A Roll of the Bones

by Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

  CUPIDS COVE

  MAY 1613

  THE BABY SURVIVED: INDEED, HE THRIVED, SUCKLING eagerly at his mother’s teat and growing larger and lustier every day. When he was six weeks old, the Sunday for Kathryn’s churching arrived. Reverend Leat had come to the house to christen Jonathan shortly after he was born, but this Sunday the babe would be brought out and shown to the community, while Kathryn herself would be declared cleansed from the stain of childbirth. And, as a small point of interest amid that holy ceremony, she would see Thomas Willoughby again.

  She had had many visitors and small gifts during the weeks since the baby’s birth, but young Willoughby had neither come to visit nor sent any message. Indeed, it would have been most unsuitable for him to do so. Those autumn weeks when she had teased and bantered with him while her husband was away on the Indeavour—before the sickness, before her child had been born—felt like part of a different life. When she walked outside on that first Sunday morning in May, tasted the outdoor air, Kathryn felt no connection to that other Kathryn Guy who had walked these paths last summer and autumn. She was a mother now, as well as a wife: she had a new role to play. And the colony itself must be different after this terrible winter. Surely one difference would be this: she would no longer feel anything when she looked into Thomas Willoughby’s eyes.

  A fresh, cold wind blew in off the water. True, the calendar said May, but no hint of spring warmth tinged that wind; green buds were tight-furled on the bare tree branches. The sky overhead was a blanket of grey cloud, broken here and there by weak beams of sun that tried to pierce the clouds. It was cold enough still that everyone’s breath clouded on the air when they spoke.

  But the mood was spring-like, as people gathered round Kathryn in the hall of the main dwelling-house, peering and cooing over the baby. Elizabeth Guy’s little boys, well recovered now from the sickness, ran about the dwelling-house with hearty whoops and hollers, and had to be shushed to silence by their mother, who led them over to see their small cousin. James, the elder boy, looked at the baby once before turning his attention to a spinning top Ned had made for him, but little Harry stared a long time, as if finding it hard to believe there was now a resident of Cupids Cove even smaller than himself.

  A few of the other women, like Kathryn herself, wore gowns that looked as if they belonged in an English church on a May morning, instead of the heavy dark woolens they had shivered in through the winter. Without blossoms or warm weather, they had still the promise of spring: the harbour ice had thawed; ships were arriving from England; the ground would soon be ready for planting. The baby that Kathryn carried in her arms, new life after so much hardship, was a symbol of that promise: like Philip and Elizabeth’s little boys, he was a reminder that they were building something here that was meant to last, that there would be generations of English children in this land to continue what the colonists had begun.

  “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His goodness to give you safe deliverance,” the minister intoned as Kathryn knelt before him, “and hath preserved you in the great danger of childbirth, ye shall therefore give hearty thanks to God, and pray.”

  Hearty thanks, indeed. After the service, the benches were moved and tables laid for a communal dinner. After her long confinement, Kathryn was hungry for other faces, other voices, even as she could not help noticing the empty spaces, the faces that were gone from their circle. As they ate, the menfolk talked about the arrival of the fishing fleet, plans for summer exploration, and what news would come from the colony’s investors in England. Governor John Guy had returned to Bristol a few weeks earlier, leaving Master Philip as acting governor—he had business to settle with the colony’s investors. Kathryn heard Thomas Willoughby’s elegant drawl above the voices of the other men, declaring that his father would certainly have to consider whether his investment in the New Found Land was worthwhile, given how harsh the winter had been and how many men had been lost. Over the heads of the company assembled, his blue eyes caught hers for a moment. With an effort, she looked away.

  While the men spoke of the colony’s hopes for summer, the women examined Kathryn’s baby, offering advice about caring for an infant and suggestions of herbs that would keep her milk flowing well. They talked, too, of what crops could be planted now and what they might hope to reap next harvest. Amid their chatter, Jane Catchmaid sat quiet and pale. Her eyes followed little Harry and James Guy as they ran about the room, then came back to rest on Kathryn and the baby. Poor woman, Kathryn thought, to lose a child and have to sit here while everyone celebrates mine. Still, Jane spoke kindly to Kathryn, congratulating her.

