Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘Jamestown,’ J said shortly, pointing north-west. ‘I have been rambling like a fool. Jamestown, of course.’

  He seated himself in the canoe and steadied it with his paddle. It was easier now that they had gone out every day and he had grown skilful. She pushed off the prow of the boat and stepped aboard. They paddled as a team and the boat wove easily along the shoreline, and then they felt the stronger push of the river.

  An hour out of Jamestown, where the river started getting dirty and the bank was pocked with felled trees, she called a halt and they ran the canoe ashore. Slowly, unwillingly, they washed off the grease in the water. She took a handful of leaves and scrubbed his back so that his white skin shone through the dark grease and the familiar smell, which he had hated so much on the first day, was dispersed. Together they put on the clothes they must wear in the town, and she shrank into the confines of the ragged shift and looked no longer like a deer in dappled sunlight but instead like a sluttish maidservant.

  J, shrugging back into his shirt and breeches after the freedom of the buckskin loincloth, felt as if he were taking on the shackles of some sort of prison, becoming a man again with a man’s sorrows and no longer a free being, at home in the forest. At once the cloud of insects settled greedily on his sunburned arms and shoulders and face. J swatted at them and swore, and the girl smiled with her lips but with no laughter in her eyes.

  ‘We’ll come out again,’ J said encouragingly. He pointed to himself and to her and to the trees. ‘We’ll come out again some day.’

  She nodded but her eyes were dark.

  They got into the canoe and began to paddle upstream to Jamestown. J was plagued all the way by the biting moths and the sweat in his eyes, the tightness of the shirt across his back and the rub of his boots. By the time they came alongside the little wooden quay he was sweating and irritable. There was a new vessel in port and a crowd on the quayside. No-one wasted more than a quick glance on the little Indian girl and the white man in the dugout canoe.

  They ran the canoe aground at the side of the quay and started to unload the plants. From the shadow of the dockside building a woman came and stood before them.

  She was an Indian woman but she wore a dress and a shawl tied across her breasts. Her hair was tied back like a white woman’s and it exposed her face which was badly scarred, pocked all over with pale ridges of scar tissue as if someone, long ago, had fired a musket at point-blank range into her face.

  ‘Mr Tradescant?’ She spoke with a harsh accent.

  J spun to hear his name and recoiled from the bitterness in her face. She looked past him at the girl and spoke in a rapid string of words, fluting and meaningless as birdsong.

  The child answered, as voluble as she, shaking her head emphatically and then pointing to J and to the plants and to the canoe.

  The woman turned to J again. ‘She tells me you have not hurt her.’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Not raped her.’

  ‘No!’

  The bowstring-tight line of the woman’s shoulders suddenly slumped, and she gave a sharp sob, like a cough of vomit. ‘When they told me you had taken her into the woods I thought I would not see her again.’

  ‘I am a plant collector,’ J said wearily. ‘See. There are the plants. She was my guide. She made a camp. She hunted and fished for us. She has been a very, very good girl.’ He glanced at her and she gave him a swift encouraging smile. ‘She has been very helpful. I am in her debt.’

  The Indian woman had not followed all of the words but she saw the glance that passed between them and read correctly the affection and mutual trust.

  ‘You are her mother?’ J asked. ‘Just … er … released?’

  The woman nodded. ‘Mr Joseph told me he had given her to you for the month. I thought I would not see her again. I thought you had taken her to the woods to use her and bury her there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ J said awkwardly. ‘I am a stranger here.’

  She looked at him with a bitter line around her mouth. ‘You are all strangers here,’ she observed.

  ‘She can speak?’ J remarked, tentatively, wondering what it might mean.

  The woman nodded, not bothering to answer him.

  The girl had finished unloading the canoe. She looked at J and gestured to the plants, as if asking what should be done with them. J turned to the woman. ‘I have to fetch some barrels and prepare these plants for my voyage home. I may take a passage on this ship. Can she stay and help me?’

