“We are in good stead,” Tamsyn said cheerfully. “She has come far already, and the babe is in the proper position.”
A sigh of relief escaped Jassy. Jamie looked at her pained features and knew that she was thinking of Joan Tannen aboard the Sweet Eden, and of the babe stillborn upon the vessel.
Her features screwed up into a curious mask. Jamie lay his hand upon her abdomen and felt the tremendous tightening in her womb. Her fingers shook, then dug into his hand again. “They come so fast!” she cried piteously.
And they did come fast. Elizabeth and Molly came back with the water and the cloths. Jamie wiped her face, and he spoke to her reassuringly each time that the pains subsided, but they came again and again, faster and faster.
She pleaded with him once to leave, but he met Molly’s eyes over her form, and Molly shook her head. A second later Jassy’s fingers crunched down upon his, and he held her, trying to take some of the pain away, trying to give to her some of his strength. At one point she seemed to sleep. Her grip eased from his. He stood, stared at Tamsyn, and paced the room, his hands locked behind his back. Elizabeth and Molly looked on.
Jamie threw his hands into the air. “Do something!”
“Do what, Lord Cameron?”
“Hurry this along. She cannot stand so much pain.”
Molly, Tamsyn, and Elizabeth all gazed at one another.
Elizabeth stepped forward, reaching for Jamie’s hand. “It is not so very long, Jamie. It has been just a matter of hours. Many more hours may go by before the babe comes; it is nature’s way. You do not understand so much about babes coming into the world.”
“And you do?” Jamie said.
Elizabeth flushed. “I was there when your sister bore your niece, My Lord Cameron, so, yes, I know something of it!”
Jamie lowered his head in acknowledgment. Elizabeth trembled slightly. She had never seen him even remotely humble before. She touched his arm. “I know that everything will be well, Jamie.”
Jassy screamed suddenly from the bed, awakened by the ferocity of another pain. Jamie flew back to her side, his face dark, his hands shaking. “Easy, Jassy, easy.”
“I cannot bear this—”
“You will bear it. Breathe.”
“I cannot—”
“I command it, love. Breathe and hold my hand, and let loose of my son, madame.”
“Let loose of your son!”
Her eyes opened in a flash of temper, and Jamie laughed. “Aye, lady, come now. You dally here!”
She lay back, telling him that he was a vile knave. When the next pain seized her, she swore like a dockhand and dug her nails into his hand, but she did not cry or weaken or scream. The pains were coming very, very fast.
Tamsyn realized that they would not be waiting hours and hours. The babe was coming before nightfall.
Lord Cameron’s face was ashen as he watched over his wife. Tamsyn lightly touched his arm. “The babe comes soon.”
Jamie started, sitting up. Molly awaited the child with swaddling, and Tamsyn talked to Jassy. “You never could wait for anything, lass. You never did learn patience, and you never could do things in half measures. You couldn’t marry a merchant, but you had to have a fine lord, and that, lass, you did in a hurry too. Seems that this little lad will be one like his mother. Now push, Jassy, love. Give him a push.”
“I cannot!” She fell back in exhaustion. Jamie caught her shoulders and pressed her forward. “Jassy, ’tis Tamsyn talking to you, and you must give him heed.”
“Oh!” she cried out, and she tried to escape his hold and give up. He would not release her, and she was forced to bear down.
“I see a very dark head!” Molly cried enthusiastically.
“Again!” Tamsyn persisted.
“Jassy, I will have my son now!”
“A daughter,” Jassy said argumentatively.
“Push!” Jamie said gratingly.
And the baby came from her. It was the greatest relief that Jassy had ever known. Life spilled from her in a great, heavy gush, and the pain was numbed.…
And she heard the cry, the sharp, plaintive wail that came from her newborn infant. Sharp, plaintive, and very lusty.
“A son, at that!” Tamsyn laughed. “And very much alive and well.”
“Oh!”
A son …
Just as Jamie had commanded.