  Mistress Catchmaid’s staunch supporter Sal Butler, who had served as midwife, was less generous. “You are most fortunate, Mistress Guy,” she said as she bent down to peer at baby Jonathan, sleeping in a basket on the floor. “Still, ’tis often true that poor women such as we have an easier time birthing than ladies like my mistress, is it not?” Kathryn might be married to the governor’s cousin, but Sal Butler was not about to let her forget that she was only a stonemason’s daughter. And when Kathryn smiled and nodded, Mistress Butler added, “You’d have had an easier time still, had you been allowed to drink my ginger posset with spruce bark boiled into it. ’Tis a great help in birthing, that brew, but your girl would have none of it, and dashed the cup from your lips.”

  “If you’d as much experience birthing babies as you claim, you’d have known she was in no fit state to drink anything at the time, and not tried to force it on her,” Nancy shot back.

  Kathryn gave Nancy a stern glance. “’Twas a difficult time, as birthing always is, and there are bound to be disagreements. All that matters is I have a hale little boy out of it.” She saw that her words had stung Mistress Catchmaid yet again and wished she had spoken with more care.

  “By the time he’s big enough to eat solid food, we’ll have more than ship’s biscuit to feed him—I know my two have grown tired of that, these last weeks,” Elizabeth Guy put in, turning all their thoughts back to the ever-present topic of food.

  “I knows ’twas some nice to knead out that first loaf of bread when we first got grain in after all winter,” Daisy said. She smiled for a moment, then her round face grew sober again: she had not spoken of being happy about anything since her husband and sister had died.

  “Perhaps the next ship will have cheese,” Nancy suggested quickly. They had gone through their own stores of cheese over the winter and had no means to make more since all the cows and most of the goats had died for want of fodder.

  “Raise up that little kid-goat of yours and we’ll be getting milk from her before long,” Daisy said, and most of the women laughed. Nancy had taken a good deal of teasing for nursing the baby goat to health and toting it around like a pet; she had even sat beside Kathryn, feeding the kid from a bowl of milk as Kathryn fed the babe at her breast.

  “Yes, cheese…and plum preserves,” said Bess in a dreamy tone, as a girl might talk about wearing diamonds or living in a palace.

  “You will all have bread and preserves and cheese enough, once more supplies come from Bristol,” said Master Philip Guy, passing by to hear their talk. “This is all a great experiment, you know—to learn by experience what it takes to survive here, so that every year we can support ourselves more and depend less upon ships from England.”

  “But one must ask if the experiment is even a sensible one,” Mistress Catchmaid said. “I know I had not expected so harsh a winter, or I would have had second thoughts about coming out.”

  “Summer will be a kinder season,” Philip Guy assured her. “We have committed to make this a success, and we must stay the course.”

  He passed on from the knot of women, taking his wife Elizabeth and the boys with him. Mistress Catchmaid said to the women around her, “Must we stay the course at the risk of so many lives? Think of the tales from the Virginia colony, of all the lives lost there! Will we bide here till we begin eating each other?”

&nb
sp; With Elizabeth Guy gone, Kathryn was the only other woman of rank at the table, and thus the only one who could chide. “That kind of talk will put no heart in us, Mistress Catchmaid. After the hard winter we have come through, we need courage and good faith.”

  “Oh, and ’tis easy to speak of courage, when you are not the one who has lost a babe!” Sal Butler leaped to her mistress’s defense. It might have turned into a quarrel indeed, had Jonathan not woken at that very moment and set up a howl. Nancy picked him from the basket and handed him to Kathryn, and the other women took the interruption as a chance to leave the table and go off to do those tasks that needed doing, even on a Sunday.