  ‘We’ll both help,’ the woman said shortly. ‘I don’t leave her alone in this town.’ She hitched her skirts a little and went down to the shoreline. J watched the two women. They did not embrace; but they stood just inches away from each other and gazed into each other’s faces as if they could read all they needed to know in one exchange of looks. Then the mother nodded briefly and they turned side by side and their shoulders brushed as they bent over the plants together.

  J went up to his lodging to fetch the barrels for packing the plants.

  They worked until it was dusk, and then they worked again the next day, wrapping the cuttings in earth and damp linen, layering them in the barrel separated by damp linen and leaves, and packing the seeds in dry sand and sealing down the lid. When it was done, J had four half-barrels of plants which he would keep open to the air and damp with fresh water, and one sealed barrel of seeds. He shouted up to the ship and a couple of sailors came down and loaded them for him. At least he would have room to care for them on the voyage home. There were only a couple of people making the return voyage to England. The rest of the space was taken up with the cargo of tobacco.

  ‘We sail in the morning at first light,’ the captain warned him. ‘You’d best get your things aboard tonight and sleep aboard yourself. I can’t wait for passengers, when the tide ebbs we go out with it.’

  J nodded. ‘I will.’ He had no desire to return to the inn and the embittered landlady. He thought if she called the girl a beast in his hearing then he would speak in her defence and then there would be a quarrel and perhaps worse.

  He turned to the two women. ‘What is her name?’ he asked the mother.

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘Mary?’

  She nodded. ‘She was taken from me when she was a baby and baptised Mary.’

  ‘Is that the name you use for her?’

  She hesitated, as if she was not sure she would trust him. But then there was a murmur from the girl at her side.

  ‘She is called Suckahanna.’

  ‘Suckahanna?’ J confirmed.

  The girl smiled and nodded. ‘It means “water”.’

  J nodded, and then the fact of her speaking his own language suddenly struck him. ‘You can speak English?’

  She nodded.

  He had a moment of profound, unhappy bewilderment. ‘Then why did you never …? You never …? I did not know! All this time we have travelled together and you have been dumb!’

  ‘I ordered her never to speak to a white man,’ the woman said. ‘I thought she would be safer if she did not answer.’

  J opened his mouth to argue – it must be right that the girl should be able to speak, to defend herself.

  But the mother cut him off with an abrupt gesture of her hand. ‘I have just come from a month in prison for saying the wrong thing,’ she pointed out. ‘Sometimes it is better to say nothing at all.’

  J glanced at the ship behind them. Suddenly he did not want to leave. The realisation that the girl had a name, and could understand him, made her intensely interesting. What had she been thinking during their days of silent companionship? What might she not say to him? It was as if she had been a princess under a spell in a romance and suddenly she had found her tongue. When he had confided in her and told her of his feelings, for his home, for his children, for his plants, she had met his confession with an impassive face. But she had understood, she had understood everything he said. And so, in a way, she knew him better than any woman had ever know
n him before. And she would know that only yesterday morning he was tempted to stay in this new land; to stay with her.

  ‘I have to go. I am promised in England,’ he said, thinking that they might contradict him, that he might not have to go, as if the breaking of the spell which had kept her silent might release him too.

  The two women said nothing, they simply watched the indecision and reluctance in his face.

  ‘What will become of you two now?’ he asked, as if their plans might affect him.

  ‘We will leave Jamestown,’ the woman said quietly. ‘We will go back into the forest and find our people. I thought we would be safer to stay here, my husband and my father are dead. I thought I could live inside the walls and work for the white men. I thought I could be their servant.’ She shook her head. ‘But there is no trusting them. We will go back to our own.’

  ‘And Suckahanna?’

  The woman looked at him, her eyes bitter. ‘There is no life for her,’ she said. ‘We can find our people but not our old life. The places where we used to grow our crops are planted with tobacco, the rivers are thin of fish and the game is going, scared away by the guns. Everywhere we used to run, there is the mark of a boot on the trails. I don’t know where she will live her life. I don’t know where she will find a home.’

