Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory
than the crumpled mess of the shift. He thought she was diminished by the gown, she looked less modest than in her proud tattoos and buckskin. He made a little shrug to show his sense that she was returning to some sort of unnatural constraint and she nodded at his sympathy, her face grave.
‘You will stay at my inn tonight,’ J said, pointing down to Jamestown where there were already lights showing and chimneys smoking.
She neither nodded nor shook her head, she was frozen still, her eyes never leaving his face.
‘And tomorrow we shall go out into the forest again. Mr Joseph said you should come out with me every day for a month, until your mother is freed.’
She nodded her consent to that. Then she stepped forward and pointed at the little plants in his pocket and gestured towards the river. She mimed the strong paddling of a canoe, out towards the sea. Her hand gestured to the right, they should go south, she waved, a long way, waved again, a very long way; then she stepped back from him and with her arms spread and her shoulders rounded she mimed for him a tree: a tree with branches that bowed down, bowed down low over still water, spread her fingers: with branches that trailed into the water.
J was entranced. ‘But can we get a canoe?’
The girl nodded. She pointed to herself and held out her hand, pointing to her palm, the universal mime for money. J proffered a silver coin, she shook her head. He drew out his tobacco pouch. She nodded and took a fat handful. Then she pointed his face towards Jamestown, looked into his eyes again as if she were reluctant to trust so stupid a man to find his own way home, and then she nodded at him and turned towards a shrubby bush.
In a second she had disappeared. Disappeared without trace. J saw the little branches of the bush quiver and then she was gone, not even a glimmer of the servant’s smock showing in the darkness. For a moment he waited, straining his eyes against the failing light to see if he could spot her, but she had disappeared as surely as a roe deer will vanish by merely standing still.
J, realising that he would never find her against her will, knowing that he had to trust her, turned his face towards Jamestown as she had bid him and trudged home.
When the lodging-house woman knew that J had spent all day with the Indian girl in the woods, and would spend nights away with her, she was scathing.
‘I’d have thought a man fresh out of England could have done without,’ she said. She dumped in front of him a wooden bowl filled to the brim with a pale porridge.
‘Suppawn,’ his fellow lodger said out of the side of his mouth. ‘Indian cornmeal and milk.’
‘More corn?’ J asked.
The man nodded grimly and spooned his portion in silence.
‘I’d have thought you could have brought a woman from England, if your needs are that urgent,’ the woman said. ‘God knows, the town needs more women. You can’t make a plantation with nothing but soldiers and fools.’
J bent his head and slurped porridge from his spoon.
‘Don’t you have a wife you could have brought?’ the woman demanded.
Grief stabbed J like a knife in the belly. He looked up at her and something in his face silenced her nagging.
‘No,’ he said abruptly.
There was a short embarrassed silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘if I spoke wrong …’
J pushed away the bowl, the familiar feeling of grief choking him from his belly to his throat.
‘Here,’ the man offered. He produced a leather bottle from the folds of his breeches and poured a slug over J’s unwanted porridge. ‘Have a drop of Barbados rum, that’s the thing to give it flavour.’ He poured a measure for himself and stirred it in. He waved to J with his spoon. ‘Eat up,’ he said with rough kindliness. ‘This is not a land where a man can go hungry and eat later. Eat up and drink up too. You never know where your next meal is coming from here.’
J pulled his bowl towards him, stirred in the rum and tasted the porridge. It was much improved.
‘The girl is guiding me to plants and trees,’ he said to them both. ‘As I told you, I am a collector. Neither the governor nor Mr Joseph could think of anyone else who could assist me. But she is a good little girl. She is not much older than my own daughter. I should think she is little more than thirteen. She leads me to the forest and then waits quietly and leads me home.’
‘Her mother is a whore,’ the lodging-house woman remarked spitefully.
‘Well, she is but a little maid yet,’ J said firmly. ‘And I would not be the man to abuse her.’
The woman shook her head. ‘They’re not like us. She’s no more a maid than my young mastiff bitch is a maid. When she’s ready she’ll couple like an animal. They’re not like us, they’re half-beasts.’
‘You speak badly of them because of your losses,’ J’s fellow lodger said fairly. He nodded to J. ‘Mistress Whitely here lost her man and her child in the Indian rising of ’twenty-two. She doesn’t forget. No-one who was here at the time can ever forget.’
‘What happened?’ J asked.
The woman lowered herself to the bench opposite him and leaned her chin on her hand. ‘They were in and out of Jamestown every night and day,’ she said. ‘The children stayed in our houses, our men went out hunting with them. Again and again we would have starved if they had not traded with us – food, fish, game. They taught us how to plant: corn and the rest. They taught us how to harvest it and cook it. We would have died over and over again if they had not sold us food. The vicar was going to have an Indian school. We were going to teach them our ways, Christian ways. They were to be subjects of the king. There was not the slightest warning, not the hint of a warning. The chief had been their leader for years and he came and went through Jamestown as free as a white man. We had his own son as a hostage, we feared nothing. Nothing.’
‘Why did you have hostages then?’ J asked.
‘Not hostages,’ she corrected herself swiftly. ‘Adopted children. Godchildren. Children in our care. We were educating them in our ways. Turning them from savagery.’
‘And what happened?’ J asked.
‘They waited and planned.’ Her voice was lowered, the two men leaned forward to hear her, there was something fearful in the way the three white faces went closer together, and her voice dropped to a haunting whisper. ‘They waited and planned and at eight o’clock one morning – Good Friday morning they chose in their blasphemy – all over the country they came out of the bushes, to each little farm, to each little family, to each lone man, they came out and struck us dead. They planned to kill every single one of us without a word of warning reaching the others. And they’d have done it too; but for one little turncoat Indian boy who told his master that he had been ordered to kill him, and the man ran to Jamestown and raised the alarm.’
‘What happened?’
‘They opened the arsenal at Jamestown and called the settlers in. Everyone who was near enough came in and the town was saved, but up and down the river, in every isolated farmhouse, there was a white man and woman with their skull staved in by a stone axe.’
She turned her bleak face to J. ‘My husband’s head was cleaved in two, with an axe of stone,’ she said. ‘My little boy was stabbed through the heart with an arrow head of shell. They came against us without proper weapons, they came against us with reeds and shells and stones. It was like the land itself rose up and struck at us.’
There was a long silence.
She rose from the table and stacked the bowls, callous again. ‘That’s why I have no time for even the smallest girl of theirs,’ she said. ‘They are like stones and reeds and trees to me. I hate every stone and reed and tree in this land, and I hate every one of them. I hate them to their death and destruction. This land