Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  A tobacco ship called in at the quay to load their crop the next day and John sent a note to Hester at Lambeth and packed his seeds and roots into a watertight barrel addressed to her.

  Dear Wife,

  I hope this reaches you in good health and fortune. I am on my way to Jamestown after many months living in the forest. I have no money. Please send a note of credit for me to draw twenty pounds for my board and lodging and journey home. I shall come home as soon as I receive the money.

  John flinched a little at the bareness of the note but he did not feel he could, in all conscience, offer any explanation or any reassurance of love. He feared that perhaps Hester would be hard-pressed to find twenty pounds to pay into a London goldsmith so that the note of credit could be good in Virginia, but he could not bring himself to offer advice as to what she might sell from the collection. He had been too long away. He did not know if she had been able to keep the collection safe. He did not even know for certain that she was still at the Lambeth address. He felt as if he were pitching a rope into darkness and hoping that someone on an unseen quayside might catch it and haul him in. He paused before signing his name. If anyone would haul him in, it would be Hester.

  I trust you, Hester, and when I come home I shall thank you for your care of me and mine.

  He signed his name and ran down to the wooden pier and thrust the note at the captain. ‘Please see that she receives it,’ he said. ‘I am trapped here unless she can send me my fare home.’ He looked at the ship. ‘Unless I could work a passage?’

  The captain laughed in his face. ‘Work your passage? You’re a seaman, are you?’

  ‘No,’ John said.

  ‘If you want to go home, mister, you’ll have to pay for your voyage, same as anyone.’

  ‘She’ll reward you for bringing the note,’ John promised him. ‘Please see that she receives it.’

  The captain tucked it carelessly into his jacket. ‘Oh aye,’ he said and shouted to the sailors to let go.

  The current of the river caught the ship and she pulled away from the quayside. John watched the sails unfurl and heard the shouted orders and the creaks of the rope and timbers as the ship got underway.

  ‘How long before you hear?’ the planter asked him.

  ‘It can’t be quicker than four months,’ John said. ‘A voyage there and back, if she has the money, that is.’

  The man grinned. ‘I could use a hand to work the crop,’ he said.

  John nodded. Labour was notoriously hard to find in Virginia. He would have to be a hired hand until Hester sent him a note of credit and he could become a gentleman again.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But I have to go to Jamestown first. I have a promise to keep.’

  John saw the governor for a brief snatched moment as the great man strode from the new assembly room to the governor’s mansion. John hobbled after him in his ill-fitting shoes. ‘Sir William?’

  The young man turned, took in John’s humble clothes and strolled on. ‘Yes?’ he threw over his shoulder.

  ‘I am John Tradescant, gardener to the king.’ John followed him. ‘I was planting my headright up the river when the Powhatan saved me from starving. I lived with them for years. I have come to Jamestown to ask for clemency for Opechancanough.’

  Sir William blinked at the extraordinary story and hesitated. ‘Clemency?’

  ‘He’s an old man, and he could see no way forward for his people. If they had been allowed to settle fairly after the first uprising he would not have felt so driven. They’re ready to make peace now, a lasting peace, if we could only give them the land they need.’

  ‘You are a spokesman for them?’ Sir William asked. ‘You’re on their side?’

  Almost imperceptibly a couple of soldiers from the assembly doors edged a little closer.

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘They have expelled me. I am an Englishman and as soon as I can I shall return to London. But I owe them a debt of gratitude. They took me in and they fed me when I was near to death of starvation. I should like to repay my debt to them and indeed, Sir William, I think they have not been treated fairly by us.’

  The young man hesitated for only a moment, then he shook his head. ‘This is a new country,’ he said. ‘We are exploring all the time, south and north and west. The Powhatan, and the other savages, have to know that this is our country now, and if they fight against us, if they break the peace, then death is the only response.’

  ‘The peace was here before we arrived,’ John said quickly. ‘The country was here before we came. The Powhatan were here before we came. Some might say that it was their country.’

