Felicity

Felicity, John Blackthorne’s wife and the mother of their children, is present in the novel through his memory and longing. As he waits in the cellar, his thoughts turn to her and to the family life he has left behind; the distance from home becomes at once a calculation of days and a measure of what separation costs him.

Identity and Family

Blackthorne has been married to Felicity for eleven years, though he reflects that the time he has spent at home with her has been painfully scarce. Their children are Tudor and Lisbeth. During his captivity, he works out Lisbeth’s age from the chronology of his voyage: he reckons that she was eleven days old when he embarked at Chatham, then adds the time spent provisioning and travelling before departure and the period since leaving Amsterdam. The arithmetic turns an absent infant’s age into something he can hold in mind with exactness.

Marriage and Separation

Blackthorne remembers telling Felicity that life was hard for a woman. Her answer—“Any life is hard for a woman.”—stands out for its directness, resisting an easy distinction between his hardships and hers. The exchange offers a brief glimpse of their shared understanding, but his thoughts dwell more heavily on the long separation. He reflects that, across eleven years of marriage, the days they have had together are too few.

Memory and the Hope of Home

To endure the pain of absence, Blackthorne has trained himself to think of Felicity and the children as characters in a never-ending play: people he loves and would bleed for, kept imaginatively present without allowing the loss of their company to overwhelm him. In his vision of their life while he is away, Felicity cooks, guards, cleans, and talks as the children grow, strong and fearless in his imagining. He looks ahead to returning to England and walking with her along its shore and through its forests and glades. Felicity therefore anchors his thoughts to a future beyond captivity, even as the hope of home sharpens his awareness of how much time he has already missed.