Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

Hester raised her head. “Hobert who nearly died there?”

John nodded. “He finally brought off a good crop of tobacco and came home to sell it. By making the voyage with his wife he gets another two headrights for free and he wants to make his plantation bigger. He’s hired some laborers to take with him and he gets their headrights too. He’s full of confidence. He is going back again with the Austin family and they have spare places on their ship.”

John paused. “I wondered if you would like to come with me, to Virginia. You could see our land, you might be interested in that, and by traveling together we would claim another two headrights. We could sell them, or find someone to farm them for us, or you might like to build a house and settle there, Jamestown is bound to be much improved since my first visit and now-” He broke off.

He had been about to say “Now there is nothing to keep us here,” but he did not need to say it. Hester, of all people, knew that there was nothing left in Lambeth but the rarities and the plants.

“What about that woman, the woman you left there?” she asked flatly.

He bowed his head. “I will never see her again,” he said. It did not have the ring of a promise of a reformed man, his voice had the finality of a man who knows when something is over. “She will be with her people, and I will be with mine. The time of the Powhatan dealing kindly with the planters is long gone.”

Hester thought for a moment. “Who would keep this place safe while we are gone?”

“Elias Ashmole would be glad enough to live here for a while,” John pointed out. “He has promised to help make a catalogue of the rarities collection and he has a great interest in the garden.”

Hester made a little face. “What if something happens?” she asked.

“He could manage. He’s a worldly man, he’s managed bigger estates than this little place.”

“Why would he be so helpful?” she asked baldly. “Why serve us in such a way?”

“He likes the rarities, he likes the garden,” John said. “He can do his studies here in alchemy and astronomy. He can use my herbs for his medicines.”

“I like his wife, Mary, better than I like him,” Hester said irrelevantly. “And she has been very badly treated by him. She told me that he abused her and now they are separated he won’t give her any money for her keep. And it was all her money in the first place. He had nothing when he came to advise her, and now her fortune is his.”

John shook his head. “He’s a lawyer by training,” he said. “I’m not surprised he gives nothing away. He’d make a bad enemy but he’s a good friend to us. He would guard this place for us while we were gone.”

She thought for a moment. “No,” she said reluctantly. “He would manage well enough if nothing happened. But if there was a fire or another war or an uprising he would never care for the things as we would. Mr. Ashmole would think of his own safety before the collection.”

“We could box it all up and store it,” John objected.

“Not again,” she said. “I couldn’t bear it. And even if we did, what about the garden?”

“I do really want to go,” John said. “I am so weary of this house without our boy, and I miss him in the garden. I hate the lake, I can’t go down to that end of the orchard at all, and I can’t find the energy to weed and plant and prune and pot on. In every part of the garden I come across tasks which I would give to him to do, or where he was especially skilled. Half of the plants are his plants, nursed up by him while I was away. It’s as if I meet him everywhere.”

Hester nodded. “That’s why I’ll stay,” she said quietly. “Because I too feel that I meet him everywhere, and here I can guard the things he loved and watch the things he planted grow tall and beautiful, and it’s as if he is still here.”

John raised an eyebrow. “Shall I go alone? Would you want that?”

She met the little challenge. “Will you come back again?”

“Yes. There’s no life for me there. But I could bring back some new rarities, there is so much more to discover.”

“I will wait for you,” she promised. “And keep the rarities and the garden safe for you.”

He bowed his head and kissed her hand as it rested on the table. “You will not blame me for leaving you to your grief?”

She touched his head with her other hand like a blessing. “I would want it,” she said simply. “I should like to spend a little time alone. Perhaps I will become accustomed to being without him, if I have a little time alone.”

“Very well then,” he said gently. “And I promise I will come home.”

John was at sea, running from grief, once more, and knew that he had chosen the right course. The movement of the ship rocked his sleep at night and the noise of the wind in the sails and the creaking of the timbers were the sounds of mourning to him. He thought of Johnnie constantly and, away from the land and from Hester, he felt free to think of Jane, his first wife, and knew that if there were a heaven and a communion of saints, then she was with her son now. As the seven-week voyage went on, he felt that he could let Johnnie go, as he had once before let Jane go, and love him only in his heart as a memory, and not with that wrenching desire to bring him back.

