‘I thought you had all but left them?’ Hobert remarked.
‘I should not have done so,’ John said, his voice very low. ‘I should not have left them in the middle of such a war. I was angry with her and I insisted she came with me and when she defied me I thought I was free to go. But a man with a child and a garden planted is never really free to go, is he, Bertram?’
Hobert shrugged. ‘I can’t advise,’ he said. ‘It’s an odd life you’re making, that’s for sure.’
‘It’s two lives,’ John said. ‘One here, where I live so close to the earth that I can hear its heartbeat, and one there, where I live like an Englishman with duties and obligations but with great riches and great joys.’
‘Can a man do both?’ Hobert asked.
John thought for a moment. ‘Not with honour.’
The moment that Suckahanna saw him come from the shadow of the forest and walk past the sweat lodge, the fields and up the village street she knew that something had happened. He walked like a white man with weight in his heels. He did not stride out as the men of the Powhatan. He walked as if something was pulling his shoulders downwards, pulling his head down to his feet, pulling his feet so that he looked as if he was wading through a mire of difficulties instead of dancing on smooth grass.
She went out slowly to meet him. ‘What’s wrong?’
He shook his head but he would not meet her eyes. ‘Nothing. I have done what I promised to do and now I am come home. I need not go again until harvest time.’
‘Are they sick?’ she asked, thinking that his slouch might be shielding some illness or pain.
‘They are well,’ he said.
‘And you?’
He straightened up. ‘I am weary,’ he said. ‘I shall go to the sweat lodge and then wash in the river.’ He gave her a brief unhappy smile. ‘And then everything will be as it was.’
In the warm days when the woods seemed to grow and turn green before his very eyes, John returned to his trade of plant collecting and rarity hunting. Already he had sent home a large parcel of Indian goods: clothing, tools, a case of bands and caps made from bark; now he recruited Suckahanna’s son as his porter and every day the two of them left the village for a long stroll in the woods and came back laden with sprouting roots. John worked in companionable silence with the boy, and found that his thoughts often wandered to Lambeth. He felt great affection for Hester and a powerful sense that he should be there with her, to face whatever dangers might come from a country in the grip of an insane war. But at the same time he knew he could not leave Suckahanna and the Powhatan. He knew that his happiness, and his life, lay with the People.
John thought himself a fool: to abandon a wife and then to try to support her, to take a wife and then to think daily of her rival. He wanted so much to be a man like Attone, or even a man like Hobert, who saw life in simple terms, who saw one road and steadily walked it. John did not think of himself as complex and challenged; he lacked all such vanity. He saw himself as indecisive and weak and he blamed himself.
Suckahanna watched him create a nursery bed, heel in the roots, and linger over his cuttings; but she said nothing for many weeks. Then she spoke.
‘What are they for?’
‘I shall send them to England,’ John said. ‘They can be grown and sold there to gardeners.’
‘By your wife?’
He tried to meet her direct black gaze as frankly and openly as he could. ‘My English wife,’ he corrected her.
‘And what will she think? When a dead man sends her plants?’
‘She will think that I am doing my duty by her,’ John said. ‘I cannot abandon her.’
‘She will know that you are alive, and that you have abandoned her,’ Suckahanna observed. ‘Whereas now she may have given you up for dead.’
‘I have to support her in the way that I can.’
She nodded and did not reply. John could not accept the stoical dignity of the Powhatan silence. ‘I feel that I owe her anything that I can do,’ he said awkwardly. ‘She sent me a letter which I got at Hobert’s house. She is in difficulties and alone. I left her to bring up my children and to manage my house and garden in England, and there is a war in my country …’
Suckahanna looked at him but said nothing.
‘I am torn,’ John said with a sudden burst of honesty.
‘You chose your path,’ she reminded him. ‘Freely chose it.’
‘I know,’ he said humbly. ‘But I keep thinking …’
He broke off and looked at her. She had turned her head away from him, hiding her face with a sweep of black hair. Her shoulders, showing brown and smooth through the veil of black hair, were shaking. He gave an exclamation and stepped forward to comfort her, thinking that she was weeping. But then he saw the gleam of her white teeth against her brown skin, and she flicked around and was running down the village lane, away from him, and was gone. She had been laughing. Not even her immense courtesy could restrain her amusement any longer. The spectacle of her husband struggling interminably forwards-backwards, duty-desire, English-Powhatan, was in the end too helplessly funny for her to take seriously. He heard the wild ripple of her laugh as she ran down the path to the garden where the sweetcorn was already growing high.