  Back in her own household later that evening, Kathryn thought of the women’s talk again. Around her table were gathered her husband and Nancy, Bess and Daisy, Ned and Tom, and three of the other men who shared the upstairs loft: Frank Tipton, John Teague, and John Crowder. To that small group she recounted Mistress Catchmaid’s words, adding, “’Tis only natural she should be discontented, but it seemed as if others share her misgivings. Is there talk of folk wanting to leave the colony and go back to England?”

  “That there is—I’ve heard it from many of the fellows,” Ned Perry said.

  “Now that the governor is gone back,” Nicholas Guy said, “William Colston will follow—they says ’tis to raise more funds for the colony, but Mistress Colston and her sister will go back as well once their master goes, and they may not return. As for the single men, many of Willoughby’s apprentices are not suited to this life—and, though ’tis a shame to say it, Willoughby’s own son is no better. That puffed-up young coxcomb needs to be on the next ship to England, only his father won’t have him back.”

  Across the table, Nancy lifted her eyes to meet Kathryn’s. For the second time that day, Kathryn looked away from a gaze that cut too close her feelings for Thomas Willoughby. At the thought of him going back to England, she felt a queer mixture of relief and disappointment.

  In their bed that night, curtains drawn, she turned to Nicholas. “If so many are going back to England, what of us? Will we go?”

  There was a little silence; for a moment she listened to his steady breathing and wondered if he was already asleep. Then he said, “I have made no fortune here. If we go back to England now, I will not have the means to buy into the merchants’ guild. I would have to go back to being a shoemaker.” Though he had been a fisherman, a farmer, a hunter, and a boatbuilder since coming to the New World—and had repaired a fair few boots as well—she could tell how deeply he disliked the idea of returning to Bristol to take up his old trade.

  “And if we stay?”

  He propped himself up on an elbow: she could not see his face but could feel him looking down at her. “There is a fortune to be made here, but not in Cupids Cove.”

  “What…what can you mean?” She thought of the dark, tree-covered hills, the empty coves and bays, the fishing stations and the pirates’ fort, the native camp the men had visited. What kind of life could an English family have in this land, outside of the settlement?

  “This cove is too small, too crowded, and any man who hopes to make his fortune will need to clear land of his own. There is trouble, too, with the company back in England. The governor is afeared that the investors will withdraw their support, for we have been here three years, and instead of making them rich, we are still costing them money. I fear the whole venture may fall prey to petty squabbles and mismanagement.”

  Then surely, she thought, we would go back to Bristol. Back to being a shoemaker’s wife, trying to wrest control of a tiny household from her sister-in-law’s grip.

  Her husband went on. “I’ve not spoken of this yet—I did not want to trouble you with it, so soon after bearing our son. But Kathryn, this land has changed me—changed my ambitions. I once thought nothing could be finer than returning to Bristol with gold in my pocket, to be a merchant of that city. You know ’twas always my plan. But after three years here—I look at this land, at the sea around it, at all the opportunities it offers, and I have thought…what say you, to making this our home? To building our own plantation here, being master and mistress of our own estate?”

  “You mean—we would own our own land, live on it, and work it?”

  “Yes. I have spoken to John, before he went away. While he would like to imagine that everyone will stay in Cupid’s Cove and work for the good of the settlement, the governor sees that there must be room here for some men to strike out on their own. I want to be the first to do so. My work here has earned me the right to my own grant of land, and with a few men I could clear a plot of land up the shore, between Harbour Grace and Carbonear.”

  “You have given this a good deal of thought.”

  “I have. But I have not—I would not make any commitment to it, without consulting you.”

  She remembered the night in Bristol when Nicholas had announced he was going to the New World, and explained to her that men did not consult their wives about such things. Their year together in the colony had changed that, she saw. Perhaps theirs was becoming a true partnership, after all. “I hardly know what to say,” she said. But she found she liked the thought of their own plantation. They could build a grand house and give it a lovely name, like an English manor.

  Kathryn thought, for the first time in a long time, of the portrait of the woman in the blue dress she had once admired on the wall of a great house back home. Someday, perhaps, there would be an artist in the New Found Land, and he could paint her portrait to hang on the wall of their fine home. Not wearing silk, perhaps—but not in homespun, either.

