“A fitting tribute indeed, Nicholas!” John Guy said above the applause, and raised his glass to his cousin.
Nicholas Guy took his seat, and drank, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “And a fitting moment to tell you, cousins, that I have given much thought to the offers you have made, and decided that if you still want to add me to your number, I am ready to make one of your colonists when the Fleming sails in the summer.”
Kathryn felt the shock like a blow to her stomach. John and Philip Guy and their wives were nodding as though this were news they had expected to hear; even old Master Guy gave a harrumph of approval. Kathryn met the eyes of her sister-in-law and saw that Joanna was the only person there who shared her surprise.
“But we have spoken of this!” Nicholas Guy insisted much later, when everyone had gone home. They were upstairs in their sleeping chamber, while below Joanna directed Nancy, the Pipers, and the apprentice boys in cleaning up the dinner. Even here in the bedchamber Kathryn would not burst out with the reproaches that sprang to her lips, but only say, “Why did you not tell me beforehand that you had made up your mind to this? Or that you would announce it tonight?”
Nicholas Guy sat heavily on the bed, rubbing a hand through his hair. “You knew I was thinking of going out to the colony.”
“You talked of being interested in the venture—sometime in the future, you said! You assured me it would not be this year.”
“I gave no assurances.” He looked up at her, his narrow face serious. “I did not think myself that I would go this year, but speaking with John since he came back from London has convinced me this is the right time to go.”
“And you announced it tonight before them all without even telling me first? Do you think Master John did not talk to Mistress Anne before deciding to go out to the New Found Land? Or Philip with Elizabeth?”
“I am sure my cousins have both discussed the plan with their wives many times,” Nicholas admitted. He pulled off his doublet, standing before her in only his tunic and hose. “John and Anne have been married fifteen years; they have four children with another soon to come, and she manages his household when he is away on his ventures. Philip and Elizabeth, though they are younger, have likewise been long married and have sons already. At their time of life, a husband would naturally seek the counsel of a wife who is mature and has proven her worth.”
“What are you saying—that I have not proven myself worthy of your confidence?” She could feel tears, just at the edge of her eyes. “Because we have been married only a few months? Because I am not with child yet? Or is it some other fault in me?”
He crossed the room to her, put his hands on her shoulders. “No fault in you at all, dear girl. But you are a girl—you are eighteen years old and know nothing of the world outside your father’s house. You know I have great ambitions, and I plan for you to be at my side as I rise in the world. A season or two in the colonies will help me build my wealth and rise to a higher station. I do not intend to be a cobbler all my life, nor you to be a cobbler’s wife, I can assure you.”
“I—I know all this. But you never said—”
“Dear girl, even a man like my cousin John, whose wife is a matron of great wisdom and experience—even in such a case, this decision is the sort that a man makes in consultation with other men. Taming the New World is men’s business, though in the end we will have to bring women out with us.”
“And will they bundle the women off, without consulting them? Is that a decision men must make also?” She was trembling with the effort of fighting back tears and anger. And her husband was undoing the laces of her gown, pulling her shift off her shoulders, baring her skin to the chilly air. She wanted to pull away from him, shrug her sleeves back up over her arms and turn her back.
“I am sure those men who bring their wives out to the colonies will have long and tearful discussions with them first,” he said with a smile. “There are women in Virginia already, and from what I hear, more of them eager to join the men over there. ’Tis a grand adventure, you know—yes, it is, don’t shake your pretty head at me.”
“But—you’d not expect me to go over there?”
He frowned for a moment, thinking, then said, “I doubt it. I do not think I would stay there so long myself. A year or two, to build my fortune. I will acquire land there, but I would have someone else to work the land and fish for me. I will go for a season with my cousins and hope to return to you a wealthier man, with a better name here in Bristol.”
As he spoke, his fingers continued the business of undressing her, till her clothes lay on the floor in a heap and he drew her onto their bed, behind the hangings. It really was freezing in this room, even within the curtains of their marriage bed where he now drew her down beside him. His promise that he had no intention of staying long in the New World did a little to blunt the shock of his announcement that he was going at all, but Kathryn knew she must not fret him about it. No man would be anxious to rush home from the colonies to a nagging shrew of a wife.
“Then I suppose it is best that you go,” she said, letting him pull her into an embrace. “Only…it seems so soon…I wish I could be sure I was carrying a son for you, before you go.”
“Ah well, we know the remedy for that,” he chuckled. Then he rolled over on top of her, and Kathryn closed her eyes. She had gotten used to this business now, and it was not unpleasant, though it was hard to believe that what Master Nicholas did in bed was the same kind of passion that caused people to abandon fortunes and overthrow kingdoms. But, she reminded herself, those kind of things only happened in stories. Nobody expected great passion from a tradesman’s virtuous wife.
She thought again of the serene and beautiful woman in the painting and composed herself to lie quietly beneath her husband’s touch.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Judgement is Carried Out
Diverse well-minded men, wise, rich, and able,
Did undertake a plot inestimable,
The hopefullest, easiest, healthiest, just plantation,
That e’er was undertaken by our Nation.