The squalling infant passed from Tamsyn’s hands to Molly, who quickly and tenderly swept him into swaddling and began to clean his little face. Jamie quickly and vehemently kissed Jassy fully upon the lips, running his knuckles over her cheeks. She was dazed, but still she thought that he looked upon her with great tenderness. But he was up then, and demanding his child from Molly. He stood in the candlelight and stared down upon the tiny new life, lifting away the covering and inspecting every bit of the child. He smiled, and he looked striking when he turned back to his wife with pleasure and exuberance.
“Perfect, my love. Ten fingers, ten toes, a stubborn chin, blue eyes, and very dark hair, I believe. It’s quite sodden.”
The new Cameron howled, and Jassy saw a tiny fist protrude from the coverings. A sharp sensation stung her breasts, and she felt them swell. “May I see him?” she whispered. She tried for the strength to sit up but was exhausted. Despite the cold of winter, sweat trickled through her hair and dampened her forehead.
“Jassy, one more time,” Tamsyn said to her, and she looked at him in confusion. “One last time, love. The birth sac must come now. Push for me, lass.”
It was not so hard that time. She was so anxious to see her son. She gritted her teeth and bore down, and again she felt the most wonderful sensation of relief. She fell back, closed her eyes, and breathed in exhaustion, but when she opened her eyes again, Jamie was hovering over her, and he very carefully placed the baby into her arms.
The love that swelled in her heart was instant and total. He seemed very tiny, but he was perfect. His mouth was open and his screaming was probably quite horrible, but it was delightful to her ears. His eyes were blue, a dark blue, like Jamie’s, though she knew they might change and take on her lighter hue. His cap of hair was all Jamie’s, though, very dark and rich and in startling plenty for a newborn. She loved his little gnome’s face, wrinkled and pink and knotted up in the effort that drew forth his lusty howls. She, too, pushed the swaddling back. He was quite perfect. He was long and was very certainly a little boy, and though he wasn’t chubby, he didn’t seem to have suffered the loss of the extra weeks he should have spent in the womb.
She started to shake. Her nightmare vision was really at rest. Her son had been born alive, and he was beautiful.
“Oh, Jamie!” she whispered, and she was afraid she was going to burst into tears. “He is … fine.”
“He is magnificent,” Jamie corrected her. He gently touched his son’s cheek with his finger, his hand seeming huge against the tiny face. Then he brushed her lip with his thumb, and she looked into his eyes. “He is magnificent,” Jamie repeated.
Tears were welling in her eyes. Molly stepped forward very matter-of-factly. “Let him nurse, love. He won’t get too much nourishment yet, but he needs to pull the milk in.” Molly hesitated suddenly, looking from Jamie to Jassy. “That is, if you want it in. Ladies don’t always nurse their own, do they, Lord Cameron?”
Jassy’s breath caught. Did they not nurse their children out of choice? she wondered. She wanted nothing more than to have the baby as close to her as possible. She wanted to explore every angle of this new thing called motherhood, and she hoped desperately that Jamie would not deny her. Perhaps husbands chose wet nurses so that their wives would not be overly occupied with their newborns.
“We haven’t a tremendous supply of wet nurses around,” Jassy murmured.
“I’m sure that someone can be found—” Molly began.
“Jassy will nurse the babe,” Jamie said firmly.
She gazed at him, grateful for his response. Beside her, he was every bit as fascinated with the
infant, and he smiled at her and gently pulled upon the lace of her gown. Awkwardly, for her fingers trembled, Jassy set the baby to her nipple, and then laughed, her nervousness easing as he rooted about her breast, finding his hold upon her. He latched on hard at last, and a shaft of lightning seemed to streak through her. Love, as intense as the blaze of the sun, filled her with the strange new sensation. He began to suck hard upon her, sounding much like a little pig. Molly and Elizabeth laughed. “There’s a hungry one for you,” Molly said.
“Like his father,” Jassy murmured, and then she realized what she had said, and looked up, reddening with embarrassment. But Jamie laughed then, too, and Tamsyn joined in, and it was one of the nicest moments of her life. She held the baby against her breast for a few minutes more, then Jamie took him from her again. He kissed her lips once more. “Molly says she’s going to bathe you and set the bed right. Then you need to sleep. I’ll come to you later.”