  ‘Surely there is room for your people as well as the planters,’ J said passionately. ‘I can’t believe there is not space in this land … we were out for nearly a month and we saw no-one. It’s a mighty land, it stretches for miles and miles. Surely there is room for your people as well as mine?’

  ‘But your people don’t want us here. Not since the war. When we plant fields they destroy our crops, when they see a fish weir they break it, when they see a village they fire it. They have sworn we shall be destroyed as a people. When my family were killed they took me into slavery and I thought that Suckahanna and I would be safe as slaves. But they beat me and raped me, and the men will soon want her too.’

  ‘She could come with me,’ J suggested wildly. ‘I could take her to my home in England. I have a son and a daughter there, I could bring them up all together.’

  The woman thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘She is called Suckahanna,’ she said firmly. ‘She must be by the river.’

  J was about to argue but then he remembered seeing Pocahontas, the great Princess Pocahontas, when he was just a boy himself and had been taken to view her as a child might be taken to see the lions in the Tower. She had not been Princess Pocahontas by then, she had been Rebecca Rolfe, wearing ordinary English clothes and shivering in an English winter. A few weeks later she had died, in exile, longing for her own land.

  ‘I will come again,’ he said. ‘I will take these things to England and come out again. And next time, when I come, I shall build a house here and you shall be my servant and she shall be safe.’

  ‘How could she be safe with you?’ her mother asked swiftly. ‘She’s not a child, though she’s so slight. She’s near thirteen now, by the time you come back she’ll be a woman. There’s no safety for a Powhatan woman in the white man’s town.’

  J thought for a moment and then took the step, the next step, speaking without thought, speaking from his heart, his unexamined heart. ‘I shall marry her,’ he promised. ‘She will be my wife and I will keep her safe and she shall have her own house and fields here. I shall build her a house beside the river and she need fear for nothing.’

  He was speaking to her mother but he was looking at the girl. A deep rosy blush was spreading from the coarse linen neck of the shift up to her forehead where the bear grease still stained her brown skin at the dark hairline. ‘Should you like that?’ J asked her gently. ‘I am old enough to be your father, I know. And I don’t understand your ways. But I could keep you safe, and I could make a house for you.’

  ‘I should like that,’ the girl said very quietly. ‘I should like to be your wife.’

  The older woman put out her hand to J and he felt the roughened palm in his own. Then she took her daughter’s hand and joined them together in a hard grip. ‘When you come back she shall be your wife,’ she promised him.

  ‘I will,’ the girl said.

  ‘I will,’ J swore.

  The woman released them and turned away as if there was nothing more to be said. J watched her go, and then turned to Suckahanna. She seemed at once very familiar, the easy companion of weeks of travelling and camping, and exquisitely strange, a girl on the edge of womanhood, a virgin who would be his wife.

  Carefully, as if he were transplanting a seedling, he put his hand to her cheek, stroked the line of her jaw. She quivered as he touched her but moved neither forwards nor back. She let him caress her face for a moment, for one moment only; and then she turned on her heel and ran from him.

  ‘Come back soon,’ she called, and he could hardly see her in the darkness as she went swiftly after her mother, only her linen shift gleaming in the dusk. ‘Come in the good time, the fruitful time, Nepinough, and I shall make you a great feast and we will build our house before winter comes.’

  ‘I will!’ J said again. But she was already gone, and the next day at dawn the ship sailed and he did not see her.

  Summer 1638, London

  J’s ship arrived at London docks at dawn in early April and he came blearily out of his cabin into the cold English air, wrapped in his travelling cloak with his hat pulled down on his head. A wagoner was idling on the dockside, fiddling with the feedbag at the head of a dozing horse.

  ‘Are you for hire?’ J shouted down.

  The man looked up. ‘Aye!’