CUPIDS COVE
AUTUMN-WINTER 1610
“PERRY! OVER HERE!” CALLED NICHOLAS GUY AS NED pushed the wheeled barrow up the slope.
“On my way!” Master Nicholas sometimes called him by name and other times, if they had anything to do with stone, he called Ned “stonemason,” though Ned had not even completed his apprenticeship. Of the thirty-nine men in Cupids Cove, Ned was the only one with skill in masonry. He saw that in the colony he might become a master mason simply for lack of anyone more skilled to fill that role, but in these first months they were building little in stone. There simply was not enough time before winter closed in, so the palisade wall around the settlement, as well as all the buildings, were being built of the wood that grew abundantly all around.
The rutted and stony ground under the barrow’s wheels had no softness left to it; the first frosts had come a fortnight ago and the temperature had stayed cold. It had been a long, mild, sunny autumn, the trees holding their leaves till late October, but now the men felt the teeth of winter in the air.
Those first months, the expedition had felt as if it were charmed. The crossing had been rough—but not spectacularly rough, Ned now understood from talking to the more experienced sailors. Only his own inexperience at sea had made him think he was like to die when the ship pitched and rolled in the waves. He was sick enough that he swore he’d never cross the ocean again, which was as good reason as any to make himself a life in this new world.
Once they were on land they had fair weather, and their work proceeded quickly in the long days of late summer and autumn. They had toiled hard to get the dwelling-house and storehouse closed in and to finish the palisade wall. The frosty nights were not too cold to bear now that they no longer had to sleep in pits dug into the ground and covered with canvas, as they had done during the first weeks.
Many fishing ships had been in the bay when Guy’s sh
ip arrived, and the fishermen had come back and forth to the colony from their fishing stations up the shore to share news and trade supplies. The fishermen had sailed home at the beginning of autumn, as had the Fleming that brought the colonists over, laden with timber from the forest and salt fish from the seas. Since the ships had gone, the settlers had seen no other humans but themselves. Neither natives nor pirates, despite their fears.
Yesterday had seen two firsts: the first snowfall, a light dusting of white across the frozen ground, and also the first serious accident. John Morris had crushed his leg while chopping down a tree, resulting in a dark, ugly wound that left him unable to walk. The surgeon who had come over with them, Reynolds, had ordered Morris to rest, along with James Stone, who was suffering stiffness in his knees and had taken to his bed. That left them short two men as they worked to complete the buildings before snow came.
As they gathered for supper last night, Master John Guy had spoken about Morris’s accident, giving the wounded man an extra ration of spirits. He also gave the men a warning. “We must carry on and be more vigilant than ever to avoid mishap. For what might be a small thing back in England could end a man’s life here.”
Ned felt no envy for Morris and Stone, left behind in the dwelling-house while the rest worked. The New Found Land was not a place where a man would choose to lie abed. Even under layers of wool blankets and fur coverings, the beds were as chilly as they were hard. Nothing warmed you up except work. Lying abed might produce far worse results: today, Morris was running a fever. Reynolds could do little more than sew up wounds and splint broken limbs; he had a cache of medicines, but he was no physician, and had little skill or experience in using those remedies. In a community of all men, you could not even hope for a cunning-woman who could heal with herbs and potions, as you might at home.
Ned unloaded his barrowful of wood at Master Nicholas’s direction. “I’ll get a start on that window frame now,” he said. The colony’s supplies had included not one, but two glass windows for the dwelling-house, a luxury that showed how serious Governor Guy was about planting a permanent colony.
“Good man,” said Master Nicholas with a nod. He was a younger and more vigorous man than his two cousins John and Philip, and he was a fair master. Ned knew that any small burn of resentment he felt towards Nicholas Guy had less to do with the man’s leadership than with the fact that he had Kathryn Gale in his marriage bed, and had left her back in Bristol. If she were mine, Ned thought, I’d not have sailed halfway across the world; you can count on that.
But she was not his, and such thoughts were themselves better left on the other side of the sea. Master Nicholas strode on as Ned settled in beside Tom Percy and George Whittington, setting the window frame into the final wall of the dwelling-house. When Ned pointed out a fault in Whittington’s work, the other man took the correction with a good enough spirit. “I never claimed any skill at building,” he shrugged, pulling out the nails he had driven in. Despite the chill of the morning air and the skirl of snow still on the ground, he had peeled off his shirt and was working bare-chested.
“You must have a furnace inside of you,” Ned said. “I’m warm enough when I’m working, but the chill of these mornings is enough to take the skin off a man.”
George wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. “Aye, I’ve got the lusty humours—always hot inside, no matter how cold it is outside.”
“I hope to God it is only your lusty humour and you’re not brewing a fever. The last thing we need is an outbreak of plague.” They had had a near thing of it with George’s younger brother, Marmaduke, who had been sick with smallpox on the ship coming over. All but the surgeon had kept well clear of him till he recovered, and no other man had fallen ill, but the thought of plague or fever spreading among their little company was a frightening one.
