Alec danced a formal measure with Mistress Forrest, but Mistress Sugden excused herself on the grounds that she was far too old for country sets and did not know the grand dance. But Polly was delighted to have Alec as partner and only sad that he took her out once only and then went about his former business of patrol.
There were others he and Mat met going about the same errand, appointed by Captain Smith, so after a time the two friends stood together, ready to part but reluctant to bring to an end an afternoon and evening of such unusual, simple, warm-hearted pleasure.
‘Mistress Rose was not in church,’ said Alec, following this thought further.
‘There is a truce between her and the parson. They keep each to his own territory and never speak, nor of one another to others. Each knowing the other to be a necessary member of our community.’
Alec laughed.
‘I would my father could hear these profanities!’ he cried. ‘He would call upon the Devil to take away his own and upon God to send a thunderbolt if the Devil delayed too long.’
‘A Scot of the old persuasion, thy father!’ laughed Mat. ‘I’ll go to the Devil and my mistress, Rose.’
Alec answered, ‘And I’ll to my mistress, Shallop Pearl, where she lies quiet on the water, awaiting me.’
Chapter Fifteen
One evening in March of that year, just before sundown, when the curling blue smoke from the chimneys began to fade into the darkening sky and candlelight to show in the windows of the houses, Will Trent came home with a bunch of foot-long corpses, dangling by their long naked tails from each hand.
Polly screamed. Mrs Sugden cried indignantly, ‘Rats! What ails thee. Will, to bring vermin into my kitchen! Out wi’ thee and burry them or burn.’
‘Rats,’ said Will, standing just inside the door and staring at Alec, who was mending nets at the other side of the room. ‘Rats be not native to this land. Know you that, Sandy?’
Alec dragged his mind back from his plans for the morrow’s fishing.
‘Not native?’ He put his nets aside and strode across to Will. ‘Where got ye these?’
‘Snared,’ answered Will. ‘In the runs I have found that go underground all about the town.’
‘We have none in this house!’ Mistress Sugden protested, but the men disregarded her.
‘Not native, say ye,’ Alec went on. ‘Then off the ships?’
‘They multiply fast,’ Will said indifferently, letting the limp bodies fall to the ground. ‘As you’d expect with all this wealth of corn our busy President exacts from most unwilling hands.’
‘Good God!’ Alec cried. The stores! Doth no one mind these great stores we have drawn upon through all the long winter?’
‘Ask that of thy friends the Councillors,’ Will told him sourly.
But he obeyed his sister’s repeated order to remove the vermin. In fact he took them to his friend Opecancanough, werowance of the Pamunkeys, where they were accepted as a delicacy. Will spent much of his time now with this chief, sharing his anger and humiliation at the way Captain Smith had treated him. It was out of malice that Will had shown Alec this fresh enemy in the settlement.
An enemy indeed, who had betrayed himself to the Council at about the time Alec had been alerted by Will Trent. President Smith, in ordering a fresh arrangement of the casks of corn so as to re-assess the daily ration, had found, to his horror, that a substantial amount had become wetted by melting snow falling on the casks and had gone rotten, while other casks had been gnawed through, scattered and eaten by rats.
The loss was considerable. The ration, instead of being increased, had to be restricted. Once more the idleness and incompetence of the many had mastery over the exertions of the few. It was useless for Captain Smith to rage against the keepers of the storehouse who had failed to prevent rain and snow from getting in. All he could do was to put the settlement on short commons and plan fresh expeditions for trade that he knew already would be fruitless.
But at this juncture, as twice before, succour came sailing into the James River, not this time under Captain Christopher Newport, their old friend, but with Captain Samuel Argall upon his first visit to the struggling settlement.
He was young, he was energetic and sanguine. He brought stores of all kinds, which he distributed; even some luxuries among them, such as wine and spices.