  Sir William looked sharply at John. ‘Then that man would be a traitor to England and the king of England,’ he said. ‘You say you were servant to the king himself. He’s not a man who accepts half-loyalty, and neither do I.’

  John thought for a moment of his long-distant court life and the king who could not distinguish between half-loyalty and play-acting and reality. ‘I am faithful to the king,’ he said. ‘But it is a bad example to kill the king of the Powhatan. He should be like all kings – inviolate.’

  ‘This is not a king,’ Sir William said with sudden impatience. ‘This is a savage. You insult His Majesty by the comparison. The person of a king is sacred, he stands only below God himself. This dirty old Indian is a savage and we shall hang him.’

  He turned abruptly from John and walked away.

  ‘He was a king to us only a few years ago,’ John said staunchly. ‘Pocahontas was a princess. She was invited to London and treated as a princess of royal blood. I know. I was there and I saw it. The Powhatan then were a free and equal people and their royal family was as sacred as ours.’

  The governor shook his head. ‘Not any more,’ he said simply. ‘They’re less than animals to us now. And if you choose to go back to them, then tell them this: that there is no place for them in this country. Tell them they will have to go –’ he gestured ‘– south or further west and keep on travelling. It’s our land now and we won’t share it.’

  Autumn 1645, England

  Hester received John’s letter asking for his fare home in the second week of September. The sailor who brought it was given a penny for his trouble and some thin soup at the kitchen door. Hester took the letter into the rarities room – the tiny fire was burning in there and the light from the tall Venetian windows was good. But she also had a superstitious sense that this was the rarest thing of all – a letter from her husband.

  It was crumpled from its resting place inside someone’s jacket and grubby as if it had been dropped somewhere and forgotten for a little while. Hester looked at the folded outside of the paper and the tiny splash of wax which sealed it, as if she would read every inch of the paper as well as the message inside. Then she sat at the desk that was set in the window for the convenience of artists who might come to draw the specimens in the collection, and broke the seal.

  Dear Wife,

  I hope this reaches you in good health and fortune. I am on my way to Jamestown after many months living in the forest.

  Hester paused. She had thought John was living in a planter’s house, such as were illustrated in the books about Virginia. A little house made of half-sawn timbers with wood shingles for a roof. What could he mean about living in the forest?

  I have no money. Please send a note of credit for me to draw twenty pounds for my board and lodging and journey home. I shall come home as soon as I receive the money.

  Hester raised her head from the smudged words. The Virginia venture had ended then, as she had said it would, in bankruptcy and disaster. There was no profitable crop of tobacco. There was no refuge from the uncertainty of a country at war. John had failed completely, failed so badly that he could not even come home unless she sent him his passage money.

  I trust you, Hester, and when I come home I shall thank you for your care of me and mine.

  Hester pressed her finger to her lips and then put it down, as if making a
fingerprint in sealing wax on the J at the end of the letter. John was coming home to her. She found she cared not at all that he was coming home penniless, without plantation, or tobacco, or pride. She cared not at all that he was trapped in a foreign land and could not even earn his passage home. All that mattered was that John was coming home, at last.

  She sat only for a few minutes in the light of the window and then she set to raising the money to send him at once. Twenty pounds was a substantial sum. Fortunately the letter had come in September, the very time for the sale of tulip bulbs, and the order for John Lambert had been despatched only a week before. Any day now she expected his payment.

  Hester threw a shawl over her head and went out to the terrace. Johnnie was working with Joseph, lifting and labelling the tulip bulbs from their beds. When she called him and he looked up she saw his face was still dark with sorrow.

  Johnnie’s hero Prince Rupert had failed to keep Bristol for the royalists though he had promised his king he would hold it for months. The wildest rumour was circulating: that Rupert had played the king false on purpose. They were saying that he and his brother, the Elector Palatine, now eating his dinner in London at the expense of Parliament having stolidly changed his coat and abandoned his uncle, had conspired all along to have one brother on each side so that they would profit whichever side won. Some people even said that Rupert hoped for the throne of England himself.