He was asleep when the ship sighted the Virginia coast and was awakened by the noise and excitement of their arrival in Jamestown. Bertram Hobert hammered on the little wooden shutters around John’s bunk and shouted, “Up, man! We’ve arrived!” and John tumbled out to find the ship in its usual chaos as sailors slackened off the sails and the lookout man shouted directions, and the passengers still battened down below the hatches tried to repack their goods which had been scattered during the long voyage.

“Better this time than last,” Bertram said optimistically. “At least we know the dangers now, eh, John?”

John looked into the face of his old friend. The dreadful hollowed face of hunger had gone, replaced by a rosy round prosperity, but most of Bertram’s teeth were missing and the remainder were black.

“We were greenhorns,” John said. “We knew nothing.”

“Now we do,” Bertram said. “I will be a man of substance in this land yet, John. I will be a burgess and leave a five-hundred-acre plantation.”

“I wonder what changes have taken place since we were last here?”

“Nothing but good,” Mrs. Hobert said over her shoulder, throwing linen into a bag. “I hear that the savages are quite driven back and there is a road made through the woods from Jamestown down to the sea and westward along the riverbank inland.”

A sailor lifted the hatch above them and shouted that they could come up on deck. John hefted his chest through the hatchway, and took his bundle of clothing.

“You’re traveling light,” Bertram remarked.

“It is going home that I hope to be laden,” John said.

They scrambled out on deck and then paused in amazement. For a moment John thought that something had gone ludicrously wrong and they had come to the wrong place. But then he saw that the old wooden fort had gone, the mixture of garrison and town had changed. Before him now was a new town, an elegant town, beautiful and solid and built to last.

A line of stone-built houses with small ornamental gardens before them lined the front road alongside the river and looked down to the quay. Great trees had been left in place to shade the road, and around each tree they had built graceful circular seats so that passersby could rest in the shade. Each house had a bright new wooden fence before it, one or two even had low stone walls to mark the division between the garden and the street.

There was a pavement slightly raised with wooden beams to keep the ladies’ shoes dry and a gutter for storm water and sewage, which drained away into the river.

The houses were built two, even three, stories high, so close that they were all but adjoining and they were built like good London houses, not flung together with wood and mud; but well-planned, proper houses with a central doorway and a window on either side with well-hung shutters and glass in the windows.

The people walking up and down the road and strolling down to the quay were changed as well. The sharp division into the one or two wealthy men and the rest, hungry, work-hardened paupers, was over. There was a more gentle gradation of wealth and status that you could see from the shirts and waistcoats of the laborers through the smart dark homespun of the artisans and smaller planters through to the silks and satins worn by the gentry.

And now there were slaves. John blinked at the numbers of black men and women, fetching, carrying, running at an obedient dog-trot behind a cart, catching the ropes on the dockside and running the gangplank out to the ship, unloading carts and throwing down the bales of cotton, and women with trays on their heads weaving through the crowd at the dockside with fresh produce to sell. Many of them were branded with the mark of their owner on their forehead or cheek. Many of them had the old scars of a whipping on their backs. But some of them, like the women traders, were clearly free to sell their own goods, and walked at their own speed with an arrogant roll of their hips under bright-patterned dresses.

A sailor opened the ship’s railing, made sure the gangplank was secure and then stepped back. John walked down the plank to the new land.

He had not thought that he would find her again, and he knew she would not look for him; but he did not expect that the country would be emptied of Suckahanna’s people. The last Indian war had indeed been the last. Opechancanough’s execution was the death of the People as well as the death of their last greatest war leader. Some drifted away, inland, and found other nations that would accept them, and then they too had to move, always westward, always away from the coast and the encroaching white men, the noise of falling timber and the scarcity of game. Some went into service, a service more like slavery for they were paid no wages and allowed no freedoms and worked until they died for no thanks. Some were imprisoned for the crime of rising up to defend their own villages and they served their sentences until illness and despair finished the work that the war had begun.