Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘What lady?’ Hester asked flatly.

  ‘I said we need not say her name.’

  ‘If she’s asking me to risk my neck she can tell me her name,’ Hester persisted.

  He put his mouth to her ear and Hester smelled the familiar scent of sandalwood that the young men of court used as pomade. ‘Lady d’Aubigny,’ he whispered. ‘A great lady and the widow of a hero. Her lord fell at Edgehill and she is trusted by the king to call out the royalists of London to fight for him. And she is trusting you.’

  Hester felt a deep sense of relief that John was far away. ‘I am sorry,’ she said swiftly. ‘My husband is away in Virginia, gathering rarities, and making his own plantation.’

  ‘When will he return?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  The man’s gleeful, conspiratorial mode deserted him in a moment. He swore and took two hasty paces away from her. ‘Then what are we to do?’ he demanded. ‘Mr Tradescant was to secure Lambeth and the riverside. We were counting on him.’

  ‘You were counting on him to secure the king’s safety and you did not think to discover if he was at home?’ Hester asked, disbelieving. ‘He could be sick, he could be dead of the plague, he could have changed sides!’

  The man threw her a swift, angry glance. ‘War is a gamble,’ he said grandly. ‘Sometimes the gamble pays off, sometimes it does not. I was gambling that he would be here, in good health, and keeping faith with his master.’

  Hester shook her head. ‘He does not break his faith. But he can be of no use to you.’

  ‘His son?’

  ‘Johnnie is not yet ten.’

  ‘What about you? Surely you have influence with local people. You could use this house as a rallying point. I could send you an officer to raise the men, or your father … d’you have a father?’

  Hester shook her head. ‘No father, and no influence. I am a newcomer here,’ she said. ‘I am Mr Tradescant’s second wife. We have only been married four years. I have no friends here. And I have no family.’

  ‘Someone has to do it!’ he burst out. ‘Someone has to secure the riverside and Lambeth!’

  Hester shook her head again and led the way to the front door. The royalist conspirator trailed unhappily after her.

  ‘What about someone at the bishop’s palace? What about the local vicar?’

  ‘The Archbishop is in the Tower for his service to the king, as you well may recall. And his servants are long gone.’ Hester opened the front door. ‘And the vicar here is an Independent. He was one of the first to preach against Archbishop Laud’s reforms.’

  The man would have hesitated but she ushered him out of the house. ‘I shall call on you if we need a safe house this side of the river,’ he promised. ‘D’you have horses, or barns where a small troop of horse could lie hidden?’

  ‘No,’ Hester said.

  The man hesitated and looked at her with a sharp look. Hester felt a sudden fear, she had taken him for a fool but the bright assessing gaze he turned on her was not the gaze of a fool. ‘I trust you are for the king, Mrs Tradescant,’ he said, and there was menace in his voice. ‘When he comes into London he will expect support from his loyal servants. You will have to put this house at his disposal.’

  ‘I know nothing of these matters,’ Hester said weakly. ‘I am just conducting the business of the house and the garden in my husband’s absence …’

  ‘There are wives and widows in the same case as you all around the country,’ the man said sharply. ‘And they have not forgotten where their loyalties lie. Are you for the king? Or not?’

  ‘For the king,’ Hester said unenthusiastically.

  ‘Then His Majesty will call on your services,’ the man said. ‘You may count on it.’

  He nodded to her, turned and walked across the little drawbridge over the stream at the side of the Lambeth road. Hester watched him stride away, his coat flung back, his feathers bobbing in his hat, every inch a nobleman, every inch a cavalier, then she closed the door on the sight of him, and on her fear.

  She thought for a moment and then went into the parlour to write a note to Alexander Norman.

  It may be that I need your assistance. Please let me know that your neighbourhood is free of the plague. I may wish to come and stay with you for a few days.

  She sealed the note and went through to the kitchen. The gardener, Joseph, was in there, eating his midday dinner of bread and bacon.

