Roanoke (The Keepers of the Ring)

by Angela Hunt

  At sunrise the next morning, a crew of men took the pinnace for its second trip to fetch the remaining supplies while the colonists set to work in earnest. Tall poles were sunk into the sandy ground, then the prefabricated walls of timber and clay were lashed to the supporting poles. The simple, one-story storehouses rose quickly; the two-story houses were more difficult to raise.

  A scouting party of children found a wild shrub with leaves nearly two feet across. Jocelyn recalled seeing a similar plant used to roof native huts in the Caribbean Islands, so she sent the children out to gather more of the broad leaves while the women tied them onto branches.

  The pinnace returned just before sunset, and the men aboard hurried into the palisade before night fell. Too tired to eat the supper several women had prepared, Jocelyn went straight to the newly erected house she and Thomas would share and spread her blanket on the earthen floor. Though the wind whistled through the green roof and the house still smelled of soil and crawling things, she closed her eyes and slept, too exhausted to care.

  As invading daylight streamed through the open doorway the next morning, Jocelyn groaned and pulled her blanket over her eyes. Eight months of pregnancy and several days of difficult physical exertion had left her sore and tired. Sleep brought her but little rest, for she could not sleep on her stomach, and the hard earth beneath her brought no ease to her tired muscles.

  “Good morrow, Mistress Colman.” She lowered the blanket—Thomas sat on the ground next to her, his hands casually resting on his knees. He still wore the white work shirt he had worn the previous day, and his tired face made him look older than his years.

  “Good morrow.” Her voice cracked.

  “William Clement has asked to marry our Audrey,” he said, smiling more from habitual civility than honest pleasure. “I told him the girl was your maid and that I must needs speak with you.”

  She lifted her head, and Thomas thoughtfully extended his hand to help her sit up. “I have already given Audrey my permission,” she said, pushing her disheveled hair from her eyes. “She is in love with the man.”

  “So I hear,” Thomas answered, his voice flat. Was that sarcasm in his voice? Jocelyn could not tell.

  “Of course the happy couple will have to ask the council’s permission to wed,” Thomas added.

  “Why should they? We did not ask anyone’s permission to marry.”

  “We had your uncle’s blessing,” Thomas answered, wearily studying his blistered hands. “We were both—free. We had no masters to object.” He dropped his hands suddenly into his lap. “Except God.”

  A sudden shaft of morning light from the doorway focused itself upon Thomas, haloing him in an unearthly light. Layers of dark wrinkles lined his coal-black eyes, etched by the travail of suffering. But though the death of his wife and the separation from his son were a part of his past, why couldn’t he rejoice in this new city, in their new life?

  “Thomas,” she began, hoping that this rare privacy might enable him to speak freely, “why should God object to our marriage? Surely if a man and woman wish to join together and there is no impediment between them—”

  “They say I was wrong to take a second wife. The Scripture itself says a spiritual leader should be the husband of one wife, and I cannot argue against God’s Word.”

  “But mayhap the Scripture means you should be the husband of one wife at a time! Does not the Word of God allow widows to remarry? You are a widower—”

  “You do not understand.”

  “In truth, I do not.” Her anger of weeks past had dissipated; when she looked at him now she felt only love and an overwhelming sense of despair. Inside her, the baby woke and kicked vigorously at the sound of Thomas’ voice.

  They sat for a moment in silence, then Thomas raised his eyes to her face in an oddly keen, swift look. “I never meant to hurt you. Upon my soul, I never did.”

  She shook her head. “I do not blame you for our loveless marriage, for I know you cannot give what you do not have. I only hoped that you would—”

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “I know I have hurt you, Jocelyn, and I would as lief cut off my arm as bring you pain. During the weeks I was away, I realized how hard you have worked to make a home for us.” His voice softened. “‘Tis nice to wake up next to you. ‘Tis nice to come home from a busy day and see you stirring supper by the fire. A cozy house, mended clothes, an honest and frank discussion—”

  He looked up at her. “I found that I have come to depend upon those things. And God has shown me, very clearly, that I have wronged you.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes, but Jocelyn blinked them away. Thomas stared again at his hands. “I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to have a child. You are my sister in Christ, and as such I will hold you in great esteem.”