  Ever since the news had come in of the fall of Bristol Johnnie had come down to breakfast with red eyes, and he had been quiet and moody all the day. When Hester wanted him for work in the garden she had to find him first, and half the time he would be down at the little lake, sitting in the rowing boat, adrift in the middle, slumped in despair over the dripping oars.

  ‘How are the tulips?’ she asked.

  He nodded, as if he could not take joy even in them. ‘They’ve done well. For every bulb that went in, we are raising three. It’s been a good year for tulips, if for nothing else.’

  Joseph nodded. ‘I’ve never seen such a crop,’ he said. ‘Something’s going right at least.’

  ‘More than one thing,’ Hester said. She tied the ends of the shawl crosswise around her waist and thought it felt like a tight and loving embrace. ‘I have a letter here from Virginia.’

  The shadow left Johnnie’s face and he jumped to his feet from the bed of tulips. ‘He’s coming home?’

  ‘He’s coming home,’ she assented. ‘At last.’

  The waiting was the hardest time of all. She had the money from John Lambert for his order of tulips, and then she took some old Roman coins from the rarities room and offered them for sale to a London goldsmith. The price he gave her was little more than theft but Hester realised that portable treasures were flooding on to the market as one grand family after another tried to survive the war years. She went to Alexander Norman to borrow the rest of the money and took the whole amount to the goldsmith who was known to give and receive credit for Virginia. He signed a note of credit for twenty pounds to John Tradescant by name and then Hester had to take it down to the London docks and find a ship sailing to Virginia.

  A vessel was waiting to go, almost ready to cast off: the Makepeace, going to Virginia by the southern route and stopping at the Sugar Islands.

  ‘I have to see the captain,’ Hester said to one of the sailors. She was jostled by a family throwing their bundles on board and pushing their way towards the gangplank. ‘Or a trustworthy gentleman.’

  ‘We’ve got a brace of vicars,’ the man said rudely. ‘And half a dozen cavaliers. Take your pick.’

  ‘I need a gentleman to assist me,’ Hester said stoutly. ‘I shall see one of the clerical gentlemen.’

  The sailor laughed, turned his head and shouted below. Hester smoothed her cape and wished that she had brought Johnnie with her, or even allowed Alexander Norman to come too. Eventually a white-haired man looked down from the ship’s side and said quietly, as if he would not raise his voice over the din of the ship, ‘I am the Reverend Walter de Carey. May I help you, madam?’

  Hester stepped quickly up the swaying gangplank and held out her hand. ‘How do you do, I am Mrs Tradescant, wife of John Tradescant of the Ark, Lambeth.’

  He bowed over her hand. ‘I am honoured,’ he said.

  ‘I am sorry to ask a favour of a stranger but my husband has been –’ Hester paused for a moment. ‘Plant collecting in Virginia and finds himself without money. I have a note of credit for him but I need to find a trustworthy gentleman to take it to Virginia and give it to him.’

  The man smiled wearily. ‘I am so little trusted that I have been expelled from my church and the blacksmith stands in my pulpit and tells my congregation what revelation he has gleaned that week from his forge fire,’ he said. ‘I was twenty years in my vicarage and I baptised every single one of those young men and women who now tell me that I am in league with the Antichrist and a worshipper of the whore of Babylon. They would not call me a trustworthy man.’

  Mutely, Hester held out the sealed and folded paper. ‘If you were twenty years in the vicarage and a good parish priest then you are the man for me,’ she said. ‘These are hard times of change for us all. Will you help me try to bring my family back together? This is my husband’s passage money home.’

  He hesitated for only a moment and then he took the paper. ‘Forgive me, I am too absorbed in my own sorrows. I will take the paper; but how will I find your husband?’

  ‘He’ll find you,’ Hester said with certainty. ‘He’ll be waiting for this. All you have to do is to tell people in Jamestown that you are looking for him and he will find you. Whereabouts are you going in Virginia?’