More important than all this, he brought news of various kinds. In the first place he had come, he told the Council, by a new route, keeping only a little to the south of west after leaving the English Channel, so that he passed near the islands of the Azores and found the north-east trades to push him past Bermuda and so to the Virginian coast. It made a passage of little more than five weeks instead of Newport’s long voyages round by the Canaries, the Cape Verdes and the West Indies.
This was excellent news to the Council, for it meant a closer communication than before with the mother country, a more frequent exchange of news and of persons, a livelier trade. There were many in the settlement who would have chosen to return if they could do so without fear of punishment or persecution by the Law or by their family connections.
In addition to this Captain Argall brought news of a great assembling of ships in Falmouth, due to leave there in June with several hundred new settlers, men and women, domestic animals, farm implements; the men skilled in various trades and above all, in Sea Venture, a Governor for the colony appointed in London.
‘To solve all our quarrels and envy and various ambitions,’ Mat Scrivenor told Alec. ‘Poor gentleman, he little knows what awaits him!’
‘To dispose of our valiant John Smith, I’ll be bound,’ said Alec sadly, ‘who hath striven as ten men and endured hardship no ten men would easily suffer and still live.’
‘His day here is over,’ Mat said, soberly.
Alec was alarmed.
‘Whisht, man, ye speak rashly! There be those—’
‘Aye, there be many. We need no longer heed them. Governor Gates, when he arrives with his ten ships and his several hundred souls, will smother our little close, unfriendly, unskilled, unfortunate community in a suffocating embrace.’
‘You speak with too much bitterness, Mat! What hath Captain Argall said to bring up this excess of bile?’
So Master Scrivenor described to the best of his recollection the new patent that had been devised and presented to the London Company, henceforth to be named Virginia Company. It offered shares of stock at twelve pounds ten shillings each. It offered to planters and settlers a good house, food and all reasonable amenities in return for several years service to the Company at its settlement in James Town. Sir Thomas Smith in London remained at the head of the Company as its sole owner and director. A governor was to be appointed in London. He would supersede the present arrangement of Council and President.
‘I shall not personally regret it,’ Mat said, ‘for it is a great burden with little reward and no thanks at all. Moreover our President’s term will end this autumn and to my thinking, as I said, his usefulness here hath come to an end.’
But Alec shook his head sadly.
‘How ignorant they be at home,’ he said. ‘How little they conceive of our life here. And yet it is no worse than much I saw in the English countryside and those Scottish Highlands for the most part of my outlawry.’
‘City burghers and fine gentlemen,’ Mat scoffed. ‘What do they know of their native countryside? So how imagine this immensity of wildness? We have freedom, have we not? To speak ill of them without fear or favour? That is what it will be our privilege to make plain to Master Governor Gates.’
‘Not I,’ Alec laughed. ‘I’ll no join ye to beat my brains out on that wall. I’ll keep to my boats where the issue is between me and salt water. I know my place among the waves, and my smallness there.’
Matthew Scrivenor pressed his friend’s arm and left him. He was, on the whole, well pleased with Captain Argall’s account of movements in England. He did not share Alec’s affection for the President. T
he old mercenary, with his stories of the Turks, the middle Europeans, the battles, betrayals, imprisonments and escapes of his early life, aroused little admiration in Mat’s sophisticated mind. He hoped to find a more cultivated circle from among the several hundred companions of the large-scale expedition Captain Argall described. Sandy Nimmo was a godsend, indeed, his present fellow-councillors were pleasant enough, but if he were really to make his home in this place—Master Gates, surely already by now on his way by the new route, would make a decision easy.
No decision was required of him. He stayed, but not of his own choosing. He stayed, together with Councillor Waldo, Anthony Gosnold and several fishermen. But half of them stayed below ground in the ever-expanding cemetery and the rest below the waters of Chesapeake Bay.
Alec had gone down to the boats as usual that morning but had decided the weather was not proper for his purpose. He had noticed that Master Scrivener’s boat was not at her usual place, but had concluded he had taken her round to the main landing stage for better shelter. It was not until evening that he heard the boat with the ten men in it had gone out and had not returned.
