Free The Silent Love by Diane Davis White Page A

well.
    Sorrow that she would never know the babe's father, nor he know his son. For she was certain it would be a son, knew it in her very bones. She began a small ritual of spending an hour each morning in the nursery by herself, sitting in the rocker by the wide window, her hands placed over her stomach as she talked to the child within her.
    She would sing little nursery songs, whisper of her dreams for a good life for the child, and sometimes her mind would drift, without her consent, to the shadowed man who was the child's sire.
    Hannah suffered greatly from morning sickness, and her hands and feet were constantly swollen and aching. As she grew larger, her diminutive body was assailed with all manner of pains and aches, for the babe was large and she was not.
    Her stomach protruded from her thin body and gave her a comical look. But there was nothing comical about the nausea and heartburn that she endured. She suffered as well from bouts of depression that left her listless and wan, as she wandered the house, her eyes unseeing and her hands resting always over the babe cradled in her womb.
    The Marquis, worried about his young wife, kept his distance and watched her grieving, knowing there was nothing he could do to ease her, for she was oblivious to her grief. She denied it with every gesture and word, denying the love that was pushed back, buried deeply in the furthest regions of her consciousness.
    Her suffering became his own and with time, he began to wear under the strain, new lines of fatigue appearing in his careworn face as his sleep was disturbed by dreams of his son.
    In his dreams David hovered just beyond the lawn, staring toward the house with hungry pain-filled eyes. The Marquis would hurry toward him, closing the distance on strong legs, only to find that David had turned into the forest and disappeared just as he reached him. He would wake, sweating and cold, trembling with torment. The dreams came nightly.
    His solicitor had tracked David's movements from the very first day, and the Marquis knew the boy—as he often thought of him—was somewhere on the high seas. A letter had arrived yesterday, from Hong Kong, David's last port. The man of business had written to give David's next destination, for he had signed on with yet another packet, bound for Australia. Would he ever come back? The Marquis did not know.
    He instructed Mr. Maguire to continue putting the allowance into David's account and keep him appraised of the boy's movements. Each time he received a missive, he would go to the map he had put up on his wall and pin a small flag at a port where David had been.
    He knew his son was trying to build his life without relying on anyone else, and he admired the character that had allowed him to turn his back on the generous allowance, but lamented that he had turned his back as well, on his father.
    As time passed, the tiny flags drew a pattern of David's movements, and his course had at last turned toward home.
    Relieved to find that David's ship would be docking in England within the month, the Marquis began to make plans for his arrival, hoping to draw him home to fulfill his duty as the guardian of the heir.  He was rapidly sinking under the strain of the last months, and it was clear he only held on to see the babe born and David home to care for mother and child.

Chapter Seven
    ~~
    David stood on the roiling deck, his eyes trained on the far horizon, the storm clouds far behind. He had spent the last several hours battling, along with the rest of the crew, to keep the vessel from keeling in the high seas. As a deck hand, he was getting better, but his seasickness still came on quite regularly. Eight months at sea and he still could not keep his dinner down.
    He had been to far places, and now he was coming home again. Home being the one place he was not sure he wanted to be. In fact, he wasn't sure just where home was anymore, except that England, in a broad sense, was his homeland.
    He knew