  ‘Come and fetch my goods,’ J called. The man started up the gangplank and then recoiled at the waving fronds of saplings and small trees.

  ‘Goods?’ he asked. ‘This is a forest!’

  J grinned. ‘There’s more than this,’ he said.

  Together they humped the barrels filled with damp earth down the gangplank and into the wagon, the whippy branches of trees stirring above their heads. Then J brought another barrel of seeds and nuts, and finally his own small bundle of clothes and a chest of rarities.

  ‘I know where we’re headed,’ the man said, climbing on to the box and waking the horse with a slap of the reins on its back.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Tradescant’s Ark,’ the man said certainly. ‘It’s the only place in the world that you’d go to with half a forest on board.’

  ‘Quite right,’ J said, and put his feet up on the board. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked.

  The carter spat accurately over the side of the wagon and hit the dirt road. ‘Nothing new,’ he said. ‘A lot worse.’

  J waited.

  ‘Everything you can eat or drink is taxed,’ the carter said. ‘But that was true before you went away, I dare say. Now they’ve got a new tax, a rotting crime of a tax: ship money levied on everyone, however far they are from the sea. It’s the ports that should pay ship money, they’re the ones that need the navy to keep them free of pirates. But the king is making all the towns pay, even inland towns. My sister lives in Cheltenham. Why should she pay ship money? What are the seas to her? But she has to.’

  J nodded. ‘The king won’t call a parliament, then?’

  ‘They say he won’t even hear the word mentioned.’

  J allowed himself a pleasurable ‘tut tut’ of disapproval.

  ‘If he called a parliament and asked them to set a tax they would tell him what they think of him as king,’ the carter said baldly. ‘They would tell him what they think about a Privy Council which is advised by a Papist French queen, and a court which is run by Frenchmen and Jesuits.’

  ‘That can’t be so,’ J said firmly. ‘I’ve only been gone a few months.’

  ‘It’s well known the Tradescants are the king’s servants,’ the man said unpleasantly.

  ‘It is indeed,’ J agreed, remembering his father’s regular warnings against gossip that could be overheard as treason.

  ‘Then I’
ll say no more,’ the carter remarked. ‘And see how you like it when they knock on your door and tell you that now there is a monopoly declared on the dirt in your garden and you have to pay a fine of ten per cent to some courtier if you want to plant in it. Because that’s what’s happened to every other trade in the kingdom while the king taxes the traders but won’t call a parliament which could tax the gentry for their rents.’

  The man paused, waiting for a shocked response. J discreetly kept silent.

  ‘You’ll have heard that the Scots have sworn they won’t read their prayers from the new book?’

  ‘No?’

  The man nodded. ‘All of ’em. Taken against Archbishop Laud’s prayer book. Say they won’t read a word of it. Archbishop is put out. King is put out. Some say he’ll make ’em, some say he can’t make ’em. Why should a king order what you say to God?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ J said tactfully. ‘I’ve no opinion on the matter.’ And he tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed as the wagon jolted down the familiar road to his home.

  He did not lift his hat as they went down the South Lambeth road towards the common; but he looked sharply all around him from under the brim. It was all well. His father’s house still stood proudly, set back from the road, the little bridge spanning the stream that ran alongside the road. It was a handsome farmhouse in the old timbered style, but on the side of the house was the ambitious new wing, commissioned by his father for the housing of the rarities, their great collection of oddities from the monstrous to the miniature. At the back of the house was the garden which made their name and their livelihood, and the rarities room overlooked the garden through its great windows of Venetian glass. J, taught by a long-standing habit, looked at the ground as the cart drove around the south side of the building so that he did not see his father’s vainglorious stone crest, affixed to the new wing in defiance both of the college of heralds and of the simple truth. They were not Tradescant esquires and never had been, but John Tradescant, his father, had drawn up and then commissioned a stonemason to carve his own crest; and nothing J could say could persuade him to take it down.