  Jocelyn ran her hand over her belly to soothe the active child. So his increased affection resulted from missing the comforts of home! And while affection was better than indifference, still, ‘twas not what she had been hoping for. But ‘twas a start. And if God proved willing, perchance love would come later . . .

  “Thank you, Reverend Colman,” she whispered. She leaned over to kiss his cheek, and though he instinctively pulled away, she persisted until he relented and she felt the smoothness of his skin under her lips.

  She gave him a slow smile. “Thank you very much.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  I must speak to the Queen, I tell you. It is a most urgent matter of life and death!”

  The sour-faced courtier who stood entrance to the Queen’s private chambers only shook his head and glared at John White. “I am sorry, but Her Majesty the Queen cannot see you. She has expressly requested that you go away until she calls for you, Mister White.”

  White closed his eyes and took a deep breath, torn between ranting like a madman or leaving to try another diplomatic route. During his time in England, none of his attempts at political posturing had been successful, and few would even listen to his concerns about the deserted colonists. The Queen flatly refused to grant him an audience; he even found himself banned from mingling at the royal court. ‘Twas obvious that Elizabeth considered John White a noisome and pesky fly, and she would give audiences to none but a preferred handful of advisors, chief among whom was Sir Walter Raleigh.

  In any other time Raleigh would have been White’s savior and swiftest route to the queen, but a more pressing problem than Virginian colonization loomed before England in the person of Philip II of Spain. For years Philip had borne the occasional piracy of his treasure ships, but now that his empire had come to depend heavily upon the gold and silver from Spanish conquests in America, England’s persistent meddling propelled the Spanish king toward war. As a rigid and devout Catholic, Philip found it particularly galling that Elizabeth’s England, the leader of the Protestant nations, could cause him such difficulties.

  Philip decided that the path to victory lay in the open sea. He would assemble the mightiest fleet of warships ever seen on the surface of the earth, one hundred thirty ships manned with eight thousand sailors and nineteen thousand soldiers. With high wooden castles fore and aft and powerful cannons below decks, the Spanish vessels were designed for battle. His growing armada had only one purpose: to thrust his soldiers alongside enemy galleons so the men could board and take the blood of battlefields to the open sea.

  Elizabeth’s spies had been reporting news of this great and terrible armada for months. The Spanish fleet had been poised and ready to sail in 1587 but was prevented by a stroke of God, and Elizabeth and her councilors waited uneasily to see what Philip might do next.

  As a defensive measure, Elizabeth appointed Ralph Lane, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Richard Grenville to a committee to plan the overall protection of England. Raleigh and Grenville were given the job of organizing the defense of England’s western shore should the Spanish attempt an attack there, therefore neither man had much time to devote to John White when he made his precarious way back to England in No
vember, 1587.

  White was particularly horrified to learn that one reason for Raleigh’s reluctance to aid the colonists was the tremendous profit he and Grenville had earned from their recent service to queen and country. As part of the government’s strategy for controlling Ireland, Raleigh and Grenville were given large tracts of Irish land that had been confiscated from rebels. They were chartered to colonize these lands and create happy English citizens in Ireland, so both Raleigh and Grenville had diverted their attention from distant Virginia toward the more visible and profitable shores of the Emerald Isle.

  As months passed and the political truth gradually revealed itself, John White felt fear rising like the quick, hot touch of the devil in his veins. To all appearances, the colonists’ worst fears had come to pass: the people of Roanoke had slipped to the bottom of a long list of English priorities. By the spring of 1588, his was the sole voice speaking in their behalf.