Her eyes were already closing. She was dimly aware that Molly asked for the baby back, that he might be bathed. Jamie turned the baby over to Molly and left the room. Jassy awoke somewhat when Molly moved her about to change the sheets and her gown, wiping her down with a wet cloth.
Then she slept, and slept hard, with no dreams or nightmares to disturb her.
Later that night she awoke, ravenous, and achingly aware of the howls and sniffles that aroused her from her slumber. She opened her eyes and found that Jamie was with her again, pulled up to the bed in the large captain’s chair from his desk. The baby, now clean and swaddled anew in soft linen, lay upon his lap. He smiled when he saw her open eyes, then lay the baby at her side. The aching sensation seared her breasts, and she turned to her side and led the baby to nurse. He latched quickly and fiercely, and her eyes met Jamie’s with delight. “I must do it right.”
He chuckled. “Certainly so, madame. I never doubted you for a moment, and neither did he, so it seems.”
She smiled, pleased and warmed. Jamie moved forward, stroking the babe’s cheek, lightly brushing his fingertips over her breast. “He must be baptized first thing in the morning. What shall we call him?”
“First thing?” she repeated with a frown, and panic seized her. “Jamie, he is all right? There is no need to fear—”
“Jassy, he is in good health. Tamsyn assured me that it is so. It is only right to baptize him as soon as possible.”
She nodded, lowering her head and wishing that she didn’t betray her fears so quickly all of the time.
“Jassy, he needs a name.”
“Don’t—don’t fathers usually insist upon naming their sons?”
“He is your son, too, madame. I had thought that after this morning you’d be quite loath to give me any of the credit.”
She flushed, thinking that indeed it seemed far the easier measure to be a sire than a dam. “James,” she said out loud.
“For the king?”
“Nay, for his sire. He is the firstborn.”
“Is that a promise for an army to come?”
“Nay, it is no promise!” Jassy said vehemently, and he laughed.
“If you wish it, he will be James. James Daniel Cameron, if that suits you, and we might, for the moment, call him Daniel to avoid confusion.”
“James Daniel Cameron,” Jassy murmured. “I like it.” James Daniel opened his eyes wide to her. “James Daniel Cameron,” she repeated. She bent down and kissed his impossibly soft and downy head. “I love you, James Daniel.”
The baby’s eyes closed. She stroked his soft skull with wonder, then she saw that Jamie was watching her. She stared at him and he smiled ruefully. “It is customary for a lord to present his lady with a gift upon such an occasion. I admit, were we home, I would have given you a rope of pearls, but alas, I have no such thing—”
“It does not—”
“I do have something else which I think is very fine.” He produced a narrow string of rawhide, upon which was a striking and unusual amulet. The fingers of a man and a woman were etched primitively upon a pink shell. A sun burst above the two of them, casting rays about them both. A god seemed to peer down benevolently from the rays of the sun. With the baby asleep at her breast and his mouth half opened upon it, Jassy studied the amulet. She looked at Jamie and smiled slowly. “It is lovely.”
“It was given to me once by a little girl.”
“A little girl?”
He smiled. “The first time that I was here, I met Pocahontas. She had saved John Smith, but she was just an eleven-year-old child, and her fascination and generosity to the settlers was astounding. I was young myself, into my teens. She and Powan and I came together, first when the whites would have slain Powan, and second when the warring Powhatans might have gotten their hands upon me. I have always cherished it, and I hope that it will mean something to you, if it is only a symbol of the pearls that I will one day come to find.”
He did not look in her eyes. He gently disengaged their sleeping son from her breast, then set him upon his shoulder.
“Jamie.”
“Yes?”
“It is beautiful. I will cherish it, I swear it.” She slipped it over her neck. He smiled at her.
“Molly has stayed. She will bring you something to eat in a minute. You must eat, and you must sleep, and—”
“I will be up soon, I promise.”
“Milady, you will not. You will not rise for more than an hour or two for at least a week. Tamsyn has said so, and I will see that it is so.” He smiled again, taking the sting from his words.
The door closed in his wake. Jassy pulled the covers close to her chin, and she smiled to herself.
