Over the Seas

by Josephine Bell

  So without any real leader, with no ships but a few fishing boats and other small craft, the settlement sank into a state of stupor, awaiting their fate.

  But Alec continued to store fish. John Laydon and other craftsmen abandoned their skills to hunt or to dig for those nourishing roots, the so-called ‘earth-apples’ or ‘potato’ as the Indians called them. Will Trent led away the nanny-goat and her kids, for safety, he said, and for increase the following spring when the billy-kid would be capable. He knew, before the general realisation, what was coming for all the live-stock in the town. By the end of October Anne Laydon was eight months pregnant and Polly too was expecting her first child the following May.

  Before the snow drove the game deep into the great forests the provident settlers brought in venison and wild turkeys and even the occasional mountain bear that had strayed south from his natural haunts. All these they dried and salted, making severe inroads upon Alec’s supply of brine or solid salt. Among those who came to him for it was George Tucker, very quiet and humble, beginning his request with an apology that Alec knew was far from sincere. But he no longer feared to suffer harm from the man, since his associates were all gone, West and Archer to England, Ratcliffe to his just reward, he hoped. So Tucker had his share of the salt and carried it away to Rose Bartlett’s house which he now shared openly and shamelessly.

  ‘He should marry her,’ Mistress Sugden declared. ‘She hath altogether turned from her wantonness and is a true wife to him.’

  ‘He considers himself a gentleman,’ Mistress Forrest told her. ‘Therefore marriage to a whore, however reformed, would never enter his head.’

  It did however enter Mistress Bartlett’s head, in spite of her infatuation, that unfair demands were being made upon her. She approached the subject in various gentle ways, but got no response. It was when the dreaded winter, with its deep snow, heavy frosts and biting winds was well upon them that her patience broke and she accused him of trying to corrupt her afresh. At first he treated her accusation with cold sneers.

  ‘It scarce becomes thee, Rose, to quarrel with my desires. I do but suggest thou employ thy charms as heretofore in the way of business that might profit us both. We shall have meat but no bread. The ration will be ended before long. In exchange for the grain they do not want, men—’

  She forced him to stop with a stamp of her foot and a high scream that brought him to his feet to put an end to her outburst. But she backed away from him crying out, though not so loudly, ‘Villain, scoundrel, pimp, would-be purveyor of women! Thou knows I gave that up when I was so foolish as to love thee! Love such a wretch as would betray me to fill his stomach! Thou shalt live no longer in my house, no longer, I say! Loll over my fire not even gathering logs for it! Force me to earn even thy warming by infamy!’

  ‘We have lived these many weeks already upon thy past warming of other men,’ he said, watching her.

  She sprang at him, nails reaching for his face, but he caught her wrists together and swung her round and flung her to the floor. She was gathering herself up and had scrambled to her knees when a heavy blow to the back of her head felled her again. This time she did not move to rise.

  Master Tucker hid the bloodstained tomahawk. He had bought it from a visiting Indian with a small quantity of firearm powder, a crime in settlement law. Later he took the weapon into the forest and dropped it in the deep snow. He laid Rose Bartlett on her bed when the blood ceased to run, cleansed the hut and called in his friends to sympathise with his grief at her sudden seizure and death.

  He ordered a coffin to be made for her. The weather was so cold there was no immediate haste needed as in the summer months. So no one was surprised that he refused all help with the laying-out of his poor paramour. Many put down her death to the excesses of her former life. A premature end from venal diseases was not uncommon, they reminded one another.

  After three days a coffin was delivered in the morning at the door of the ‘Honeypot’ and an hour later a small procession of four bearers with Master Tucker, pale but composed, in the rear, passed the church on the way to the burial ground where three other graves beside that destined for Rose had been dug overnight in the hard ground.

  At the church door stood Master Hunt in his robes, who stepped forward.

