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There is a lantern burning in the library window as he rides up the long, winding length of the avenue, and he is near overwhelmed by the sight.
He had not expected her to sit up for him - they had made port around noon, but there had been such an unusual amount of paperwork to muddle through that the afternoon and evening had passed him by almost without notice.
He had assumed that she would be sleeping, that he would have time to bathe and shave before pulling on his nightshirt and slipping between the sheets to curl against her back, around her warmth, but not so.
She is sitting up for him, and he honestly does not know why he expected any different. He knows her better than that by now.
The library door is open, the fire burned down to barely-smouldering embers, and Elizabeth is all shadows and surprising highlights, asleep on the soft chaise in the middle of the room, where she likes to lay and have him read aloud to her.
“Welcome home,” she says, waking when he kneels beside her. She’s soft with sleep and sweet dreams, and she tosses aside his forgotten hat so she can kiss him in greeting. “You’ve been greatly missed, Commodore.”
He kisses her again, useless as always with words but hoping she can taste just how desperately she’s been missed in return.
“We can speak in the morning,” she says, looping her arms around his neck as if she were drunk, limp-boned and trusting. “Put me to bed, love, I’m hardly able to move.”
It isn’t until he has her in his arms, curling against him as she always does, that he realises just why the shadows and highlights of her were so surprising.
“Ah,” she says, grinning up into his stricken face, “perhaps I ought to have said that you missed a great deal, rather than that you were greatly missed.”
He sits her on the edge of the bed as gently as he can, and drops to his knees before her. Her belly is round, and smooth, and bigger than he’d expect for four months.
She laughs when he says so.
“The midwife warned me you’d say that, and not to take offence,” she says, taking off his wig so she can scratch her fingers through his short hair. “Men never really know what to expect, I suppose.”
He can hardly bring himself to touch her, afraid, somehow, that he will do some irreparable damage to her, or worse, to the child.
A child. He has never given it much thought, not beyond abstract maybes, daydreams of Elizabeth walking hand-in-hand with a little girl with her wide eyes, while he walks a ways behind with a boy who has his father’s red hair.
A child! A child they can raise to have Elizabeth’s daring, hopefully tempered a little by his common sense - he loves his wife very much, but is more aware of her flaws than she would like, or he would ever admit.
“I will not break,” she assures him, very gently, and he dares to press his hands carefully to her belly, warm through her nightgown. It does not seem so big now, covered by his splayed-wide fingers, but Elizabeth is so slight, so slim through the hips - what if something goes wrong? What if the child has his big head and broad shoulders?
Mrs. Swann, Elizabeth’s mother, died in a sweaty summer ‘flu that killed Elizabeth’s brother, too, barely more than a babe, and drove her father to seek a commission in the Caribbean - but her grandmother, her mother’s mother, died in childbed. Elizabeth told him as much, late one night while they were drunk, and arguing over the effectiveness of the expensive doctors in town proper as opposed to the natives, who used the local flora for their cures. Elizabeth was insistent that a good midwife would have been more use to her grandmother than some highly-paid twit from the City, and James had not been able to see how she could so easily trust just anyone to come into her house, much less sit between her legs.
Here, sitting between her legs, he half wants to lower his head, half wants to nudge her to lie back on the bed so he can kiss into her until she shakes apart, and is mortified by it. She is carrying his child, and he is still weak before her - disgraceful!
“Thank you,” he says, unable to keep the reverence from his voice, and kisses the rise of her belly between his fingers. “For giving me so much more than I can ever hope to return.”
James has been home almost two weeks before he stops sharing her bed.
Elizabeth knows what it is to sleep alone in her marital bed - James is a busy man, after all, whose duties often keep him away from her for weeks at a time, sometimes even months, and she has become as used to sleeping without him as sleeping with him.
But she loathes sleeping without him when he is in the damned house.
And so she gets up, tugging on a bedrobe to guard against any chills, and pushes through the door connecting their bedchambers.
He’s used his so rarely - only when he had that awful vomiting sickness, six months after they married, or when she has her monthlies - that it always takes her a moment to orient herself, when she comes through. It’s a mirror of her own room, if a touch grander, and she wonders why they don’t sleep here - the bed seems larger, if nothing else.
He stirs only slightly when she curls against his front, tucking herself into the curve he makes sleeping on his side, and he sighs against her hair when she tugs his arm over her waist.
He is gone when she wakes, and when she tries to follow him into his own room that night, she finds the door locked.
Elizabeth is not speaking to him when he returns from visiting with her father, and he finds himself more helpless even than usual.
He is so afraid of hurting her, of hurting the child, that he hardly dares to touch her. It is the most difficult thing he has ever done, save letting her go, when he thought she and Turner-
No, it is wholly different. If it were just that he has to give her up for a time, it would be an inconvenience, but this is a whole new sort of wanting - he can envision just how he would take her to bed, moving to accommodate her belly, just how he would make use of the new sensitivity in her breasts, of which she complained over breakfast the other day, to his advantage.
But he cannot do that, because Elizabeth is sturdier than he can ever fully believe, but the baby has made her delicate in a way he does not quite understand. He respects it, almost reveres it, and cannot bring himself to risk shattering it apart by setting his too-big, too-heavy hands on her.
Elizabeth, of course, disagrees.
“If you do not find your way to my bed tonight,” she tells him over dinner, not even looking away from whatever note she is reading, “then you will wake to find me sleeping outside your door, and I cannot imagine how dangerous that might be for the child.”
She is smiling, behind that blasted note, around a spoonful of custard, and he feels typically helpless because she has no sense whatsoever and he has too much, so he is always chasing in her wake.
James’ throat bobs magnificently when she turns to face him, stepping away from her dressing table.