  ‘I hope to settle there and found a school,’ the vicar said. ‘The times are against men who believe in the king and God in this country. I trust that the new world will be a refuge for men of steady faith. Half this ship is filled with men like me, who cannot bear the new rule of Parliament and the wild heresies of madmen and self-taught preachers and the like in our own churches.’

  ‘My husband left at the outbreak of the war,’ Hester said. ‘He could not bear to watch the country being torn apart, and it was tearing him apart too.’

  ‘He will come home to difficult times,’ the vicar remarked. ‘The fighting may be nearly over, but the bitterness of these years will not be easily restored. And what is to become of the king in the hands of such a crew?’

  There was a shout from the bridge and an answering shout from the shore.

  ‘I must go,’ Hester said hurriedly. ‘I do thank you for accepting the letter for John. He will do all he can to help you when he meets you, I know he will. He will be grateful.’

  The vicar bowed. Hester turned for the gangplank and went down it as the lumpers on the dockside shouted to the sailors on the ship and finally cast off from shore.

  ‘God speed,’ Hester called to the ship. ‘Tell him I am waiting.’

  The vicar put his hand to his ear, so Hester waved with a smile on her face and said more quietly, so he would be certain not to hear, ‘Tell him I love him.’

  Autumn 1645, Virginia

  John found that he had learned patience from the Powhatan, as well as the skill of living off the land. When he knew for certain that nothing he could do or say could save Opechancanough from death he went back to the farmer at the edge of the forest and agreed with him that he would work four days a week for his food and bed and a pittance of a wage, and three days of the week he would be free to go collecting in the near-virgin woods around the plantation.

  Only a year before he would have been irritable, longing for the ship to come to release him from this service so that he could go home. But John found a sense of peace. He felt this was an interlude between his life with Suckahanna and the Powhatan, and the return – which must be a difficult experience – to Hester and the Ark at Lambeth.

  In the days when he worked in the fields he was employed in harvesting the tobacco crop, taking the leaves to the dryin
g sheds, baling them up and then loading them on to the ships which stopped at the little quay as their last port of call before setting off across the Atlantic.

  In the days when he was free to roam he took his duckskin satchel, now properly cleaned, and went out into the woods with nothing more than a knife, a trowel, a bow across his shoulder and a couple of arrows in his quiver. It was a secret life he lived once he was out of sight of the planter’s house. As soon as he reached the shelter of the trees he stopped and shed his heavy clothes and kicked off his painful shoes. He wrapped them and hid them in a tree, just as Suckahanna the little girl used to do with her servant’s gown, and then he went barefoot and naked but for his buckskin through the forest and felt himself to be a free man once again.

  Even after his years in the wilderness he had not lost his sense of awe at the strangeness and beauty of this country. He longed to bring it home entire, but he forced himself to choose the best of the shrubs and trees that he found on his long, loping surveys. He found a type of daisy that he thought had never been seen before, a big-flowered daisy with curious petals. He dug up half a dozen roots and packed them into damp soil, hoping they would survive until he had a ship for home. He took cuttings of the vine which Suckahanna had planted at his doorstep all that long time ago. He recognised it now. It was a favourite of hers: a sweet woodbine which some people called honeysuckle, but growing here with long scarlet flowers like fingers. He had a new convolvulus which he would name for himself, ‘Tradescantia’. He found a foxglove which was like the English variety but stronger-coloured and bigger in shape. He potted up a Virginian yucca, a Virginian locust tree, a Virginian nettle tree. He found a Virginian mulberry which reminded him of the silkworms and the mulberry trees at Oatlands Palace. He found a wonderful pink spiderwort, the only flower his father had put his own name to, and kept the corms dry and safe, hoping that they would grow in memory of his father. He dug up the dry roots of Virginian roses, certain that they would grow differently alongside their English cousins if he could only get them safe home to Lambeth.