  For the sake of his daughter and infant granddaughter, White did not give up after the queen’s Privy Council forbade him to sail. He wrote countless letters and spent endless days pacing the drawing room of Raleigh’s house until he was finally granted permission to detach two of the smaller ships from Sir Richard Grenville’s fleet for a journey back to Roanoke.

  He had lost an appreciable number of prospective settlers when Grenville’s Virginia expedition was cancelled by royal decree, but seven men and the four wives of men waiting in the colony—Mistress Sampson, Mistress Prat, Mistress Cooper, and Mistress Stevens—were still determined to make the journey.

  From his tiny office on the docks of Bideford Bar, White oversaw the rapid provisioning of the Brave, a ship of thirty tons, and the Row, a clumsy-looking pinnace of twenty-five tons. Seeds, tools, munitions, livestock, and the baggage of eleven passengers were loaded onto the ships as quickly as possible, for White feared that Raleigh or the queen might yet postpone his journey.

  On April twenty-second John White boarded the Brave with hope in his heart and a very important letter in his satchel. Sir Walter Raleigh had sent a dispatch at the last moment, a letter to cheer the colonists, in which he promised that with all convenient speed he would prepare “a good supply of shipping and men with sufficiency of all things needful” which, God willing, should be with them the summer following.

  The cool April breeze ruffled John White’s white hair as Arthur Facy, commander of the Brave, gave the command to raise the anchor. As the ship raised her sails and slipped from her moorings at the docks, John White prayed that his colonists would be able to survive until he reached them. Springtime in the wilderness, when stores of winter were depleted and the new crops not yet sprung, oft proved to be a starving time.

  They had barely been under sail for one full day when John White sensed the familiar stirring of trouble. Like Simon Fernandes of the Lion, Arthur Facy considered piracy his first priority. And his seamen, who were but castoffs since Grenville had been instructed to reserve his best men to confront the Armada, were little more than cutthroats and thieves.

  As the two English ships emerged from the Bristol channel, they chased and then boarded four vessels, taking three sailors prisoner to fulfill the necessary complement of seamen. On the second morning, without conscience or character, Facy lobbied a cannonball at a small pinnace from Scotland and robbed her of everything of value; that afternoon he brazenly attacked and looted a Breton vessel.

  In White’s pleas for restraint Arthur Facy seemed to find only further excuse for foolhardiness. ‘Twas as if the men and women who waited below were nothing but incidental cargo, thoughts of the colony were the last thing on his mind. When Facy gave the order to chase and attack a two hundred ton ship, a move as logical as a minnow attacking a whale, White launched a verbal assault that only broadened the swarthy sailor’s impenitent grin. In the end, White went below deck to await disaster and pray; mercifully, the larger ship escaped. Separated now from the Row, the Brave sailed on toward Madeira.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The new Virginian village, or City of Raleigh, as Ananias declared it, rose from within the palisade more quickly than Jocelyn thought possible. The prefabricated walls that had served them so well in Roanoke made home building easy, and Thomas was pleased when the settlers did not hesitate to lend a hand in reassembling the church. Wells were dug, outhouses built, and the young boys set to building enclosures for breeding rabbits and wild turkeys. Jocelyn had to smother a grin when young George Howe brought her a turkey for dinner and expected that she’d cook it with the feathers still attached.

  Young George, as he was still called, had taken up residence with the unmarried men and seemed to have aged two years in the eight months since his father’s death. Because she knew how bereft a fatherless child could feel, Jocelyn worried about young George and often invited him to have dinner with her and Thomas. But George usually declined, preferring to eat with the other men. All the children of the colony, Jocelyn noticed, grew up too quickly, with chores and lessons and the danger of death looming constantly in the distance.

  But Ananias and the council followed Raleigh’s instructions and the colony was well prepared for the future. To prepare for planting, additional fields were burned outside the palisade to clear the land of brush, and the trees that remained in the fields were girdled.

