John Blackthorne and Felicity's Marriage

John Blackthorne and Felicity's Marriage is presented through the strain of distance rather than a shared domestic scene. Blackthorne has been away for much of their eleven years as husband and wife, but his careful thoughts about Felicity and their children show how vividly he keeps family life present while imagining a return home.

Marriage and Separation

Blackthorne reflects that the days he has spent at home during eleven years of marriage are few—too few. His absence is not abstract: while confined in the cellar, he calculates how long he has been away, adding the time since reaching Amsterdam, the thirty-seven days spent provisioning and traveling from Chatham, and the eleven days Lisbeth had been alive before embarkation. He uses that reckoning to work out her age, hoping that all is well with her.

Felicity and the Children in His Thoughts

His imagined home is a place where Felicity cooks, guards, cleans, and talks while Tudor and Lisbeth grow up. He pictures his wife as strong and fearless, and looks forward to being with her again on walks through England's shores, forests, and glades. The scene gives his longing concrete form: he measures separation in the children's ages and in ordinary acts of family care, not merely in the distance between places.

A Way of Bearing Absence

Blackthorne has trained himself to think of Felicity and the children as characters in an unending play—people he loves and would bleed for. This imaginative distance helps him contain the pain of being away; without it, he thinks, the hurt would be too much. His recollection of telling Felicity that a woman's life is hard, and her answer that any life is hard for a woman, gives their marriage a note of shared recognition rather than idealized ease. In this passage, the bond persists through memory and anticipation, even as the outcome of his hoped-for return remains uncertain.