Unfortunately Captain Smith spoiled Newport’s change of heart and increased his own unpopularity among the gentlemen adventurers by an act that no one could approve but himself.
Before the boats set off from Weromancdmoco at dawn following the night of revelry and terror, a messenger came from the Princess Pocahontas. He bore a leather bag which he was to deliver to Captain John Smith with these words: ‘Beloved, your country, you have said, displays the heads of your traitors on the poles of your wigwams. This was your traitor, not my father’s. Do with him according to your custom.’ In the bag was the scalp, neatly taken, still soft and bloody, of Ratcliffe’s man.
Captain Smith accepted the bag gravely, sent an appropriate message of thanks and continuing devotion to his young admirer and on arriving back at James Town, took the bag over to Mary and Margaret where he delivered it to Captain Ratcliffe in the presence of Captain Newport. He explained shortly how he had come by it and left before the ex-President, chalk-faced and trembling and the sea captain, red with anger, were able to speak.
Naturally the tale went through the settlement like a thunderstorm on a hot summer’s day. Many were horrified to hear of the murderous plot, others to discover how and why it had failed. Alec made both friends and enemies for his part in the outcome.
‘I am both famous and infamous,’ he protested to Mistress Sugden. ‘I sought neither, only to add to the safety of the settlement. An I were a free man I’d have a mind to go back home.’
‘But seeing they have outlawed thee, thou canna,’ she answered, bluntly. ‘Yet thou hads’t letters, dids’t not? Can thy friends not move for a pardon?’
She had heard the story of the tavern death but nothing of the later killing of the warden of Eilan Donan. Nor of Kate. Never of Kate, Alec told himself. And now the fool masquerader! Out of pity for the man’s agony, but also, he told himself angrily, out of contempt for his multiple misjudgement, that had put them all at risk.
Polly, who was spinning, heard this conversation.
‘There’s many say thou dids’t bravely,’ she interrupted, stopping her work to lean towards him over her spinning wheel. ‘It were an impudent young neer-do-weel as Anne and I know well—him and his friend that slimy Tucker. God rest his soul, I’d not will him those torments the Devil puts it into these heathen souls to—’
‘Hush, lass,’ her mother said, seeing she was working herself towards hysteria in her loving admiration of Alec’s courage and her loathing of his deed of mercy.
The girl recovered herself. She sat back, quietened but still looking at Alec with sad eyes.
‘What would the poor folk here do without thee and those few like thee?’ she asked in her gentle voice.
‘Better mayhap if I were away,’ Alec answered, turning from her. ‘But never fear, Poll. Those friends at home can be friends no more, so I must walk warily and ye two must help, since patience is not in my nature, God forgive me.’
He meant what he said and for this reason managed to avoid joining President Smith’s next and subsequent expeditions away from James Town.
These excursions were not punitive, nor exploring. They were simply in search of trade, to lay up sufficient food for the winter that was nearly upon them.
Alec’s refusal was accepted by the President, who had wished to engage the tall Scot for whom he had a great liking and so wished for his company. But he decided on consideration to meet Alec’s reluctance with consent because he was by his fishing a very valuable provider by now. What Master Scrivenor and his friends did for pleasure, Alec had made into a business and a prosperous one at that. Not only did his boats and men fish the waters of the Bay and even gather sturgeon now and then in the open sea, but having eaten Powhatan’s oysters and seen the string of pearls about his neck, he consulted Will Trent and went prospecting for oyster beds on the many small islands just offshore. He was soon rewarded. Another industry was laid down, men were found who understood shellfish, had cultivated or watched others cultivate oysters near Colchester and lobsters in Lyme Bay.
Captain Newport planned to leave James Town in December of that year, taking Captain Ratcliffe, whom he had kept a close prisoner for the latter’s safety since the unhappy events at the crowning of Powhatan.
There were no more attempts upon the life of President Smith, due more, perhaps, to the latter’s continuous long absences in the cause of trade than to any slackening in Ratcliffe’s desire and scheming for revenge, not only on his own account but on that of the young man who had found hideous death in place of the expected reward.