  ‘I am about to pronounce the burial service over three more of our number,’ he said. ‘Will you not bring this poor sinner in, Master Tucker, that I may join her to our prayers for mercy and the forgiveness of sins? ‘There shall be more joy over one sinner that repenteth—” ’

  ‘I thank you,’ said Master Tucker very coldly. ‘She had your enmity when she lived. I think she cannot profit from a turnabout now that she is dead. Proceed, friends,’ he said to the bearers and left the clergyman, purple-faced and trembling with rage at the church door.

  Ann Laydon’s child, a boy, was born in the first week of December. She was attended by Mistress Sugden for the birth, which was easy, though labour was prolonged, it being her first. John spent the hours of anxiety with Alec, for he declared he could not work with glass at such a time for fear of spoiling good materials. As the weather was colder than ever, Alec was stopped from fishing, for the gear was dangerously frozen and ice covered the shallow parts of the river and the bay. Only the central tidal waters were open.

  In spite of short commons for the last three months Anne’s baby was plump and lusty and although the mother had grown very thin her breasts soon produced a fair abundance of milk, which astonished Polly and Alec as well as the father, who had felt very fearful for his child’s sustenance. Mistress Sugden, however, greeted it as a natural occurrence, only insisting that they all work harder than ever to supply the young mother with plenty to eat.

  ‘At home,’ Mistress Forrest said severely, upholding Anne’s protests, ‘mother’s milk is not in favour. A little thin gruel—’

  ‘For which we have no grain,’ Anne lamented.

  But Alec remembered a dispute on these lines at Oxford, in the house of his benefactor’s married son whose wife was breast-feeding her baby. He recounted the story, upholding Mistress Sugden’s opinion that Nature knew her work and moreover the babe thrived, which was patently the case.

  The winter moved on to a comfortless Christmas, a continual tightening of belts and a growing lawlessness. Alec was much at home because his occupation had come almost to a standstill. Also because Polly was often unwell. The earlier manifestations of her pregnancy, a frequent vomiting, headaches and restlessness, had passed but had left her very thin and languid. She was much encouraged by the total success of Anne’s confinement, but by January, when death became a daily, expected, multiple event and there were still four months of waiting before her, she began to weaken.

  Alec comforted her as best he could.

  ‘My son will be a melancholy coward if thou breed him with all these fears and qualms about thee,’ he teased her.

  But when she wept at this he took her in his arms and kissed her wet cheeks and whispered his praise, his admiration, his firm belief in their survival, all three.

  ‘The good Lord will not punish thee for my sins,’ he told her. ‘Master Hunt says continually it is the fault of the arrogant and lazy who would make no provision.’

  ‘Men do not reckon up their sins when they be hungry,’ Mistress Sugden insisted. ‘Tis not now disease that brings them to their coffins, but plain starvation. When a man’s clemmed he’s not answerable.’

  By the end of February, the snow still deep, the frost still iron-hard on the ground, many houses were empty, smoke rose from fewer and fewer as the days passed. Not many folk moved about the streets. Some sat or lay indoors, too feeble even to gather wood for warmth, waiting only to join the larger number who now filled the church in their coffins, even in their shrouds, waiting for burial in the thaw, if there were any left to bury them.

  Polly’s mother had brought her friend to Alec’s house at Christmas time for economy in firing and food. They stayed on to look after P
olly while he and a few other stalwarts cut wood in the forest. Soon John Laydon brought his wife and the baby to lodge there also. Warmth had grown almost more pressing a need than food and as the days passed and men’s strength ebbed they sought the nearest, most easily won fuel in the shape of their dead neighbour’s furniture and goods. So the Laydons, and the two older women brought everything they prized to Alec’s house to preserve it from attack.

  Alec still went armed, for Master Tucker and three friends had survived into the New Year and were often near him at his wood cutting. The four exchanged hard looks with the Scot who usually had John Laydon and one or more of his fishermen with him. Then one day Tucker was seen with but one companion and later still alone.

  Alec said to him, ‘Where be thy friends?’

