Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  The braves came home jubilant. The first wave of the attack on the isolated houses along the riverside had gone perfectly. The attack on Jamestown had hit the sleeping town and taken it unawares. As many as five hundred colonists had been killed, but as soon as the alarm was given the Indian army had fallen back. Although the fort was taken unawares, the town was now so spread out, and the houses so defended with shutters and stout doors, that no single battle could complete the war. The braves had fallen back to regroup, to heal the wounds and bury the dead, and then they would push forwards again.

  Meanwhile in Jamestown the governor was mustering all the able-bodied men and hunting dogs to counter-attack. He had promised the colonists a fight to the death, a solution once and for all.

  ‘We have to move,’ Attone said as soon as all the men had returned. ‘Deeper into the forest, perhaps across the river and into the wet creeks. Once the village is safely hidden we can come out again and fight.’

  The women went to the houses at once to start packing. ‘And the crops in the fields?’ Suckahanna asked him.

  He made a gesture which told her that they were lost. ‘Perhaps later. Perhaps we can come back,’ he said.

  They exchanged a sharp, hard look. He took in the hardness of the lines around her mouth and John, hovering helplessly behind her.

  ‘You are hurt,’ she said.

  ‘Just bruised. You?’

  She turned away. ‘Just bruised.’

  They travelled all day. Once, when they paused, they heard a hunting horn and the baying of a dog. It was the governor Sir William Berkeley’s hounds on the track, hunting Indians would be the colonists’ great sport this season.

  They crossed the river at once, the children riding on the shoulders of the men, the women wading through chest-high, rapid-flowing water without a whisper of complaint, and crossed it again, then Attone led them on at a steady run.

  John was in the rear, helping the old men and women keep up, carrying burdens for them. Suckahanna had told no-one of what had passed between her and her husband, but she did not need to speak. Everyone could see that the Eagle was not at the side of his friend, not at the side of his wife. Everyone could see that he was a dead man to Attone, to Suckahanna, as surely as if he had gone into Jamestown and fought like a brave and died like a hero. So they let him carry their goods or hold them steady in the river as if he were a rock or a tree, or something of use. But they did not speak to him, nor smile at him, nor even look into his eyes.

  All day they travelled as Attone led them closer to the sea, where the mosquitoes rose in clouds from the sodden grass and reeds and the trees bowed down low over dark, silty, salty water. At night they found some ground only a little higher than the tidewash. ‘Here,’ Attone said. ‘Make shelters but no fires.’

  An old woman died in the night, and they piled a heap of stones over her face.

  ‘We move on,’ Attone said.

  All day they travelled at that punishing pace. An old man and an old woman stopped at the side of the trail and said they would go no further. Attone left them with a bow and arrow to do what damage they could to the pursuers, and with a tiny sliver of sharpened bark to open their veins rather than be captured. None of them stopped to say goodbye. The safety of the People was greater than the farewells of individuals. Attone wanted to get the People away.

  On the third day they reached a small hill deep inside the swamp and Attone gave the order that they could rest. There was nothing to eat except some dried flour which they mixed cold with the marshy water. Attone sent out scouts, empty-bellied, to go down the trail and see if they were followed. When they returned and said that the trails were safe he sent them out again. Only when the third party had come back on the fifth day did he say that the women could light fires and start to collect food and the men could go hunting.

  ‘What happens now?’ John asked one of the old women.

  ‘We live here,’ she said.

  ‘In the middle of a foul swamp?’

  She gave him a look which told him as clearly as words that she despised his weakness. ‘In the middle of a foul swamp,’ she said.

  Summer 1644, England

  Alexander’s predictions seemed correct. Through the spring and early summer gossip, wild surmise and news filtered back to London, and finally to Lambeth, of small battles all around the country and then finally, in July, a dreadful battle at Marston Moor. Alexander wrote to Hester:

  I cannot come out to see you, I am so busy with the demands of the ordnance. There has been a major battle in Yorkshire and it has gone the way of Parliament. I hear that Prince Rupert has met Cromwell himself, and it was Cromwell that triumphed. In haste … Alexander.

  Hester waited for news for another few days and then one of her neighbours rapped on the door to say that she was going up to the House of Commons to see the king’s standards. ‘Forty-eight royal standards laid for all to see on the bar of the House,’ she said. ‘I’ll take Johnnie along with me. The boy should see it.’

  Johnnie shook his head. ‘Is Prince Rupert’s standard taken?’ he asked.

  ‘You shall see it,’ the woman promised. ‘Stained with his own blood.’

  Johnnie’s brown eyes grew bigger in his pale face. ‘I don’t want to see it,’ he said stubbornly, and then remembered his manners. ‘But thank you very much for inviting me, Mrs Goodall.’

  She bridled for a moment. ‘I hope you’re not siding with the enemy?’ she said sharply. ‘The king has forced us to this battle and now he is defeated and good riddance to him.’

  Hester stepped forwards and laid her hand on her stepson’s shoulder. ‘He’s still the king,’ she said.