  Jocelyn thought the act of girdling strange at first, but she understood why the procedure was necessary. With no horses or mules available, girdling was quicker and easier than felling or uprooting trees, and achieved the desired effect. After a continuous ring of bark was chipped or torn from trees, the trees slowly died where they stood. Leaves fell from the dead limbs to provide a rich compost for the soil beneath, and sunlight poured through the leafless branches to warm the ground. But Jocelyn could not shake an eerie murderous feeling as she helped the other women strip the bark from trees in the burnt field. Many of the trees were giants that had stood for scores of years before the colonists’ arrival. In time, the blackened, dead trees would stand as ghostly sentinels over the fields.

  By the end of April the village had been fully erected. True to his word, William Clement took Audrey Tappan to the church to approach the council. Ananias Dare, Roger Bailie, Christopher Cooper, Thomas Stevens, Roger Prat, and John Sampson sat at their places around the long council table at the front of the building, and as interested parties, Jocelyn and Thomas sat in the back of the church and listened intently.

  William Clement lifted his golden head confidently. “I’d like to request permission from my master, Roger Bailie, and the council to marry Audrey Tappan,” he said, smiling.

  Jocelyn wryly noted that the smile that drew women like moths to a lamp did little to impress the council. “How can an indentured servant marry?” Christopher Cooper asked, doubtless worried that his servant, James Hynde, might be unduly influenced by William’s brashness.

  John Sampson shook his head in stern disapproval. “May I remind you, sir, that you were a convict? Sentenced to prison for the rest of your life? And that you came here willingly to serve your lifetime—”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Master Sampson, but my crime was stealin’ forty sheep. Are forty sheep worth a man’s life?”

  “Could be,” Roger Prat answered slowly. “Marry, it all depends. If forty sheep are all a man has, and they’re stolen by a couple of blackguards, then yes, I’d have to say the knaves should pay with their lives.”

  “I cry you mercy, sir!” William answered, offended. “Have I not worked as willingly as any man in this colony? Have I not given good service to my master?”

  The members of the council turned to look at Roger Bailie, who scratched his white beard and said nothing.

  William turned in exasperation to Thomas and Jocelyn. “There!” he said, pointing to them. “My lady’s master and mistress have consented to let her be free to marry. In Virginia, a man is supposed to be free to make what he likes of his life—”

  Thomas Stevens held up a gnarled finger. “Miss Tappan�
��s life was not claimed by the courts of England before coming to Virginia,” he pointed out, practically snarling at William. “She is a free and moral woman, sir, and you paid for your passage and your freedom with indentured service to Roger Bailie for the rest of his natural life. I am inclined to believe that you should render this service without the distraction of a wife until you are released from your bond.”

  William thrust his hands on his hips, pouting, and Jocelyn turned her gaze toward Roger Bailie. The old man’s eyes flickered from William Clement to Audrey, who sat silently on a bench, her face flushed, her hands clasped as if for prayer. Her red hair glowed in the lamplight, and something akin to pity flitted across Roger Bailie’s gentle face.

  ‘Pon my soul, he would let them be married, Jocelyn thought, inwardly rejoicing. The council members continued in noisy debate, then Ananias raised his hand for silence. “This debate belongs to Master Bailie,” he said, nodding gravely to the elder council member. “William’s his servant, and there’s no doubt he’ll be the most affected. Roger, what say you?”

  Roger Bailie stood and nodded pleasantly to Audrey, then to William. The long strands of wispy blonde hair straggled over his shoulders while his bald head gleamed in the dim light. “I would agree to this request,” he said simply, his fingers nervously tapping the top of the table before him, “but I am an old man, and likely to need help in the years to come. But I’ll not stand in the way of young love, nor would I forbid this union and drive them to immorality or some such thing.”

  Audrey bowed her head and blushed, and the effect was not lost on Roger Bailie. His eyes gentled as he spoke: “‘Tis this I propose, then: when I die, and William Clement is released from his bond to me, then he may marry Audrey Tappan if he so chooses.”