  ‘Where thine are not,’ the man answered, with a sidelong evil glance. ‘In the church whither starvation led them.’

  This surprised Alec for until very recently they had all seemed reasonably strong, though very thin as was to be expected.

  He said no more, but after deep thought he went to the preacher that evening to put his suspicions before him. And the outcome of that was a secret visit to the church by Mr Hunt, three older members of the regular congregation, together with Alec and John. They opened the three coffins. The bodies, in that intense cold, were perfectly preserved. In each corpse they found a blackened mouth, a twisted look of horror, staring eyes, a contorted body.

  ‘Poison, by the Lord!’ one elder said.

  ‘As I suspected,’ Alec agreed. ‘Master Tucker favours the secret crime.’

  ‘We cannot prove it,’ John Laydon objected.

  ‘Nay, but we know the man hath no illness himself and is surprisingly well nourished.’

  ‘You believe he is helped by the natives and hath secured poison from them?’ Master Hunt asked.

  ‘I believe a worse thing than that,’ Alec said.

  He was remembering the brine Tucker had taken from the fish-curing shed to salt down venison. He was remembering Rose Bartlett’s sudden death and swift burial.

  The party listened. They shook their heads. It would not be possible to dig up her coffin even could they discover where it lay. But one of the elders had followed that cortège out of compassion when Master Tucker had refused Master Hunt’s offer of a burial service. He led them to the spot beyond the tar swamp where the coffin had been lowered into a shallow grave. They managed to break it loose and open it, when Alec’s terrible surmise was found to be true. Rose Bartlett’s head was there, the skull shattered at the back by a great blow. Her ribs and spine were there, her hands and feet, her entrails, lungs and heart. But her limbs and the fleshy parts of her body were not.

  ‘I think he hath salted her down,’ said Alec, ‘and I think his friends discovered it.’

  The men about him groaned aloud. Their horror and their disgust were great but greater still was their felt need to punish a crime that was not only murder but blasphemy, an insult to God the Creator of Man in His image. It was not unheard of among savages and shipwrecked sailors. But with their community in its present state immediate punishment was needed.

  So they went in a body to Master Tucker’s hut. He paled when he saw Alec among them but did not dispute their entrance. The elders examined his cask of salted meat in which a fair store still remained. It was clearly not venison, but human.

  When he heard how he had been exposed he made an attempt upon Alec but was overcome and bound securely.

  Alec said, ‘I suspected this man because I knew he was evil, having attempted my life by injuring my Shallop Pearl.’ He said to Tucker, ‘I led these men to disclose your crime, your four murders and—and this. But I will have no part in your punishment. I will be neither judge nor jury.’

  He left the hut and went home with John where they said nothing to the women of what they had been about.

  The others argued for more than two hours about what course to take. Master Tucker must die; that was certain. But how? And who would take the responsibility? There was not one among them capable of forming a Court of Law and proceeding by it in a traditional manner. But they would not take a life in cold blood, illegally.

  In the end Master Tucker, who had occupied himself during their deliberations by loosening his bonds, leaped up suddenly and fled. Night had fallen, the pursuit was hampered by darkness. Tucker dared not seek the forest where the Indians lurked but running the other way past the plantations, came to the high banks above the estuary, missed his footing, fell upright and broke both his ankles, before rolling half-way down the sand towards the water.

  His pursuers found him, noted his injuries, withdrew well above the tide mark and settled down to watch his end. The Lord God had smitten him, the servant of the Lord, the sea, would take him to his just doom.

  At first George Tucker struggled to avoid his fate. He appealed for mercy, he begged for pity. Seeing it was useless he cursed his enemies, his friends, his failed life, his distant parents, his birth, his tempter the Devil. Even at last he cursed his God.

  There was time. The tide was only half-way down when he fell rolling on to the wet sand. It continued down for another three hours and then turned, taking five to reach him. By this time he was silent, nearly dead from cold and pain but able, when the first wave broke over him, to shriek once or twice as it nudged him over on to his face and pulled him back again.