Her nightgown is perhaps a little indecent, but no more than she usually wears when they are together - it reveals only the inner curves of her breasts, and ends below her knee, and true enough that it has no sleeves but surely he is not aroused by her arms.
He does seem aroused by everything else about her, though.
“Elizabeth,” he says, “ please let me-”
“No,” she says, taking his hand and leading him to the bed, more amused than is proper by how little his nightshirt hides - not the broad stretch of his chest and shoulders, not the thick, ropey muscle of his arms, and certainly not the interest peaking between his legs.
“El izabeth ,” he sighs, lying very firmly on his back and not curling around her as he usually does.
Very well. If he is going to be difficult, well, she can be twice as difficult.
He grunts when she sits in his lap, pressing down firmly against his manhood, and his throat bobs again. She wants to bite down, right there, but has a horrible feeling that he might die underneath her if she overplays her hand.
“Do you want to feel the baby kick?” she asks, taking his big, warm hands and pressing them firm to her belly. “Wait a moment now, wait a moment, you’ll feel it-”
The child has been kicking only a little - Elizabeth is not even sure that it can be felt from the outside, until something beatific dawns on James’ face, a slow smile and the soft eyes usually reserved for her, early in the mornings.
“I felt it,” he says, voice a bare caress, and Elizabeth wonders how it is she thought him somehow repulsed by her changing body - James does not have it in him to be repulsed by anything of her. He is far too good a man to deserve such doubt. “Elizabeth, I-”
He presses his lips tight together, and she is stunned by the appearance of a tell-tale shine in his dark eyes.
She kisses him, just so he will not become embarrassed by his tears, and slides sideways to curl against his side, her belly pressing against his hip when she tucks herself under his arm.
“Never before have I felt so blessed,” he says quietly, tilting his head down to nuzzle against her hair. “Thank you, my love. Thank you.”
Her father, of course, is terrified for her.
Elizabeth has no patience for such things - she has a proper, bewigged doctor, to ease James’ nerves and to keep the matrons’ tongues from wagging, and she has a sensible local woman, too, who has delivered a dozen babies and knows very well what she’s doing.
Her father, though, is terrified for her. He always is, God bless him, and tries to hide his fear under fussing, and silly gifts.
This is not a silly gift, though, and Elizabeth is still weepy and overwrought when James comes home that evening.
“Whatever is the matter?” he asks, immediately frantic as he sweeps over to crouch before her. “Is it the child?”
She cannot speak, can only shake her head and hold out the bundle of lace and satin for him to investigate.
“Is this a christening robe?” he asks, shaking it out and looking surprised by how small it is.
“It was my brother’s,” she manages. “Father gave it to me today, for the child.”
They’ve argued over names.
James wants Weatherby at least as a middle name, but Elizabeth has always thought her father’s name absolutely absurd, and knows that he secretly agrees.
Elizabeth wants James as a first name, knows that James disagrees, and wants Alexander as a middle name - for her brother.
James has suggested, well, perhaps they might have Alexander Weatherby Norrington, and she has laughed, and pressed her hand to his cheek, and stitched a blanket with Alexander James Norrington.
They have agreed to disagree, and have not considered that perhaps the baby will be a girl, because both James’ doctor and Elizabeth’s midwife are sure that it is a boy.
(Elizabeth’s mother was called Adelaide, James’ Maria, and Elizabeth is sure that Adelaide Maria Norrington will be very happy, and that her older brother Alexander James will be delighted by her.)
“Will you be disappointed if it’s a girl?” she asks him one night, unable to sleep for the pains in her breast and ankles. James never sleeps when she can’t, and she loves him for it.
“So long as she is not cursed with my face, no,” he says, his smile a bare gleam in the moonlight peeking through the drapes. “But you are so sure that it is a boy, are you not?”
“Sure enough,” she admits, pleased - she knows that he will love any child they have, but it is nice to have the assurance that he will love their daughters, not only their sons.
She has had such an indulgent father all her life that the thought of James not spoiling their daughters is unbearable - but she ought to have known better. He has never let her down yet, not since the day she took his name.
James sits very carefully in the library while, above his head, Elizabeth curses his name in language she must have heard aboard the Black Pearl.
Governor Swann flinches every time a scream echoes down the stairs, but James cannot allow himself even that much. He sits very, very still, clutches tight to the arms of the elegant chair Elizabeth chose, and prays on dry land for the first time since he joined His Majesty’s Navy.
“She always did have a fine set of lungs,” the governor says, trying for mirth and missing by several nautical miles. “Her mother was just the same in childbed - and came through it twice unscathed.”
That is a comfort, more than any attempt at humour, undercut only by a shrill, enduring scream and a fountain of shrieking curses from upstairs.
Later, after an eternity-
“Alexander James Norrington,” Elizabeth whispers, almost as red in the face as her tiny, tiny son. She is so proud of them both, her for enduring and him for surviving, and she is thrilled beyond words to finally, finally meet this tiny person who has spent the better part of the past year under her lungs.
“He doesn’t look like either one of us quite yet,” James says, almost as soft, and ghosts his fingertips over Alexander’s fine, wispy hair. It’s darker than her own, the same colour as James’, but other than that it’s true, he looks neither like James nor like Elizabeth herself just yet.
“He’ll grow into himself,” she says firmly, looking up to accept the kiss James treats her to, and then she smiles. “He has a fine father to live up to - he has a great deal of growing ahead of him.”
James bows his head, bashful, and Elizabeth is thrilled by him as much as by their son. She cannot imagine what life they might have led, had she chosen Will, so long ago now, and cannot see how it might have been a better life than this.
“How lucky we are,” she says, and kisses Alexander’s red, scrunched brow. “How very, very lucky.”