Roanoke (The Keepers of the Ring)

by Angela Hunt

  Ananias raised an eyebrow until he caught the gleam in Taverner’s eye and realized the man was joking.

  As the pinnace threaded her way home up the Chowan, Thomas stood at the railing with Christopher Cooper. “Taverner was pretty funny, eh, Reverend?” Cooper asked, his eyes squinting in the sunlight that reflected off the river. “Bring ‘em wives? Where’s John White supposed to get wives for that scruffy lot?”

  “Yes, he was funny,” Thomas agreed, nodding politely.

  “Of course, you didn’t have any trouble landing yourself a pretty wife, eh, Reverend?” Cooper persisted, elbowing Thomas roughly. “‘Twasn’t fair, though, you didn’t give the rest of us a decent shot at the prize. Mayhap if you’d waited until we landed, things would have turned out differently.”

  Thomas sighed and moved away, hoping the man would take the hint. If Cooper didn’t leave him alone, he just might tell the entire story, and then what would they think? They would think you crazy, the answer came, because you live with a beautiful woman who makes you weak with longing every time she glances your way, and yet you ignore her, turn from her, snuff out every affectionate moment that springs up between you.

  Thomas bit his lip until he tasted blood. The thought of Jocelyn at home, his baby at her breast, sent a wave of warmth along his pulses and made his knees weak. Home had been bearable, at least, when she was swollen and heavy with child, and he had not been afraid to stay by her side when she was near death.

  But God, in his harsh wisdom, had brought her from the brink of heaven and kept her in Thomas’ house. How could he endure living with her now, when she had never looked more beautiful?

  Life settled again into a normal return after Ananias and the men returned from Croatoan. John White had not come as yet, Ananias told the village, but surely each day that passed brought him closer.

  As Jocelyn gradually convalesced from the exhaustion and travail of childbirth, she learned that by inviting the Indians to help her, Ananias had opened a door to the Indian village of Ohanoak. The Chawanoac Indians who dwelt nearby, while friendly, had hitherto avoided daily contact with the English. But since the werowance, Abooksigun, and his wife had entered the City of Raleigh at Ananias’ invitation, a steady stream of Indian visitors arrived at the gates of the English palisade every morning.

  They brought furs, fish, and seed corn to trade. After spreading their wares on the ground, the savages stood back and waited for offers to be made. The villagers learned quickly that the Indian manner of trading involved equal reciprocation. Nothing was given without the expectation of something in return, and nothing could be accepted without giving a gift in kind.

  But the Indians gave much more than they took in pots and axes and trinkets. Their women taught the English women how to treat the bites of lice, ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes, and through their example the English learned that sweat baths eased the pain of arthritis and rheumatism, knowledge that greatly cheered Roger Bailie. Boils and bruises in the colony came to be treated by Indian poultices, and once when Jocelyn was about to make rags of a dress which had become infested with lice, an Indian woman sternly took the garment from her and carried it outside to an anthill. Jocelyn watched in honest puzzlement until she realized that the lice were a verifiable feast for an ant colony. By the morning of the next day, the dress was free from both varieties of insects.

  The path between the two walled villages gradually grew wider and an “open door” policy soon bound the English and Indian villages together. While the Indians were quick to pick up basic words of the English language, Jocelyn noticed that most of her fellow colonists were reluctant to speak the Indian tongue because they were quietly convinced that all things English were vastly superior. But without the help of the Indians or a miraculous provision from John White’s promised supply fleet, Jocelyn doubted they would survive the coming winter.

  According to the dictates of their Indian friends, throughout the summer of 1588 the colonists planted, harvested, and stored food for winter. The young savages taught the English boys how to build weirs to trap fish in the river, and the English women learned how to build “hurdles” of sticks, from which they hung pieces of meat or fish to smoke over a smoldering fire.

  With Regina securely tied onto her back in the Indian manner, Jocelyn visited Pauwau, the wife of the werowance, and learned that this aged woman had saved her life during the travail of childbirth. During her first awkward visit with Pauwau she sensed that the Indians did not care for effusive thanks, but preferred to receive gratitude in the form of respect and an attentive ear. So Jocelyn became Pauwau’s student, of sorts, and from the older woman she learned much. As the summer sun slowly encouraged their crops to bloom into ripeness, she sat at Pauwau’s feet and learned to make coiled clay cooking pots even as she prayed for an opportunity to bring light into the Indians’ spiritual darkness.

  Through she did all she could to aid the colony’s survival, Jocelyn tried to remember that she and Thomas were responsible for ministering to and evangelizing the Indians. In her time with the women of the Indian village, Jocelyn talked often of God the Father, creator of the world. One afternoon while she helped several Indian women make buckskin, she told them that the creator Father had made deer for man’s use.

  The women nodded. “We know of this god,” Pauwau said, nodding gravely. “He is Mantoac, and is older than the earth.”

  Jocelyn paused, her fingers deep in the sudsy mush that resulted from boiling deer brains and liver. “I suppose it matters not what we call him,” she said, nodding. “As long as we serve him. But do you know of his son, Jesus, the Christ?”