  ‘Can you take this to Cousin Norman at Aldgate?’ Hester asked abruptly.

  The man wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I was going to cut back the leaves of the early tulips this afternoon,’ he said.

  Hester hesitated. There were few things more precious in the Ark than the tulips. ‘Even so,’ she said. ‘I think this is more important. Put it into his hands only, and wait for a reply.’

  Joseph brought a message back as it was getting dark. Hester was sitting on the terrace before the house, enjoying the setting sun and the slow gathering of the darkness. The garden before her was an enchanted place in the quiet twilight. The apple blossom was like a mist around the heads of the trees in the lower orchard, the tulips were drained of their daytime colour and glowed like white cups in the beds. Hester thought of John Tradescant, the old man she had met, who had willed his grandchildren into her care, and thought that this garden was his memorial, as much as the ornate stone tomb in the churchyard.

  ‘He didn’t write it, he spoke it to me.’ Joseph made her jump, appearing suddenly before her on the path.

  Hester put her hand to her heart. ‘You frightened me! Coming out of the gloaming like a ghost!’

  ‘He said: “No plague. Rooms ready. Whenever.”’

  Hester smiled at the man’s frowning delivery. ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Absolutely all,’ he said. ‘I made sure I would remember it, and he heard me say it over and over a dozen times before I left.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Hester said. ‘Johnnie and Frances and I will help you with the tulips tomorrow.’

  He nodded and went round the back of the house to the yard pump and the kitchen door. Hester sat alone, watching the last light leave the tops of the trees, the nodding flowers. When it grew cold she rose to her feet and went towards the door. ‘John,’ she said softly. ‘I wish you would come home.’

  Summer 1643, Virginia

  The days that followed John’s arrival in the Indian village fell into a routine as orderly as the smooth running of John’s English home. In the morning Suckahanna’s boy would waken him with one of the smooth black bowls filled with hot water for washing. Outside his hut, in the cool dawn light, John would see the People coming and going as they went down to the river for the morning prayer.

  When they returned John would look for Suckahanna, her face bright as she walked beside her husband, his son at one side, her baby strapped on her back. The boy was Suckahanna’s shadow and she seemed to know his whereabouts, without even turning her head to look for him. It was as if, when she adopted him and married his father, she had made a bond with him that stretched over any distance but was as palpable as touch.

  Before he was allowed to eat the boy had marksman training. Suckahanna plucked a piece of moss from a tree and threw it in the air for him. Not until his little arrow had pierced the falling moss could the boy eat his breakfast. Some mornings Suckahanna was out under the trees with him for three, four, five attempts before John heard her word of praise and the quick touch of her fingers on his dark head.

  ‘He had no mother for his early years,’ she explained to John. ‘He has much to learn.’

  ‘Why did his father not teach him?’ John asked. He was tempted to complain of Suckahanna’s husband, to make him look foolish in her eyes. She just tossed her head and laughed. ‘Bringing a child into the world is work for a woman,’ she said simply. ‘A man cannot do it.’

  As the sun rose and warmed the air they would all gather for a breakfast of fruits or nuts or a gruel made from cornfl
our and berries. This was the hungriest time of the year – the winter stores were almost exhausted and the summer crops were not yet ripe – but even so no-one went hungry in the village. The stores had been put aside all through the rich fruitful time of the year, and then extra had been laid aside as well in the huge granary building filled with great bowls of dried pulses, huge netted sacks of dried maize, vats as big as a man filled with nuts. John wondered why they did not broach the great store, but no-one would tell him.

