Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory
She had roofed them with some wide green leaves and filled in the walls with rushes. The canoe was drawn up before the open mouth of the little hut and tipped on its side as protection, and there was a small fire smoking before the hut and two fishes staked on sharp sticks, waiting to be roasted. J came quietly but she did not jump when she saw him, he imagined that she had heard his every move since he had left her at midday. She nodded gravely as she saw him and then pointed to his satchel.
‘Yes. I’ve done well,’ he said. He opened the flap of the bag and showed her. She nodded her approval and then indicated behind him. She had weeded and dug a little patch of ground.
J felt a sense of real delight. ‘For my plants?’ He pointed to his satchel.
She nodded and looked at him, querying if it was what he wanted.
‘That is excellent!’ J beamed. ‘I shall collect more tomorrow and plant them up here, and only move them again when we go back to Jamestown. Thank you!’
The girl nodded with a little smile and he saw that she relished his praise just as his daughter Frances did. ‘You’re very, very clever,’ he said, and was rewarded by a slight blush and another smile.
She turned to the fire and threw on some dry kindling, and the blaze flickered up. She hunkered down on her heels and fanned the flame with a handful of stiff reeds until the twigs were glowing red, then she took one stick with the spitted fish and gave J the other. She showed him how to hold it above the glowing twigs so that it roasted in the heat but did not catch fire, and to turn it when the skin was brown and crispy.
When it was cooked she tipped the one on her stick on to a broad green leaf and proffered it to J, and then took the one he had cooked which was too dark on one side, and still a little raw on the other. She bowed her head over it for a moment, for all the world as if she were saying grace in a Christian home, and extended a hand to the sky, then turned it palm down to the earth. J realised that she was saying grace, which he had quite forgotten, and he had a momentary uncomfortable sense of confusion as to which of them was the ignorant pagan and which the civilised human. Then she smiled at him and started eating.
It was a firm white fish with a wonderful spicy taste from the scorched skin. J ate with relish, leaving only the bones, the head, tail and fins. When he had finished she drew from inside the canoe a little basket of dried fruit and gave him a handful of berries, dried blueberries. They were like a handful of pebbles in his mouth at first and then their taste seeped out, making his face pucker with their sourness, which made her laugh.
It was growing cold. The sun was behind them, inland behind the high trees. J put some more wood on the fire, and the girl got to her feet. She took a small glowing twig from the fire, went down to the water’s edge, and laid the twig on a shell at her bare feet. From the purse at her waist she took out a small pinch of something and then, without embarrassment, untied the thong of her buckskin skirt and laid it to one side. She picked up the burning twig and the pinch of herbs and, naked, waded into the water. J heard her gasp a little at the coldness of it.
The tide was coming in; the river, a mixture of salt and sweet, lapped at the sand beach. The girl was nothing more than a dark shadow against the dancing, gleaming water. J watched her blow on the glowing end of the twig and then put it to her cupped hand and blow again. She was lighting the herbs. J smelled a sharp, acrid smell like tobacco, carried to him on the onshore wind. Then he saw her scatter the smoking herb on the water.
She washed her face and her body, and then raised her wet head to where the moon was showing low on the horizon and lifted her hands in prayer. Then she turned back to the land and waded out of the water.
J thought of evening prayers at Lambeth, of his dead wife’s faith, and of the lodging-house woman who had assured him that these people were animals. He shook his head at the contradictions. He pulled off his boots and went into the shelter she had built them.
Inside she had heaped two beds of leaves. They were soft and aromatic. J’s clothes were neatly spread over the top of one heap, his travelling cloak on top of it all. J rolled himself up in its comforting smelly wool and was asleep before she had come inside.
J and the Indian girl stayed for nearly a month in the shelter she had built. Every day they went further afield, paddling in the morning in the canoe, and then she would run it aground and fish, or set snares for birds, while J foraged in the undergrowth for saplings and young spring growth. They would come companionably home in the light of the setting sun to the little camp and J would heel in his collection while she plucked the birds or cleaned the fish and prepared the evening meal.
There was a powerful dreamlike quality to the time. It was a relationship like no other. The grieving man and the silent girl worked together day after day with a bond that grew but needed no words. J was absorbed in one of the greatest pleasures a man can have – discovering a new country, a country completely unknown to him – and she, freed from the conventions and dangers of Jamestown, practised her woodcraft skills and observed the laws of her own people for once without a critical white observer judging and condemning her every move, but only with a man who smiled at her kindly and let her teach him how to live under the trees.
They never exchanged words. J would talk to her, as he would talk to his little seedlings in the seed bed she had made for him, for the pleasure of hearing his own voice, and for the sense of making a connection. Sometimes she would smile and nod or make a little grunt of affirmation or give a trill of laughter, but she never spoke words, not in her language nor his own, until J thought it must be as the magistrate had said and that she was dumb.
He wanted to encourage her to speak. He wanted to teach her English, he could not imagine how she could survive in Jamestown, comprehending only the outflung pointing arm or a clip to the head. He showed her a tree and said ‘pine’, he showed her a leaf and said ‘leaf’, but she would only smile and laugh and refuse to repeat what he told her.
‘You must learn to speak English,’ J said earnestly to her. ‘How will you manage if you cannot understand anything that is said to you?’
The girl shook her head and bent over her work. She was twisting supple green twigs into a mesh of some sort. As he watched she made the final knot and held it up to show him. J was so ignorant that he could not even tell what it was that she had made. She was smiling proudly.
She set the little contraption on the forest floor and stepped back a few paces. She dropped to her feet, hunched her back and sidled towards it, her arms stretched before her, her hands shaped like beaks, snapping together. At once she was a lobster, unmistakable.
J laughed. ‘Lobster!’ he said. ‘Say “lobster”!’
She pushed back her hair where it fell over the left side of her face and shook her head in her refusal. She mimed eating, as if to say, ‘No. Eat lobster.’
J pointed to the trap. ‘You have made a lobster pot?’
She nodded and stowed it in the canoe ready for setting at dawn the next day when they went out.
‘But you must learn to speak,’ J persisted. ‘What will you do when I go back to England? If your mother is put in prison again?’
She shook her head, refusing to understand him, and then she took a twig from the fire and walked towards the river and J fell silent, respecting the ritual of casting tobacco on the water, which was the same at dawn and dusk, and which marked her transition from day to night to day again.
He went into the shelter and pretended to sleep so that she might come in and sleep beside him without any fear. It was a ritual he had developed of his own to keep them both safe from his growing fascination with her.
Only on the first night, when he had been so weary from paddling that he could not keep his eyes open, had he slept at once. All the other nights he had lain awake listening to her near-imperceptible breathing, enjoying the sense of her closeness beside him. He did not desire her as he might have desired a woman. It was a feeling more subtle and complicated than that. J felt as he might have done if some precious rare animal had chosen to trust him, had chosen to rest beside him. With all his heart he wanted