Call Upon the Water

by Stella Tillyard

  He laughed at that. His eyes were black and sparkling.

  “You are a woman of spirit to give me such a reply. You know what I mean.”

  “Sir?”

  “Were you one of those forced into indenture or did you come of your own accord?”

  I stayed silent, knowing that the Captain might ask the overseer about me and though there were dozens of us there in the fields, Mr. Hawker knew well the ones who’d come from jail, who’d only get a set of clothes with their freedom, nothing else.

  But the Master only laughed softly.

  “No matter. You have found your way to the house, and to Damaris too.”

  I said nothing in reply, but stood back so that he had to pass and enter the room. I came in behind him and saw him already seated on the bed lifting the Mistress’s hand to his lips. The last months of my mistress’s life were made happy by her husband’s devotion to her.

  That winter of 1653 Damaris Maybrick, my mistress, faded away without complaint. Day by day she grew weaker, as if everything within her was slowing and could not be started up again. Oh, I tried, for I had no wish to see her die. When the spring came, and she would no longer leave the house even to sit upon the bench in the shade, I told her how bright the new grass was in the meadow, and how lively the birds were at their nesting.

  “Talk to me, Eliza,” she said. She lay in her bed all day now, the coverlet over her thin legs and her voice smaller than before the winter. I spoke to her of all the flowers of this place, though I then knew no names for them, but could only speak of the trails of hanging flowers in the meadow, scarlet and yellow; the great white cups on the trees at the swamp edge; the starry orange carpet in the marshes.

  Damaris my mistress put her head down on the pillow and closed her eyes. Her voice was so small I had to lay my head by hers to hear of the cowslips on the bank at Combe Down; their tiny buds. Rough encircling leaves uncurled as the flowers came out, slowly offering their treasure, she said. She had picked great bunches of them, filling silver tankards with mounds of yellow.

  My mistress never felt herself graced by fate. How fine her life was; how easy. Yet she was sick, and only pined for the gentle green world she had lost. She died quietly one morning in May, the Master kneeling by the bed, myself in the shadows ready to close her eyes. A week later she lay under the earth, in the burial ground beyond the meadow. The captain carried purple lilies to the sandy grave; the pastor alone attended him. Later I learned that two little children were buried there already, but I did not know that then.

  In the weeks after my mistress’s death I was watchful and quiet, and took care to stay hidden when I was outside the house. I feared to catch in the thoughts of Mr. Hawker the overseer, for now that Damaris my mistress was dead I might be sent back to the fields. When the Master was in the house I made sure to be round about but not too near. Mrs. Lyle gave me indoor tasks. I polished the silver and slept under the eaves as I had always done, having long before found a cupboard there that I had for my private use and shared with no one. From its small window, high up, I watched the Master come and go.

  One evening in the autumn he called for me.

  “Captain Maybrick is asking for you to attend him,” Mrs. Lyle said.

  There was no choice about the summons. An indentured servant may not run away or refuse. The overseer walks the lines in the fields and can pick out women at will. A woman with a man and a family might be left alone; but that depends on the desires of the overseer and the temper of the place. Captain Maybrick was spoken of as a man more interested in luxury than women, yet I had felt his eyes upon me in the months my mistress was ill.

  I went into the parlor by the servants’ door that was cut from the paneling in the back of the room. I came up to the Master, in this way, from behind, as he sat before the fire and looked for me at the main door.

  “Captain Maybrick, sir. You called for me?”

  Then he turned, still sitting.

  “Eliza. Come here.”

  I went towards him, stopping a little way off. We looked at one another. I saw a gentleman, dressed in green velvet with a white lace collar and silver buckles on his shoes. A Cavalier, with a high sense of himself. A man, too, I knew from those accounts I had seen, whose plantation was not as profitable an enterprise as he would like, who owed money. From the open doors to the meadow came a cool evening breeze. He held out a hand. I did not take it, but moved to the chair opposite his.