Mistress Forrest had come inquiring to Mistress Sugden.
‘My Anthony hath not come in for his supper,’ she said. ‘He was to go fishing with Mat, so, he told me.’
‘Fishing!’
Alec jumped up in alarm.
‘This hath been no day for fishing, madam,’ he said, speaking quickly, ‘When did they leave?’
It must have been early, he thought, remembering when he had decided himself to call off any work on the water that day and had noticed then that Mat’s vessel was not at her usual berth.
‘Full early,’ Mistress Forrest told him vaguely. ‘To go to that island where you found pearls. Master Nimmo.’
He thanked her but was gone, running, as soon as he learned his friend’s intention. One of that group of small islands where oysters flourished off warm, shallow, shingly beaches. Pray heaven they were taking shelter there, to return when the squalls ceased as they most likely would by morning or at any time if the wind shifted.
Alec had built himself a small sturdy boat similar to the one he had made with old Nial at Eilan Donan. It had a short mast and single sail and sweeps to use if the wind did not serve. Without thought of his own safety but with a terrible dread in his heart he unloosed his little craft and pushed out into the still choppy waters of the bay. With evening the wind had certainly dropped, but the low sun shone strange and yellow on great darkening clouds and the breeze was cool for early July.
However, with his sail tied well down Alec made rapid if wet progress towards the group of little islands where he hoped to find his friends. Without his inward fear he would have rejoiced in this swift skimming from wave to breaking wave, his small sail taut in the wind, the strong hull carving the water, throwing it back, taking each thump, each pounding, with only the slightest shudder. Alec was wet to the skin with spray, but he took in no green water, the tiller was light under his hand as his boat sped on its way with the wind just forward of the beam.
When he arrived at the islands he put his boat in the lee of one of them and lowering his sail began to use the oars to move slowly along the beaches, calling at intervals, searching each small cove and creek for signs of those he sought.
He found nothing. No boat rocked at anchor or was drawn up on land: no voice answered his. In James Town it had been growing dark in the shadow of the forest. Out here it had been lighter. But now the sun went down and in that land of short twilight it soon became dark. There was no moon and the stars were covered by the heavy clouds he had seen earlier. It would not be easy to find his way back, he thought and considered for a few minutes whether it would not be wise to stay for the night on one of these islands.
Prudent perhaps, but not what he had set out to do, which was to find Mat and his friends. Had they reached the mainland at some other spot? It was possible. But if so, where? Not north of James Town for that would have been in the teeth of the wind from where the squalls had rushed across the bay at intervals all that day. If they had run before them, then might they have been blown across the mouth of the James River, landing some twenty miles nearer to the open sea?
He decided that there was nothing at all he could do to discover this. He had established they were not at the oyster beds. He must go back and wait for news and he knew from long experience exactly what that meant in fear, frustration and misery. It seemed to him, driving back towards the mainland, the wind now on his quarter, that much of his life had been spent in this way. His childhood in the East Neuk of Fife, with his father’s boats always at peril, had hardened him to loss at sea, but never completely to this waiting for news that might never come, might never be resolved but sink slowly into hopelessness, accepted grief or unbearable despair.
The darkness grew deeper and the wind rose again. Alec, staring ahead, without any real means of navigation but the direction of the wind on his right cheek and the back of his neck, began for the first time to consider his own safety. James Town was at all times too ill-lighted to show until he was within a cable’s length or two of the shore. But he would have expected a beacon to have been lit by now on the shore facing into the bay. The folk knew that a fishing boat with two councillors and others on board was missing. They might have discovered by now that he was absent himself with his personal small craft.