  After breakfast the men would string their bows, oil their bodies, tie back their hair, paint their faces, and go out to hunt together. John watched the laughing camaraderie of the huntsmen with the knowledge that he would always be an outsider. The men did not speak to him, he did not know if they even understood English. The women understood everything he said, but their replies were brief. Inevitably, John was learning the rhythm of Powhatan speech, picking up individual words and names. He watched the men, understanding that they were planning the hunt. Suckahanna’s husband was among them, in the very heart of the preparations. He was acknowledged as a fine hunter, a man who could kill a deer alone, without the help of a hunting party. Other braves could drop a deer with a well-placed arrow when it had been driven from one cover to another and directed towards them; but Suckahanna’s husband could throw a deerskin over his shoulder, strap the horns to his head and move so skilfully and so deer-like with his tittupping step and his nervous, flickering head-tossing, with his sudden stag-like stillness, that he could go among a herd of deer and pick one off as it grazed beside him. A man had to be blessed by the deer god to manage such a feat. Suckahanna’s husband was treated with loving respect and he alone decided the course of every hunt. Even his name showed his nature. He was called Attone – the arrow.

  As the men readied themselves to leave the village, the women gathered children and their gardening tools and went to the fields to plant and to weed. While John was weak from his illness and under Suckahanna’s special protection he went with her, and watched them planting. Their crop was set in a field which had been roughly cleared by burning. They left the tree stumps, left even the biggest living trees and planted around them. The edge of the field was ragged, where the fire had not taken hold. Its disorder offended John’s sense of how a tidy field should be set square on the landscape, its lines drawn clearly, hedged and ditched.

  ‘You could get the men to help you clear the tree stumps,’ he suggested to Suckahanna. ‘It wouldn’t take long to uproot them and pull them out. Then you could plant your crops in straight rows. Those tree stumps you have left in will only grow back within a season, and then you’ll have all the work to do all over again.’

  ‘We want the trees to grow back,’ she said. ‘We don’t want this field for more than a season.’

  ‘But if you cleared it properly then you could use it year after year,’ John insisted. ‘You would not have to move on. You could have the same fields and keep the village in the same place.’

  Decidedly, she shook her head. ‘The earth gets weary of working for us,’ she said. ‘We plant a field here and then we set her free. We move on to another place. If you plant corn in the same field three years running, then in the third year you will harvest nothing. The earth gets weary of hungry men. She has to rest like a woman with a baby at the breast, needs to rest, needs some time alone. She cannot be always feeding.’

  ‘White men plant the same fields, and go back to them year after year,’ John observed.

  ‘White men did,’ she corrected him. ‘All around Jamestown now they are finding that the land is tiring of them. The land is weary of the hungry white mouth which eats and eats and eats and cannot be satisfied and will not move on.’

  She moved to the next row with her hoeing stick. In each hole she dropped four grains of corn and two bean seeds. Behind her another woman came sowing pumpkin seeds. Later, beneath the crops, they would plant the quicker-growing amaracocks for their lush, thirst-quenching fruit.

  John picked up a stick of his own and hunkered down beside her. ‘I’ll help,’ he said.

  She could not repress a giggle at the sight of him, and then she shook her head. ‘This is women’s work, only women do it.’

  ‘I can do it. I’m a gardener in my own country. I can plant.’

  Still Suckahanna refused. ‘I know that you can. And any Powhatan man can do it, if he has to. But women like to do it. It is what we do.’

  ‘To serve the men?’ John asked, thinking of the delicious idleness of the hunting men when they returned to camp and found their dinner waiting for them and their fields cleared and planted, their houses swept clean, the sweat lodge heated and ready for them.

  She shot him a quick, scornful look from under her dark eyebrows. ‘Because the earth and the women are together,’ she half-whispered. ‘That is where the power of the People belongs, not in the war councils or in the hunting parties. It is women who have the power to make things grow, to give birth. The rest – is pipesmoke.’

  John felt his view, his comfortable view of the world, shift and rock. ‘Men have the power,’ he said. ‘God made them in his image.’

  She looked at him as if he might be joking. ‘You may believe that your god did that,’ she said politely. ‘But we are the children of the Hare.’

  ‘The Hare?’