Captain Smith’s absences, therefore, were much approved by Captain Newport, who was a fair-minded man and had to acknowledge that a good stock of food was being laid up to carry the settlement through the winter. Trade would continue, for Smith insisted upon taking corn in exchange for much trash and a little valuable steel and copper. For the most part the Indians, prompted by Powhatan, refused to part with corn they said they could not spare. Smith insisted, the Indians tried to attack, to ambush, to snare, even to poison him and his crews, but all failed. The man’s energy was unlimited, his resource, his courage were unbreakable. Always his determination defeated a people who were totally unused to such a quality. In the end Powhatan left his capital rather than agree that he could by no means send these unwanted foreigners away. But he did not succeed even then in depriving them of the trade they sought for Pocahontas defied her father and Captain Smith sailed away from the deserted Weromancomoco with the corn she had preserved for him.
The President was planning still more ventures for food when Captain Newport left for home. Newport took with him as well as ex-President Ratcliffe, a good cargo of glass, tar, pitch, sassafras, cured furs, dried and salted fish, a few pearls gathered by Alec, samples of cotton and tobacco and the usual consignment of clapboards. Also letters from several of the settlers and an account of the last year’s events written in flamboyant style by John Smith.
Alec’s letter to Master Angus Leslie dealt solely with business matters. He praised President Smith’s administration and the present Council, especially Matthew Scrivenor. He asked that if possible no more idlers, dreamers or criminals be allowed to emigrate to James Town ‘… for we have our fill of them, these drones that do no work, but eat our stores. They will not hunt nor fish, dig nor plant. They lie in the sun all summer and sit by their fires all winter—’
To Francis, Alec wrote in deep sorrow and shame but very briefly, for the matter lay now well in the past and there were no means to undo his act and its result. He must express humiliating thanks for Francis’s kindness to his bastard son but he saw no likelihood of ever seeing the boy. He grieved for this end to their friendship. He looked back upon it with love and abiding sorrow.
The writing of this letter, followed by the sight of Mary and Margaret passing away over the horizon of the great Atlantic, which many of the settlers besides Alec watched from Cape Henry, brought him to the lowest depths of depression he had yet reached since he landed on those alien shores. Master Scrivenor, seeing him so low, invited him, when they happened to berth their fishing boats at the same time, to take a meal with him.
‘Then I can hear thy complaints in private,’ he said, as they walked up from the hard together. ‘With John Smith away again the ordering of affairs falls on me. Not that I seek it or enjoy it,’ he added, with a grin that proved his sincerity’
Alec’s first impulse was to refuse the invitation, but his need for friendship was great, Scrivenor was only a few years his senior, the disasters of the last three years of his life pressed upon him unbearably. He continued to walk at his companion’s side until they reached the latter’s house. He went in with him and before the evening was out his story was told, with all its grim detail and sad, perplexing results.
Master Scrivenor was sympathetic. His own past was far from blameless but without lasting embarrassments. He, too, had killed in anger, though in a straight fight with an equal.
‘I was not p
roscribed, Sandy,’ he explained. ‘I just considered it was as well not to appear for a time. So here I am. The whole business being done in secret will by now be wholly forgotten.’
‘For that ye are most fortunate, Master Scrivenor. I’ll not dare risk an appearance in England nor Scotland either, till our Jamie maybe grants me a pardon. And who, knowing the sum of what I am guilty of, will dare put my name forward?’
‘Perhaps our Captain Newport?’
‘With Master Ratcliffe swearing I did murder his young follower most horribly?’
‘The President wrote his commendation of that action. It saved the fellow from worse torture and stopped a concerted attack upon our boats when the Indian blood lust was roused enough to make them bold.’