“Sure, as far as plague goes, we’re better off here than back in England,” Tom Percy said. He was a dour, quiet young man, and he rarely joined in the talk and laughter while they worked. “The crowded houses and narrow streets, everyone pressed together—that’s what breeds plague.” Tom glanced beyond the building they were at work on, to the pale-blue sky and the shimmer of the water in the sheltered harbour beyond. “We’re in the best place we could be here—far from cities where folk live crowded on top of one another.”
“It may be so,” Ned allowed, grunting as he lifted a large piece of timber into place. “But we eat and sleep in each other’s pockets here. Sickness would spread damn fast in such a place.”
“There’s open space all around. I went into the woods the other day to cut firewood, and I wasn’t ten minutes’ walk from here when I could hear no sounds of voices, no hammers or axes or picks, nor them damned chickens and goats. Nothing but the wind and water and the cries of the birds.”
“And the growl of a bear that might come out of the woods and tear you to shreds,” George said. They had seen one of those huge beasts during their first days in the colony, and taken care to keep well clear of it.
“Well, I never saw no bear, and I’ll tell you the truth, I was half wishing I could stay out in the woods, save that I knew you all needed the wood I was cutting.”
“You’d have come into one of the native villages soon enough,” Ned pointed out. “The fishermen have seen ’em.”
“I want no village, savage or English. When this place is built up enough that we can spare one man’s labour, I’m going to go off into the woods. I’ll build myself a little cottage, and be free of the sound of other men’s voices.”
“Well, excuse me for talking then,” said Ned. It was a long chat to have had with a contrary bastard like Percy.
George Whittington, driving in a new nail to replace the one he had removed, snorted. “Off in a tilt in the woods, is it, Percy? Wouldn’t you be searching out that savage camp and hauling off one of their women, at least?”
“Ah, pay no mind to Percy, he’s made up his mind to be crooked,” Ned said. “I ’low you’ll be off looking for a native maid in the woods if we’re here without women much longer, George.”
“If I don’t find one of them, I might be coming after you or even Percy one of these nights,” George grinned. He seemed a decent enough fellow, George, and most of what he said was pure foolishness. “I had a whore down on Bristol docks three hours before the ship left,” George went on, “and I’ve been counting the minutes ever since. Four months is a bloody long time for a man to go without nowhere to put his cock except in his own hand, I’m telling you that. If Master Guy don’t bring out some girls from England soon, you beardless young fellows are going to have to watch yourselves at night, is all I’m saying. ’Tis not natural.”
“As long as you’re not worried about what’s natural, I’ll tell the she-goats to watch out for you, George,” bawled Matt Grigg, trundling past with another load of wood.
“Oh, you mock me, but there’s no telling what a man will do if you make him go a year without so much as a poxy dockside whore around, never mind his own bonny sweetheart.”
“Any sweetheart you got, Whittington, most likely is a poxy whore,” Tom Percy said. He and George had gotten into a fistfight in their first weeks in Cupids Cove, and Governor Guy had had them both whipped. Now the two men confined themselves to sniping at one another.
Ned did not tell Percy or Whittington or anyone else that his own experience of sweethearts went no further than one of those same dockside whores, though, he hoped, not a pox-ridden one. She had been very young and seemed shy and sweet, which was probably not the best choice—he ought to have paid a few pennies more for an experienced older woman, who would show him what to do. But there he was, eighteen years old, and he’d never had a sweetheart—always thought there’d be time enough for such things when he was further along in his apprenticeship. And, if he was truthful with himself, his dreams about Kathryn Gale had kept him from having too much interest in other girls during the years he was an apprentice in her father’s house
.
When he had decided to join the expedition to New Found Land and knew they would be a year, at least, over there with no women in sight, he had made up his mind to have a woman in the same way he had approached packing his few possessions: this was a thing he had to get done. A man couldn’t sail off on the ocean and risk dying a virgin over there. He had asked the eldest apprentice, Walter, where to go and who to ask for. Walter had taken Ned with him to a whorehouse with a decent reputation, and Ned had chosen that poor little doxy. Who, to be honest, he had probably picked not just because she was the cheapest but also because her dark hair, brown eyes, and rounded cheeks put him in mind a little bit of Kathryn.
It wasn’t an hour of passion the poets would sing of. But Ned had got the business done, so that whatever happened after he wouldn’t have to blush when fellows like George Whittington made jests about beardless virgin lads.
“That won’t do,” he said to George now, pointing his attention back to the wall. “You can see daylight in that space there—here, this will make it fit better.” It gave him some ease, put his feet back on solid ground, to give instruction to the brash, confident Whittington. True, Ned had trained as a stonemason, but his father was a carpenter, and he knew more about any sort of building than did Whittington, who had spent his life waiting on Governor Guy.
They finished that last piece of wall and put in the window before the morning was over, broke for a meal at noon, and turned to other chores later in the afternoon. Ned hitched himself up to the wood sled and hauled a load of birch from the stand of trees to the fireplace in the dwelling-house. With no horses or donkeys yet, the men did all the dragging and hauling themselves. He made several trips back and forth, stacking the wood—it was fearsome, as the weather got colder, how much wood they went through. Last winter back in Bristol had been the coldest he could remember in his life, but this New Found Land winter promised to be even colder, and their shelter was hardly as sturdy as a row of city houses back home.
A Roll of the Bones Page 4