‘Aye, you can laugh,’ John said to himself, feeling himself wholly English, as leaden-footed as if he were wearing boots and breeches and weighed down by a hat. ‘And God knows I love you for it. And God knows I wish I could laugh at myself too.’
When the snows were melted from even the highest hills, when there were no sharp frosts in the morning, when the ground was dry beneath the light summer moccasins of the braves, there was a meeting called by the ancient lord, Opechancanough. John the Eagle went with Attone and with one of the senior advisors of the community to represent their village, travelling along the narrow trails, northwards up the river to the great capital town of Powhatan. It nestled in the dry woodlands, at the foot of the mountains on the edge of the river which John had once known as the James River, but which he now called the Powhatan, and the waterfall at the side of Powhatan town was Paqwachowng.
They sighted the town of about forty braves at dusk, and paused outside the city boundaries.
‘You’re to keep quiet until spoken to,’ Attone said briefly to John. ‘The elder will do the talking.’
John looked without resentment at the older man who had led the way at a hard pace for the journey of many days. ‘I didn’t even want to come,’ he protested. ‘I’m hardly likely to interrupt.’
‘Didn’t want to come, when you can see new plants and trees and flowers? And take them back to Suckahanna when we sail downriver by canoe?’ Attone mocked.
‘All right,’ John allowed. ‘But I’m saying I didn’t ask to come. I didn’t want a place here.’
The older man’s sharp beaky face turned to him. ‘But your place is here,’ he said.
‘I know it, older one,’ he said respectfully.
‘You will answer questions but not give opinions,’ the man ruled.
John nodded obediently and fell into file at the rear.
No-one knew the age of the great warlord Opechancanough. He had inherited his power from his brother the great Powhatan, father of Princess Pocahontas, the Indian heroine whom John had visited when he had been only a little boy and she had been a celebrity visiting London. There was no trace of her beauty in the ravaged face of her uncle. He sat on a great bench at the end of his luxurious long house, his cape of office shining in the gloom with the round discs of abalone shells. He barely glanced at John and his companions as they shuffled up, bowed, deposited their tribute on the growing pile before him, and stepped back.
When everyone had come and bowed to the lord he made a brief gesture with his hand and the priest stepped forward, cast some dust into the fire and watched the scented smoke spiralling upwards. John, weary from many days’ walking, watched the smoke too and thought that it made strange and tempting shapes, almost as if one c
ould read the future from it, just as he sometimes lay on his back beside Suckahanna’s son when they detected shapes and images in the clouds that sailed overhead.
There was a deep mutter from the massed men packed tight into the big house. The priest walked around the fire, people leaning away from the sweep of his cape as he circled, staring into the embers. Finally he stepped back and bowed to Opechancanough.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Suddenly the old man sharpened into life. He leaned forwards. ‘You are sure? We will conquer?’
The priest nodded simply. ‘We will.’
‘And they will be pushed back into the sea where they came from, and the waves will foam red with their blood and their women and children will hoe our fields and serve us where we have served them?’
The priest nodded. ‘I have seen it,’ he said.
Opechancanough looked past the priest at the men, waiting in silence, drinking in the assurance that they were unbeatable. ‘You have heard,’ he said. ‘We will win. Now tell me how this victory is to be won.’
John had been dizzy with the scent of the smoke and the sudden warmth and darkness of the hut but suddenly he snapped awake, wide awake, as if someone had slapped his face. He strained his ears and his comprehension to grasp the quick exchange of advice, argument and information: the news of an isolated farmhouse here, a newly built fort with cannon further down the river. He realised with a sinking heart what he had known all along but had continually pushed to the back of his mind: that Opechancanough and the army of the Powhatan were going to fall upon the people of Jamestown, and upon every white settler everywhere in this country which they had called empty and then proceeded to fill. That if the Powhatan won there would not be a white man, woman or child left alive or out of slavery in Virginia. And if the Powhatan lost there would be a dreadful reckoning to pay.