‘The President understands these folk,’ Alec said, moodily, still nursing his unhappiness. ‘He knows they speak louder and fiercer than they intend to act. His roughness, besides, hath grown upon him over the years he was a soldier and a prisoner in Turkey and the far parts of Europe. He will not complain to sleep in the snow if need be. He will work and travel all day and fight at the end of it. But the men complain and that loudly. I think he hath many enemies. Also I share the blame for that I killed a fellow countryman, while they sought leave to rescue the wretch in a concerted action.’
‘I do not fear for you,’ Master Scrivenor said, with a short laugh. ‘There’s no man here, not on thy side, who dare lift a hand against you. I know I would myself avoid such a quarrel.’
He spoke in jest, but kindly and though Alec’s face stiffened he merely said, ‘We have no possible cause of dispute, Master Scrivenor.’
‘Nay, Sandy, not so formal. We take too much pains here, where our lives give little excuse for it to preserve position and rank, as we might at home. Thou art Sandy Nimmo to all here, so I must be Mat Scrivenor, to thee at least, from now on.’
This friendly speech won Alec over far better than any argument. Mat who had procured some very potent liquor from the Indians, filled Alec’s beaker for a series of toasts to their friendship, the settlement, the confounding of Powhatan, the return of Captain Newport, the health of the President. And before they parted in a very maudlin state, they toasted themselves again and their future prospering.
Next morning Alec suffered the usual discomforts of his night’s drunkenness, but from that time he looked upon Mat Scrivenor as a friend and became reconciled to his future. Not simply with a wish to survive the continuing hardships of his outlandish life, but with a true resolve to make the colony expand, become a thriving offshoot of his homeland, independent, prosperous, free from the corruption, power and cruelty that together with his undoubted recklessness had engineered his downfall.
These conclusions, this determination, did not come to him all at once, nor even very consciously at any time. They developed as he sailed about the wide bay, raking fish from icy waters, landing it on a snow-covered stage, laying it up, gutted and pressed between layers of ice, for immediate use. Later, as the winter grew less severe, he had it salted down in the way he had devised the summer before and had now perfected.
Mat Scrivenor continually rallied him for his over-seriousness, his overbearing Scots temper, he called it, meaning not so much his sudden rages as those dour, close-lipped silences that he put down to pride.
‘I talk when I’ve ought to say,’ Alec answered him, smiling, for he could not take offence at such open-hearted teasing. ‘Hast never considered I am the only Scot among ye all? To us the English are all foreigners, and we to them.’ He added, with a short laugh, ‘Many of us just such devilish barbarians as these red-skins here.’
Mat demanded to know the meaning of these words, so one evening before the fire in his friend’s house Alec told him about the West Highlands, the chiefs of the septs and their overlords, the raids, the feuds, the slaughter of the innocent farming peasantry.
‘Not so different from our werowances and their great chief Powhatan and those other parcels of tribes that are his enemies lying in the country beyond the mountains and the waterfalls.’
‘Thou has suffered indeed, my poor Sandy,’ Mat said, all his cheerful joking manner subdued by real feeling for his friend.
But he could not be solemn for very long.
‘This lies all behind thee now,’ he insisted. ‘Now we must put our minds, the Council certainly, the President if he be returned, to this happy event we have corning to the settlement. Know you not Anne Burrows is to be wed to her John two weeks from now, and Joan Cook joins them at the altar with Tom Meadows.’
Alec laughed.
‘Dost think our Poll and her mother would leave me ignorant of such a great event? It means more to them than any other of the dangers of this place, of the world entire, I think.’
‘Is it so great a danger?’
Reminded of what he had told Mat in his evening of indiscretion Alec said gravely, ‘We have but one physician and no midwife, though Mistress Sugden hath the knowledge, I believe of animals.’
‘Are we not all animals under God? Women especially. But in His protection to hasten or delay our end according to His will?’
Alec was silent until Mat said, with his usual lightning change of mood, ‘Now why not make this a triple coupling? Polly Sugden would make thee an admirable wife and her mother would give a ready consent. She trusts her pretty daughter, but since our Rose is come among us with her airs and graces and her foibles and that hard bright eye for her own well-being, the men feel their deprivation far more keenly than they did before. We cease to be a conquering army on the march but dwindle into a peaceful homestead. So look for home comforts.’