  “Yes, sit down. No, close the doors first.”

  I drew the doors together and slipped the arm of the catch over to hold them. Captain Maybrick and I were then shut in together, quite private.

  “You are a fine woman, Eliza; the sort of woman I wish for.”

  “You are a widower, sir. Your wife lately dead.”

  “I will ever honor the memory of Damaris, Eliza, but come, every man needs a woman, especially here. Do you not feel the emptiness of this place, the emptiness out there and nothing to hold it at bay?”

  To me, all America is brim full. It hums with life. The great beyond, that the captain felt as emptiness, vibrates with the unknown, which thrills me. What might be discovered there? Creatures unknown to us, sights never witnessed by us. All such things, even those that might be monstrous, I want to see. Those that bring danger I wish still to read of. Why draw a boundary there, between the known and the unknown world? More discovery is certain, and I long to know of it. This desire was always there from the moment of my arrival, and will never fade.

  • • •

  I did not tell the captain any of that, but only nodded. He desired me to come to him, to preserve his dignity, to ease his fear. I had a choice only in the manner of my agreement. I said yes, and willingly, though I did not speak of love. I became the companion of his evenings. I entertained him. As time went on I gathered small privileges, beginning with a room to myself on the first floor, away from the house servants.

  Mrs. Lyle, who had loved the Mistress, watched my advancement and became my ally. The housemaids and men who worked about Bellevue kept a distance from me, and what they said I never learned. Dorcas the cook, softened by my admiration, arranged the matter so that when the captain demanded that I alone carried his food from the kitchen and set it by him at dinner, no word of dissent reached me.

  Soon I had a seat at the table, if the captain asked me to sit. He softened under my attention and took to calling my name when he came back from the estate, so that it rang through the house, wishing me to sit by him as he worked on the accounts and letters to the merchants who supplied him and bought the produce of the plantation.

  “Write this for me, Eliza,” he said. “Copy this letter into the letter book. Settle this account.”

  Little by little I took over the tasks that were irksome to the captain’s sense of himself as a gentleman and soldier. I soon knew which merchants and boat owners he dealt with in Jamestown and along the James River and the Chesapeake, and learned how he might save money here, or get a better price there. At night he asked me to his chamber, and I went, returning to my own room at daylight; still a servant, still not free.

  By the summer, ten years ago, when I was in my twenty-ninth year, I saw how a compact might be made. Captain Maybrick liked my company. He wished for me in the evenings, to talk business. He wanted me at night, when I sat naked over him on the bed and showed myself to him; all the parts I wished to show. Captain Maybrick believed me to be wanton, or a woman unschooled, though I am not. Yet neither am I niggardly in matters of the heart. I had a gift to give that might bring a kind of peace and I lay willingly with Captain Maybrick and with pleasure. I watched his face soften as I lowered myself onto him, or drew him into me.

  When the captain murmured kindness and told me that I had captured his heart, I found a way to say something that was yet nothing. I gave him what I could, in gratitude for the life I got in return, yet however much I gave him, I did not give him all. I kept something back, something insoluble that stayed inside
me, reserved. The line was always fixed; I never let Captain Maybrick overstep the boundary of my soul.

  This boundary can be breached all at once, or slowly dissolved, but once gone the thing it protects is lost. A person may start off giving little and find too late that she has given all; or give everything and then find that she has taken it back. Man or woman, it makes no difference. I did not change; I patrolled that line and kept it in good order, its watchtowers all in place. Captain Maybrick never noticed. He delighted in my form, though it is a rough-and-ready thing, and eased himself happily into his old way of being a gentleman.

  So a year passed. I trained up a servant girl, Annie, to wait on us, and gave her my attic cupboard to make her loyal. The captain and I then sat across from one another at table. We slept side by side. One by one the unmarried men of the neighborhood, some of whom kept women also, were invited to our table, and I presided as the hostess at those evenings. That is how Mr. Lee and I first became acquainted, the plantation of Grace Dieu, then belonging to his father, being next upriver to Bellevue and sharing with it the transportation of tobacco to the wharfs at Hampton Roads and other conveniences.