  She stopped her work and sat back on her heels. ‘I shall tell you as if you were my little child,’ she said with a smile. ‘Listen. In the very beginning when there was nothing but darkness and the sound of the running water, the great Hare came out of the darkness and made both man and woman.’

  John squatted down beside her in the damp earth, watched the smile move from her eyes to her lips, and the way her hair fell over her bare shoulders.

  ‘They were hungry. Men and women are always hungry. So the Hare put them in a bag until he could feed them. He ran through the darkness with the bag held tight in his mouth and everywhere he ran there was land made, and water made, and the great deer to walk the land and drink the water and feed the new-made man and woman. And everywhere he went there were fierce mouths biting at him from out of the darkness, hungry meat-eating mouths that would snap at his heels and at the bag he was carrying. But everywhere he ran, the mouths were destroyed, and fled back into the darkness until it was safe for him to do what he wished.’

  John waited.

  Suckahanna smiled. ‘Then, and only then, he opened the bag and let out the man and the woman. The man ran to hunt the deer. The man has the great richness of the deer. This is what he wanted. But the woman –’ she paused and gave him a sly sideways smile ‘– the woman has everything else.’

  A year ago John would have called it a heathen tale full of heresy and nonsense. But now he listened and nodded. ‘The women have everything else?’

  ‘Everything but hunting and war.’

  ‘So what am I to do?’ he asked her.

  Suckahanna looked momentarily surprised, as if he had moved the conversation onwards in one great bound. ‘You will get well,’ she said slowly. ‘And then you will decide.’

  ‘Decide?’

  ‘Where you want to live. What kind of man you want to be.’

  John hesitated. ‘I thought I would get well and go back to my home – to my fields up the river.’

  She shook her head. ‘You must know by now that you cannot live there,’ she said gently. ‘You cannot live there alone. You must know by now that you cannot survive in this land alone. You would have died there, my love.’ The endearment slipped out, she flushed and bit her lip as if she would have taken it back.

  ‘I thought – I thought I might get a servant, or a slave. I thought –’ He hesitated. ‘I have been thinking that you might come with me?’

  ‘As a servant? As a slave?’ Her look blazed at him.

  ‘I meant I must have someone to work under me,’ John corrected himself. ‘And I have been praying that you would come to me ever since I made landfall. I meant a servant, and you as well
.’

  ‘I shall never lie under a white man’s roof again,’ Suckahanna said firmly. ‘I have taken my decision, and I am with the People.’

  John jumped to his feet and took a stride away from her and then back again. ‘Then there is nothing for me here,’ he cried out. ‘I came to make a new life for myself, to farm virgin earth, to find you. And you tell me I cannot plough or hoe alone. I cannot keep myself or even keep my fire in. I cannot take you away from your people, and I cannot take you to my people. I have been a fool to run from one life to another and still achieve nothing.’

  There was a cry from the little platform shelter where the children played. Suckahanna glanced back, listening for her own baby’s voice. They heard another woman call in response and get up from her knees and go to see to the crying child. Suckahanna returned her attention to her gardening, picked up her hoeing stick, picked out little weed seedlings from her row. Without turning her head to see if John was listening she spoke very quietly to him.

  ‘Perhaps you could be with me,’ she said slowly. ‘Leave your people and join mine.’

  ‘I can’t live here, seeing you every day,’ John said softly. ‘I want you, Suckahanna. I can’t bear to live near you and yet to sleep every night only a footstep away from you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, so quietly that he had to lean forward to hear. But still her hands worked, her hoeing stick piercing the fresh soil and the seeds dropping quickly and accurately through her fingers. ‘I could ask my husband to release me.’

  ‘Release you?’ John asked incredulously. ‘This is possible?’

  ‘He might,’ she said evenly. ‘If it was my wish.’

  ‘Your people let their wives come and go as they choose?’

  She shot him a small smile. ‘I told you that we were a proud people. Wives are not slaves. If they wish to leave they must be free to do so, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes … but –’