Two councillors! Of course, the two most effective, the two capable of demanding action. President Smith had gone off again in search of food to replace the lost stores. Captain Samuel Argall was no doubt on board his own vessel and ignorant of the crisis. Peter Winne, gentle soul, was perhaps still ignorant as well. Alec groaned aloud and as he did so felt his bows strike an obstacle, sheer off, strike again and plunge on.
Instantly he threw the tiller over to gybe round and stop the boat in her course. He could see very little, but his eyes were by now well accustomed to the night, the increasing wind had blown the heavier clouds away and the July sky, never totally dark even as far south as this, showed him the wave-tops gleaming with faint phosphorescence and among them darker objects now bearing down upon him as he lay, hove-to in their midst.
Lashing his tiller and letting the sheet run free, he lay down amidships and reached over to catch what he could. A spar, a piece of sailcloth wrapped round, shot past on a wave. Alec caught it, lost the spar but dragged the sail in. A broken floorboard bounced against the side of the boat. Alec dragged it in, too.
For an hour he worked at this salvage, wondering all the time where it had come from, but knowing full well that these sorry fragments did not belong to a native vessel, nor to one lost long ago, but to a recent disaster that could only relate to Mat and those others with him.
At last the wreckage parted from him and he found himself alone on the water with the bottom of his boat full of fragments, still far from land, still uncertain of his course to harbour, though he knew now from the direction of his drift in relation to the wind and his knowledge of the tides, that he must all the time be drawing nearer to the mainland.
As if to answer his perplexity the beacon he had longed for suddenly shot its flames into the sky, distant he guessed about three miles from where he lay. At last something would be done to help the missing ones, of whom he now counted himself one. Perhaps too late for those who mattered most. Too late. Too late.
He scrambled back to the tiller, unlashed it, gathered in the slack of the sheet and swung his boat round. It was overweighted, dipped and shuddered. He forced the tiller again, a wave smacked the stern, it swung too far, gybed again, there was a rending sound and the mast cracked across a foot above its base falling outboard and carrying with it the sail, the rigging and Alec, still gripping the sheet as he had been preparing to set course for the beacon.
In a flurry of water, spray, torn canvas, loose rope and sliding precious salvage, Alec hauled himself back to the boat’s side. She was lying broached to, listing horribly, the water
lapping in with every wave that swept across her, but still floating. Holding on to the side with one hand Alec managed to free his knife with the other and hack away the remaining rope that held the broken mast and sail. Once freed of this encumbrance, that was instantly borne away into the night, he was able to heave himself inboard again, where he lay among the remains of his salvaged wreckage recovering his breath and wondering how to reach land.
First he must rid the little craft of the water she had taken in. His usual vessel for baling was somewhere below the mess. It took him what seemed an age to find it, but in the search he was able to bring some sort of order to his strange cargo. It was easier to move under water than above, so he was able to float it about. Without the broken mast and its gear he was taking in no green water now, only spray, so the boat rode more easily. When at last he was able to bale he got her on to an almost even keel. His next search found the sweeps miraculously undamaged. He had the means to drive himself to the shore, he had the direction clear, for the beacon was glowing more fiercely than ever, though it seemed no nearer.
He had but one thought now; to reach James Town with the remains of what he had found. In his toil since his own disaster he had become sure of its nature. It could mean none other than the wreck of Mat’s craft and unless they had by some means, by swimming or clinging to spars, reached land, the men in her must be lost.
He felt no sorrow at this time. His grief was swamped by rage at men’s helplessness before this great impersonal force, the sheer dread weight of water driven by wind, the senseless killing strength of the elements.
Senseless? Alec prayed to God as he rowed, asking forgiveness for such blasphemy, forgiveness for all his sins; asking for mercy that he might forego the further just punishment he feared would be meted out to him. As he struggled against the tide that was now threatening to sweep him past the settlement into the estuary and even on out to sea, his strength, great as it was, began to ebb, his strokes to become feebler, even his will to survive grew weak. He held his own but made a very slow progress. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east and the line of the coast to grow dark against the sky when he heard a shrill cry behind him.
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