  Mrs Goodall looked angrily at her. ‘Some say that a king who is his people’s woe is no king. The law that says he is king says that he rules for our good, not for our regret. If he does not please us then he is no king at all. There are those who are saying that he should die in one of his bitter battles and we would be a happier land without him.’

  ‘Then his son would be king,’ Hester said steadily. ‘There would still be a king.’

  ‘Of course you were at court,’ the woman remarked pointedly. ‘Enriched by the pack of them.’

  ‘I worked there as many did,’ Hester said. She sounded defensive and her hand tightened on Johnnie’s shoulder as if to draw courage from his narrow little bones. ‘But I have taken neither one side nor the other. All I have wanted from the beginning is peace.’

  ‘So do we all,’ the woman agreed. ‘And there can be no peace with that man or his son on the throne again.’

  ‘You may be right,’ Hester said, swiftly stepping back and drawing Johnnie back with her. ‘Please God we shall have peace at last and our men can come home.’

  October 1644, England

  On a cold day in the middle of October, Alexander Norman rode to Lambeth between frosty hedges on icy tracks. Frances was on the look-out for him and ran out into the stable yard with her cape around her shoulders to take his horse and send Alexander into the parlour, to the warmth of the fire.

  Hester had mulled wine to greet him. He took a deep draught and set it down. At once Hester knew that he had something important to say. ‘Is it peace?’ she asked. ‘Has the king surrendered?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s taken Salisbury, it looks like he’s rallying again. But it’s not that I came about. It is time for me to speak to you about another matter.’

  ‘Frances,’ Hester said, knowing at once what Alexander Norman meant.

  ‘Frances,’ he replied.

  ‘I wrote to her father,’ Hester said. ‘I did not tell him what you had said. But I told him of my worries about keeping her safe. I thought he might make some suggestion.’ She paused. ‘I have not had a reply. Nothing since that consignment of Indian goods and a barrel of plants.’

  ‘I don’t want to wait for his reply,’ Alexander said. ‘Whether it is for me or against me.’

  Hester nodded, taking in the determined to
ne. ‘Why now?’ she asked. ‘After waiting so long?’

  ‘Because the girl is seventeen next year, because I am fifty-five next year, because peace is as far away as ever. If she waits for peace to come she will lose her young womanhood. She might have to wait another four years, she might wait twenty.’

  ‘Is that what they’re saying in the Tower?’

  ‘They’re saying that the king will do anything and everything before he surrenders. He’s suffered some bitter defeats and he’s still summoning help from the Irish, from the Scots, from the French. Nothing will stop him, no defeat can stop him. He has to be king if he is anything. And he has nothing to lose by fighting and fighting forever. And Parliament cannot stop without his surrender. Lord Manchester said it himself in the House of Parliament – they have to go on fighting until the king is completely and utterly defeated, or they are lost. The two sides – King and Parliament – have made the stakes so high that one of them has to be completely defeated, there is no middle course for either any more.’

  ‘I see that,’ Hester said.

  ‘He has taken Salisbury this week and he still holds Oxford. As they go into winter quarters nothing is decided. I thought Marston Moor would be the end of the war but nothing will end it until Parliament is routed and the members hanged for treason, or the king dead.’

  Out of habit Hester glanced at the closed door. ‘Hush.’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘It’s widely said now. People in London think there’s no stopping him, no dealing with him, and the mood is getting bitter. But until he’s either killed in battle or victorious the war cannot end. I have orders for barrels for gunpowder which will supply the army for the next ten years. It will be a long war, Hester. You cannot doubt it.’

  Hester poured him another glass of mulled wine.

  ‘So I am asking for your permission to propose marriage to her,’ he said. ‘If you refuse me permission I shall wait until she is twenty-one and can please herself.’

  Hester sighed. ‘You can ask her now,’ she said. ‘I promised her grandfather that I would care for her and keep her safe, and before God I cannot see how to keep her safe in these times. The garden earns nothing, and the rarities are hidden away and we have nothing to show, and no visitors to show it to. I can barely feed her, we live off fruit and vegetables from the garden. If I could pack her away safely like the precious rarities to bring out when peace comes I would do so. You can ask her, Cousin Norman, and I will abide by her decision.’

  She saw his face light up like a young man’s in a blaze of joy. ‘And do you know how she thinks of me?’ he asked. ‘You and she are very close. How does she speak of me?’

  ‘With great affection,’ Hester said. ‘But whether she loves you as a father or a friend I can’t say. And I’ve never asked. I was hoping, perhaps, that I would never have to ask. If she had met a young man, or if John had come home, or if the war ended …’ She turned away from a dozen regrets. ‘I’ll go and fetch her.’

  Frances was in the stable yard, pumping water into a bucket for Alexander’s horse.

  ‘Your uncle wants to see you,’ Hester said abruptly. She had to restrain herself from drawing the girl to her, smoothing her hair, holding her once more. ‘In the parlour.’

  Frances heaved the full bucket into the stable and shut the door. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  Hester kept her face pleasantly uninformative. ‘He wants to ask you something,’ she said. ‘You must answer however you wish, Frances. Please remember that. Answer however you wish. And think about it. No need for haste.’

  The girl looked puzzled and then turned towards the house.