‘I have a great affection for the Sugdens, all three,’ Alec said stubbornly. ‘But I can never marry Poll.’
Mat looked at him thoughtfully.
‘Thy heart is still in that cold and distant land of thine,’ he said. Still fixed upon that early love.’
‘I never loved Kate,’ Alec said, mistaking what his friend had said, for he did not remember that in his cups he had babbled of Janet Macllroy and his boyhood’s passion for her.
The double wedding was a great occasion. Everyone in the settlement attended except a few poor invalids and a small number of Ratcliffe’s disappointed men who still could not forego their aspirations nor control their envy of the present Council of young men, led, when he happened to be in James Town, by their arch enemy, President John Smith.
The President was there in person, to give away the two brides in the absence of their fathers. The Reverend Master Hunt performed the ceremony with rings provided by Mistress Forrest for her maid and by Captain Newport for Joan Cook. Before he sailed for home he had deposited a small store of such rings with the clergyman in anticipation of happy events, for he was quite determined to bring out more women to the settlement. He decided, quite rightly, that women were needed there as well as all other domestic animals, both for increase, for recreation and for a civilising and work-compelling influence such as Mistress Sugden and Mistress Forrest exercised.
On the great day the single church bell rang for an hour before the ceremonies began. The church was filled. Everyone made what effort they could to dress in their best, if they had any or could beg, borrow or steal some.
Anne wore a taffeta rose-pink gown, given to her by Mistress Forrest. It was somewhat faded by the Virginian sun and rather cold for the season, but she covered her neck and arms with a woollen shawl belonging to Mistress Sugden, made from the bleached wool of her former Yorkshire sheep.
Joan Cook, having but recently travelled from England with the object of making a home for herself in the New World, had brought a suitably modest, blue woollen skirt and an embroidered linen bodice with a close short ruff in the old fashion of Elizabeth’s reign. Both the young women had devised farthingales, made from bunched, dried reeds, to wear under their petticoats, which added to their dignity though not to their comfort, for they were not accustomed to such hampering garments and soon took them off when the
church service was over and the feasting began. ?
The Council were wise enough to provide a hunger-filling meal in the Town Hall at long trestle tables to which the populace had brought their own benches and stools. There was fish, both smoked and fresh, venison roast and broiled, and turkeys, supplied by some Indians of the Pamunkey tribe who were invited to the wedding as a reward.
Music was played during the feast by those who had disclosed their skill at the crowning of Powhatan. It was soon demanded again for dancing, when the tables were cleared away and the remaining scraps of food, where they had not been pilfered, were taken to the sick in their huts.
President Smith, as always on the lookout for what he called ‘garboils’, gave the usual speeches of congratulation and good wishes and then saw to it that the two happy couples slipped quietly away to their homes before any of the horseplay could begin that usually attended weddings at home. There was such a disparity of numbers between the bridal pairs and their well-wishers as they might well suffer injury instead of happiness.
‘There be some I have noticed would tear the roofs from over their heads in envy and lewd rage,’ Captain Smith remarked to Alec who was standing near the door of the Town Hall with Mat. ‘Even so sturdy and well-built a roof as those traitorous Dutchmen put on for John Laydon before they took their skills to Powhatan, God rot them!’
He was still fuming over this latest treachery. The great chief had sent for the Dutchmen to build him a house in the European style and they had, through fear or greed or some complicated plot, given their allegiance to the overlord. They had even, by lies and cunning, persuaded Councillor Peter Winne, a gentle, honest soul to supply them with fresh arms which they sent for to use in their own defence, but turned over to Powhatan.
Alec and Mat agreed with the President. They even followed, when the Hall was cleared, to act as bodyguard to the latter until he was safe in his dwelling. Then they roamed from group to group to join in the songs and dancing and general jollity with a watchful eye for trouble.
Over the Seas Page 18