  It was daylight by now. The news had spread. Every ablebodied man and woman had crept to the shore to see George Tucker pay for his unspeakable deeds.

  The sea tossed him up and down, finally drowned him leaving his limp body on the beach. So they carried him back into the ‘Honeypot’ and burned it to the ground, together with Rose Bartlett’s coffin and all her poor desecrated remains.

  Chapter Eighteen

  As John and Alec found there was no keeping the news of George Tucker’s exposure and end from the women, they gave them a true account of it, denying the more horrifying exaggerations as lying rumours. But the crime was fearful enough even in plain fact to increase their terrors and dread forebodings. If the settlers became cannibals in their extremity of starvation what hope was there for the safety of women and little children? Anne clasped her baby, declaring she feared to let him learn to walk in case he should be enticed away from her.

  ‘We shall all be dead and gone long before the poor atom stands on his own feet,’ Mistress Forrest said.

  It was now that Will Trent intervened to calm their fears. He had been absent the most part of the winter, only making occasional visits to see how his sister, fared and each time bringing gifts of food, the corn they totally lacked, a little meat, a shrunken but most acceptable pumpkin of last summer’s crop. He now suggested that all the women should move out to the Pamunkeys’ chief settlement. The werowance was willing to provide a wigwam for them and billet them as members of his tribe until the spring. He desired in return that they bring their spinning wheels and looms and teach his squaws the crafts.

  At first the answer was a flat refusal from the women, but both Alec and John saw the advantages of the plan to them all. Matters could only grow worse in James Town. Will was in high favour with Opecancanough; he would protect them. While they could be of no use to the dwindling survivors they themselves would return to the town if the conditions they found among the Indians were favourable.

  So very early one morning, with Will to guide them, the Nimmos, the Laydons, Mistress Sugden and Mistress Forrest went quietly from the house they had all been sharing and arrived, under Will’s care, at the village of the werowance. They were presented to him, offered their thanks, showed him the looms and spindles and were conducted to their new home.

  There they found two Indian women, one with a child of about eighteen months standing clasping her leg, the other with a babe at her breast, suckling undisturbed by the invasion.

  ‘They have been preparing your welcome,’ Will said. ‘But now they will go home.’

  He spoke to
them in the Algonquian language of the tribe and they nodded their heads and moved to the opening of the wigwam.

  Mistress Sugden, who had stared at them in astonishment, now exclaimed, pointing to the children, both unusually light-skinned, though their hair was as straight and as black as their mother’s. ‘Will, these be thy brats! Thou cans’t not deny it!’

  ‘I would not wish to deny them,’ her brother answered calmly. ‘I am married to their mothers by the law of the Pamunkeys, which I acknowledge to be as binding as the English law. Which drove me from my native land,’ he added, with a flash of his old bitterness. ‘See that you all respect them and treat them well as Opecancanough hath treated you. You will be safe here and well cared for so long as you do not put on airs that ill become your present fortunes.’

  He stared intently at Mistress Forrest as he spoke, but she looked back at him with a gentle smile of assent, saying nothing.

  In private John and Alec laughed together over Will’s two brown wives and ochre-coloured infants.

  ‘When we thought it was his dreadful past had crazed his mind, in truth he had turned more native than his native torturers,’ John said.

  ‘Nay, jest not too freely,’ Alec answered. ‘He was crazed enough

  when we first came to this land and found him. But after Mother Meg restored him to himself he must have had a fresh desire for those Indian ways of living he had been forced to follow so long.’

  ‘And maybe some new disgust for his own folk’s feebleness.’

  ‘Aye, that too. When he found this werowance regarded him as a supernatural, a wise man, giving him wives to content him—’

  They collapsed into laughter again, chiefly at their own former half superstitious attitude towards Will.

  ‘A very ordinary man after all’ John concluded.