Authors: Heather Graham
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.
The nights when he paced disturbed her. The nights
when he did not pace disturbed her more. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was with, or where his thoughts and yearnings might have wandered.
Hope was about too. When the snow melted, a group of the Indians came to the house, bearing gifts from Opechancanough. The great chief sent the baby a small amulet much like the one that the princess Pocahontas had given to Jamie, and that Jamie had given to her. She seldom took hers off, and though she was afraid that the baby might strangle on his, she tied it over his cradle. She wasn’t sure why. She had sometimes lost faith in her own God, but she certainly felt nothing for the peculiar and demanding gods of the Algonquin peoples in the Powhatan Confederacy. Still, she felt that it was important the baby be protected by the amulet. The Christian God was just gaining a foothold here. The Indian gods had been around much longer.
To placate Father Steven, she also asked John Tannen to make her a crucifix to rest at the foot of the cradle. Father Steven objected to the amulet. Jamie was amused by it all. “Father, we acknowledge no craven images, so it seems to matter little what decoration we choose to use upon the lad’s cradle. I’m sure that it will not sway him from growing up in the proper ways of the Church of England.”
Father Steven threw up his arms and offered no further protest. Jassy cast her husband a grateful glance, but he didn’t seem to notice. In his mind he was already away from her, anxious to attend to more important business.
Jassy was glad of his support in many things. If the question involved her in those days, he always deferred to her.
And still he stayed away. Jassy saw less and less of him.
When Daniel was two weeks old, the last of the fallen snow melted. Jonathan, who had been in the Jamestown settlement before he had come to work for Jamie in the hundred, told Jassy that maybe there would be no more snow that year.
February turned to March.
Tamsyn was no longer working in the stables. Jassy had been startled to discover that he had been set up in a small house of his own, and that the care of their medical supplies had been put in his hands. Little by little the people turned to him for help with their various woes and ailments.
“ ’Tis your husband’s doing,” Tamsyn was quick to tell her. “When Daniel was born, he bid me follow him to the great room to the left of the hallway, and I near thought that he meant to say, ‘Off with this man’s head.’ But he asked me about Oxford and my studies, and he was heartily angry, so it seemed, that I had let my life come to this over an indulgence in drink. I swore to him that I had no more difficulty, and he told me that it was a new world, a new life, and that he could not afford for me to waste my education and knowledge here. He gave me the house, and he sent the people to me. They came slowly at first. But I cured Mrs. Danver’s stomach colic, and set Timothy Hale’s broken arm, and they seem to have confidence in me now.”