  The women shook their heads as they pounded the sudsy animal skin with their fists. “Mantoac has many sons,” Hurit spoke up. The pretty woman was Pauwau’s daughter-in-law. “He made other gods to help his work. The sun, the moon, the stars. These are lesser gods, and they have made all creatures.”

  Jocelyn held up a disputing finger. “No, my friends, the sun, moon, and stars are mere creations. Jesus, the Christ, is the only Son of God.”

  Wide-eyed but uncomprehending, the women only stared at her as they worked the hide. Jocelyn sighed. ‘Twould have been better if they had known nothing of God at all; then they would have welcomed the news of a loving creator. But their culture had merged God’s truth with paganism’s deception, and she knew only patience and gentleness would help her untangle their confused ideas.

  Close association with the nearby Indian tribe weakened previously inviolate English standards, and for weeks Thomas used his sermons to address the evils of heathen morality. Though they all knew, Thomas said, that the heathen practice of giving young girls for a night’s pleasure was an abominable practice, there were more subtle evils of which the English had to beware. The Indian dances, he warned, were not to be imitated or practiced; their songs were not to be sung, the games of the Indian children not taught to English children. The Indian women who went without shirts or cloaks in the hot days of summer were not to be allowed into the English village without proper and modest clothing, and though Indian poultices and salves could be used for healing, they had to be made in the English village, so the colonists could be assured that no heathen incantations had been uttered as the medicine was being prepared.

  The colonists bore Thomas’ restrictions without comment. Except for Beth Glane and the doctor John Jones, who were forever peering through bushes and eavesdropping at windows to report on the sinfulness of their neighbors, most colonists were too busy with their work to participate in games and dances and music. The women were only too happy to learn how to make poultices and salves themselves, for ‘twas much more practical to have the natural “recipe” than to journey to the Indian village every time someone was injured or required an ointment.

  But as the hot days wore on and John White’s supply ships did not arrive from England, one standard of civilization slipped irreparably: clothing. In June’s blistering heat, the men began to go without their worn ou
t doublets, wearing shirts while in camp and frequently going shirtless while fishing. The women also began to economize on their clothing by shortening their skirts and removing layers of petticoats. But the lowering of these standards, Thomas proclaimed from his pulpit, was the beginning of a slow slide into paganism.

  Jocelyn had to laugh when she considered her own wardrobe. In her hurry to pack Jocelyn’s trunk, Audrey had thrown in an odd assortment of clothing, none of which was really practical for the wilderness of America. If she were in London, Jocelyn would have been well prepared. To dress, she would have donned a smock and French farthingale with its ridiculous hoops to hold the skirt away from her hips and abdomen, then a series of petticoats, then her kirtle. Audrey used to require ten minutes just to fasten the row of hooks down the left side of the bodice Jocelyn wore atop the kirtle, and another ten to pin the bodice’s hem to the kirtle’s waist at front and back. Still another ten minutes were required to pin the sleeves to the bodice, if, perchance, they hadn’t been unpinned when Jocelyn had last worn the dress.

  All of these pieces—smocks, farthingales, pins, and an assortment of kirtles, bodices, nightgowns, and half a dozen sleeves, two of which did not match—lay in Jocelyn’s trunk, yet in the colony she wanted to wear nothing but a kirtle and bodice—mayhap a petticoat, if the day were cool.

  ‘Twas no wonder that English women looked enviously at the Indian women in the heat of June and July. Buckskin was wonderfully soft and moved easily, but ‘twas too hot and heavy to wear in a skirt to the ankles.

  Ignoring Thomas’ admonitions, Rose Payne, Joyce Archard, and Margaret Lawrence made themselves mid-calf, one-piece dresses of buckskin and wore them to church one Sunday morning. Jocelyn saw them and held her breath while Thomas looked over his congregation. Rising, he stood before the lectern and solemnly proclaimed that the City of Raleigh was on its way to hell.

  “Buckskin is bucksin!” he ranted. Jocelyn blinked at the ferocity of his attack, but did not dare turn around to see how Mistresses Payne, Archard, and Lawrence were handling the news. “Buckskin is immodest, ‘tis a waste of God’s resources, and it harkens to the heathen, pagan community which spawned its use. No decent, godly woman should wear it, and no woman in bucksin will enter into this house of God!”

  The three women filed quietly out of church that afternoon with almost-tangible clouds of guilt over their heads, and Jocelyn wondered what her husband would do if John White did not come soon. For until they found a plant suitable for weaving into cloth, buckskin and furs would be the only materials available for dress, immodest or otherwise.

  In the late summer evenings Jocelyn nursed Regina by the hearth while Thomas poured over his prayer book. Her hope that the baby would soften his heart had thus far proved futile, for with the advent of summer and the planting season, Thomas had joined in the work with the other men and had little time for family life. While other men came home and rested or enjoyed their families, Thomas went straight from the supper table to fetch his Bible and prayer book. When Jocelyn had cleared their supper dishes away, he returned to the board and scratched his sermons out on parchment with a quill pen, often working until Jocelyn and the baby had fallen asleep.