  There being so few women in the southern colonies gives us weight in the scales of fate, which most often fall so heavily on the side of men. Though it is a puzzle, yet it is the case that for free women, and such as myself, our small numbers make us heavier and bring the scales closer to the place of balance. It delighted me to see how conduct slipped and the scales rose on one side and fell on the other, for what was being weighed was not persons, but power.

  I watched and rejoiced. I saw that the lowliest free woman could choose a man she liked the look of, just like that. Even those indentured, if spared the overseer’s attention, might cast about for what they wanted. Men of property took all sorts to their beds and still worshipped in their churches on a Sunday.

  Discretion forbade my entrance into the society of married planters. Word of me got abroad, and since I was not a native, as was common for young men to take to their bed, many men, and some of their wives also, treated me evenhandedly when we met, and did not remark on the state of affairs. No children were born to us who might be looked upon as bastards. Nothing outward in the captain’s life changed from the days of Damaris’s sickness. Death sucks away so many here, even amongst the richest, that after a few years in the Colony of Virginia neither men nor women are as scrupulous about life as in the old country.

  The captain and I took the boat to Jamestown, where I chose muslins and silks for my clothes; gold silk that held the sun and muslin the color of mist. The seamstress carried the finished gowns up from the landing stage in her arms with the delicate care of a midwife. Captain Maybrick stood and watched as she dressed me and sewed the hems. His eyes glinted when I showed my ankles underneath the skirts. That evening he ran his foot up my calf and on, all the while with his eyes on mine and one hand on the stem of his wine goblet. But though he said one morning, “Will you call me James?” and I began with some reluctance to use that name, he did not speak of the future. I did not ask, but preferred to keep my thoughts to myself.

  Though I might sit at Captain Maybrick’s table in certain company and share his bed, I was still a servant, and bound to work every hour and every day if he wished it. I was then approaching my thirtieth year. Life streamed past me. I could not hold it. I had four years and more to work out. In that time what might I miss; and after that, what then?

  Captain Maybrick stayed quiet on the subject of my freedom, so I took matters into my own hands. From the very first I had seen the beauties of the place. The James River rises and falls with the tides and overflows into its swamps at storm time. Bellevue plantation fronted the river and possessed many swamps that the Maybricks deemed useless, but were to me an opportunity. To have arrived in a watery place was my great good fortune. How I knew about marshlands and the draining of them I did not say, but one evening, Captain Maybrick was talking of his monies in a general way. His complaint was the expense of new land, there being a constant increase in the settlers of the region which made the prices rise.

  “Rather than buy far afield, you might bring more land into cultivation, James.”

  “How so? I am using every acre I possess. Stop talking nonsense, Eliza. Come here; come, come.”

  The captain held out his arms for me, unsteady on his chair.

  “I beg you, listen.”

  “Very well; very well, but then, I expect you’ll come to bed.”

  “You have a great deal of land at present lying idle that we might turn to use.”

  He looked at me then in frank disbelief.

  “What land, Eliza? Tell me what land, when here I am asking Hawker to push out the edges of the fields to the utter limit? You are thinking of the land that lies fallow? That is tired land, madam, tobacco exhausts it.”

  “I am speaking of new land.”

  “I have no new land, except if I purchase more at a distance from this place, and that I lack the money for.”

  “The swamps, sir, may be drained.”

  “It has never been done.”

  “Then you may be the first to do it.”

  He threw his head back at that and laughed, a laugh that was full and hearty and with a thread of scorn twisted in it. The captain had a fine deep voice that drew me to him, but yet he was as unfitted to this country as Damaris his wife had been. In this place it is more use to understand mud and water than swordplay and fine language, but the captain had no sense of that, thinking, if he did think at all, merely of his crops.

