky frame pressed against her, his arm swung comfortably over her side.
He has to be with us
, she thought desperately. She couldn’t feel his presence, but where else could he be?
* * *
The next day, when asked by Reverend Wells what she’d call the child, Ravenna hoped Paul heard when she gave his name to their son. What had he said on that train to Dublin?
It’s a family name
, she told the reverend.
Christian came unglued.
They had a tremendous fight over it, Christian and she, right after the reverend left the room. Sniveling with that voice which she couldn’t stand in her depression, Christian cited
his
father’s name as the only choice, not Elijah Paul, and he demanded Ravenna call the reverend back to tell him this was so.
She refused. All those images of Paul, Paul in heaven, Paul in the corner watching over his son and sleeping in her bed, Paul keeping Christian at bay with his spirit between them, all this came over her with the force of her exhaustion.
She broke then. She lost all reason. Christian took a step toward her with malice in his eyes, and in her unbearable state of mind, she thought nothing of throwing a knife from their breakfast table at him. She didn’t care if she did make a gash in his hosiery, or that he bled all over the carpet brought from Launceston.
With her shrieks filling the house, James was upstairs in an instant. He didn’t step beyond the threshold of her bedroom door, however. Christian was dabbing at his shin with a napkin, calling her the crudest names as he ducked the silver candlesticks she’d thrown from the mantel, the fire poker, the gilt-framed landscape on the wall, and still James stood there quietly as she raged on and on. Finally Sarah came in, begging her to stop even as James looked on in astonishment, for when the maid took up the baby and cradled him tight, only then did it occur to Ravenna what she was doing.
And she left, pushing past James in a stagger as the tears came down like an iron fist with the pain of it, crushing her with the idea that she lived as she lived with Christian, that Paul was irrevocably dead and she would see his face only in his son’s little features.
She went down to the music room, barely able to walk after the pain of childbirth. Swaying before the window, sobbing in screams and hard-won breaths, she stood before the storm raging outside and knew at last that this was the moment she’d glimpsed from the future. This was the grief she’d seen, crying beside the piano, slowly and steadily dying beneath the weight of Paul’s absence and the realization that this, Christian and everything about Christian, was all she’d ever know.
She remembered Paul’s words in that moment, maybe for the first time since he’d died.
Promise me that if something happens, you’ll carry on, you won’t top yourself, you won’t live out your life in a mental ward
.