  One night Thomas came home in a foul mood, and wore a look of stern displeasure throughout supper and even as he worked on his sermon. After Regina fell asleep, Jocelyn added another log to the fire and crawled up into her bed. Noting his persistent frown, she took her battered copy of Marcus Aurlieus from her trunk and began to read aloud:

  Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother; therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet, or eyelids, or like the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law—and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction?”

  “What are you reading?” Thomas’ tone was sharp with annoyance.

  Jocelyn lifted her eyes from the book. “Marcus Aurelius.”

  “Why do you read that section aloud?”

  She paused. In truth, she had been thinking that the passage might do him good. He did not work well with others—not with Ananias, or the Indians, or with her. Though they were married and had a child, never had she felt that they toiled together as a man and wife should. She labored in what she considered a form of ministry with the women as Thomas worked with the men, but never did they discuss the other’s endeavor, rarely did they speak at all. The slight affection he had shown her since arriving at their new home had vanished, and now he regarded her with open disaffection, afraid to touch her as they slept, reluctant to meet her glance across the board as they ate.

  “I know not why I read it,” she hedged. “It just struck me.”

  “Marcus Aurelius believed that a spark of the divine resides in all men, and nothing can be further from the truth. As a minister’s wife, you should not read such things.”

  “Think you that I should close my mind to the thoughts of others? Marcus Aurelius had much good to say!”

  “So do the heathen Indians who dwell at our side, yet they are not counted among the sons of God. Aurelius said that philosophy and it alone had the power to guide and guard a man’s steps. And such a philosophy, Jocelyn, will doom a man’s soul to hell for eternity, and doomed also will be those who read such ideas.”

  She let the book fall from her hand to the quilt that covered her. “I cannot speak for Marcus Aurelius,” she whispered intently. “But I will speak for myself. My soul is not doomed, Thomas, nor is yours, though you have read Aurelius, too. Nor was my father’s, and he was a philosopher of great renown as well as one who loved God and his fellow man. In my father’s house I read Aurelius, and Ovid, and Euripides, and Aeschylus—yet, by grace, still I am accepted by God!”

  “You will not read such things here.”

  Jocelyn managed a laugh. “Unless God in his mercy sends John White to us soon, I will never have such books again! But the words of the great poets are hidden in my heart. Surely you have read them—”

  He turned from her and bent over his books on the table. “I wish to devote myself to scripture.”

  “But you have read Greek poetry.”

  He lifted his head slightly, and Jocelyn knew his silence was an affirmative answer.

  “Then how can you deny the beauty of Aeschylus?” She sat up, engrossed by the memories that flooded her heart. “My father used to play-act with me. In one of my favorite scenes, I acted as one of the Furies, and my father played Orestes, who prayed for mercy as the Furies sang their binding song.”

  “‘Tis nothing but folly,” Thomas muttered, bending over his sermon. “Your father was but a foolish old man.”

  Ignoring his remarks, Jocelyn closed her eyes and swayed gently with the beauty of the poetry and the memory of her eloquent father reading from the thick book. As a child, she had memorized the powerful passage and played her part dramatically, swooping around her book-bound father as he tried not to smile.

  She recited the words that came easily to her even now:

  “Come then, link we our choral. If a man

  can spread his hands and show they are clean,

  no wrath of ours shall lurk for him.

  Unscathed he walks through his life time.

  But one like this man before us, with stained

  hidden hands, and the guilt upon him,

  shall find us beside him, as witnesses

  of the truth, and we show clear in the end

  to avenge the blood of the murdered.”

  “Stop!” Thomas roared.


  She blinked as he hurled his precious prayer book across the room, missing her head by inches. “Such things are of the Devil!” The prayer book fell to the floor with a thud as Jocelyn stared at her husband in mute astonishment.

  His face paled, and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but then abruptly turned and slammed the door as he stormed outside.

  The creaking of the latch woke her a few hours later, and she heard him quietly reenter the house. He shed his doublet, removed his boots and leggings, and slid carefully beneath the blankets, trying, she knew, not to wake her.

  She did not stir, but kept her back to him. Why had God brought her to such an unreasonable man? In the beginning Thomas had seemed a towering rock of strength. Now his solid qualities served only to frustrate and confound her. He was stubborn, immovable, implacable, and totally without understanding. She wondered if even a tiny spark of compassion existed in his soul.

  So why did her heart break each time she looked at him?

  For a long time they lay awake, their backs to each other, neither moving, neither speaking, until the dawn came and the baby stirred them with her crying.

  THIRTY-SIX

  John White felt the bow of the Ark Royal rise under his feet as the sleek flagship of Her Majesty’s Navy headed out to sea. A marvel of engineering, Sir Walter Raleigh had built the magnificent galleon, then presented it to the Queen. The ship had two gun decks, a double forecastle, a quarterdeck, half deck, and, above the half deck furthest aft, a poop deck. The innovative gallery, a balcony mastered by Raleigh’s designer, Matthew Baker, ran forward from the stern on either side of the half deck.