  When we lay on the bed with the moon coming in, the captain liked to talk about his life. The truth is that he had never been a farmer, or planned for any sort of life but an idle one in the army or at the King’s court. He had inherited his estate at a young age and had always had a man to look after it and many men who worked there. He loved Combe Down, as Damaris his wife did, and as a child does the home where he has always slept in the same bed.

  Like the Mistress he wished to talk of what he had lost, but with more anger in his voice; like her, he was foolish. He called England home, and carried that corpse over his shoulder every day.

  “Damaris spoke to you of Combe Down?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It must have been a place of beauty.”

  “Yes, yes, I see it still when I close my eyes.”

  He spoke as if possessed by the spirits of that place, dragged back by them. I wanted to shake him, but I said nothing. I wished to know how I might serve the captain and myself together.

  “My estate was laid waste in ’forty-four; the house burned to the ground, the sheep and horses taken by the Roundhead soldiers, the farmyards and hayricks set alight as they passed through. I wasn’t there, serving as I was and straggling home defeated. I came back to the ruin, and Damaris fled to her father’s house. My regiment being stood down at the end of the fighting, I had no funds to build it up.”

  “And so you came here with the Mistress.”

  “My uncle Henry took possession here in the year ’thirty, a younger son without prospects, like many who first came out. He prospered with tobacco, and offered us a refuge. I thought to sit it out until the war ended and then return.”

  “Yet you never did.”

  “The Parliament sequestered Combe Down, gave it to the commander of a regiment in their army. They killed the King and I was abandoned to this place. My uncle died suddenly in the year ’fifty. He left me his heir. There was nothing to go back to; I had no choice but to stay.”

  He paused and then said, “We had two boys, Eliza, that both sickened and died here.”

  “I am sorry for it, sir.”

  The captain’s voice trembled as he spoke, and he dipped his head before bringing it up again and gazing away to the corner of the room. I felt his sadness, yet knew that he did not wish for comfort or more acknowledgment. Our Virginia colony is a graveyard for all ages. It is a common lot to lose children here. Up in the north, and even
in this city of New Amsterdam, I’m told that the climate, though extreme hot and cold, is more favorable to life.

  The captain dropped his head into his hands and stayed a moment quiet; that was all. Then he said quietly, “John was two years old; Samuel died later, being born here in the year ’forty-eight. I buried Damaris by them, as she wished.”

  After a moment I said, “Damaris said nothing to me about them, James.”

  “She considered this place their death; wished for another child and then sickened herself.”

  The captain never spoke of the children again. I went to the graves a little later when he was away upriver, not saying anything to a soul but wishing to see for myself. A flat stone marked the place where my mistress lay. It was in the middle of the plot in front of two small ones for the boys. There was another large stone, upon which was carved the name of Henry Maybrick, uncle to the captain, with the date of his death, 20th September 1650. The captain told me later that all the stones came out in ships from England, there being in the Virginia colony no skill in carving them, and that he wished a piece of England to stay with them.

  I tend to the plot myself now, though I would choose for myself a grave in water. A wall surrounds the place, with a gate to get in by and flowers of the country growing in the square meadow. Along the end wall grows a line of oaks and to one side stands a circle of trees whose flowers open to wax-white cups.

  These days my hands are soft, as Damaris’s were, but I do not heed any damage to them. With a kitchen knife and a strong brush I scrape the moss off the stones myself each spring, kneeling on the grass and tracing the letters of all the words with my fingers, as once I learned to read. I go early in the morning, not wishing to be seen.

  Here lies the body of Damaris Maybrick and here cowslips flower. I sent to England for the seeds, demanding in particular that they come from the middle of the country, that a bit of it might live and mingle here with my mistress. Thus I honor the dead. The plants take well to the dampness that gathers at the base of the stones, and in the shade of the trees. I make sure they are watered in hot weather.