  “’Twould be hard work, no point in denying that,” her husband went on. “We would build a house—for you and me and the baby, and such servants as are willing to come with us—and there we could farm our own land and raise our own stock. Catch and cure our own fish to sell back in England. We can be landowners here, as we could never be back in England.”

  The next day, while baby slept and the women washed out the clothes and bed linens, Kathryn told Nancy about her husband’s new plan. Nancy nodded, scrubbing one of the baby’s little shifts briskly along the washboard. “If you and the master were to go off and clear your own land, you’d need servants and labourers. When Bess and Frank marry, I’d say they’d be willing to follow. Daisy will go where Bess does, and you know I’ll not leave your side.”

  “I know you’ve never wished to stay in this country.”

  “What choice have I, if you stay?” Nancy wrung out the baby’s clothes, put them in a basket, took a petticoat from the pile of soiled linens. “There’s naught for me back in Bristol.”

  “You might yet marry. Either some man who is staying here in the colony, or someone who goes back home.”

  “You know I’ve no wish for that.”

  “George Whittington spoke to my husband about you, some time ago.”

  A look that could only be fear passed over Nancy’s face. “What—what did he say?”

  “Only that he would make an offer for your hand in marriage—what else would he say?”

  Nancy hesitated a moment before saying, “’Tis a strange offer to make, since Nell Bly believes he has pledged to wed her. What did Master Nicholas tell him?”

  “That I would speak to you about it, as I am doing, but that the choice was yours. I suppose there has been no formal betrothal between George and Nell yet.”

  “Well, you know what my choice is,” Nancy said. Her strong, work-worn hands knotted into the fabric of the petticoat as she scrubbed hard. “Even if I were to think of marriage, I’d not think twice about George Whittington.”

  A Bristol ship sailed into the harbour two days later. There had been sack ships already, and the colonists had been able to trade for a few items, but this was the vessel they had been awaiting, coming with supplies and letters from their own Newfoundland Company. All the settlers gathered by the water as the ship put down boats and sailors rowed into shore. Kathryn imagined what they
might have on board: barrels of grain and salt, for certain. Sugar. Peas and beans. Wheels of cheese, perhaps. By tonight there would be a change, at last, from the monotony of their rations.

  Aboard the ship was not only food aplenty, but other necessities—cloth, rope, nails, window glass. Almost as welcome were letters and news from England. For Kathryn there was a letter from her father, with the news that her younger brothers and sister were all well. It contained greetings from the servants and apprentices, not only for her but for Nancy and Ned. Many of the other colonists, at least those whose families could read and write, received similar messages.

  But not all the news was happy. As the settlers and sailors gathered for a meal together in the big house, the first meal in months where there was an abundance of flavours and plenty for everyone to eat, Kathryn noticed the absence of Philip Guy. “My cousin has had many letters from the merchants of the company,” her husband told her. “He has closeted himself away to read them, but I think he is not well pleased with what he has read so far. Likely he’ll summon some of us men tonight to discuss his plans.”

  “Is the company losing faith in this venture? Will they abandon us altogether?”

  Master Nicholas frowned. “’Tis certainly what the governor feared before he went back—that having found no mines of gold or iron or copper here, but only the codfish that we knew was in the waters all along, they start to question whether this land is worth settling. And I do not think that, when they hear how we passed the winter, their concerns will be eased. The loss of life here has not been great compared to those lost in Virginia, but eight dead out of such a small colony may make the investors think this land is not worth the trouble of over-wintering.”

  “Nine,” Kathryn corrected, tallying the dead on her fingers.

  Her husband, too, counted. “We lost eight men, I am sure of it. So said all the reports we are sending back.”

  “Eight men, and Molly.” A girl, especially a servant girl, hardly counted in the tally, she supposed. And Mistress Catchmaid’s dead baby would not be counted either, having never even been baptized.