She had never known that it was possible to be so radiantly happy.
In the days that followed, Jassy was absorbed with the baby. They never did call him James or Jamie; from the beginning he was Daniel.
He delighted Jassy, for he seemed stronger by the minute. He quickly lost his wizened appearance, and she liked to stare at him for hours, and compare every one of his little features to those of his father. He was remarkably like Jamie. Even being an infant, Daniel had certain ways of looking at her that pulled strongly upon her heart, for they were so similar to the very ways that Jamie could look at her. He could be silent and grave, and howl like the very north wind. She was certain that he had already learned to smile, although Molly assured her that it was a “wee bit of the air in his belly”—Daniel was too young to smile. Jassy didn’t believe it for a second. He had come into the world determined, and now that he was within it, he was ingenious and precocious.
She was certain of it. When she held him in her arms. she felt complete, as she had never been complete before. Something that she had done in life was right, and special, and entirely unique.
Her one unhappiness in those days was that it seemed that she saw less and less of Jamie.
He did not sleep with her the night that Daniel was born, nor the night after. Molly had determined to stay for a few days, and so Jamie had ordered that a cot be brought up for her comfort. A group of the laborers from the settlement had come with a gift for Jassy, and Jamie had brought them up to the room. She had greeted them from her bed, and she had been delighted with their gift, a cradle that had been lovingly carved from the best of the wood, and engraved upon the side with the Cameron crest. From the bottom of her heart she had thanked them, and John Tannen, who had led the group of them, was the one to speak to her, twirling his flat cap in his hands as he was so wont to do.
“Milady, if our gift pleases you, we are most humbly grateful. We were many of us a-fearing your arrival, for we thought that Lord Cameron’s lady might be a harsh and cold mistress, demanding her distance from us all. But you came to us, lady, like a sweet angel of mercy, and we are, one and all, grateful. Molly and me are grateful, and I know that my Joan and our infant went to the Maker from a gentle touch. Lady, the best to you, and to the bonny boy!”
“Thank you, John,” Jassy said. “Thank you all so much. We will keep the
cradle forever, I promise you, and it will be cherished for the craftsmanship, and for the heart with which it was given.”
She could not look at Jamie, who stood silently in the corner of the room. Emotions were churning too deeply within her. She had not wanted to come here, yet no place had ever been so much like home. She had married for gain, and if her driving desire had been a life without hunger, poverty, and want, she had accepted Jamie, knowing that he offered a life of much more, a life of luxury. There was little enough luxury to be found here, but that had long ago ceased to matter. It seemed so long ago now. All that mattered to her now was Daniel, and the welfare of her family and her dear friends and servants, and …
Her husband.
“Come down and warm yourselves with some ale, for it still blows cold beyond the doors,” Jamie said, inviting the men. They left her with good cheer. Jamie’s eyes remained upon her until he had left the room, but she could not tell what he was thinking.
Molly stayed for the week, and then she returned to her own newly acquired family. Jassy missed her, but she had Elizabeth with her, and Mrs. Lawton, and Charity and Patience.
She still didn’t have Jamie.
The first night she hadn’t questioned his disappearance. Then Molly had been there. But when Molly had gone home, he still avoided his own bed, sleeping across the hall in the room where Lenore and Robert had stayed. He did not wish to disturb her or the babe, he told her awkwardly one morning, slipping in to find more pairs of his hose. She needed her sleep.
Jassy, hurt, did not argue with him. She wondered if perhaps he did not want his own sleep disturbed, since the winter hung on and he was busy with survival.
But sometimes she heard him late at night, pacing the floor. At those times she hugged the baby to her, whether Daniel slept or not, and she bit deep into her lip, hoping that he had not ceased to care. She knew that they could not resume marital relations for some time, but they had not been together in that way for some time before Daniel had been born, and it had not mattered; it had been good to sleep beside him, to feel his heartbeat beneath her chin, to feel his arms around her. Tamsyn had told her that she must wait a month, a full month, and go carefully then. She did not know if Tamsyn had spoken to Jamie, too, or if Jamie simply had been aware of the ways of women and childbirth. Or if Jamie simply had ceased to care.