  In the parlour Alexander found that his throat was so tight that he could hardly breathe. As the door opened he turned around and saw Frances. She put her cape over the back of one of the chairs. She was plainly dressed in a warm gown of grey and there was a thread of hay in her hair. He took her hands.

  ‘You’re cold,’ he said.

  ‘I was watering your horse.’

  ‘You should not have done that. I thought Joseph was in the yard.’

  ‘He has too much to do. We have lost all our garden boys. Johnnie and I have to help. I don’t mind it.’

  His fingers again felt the calluses on her hands. ‘I don’t want you doing hard work.’

  She smiled. ‘Mother said you wanted to ask me something?’

  Now it came to it Alexander found that he could barely speak. ‘I do.’

  She said nothing, waited for him. He drew her to the chair before the fire, and when she was seated he remained awkwardly standing before her. Then it was the most natural thing in the world to drop to one knee and take her cold little hand between his two palms and say gently: ‘Frances, I have loved you since you were a little girl and I would like you to be my wife.’

  All the prepared speech he had rehearsed on the long, cold ride beside the wintry river went from his head. He forgot to caution her against accepting him, he forgot to promise her that he would always be her friend even if he could not be her husband, he forgot all the things he had thought he would say. He just waited for her answer.

  She smiled at once, as if he had brought her a ribbon of exceptional magnificence. ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

  He could hardly believe that she assented so easily. At once he wanted to warn her against the wrong decision. ‘But I am much older than you, you should take time to think, to talk to your mother, perhaps to write to your father …’

  She leaned towards him and her arms came around his neck. He felt the warmth of her breath on his cheek and he drew her close and at once knew desire, and a passionate sense of protectiveness.

  ‘I don’t need to ask anyone,’ she said very quietly. ‘I thought you would never ask me. I have been waiting for what seems like forever. I have always known what I would say.’

  Winter 1644, Virginia

  Winter clamped down on the coastal plain of Virginia as if it had taken sides in the war and was in savage alliance with the colonists. All the food stores of the Powhatan had been looted or fired, there was not enough to eat and even the skills of the women could not feed the tribe from the fish and crabs on the shoreline or the frozen berries left on the trees. The braves went out hunting every day and came back with duck and geese shot on their migrating journey southward. The meat was shared with strict fairness and then mothers gave their portion privately to their children and the old people pretended that they were not hungry.

  When they had started the war they had thought that it would be over in one great rush – as battles generally were. There was a persistent belief that the white people would simply go, back to where they came from, especially since they always spoke of that other place as ‘home’, and talked of it with longing. Why would a man abandon his own fields, his own woods, his own game, and scratch a life on the edge of a strange river? If things went badly for him why would he not take one of the great ships and go, as easily and as unexpectedly as he had come?

  Of all the questions Opechancanough had put to John he had never asked him if the colonists would leave if they were defeated – the question never arose in the chief’s mind. He knew that land which had been won in a battle could be lost in a battle. He knew that a newly arrived people could be easily dislodged. It never occurred to him until this terrible winter that the white people would renege on their promise to move on, on their promise that they wanted only a small patch of land at Jamestown, and then their promise that they would settle a narrow strip by the river and live in peace with their neighbours.

  Opechancanough did not expect men to be honest. He himself had promised peace with a smile on his face and twice gone to war. But he did not expect the depth and consistency of duplicity that the white people brought to the virgin earth. He did not expect their determination, and to his death he never understood their greed.

  In the little village there was a strong sense that everything had gone wrong. The first attack had been a victory but since then
they had been hunted like frightened hares. Hidden now in the swamps in midwinter they were safe enough but there was a growing fear that the swamps might be all that was left for them, that only the arid land, the brackish water, the desolate and barren places would be left for the People who had been proud to walk safe on their footpaths through fertile woods.

  John’s share of the food stuck in his throat. He did not go hunting with the braves, he was not invited. He cleared the land around the temporary village with the women and with the old people, keeping his head low and scraping the earth with his hoeing stick, dropping the precious seeds safely into the earth and covering them up. He felt as if he had died on the raid on that little farmhouse and that it was his ghost who worked in the row behind Suckahanna and humbly lay in her little house at night. She did not reject him, she did not invite him. She did not by one gesture or one glance show that she saw him at all. She carried herself with simple dignity as a widow who has lost her man, and John in her shadow found that he was wishing that he had died before seeing that beautiful, loving face look away from him and those dark, veiled eyes go blind.

  He thought she might grow kinder to him if he worked without complaint and lay on the floor of her house at night like a dog, like a hunting dog which has been beaten into submission. But she stepped over him when she rose in the morning and went to her prayers in the icy water as if he were a log on the floor. She went past him without disdain, without a glance that might offend him, without a look that might open up a conversation between them, even if it were to be a quarrel. She acted as if he were a dead man, a lost man, a ghost, and as the months went by Tradescant felt that he was lost indeed.

  He went to find Attone, who was setting a fish trap by the river and watching the flow of the rising flood water over the markers at the riverbank.

  ‘Can I speak with you?’ John asked humbly.

  His former friend glanced at him and then away as if the sight of John displeased him. ‘What?’