‘And what does our brother, the Eagle, say?’ Opechancanough suddenly asked. His beaked harsh face turned towards John, where he sat at the back. The men before him melted away as if Opechancanough’s gaze was a spear-thrust pointed at his heart.
‘Nothing …’ John stammered, the Powhatan language sticking on his tongue. ‘Nothing … sir.’
‘Will they be ready for us? Do they know we have been waiting and planning?’
Miserably John shook his head.
‘Did they think us defeated and driven back, forced out of our forests and away from our game trails?’
‘I think so,’ John said. ‘But I have not been with the white men for a long time.’
‘You will advise us,’ Opechancanough ruled. ‘You will tell us how to avoid the guns and at what time of day we should attack. We will use your knowledge of them to come against them. You agree?’
John opened his mouth but no sound came. He was aware of Attone rising to his feet at his side.
‘He is struck dumb by the honour,’ Attone said smoothly. Out of sight he trod hard on John’s toes.
‘Indeed I am,’ John said numbly.
‘Your hands will be red with English blood,’ Opechancanough promised him. His face was serious enough but there was a spark of mischief, that irresistible Powhatan mischief, at the back of his eyes. ‘That will make you happy, Eagle.’
Spring 1644, England
Alexander Norman did not speak again of marriage to Frances, but he visited the Ark at Lambeth every week. He took Frances out on the river, he bought her a pony and took her riding in the lanes away from Lambeth and out into the country. Frances came back from these expeditions unusually quiet and thoughtful but she never said more to Hester than that her uncle had been very kind and they had talked about everything under the sun, but nothing that she could remember. Hester felt torn. On one hand she felt she should warn Frances against deepening her relationship with her uncle, which could only bring him pain and disappointment; but on the other hand she did not want to prevent her daughter from enjoying a trusting, loving relationship with a good man old enough to be her father.
It must be Alexander who was principally at risk from heartbreak. Frances enjoyed his company, and learned much from him – from horsemanship to politics. Hester trusted Alexander to spend every day with her without one word of courtship, but she wondered how much pleasure he took when Frances looked up at him and said trustingly: ‘You’ll know about King Henry, won’t you, Uncle Norman? You were a boy when he was on the throne, weren’t you?’
He gave Hester a wry smile over his niece’s brown head. ‘That would be true if I was a hundred years old now. Do you know nothing of history, Frances?’
She made a face. ‘Not much. So how old are you, Uncle?’
Hester thought he had to brace himself to answer.
‘I am fifty-four,’ he said honestly. ‘And I have seen three monarchs reign; but never times like these.’
Frances looked at him consideringly, her head on one side. ‘Well you don’t look very old,’ she said bluntly. ‘I never think of you as that old.’
‘I am that old,’ he said.
Hester thought that the assertion must be costing him dear.
‘I am old enough to be your father.’
Frances’s surprised ripple of laughter made him smile. ‘I think of you as my friend!’ she exclaimed.
‘Well, I was your grandfather’s friend before you were born. I bounced you on my knee when you were a dribbling little baby.’
She nodded. ‘I don’t see that that makes any difference at all,’ she said, and Hester wondered, but did not ask: ‘Difference to what?’
Alexander did not neglect Johnnie or Hester on his visits. He brought Johnnie pamphlets and ballads about his hero Prince Rupert, and he brought Hester welcome news of the progress of the war. He spoke of a new commander, Colonel Cromwell, who had come from nowhere and was said to be little more than a working man, but who had a regiment of soldiers that could withstand a royalist cavalry charge and who had been trained and drilled until they could turn and stand and march forwards on one shouted command.
‘I think this Cromwell knows his business as well as Prince Rupert,’ Alexander said.
Johnnie shook his head. ‘Prince Rupert has fought all around Europe,’ he said certainly. ‘And he was riding horses, great cavalry chargers, when he was my age. No-one from East Anglia could say the same.’
The news from the king’s court at Oxford was of riotous loose living, of scholars and courtiers drunk in the gutters every morning, and of the king celebrating victory after victory, however small the skirmish and insignificant the campaign. It looked as if the kingdom was opening up to him and he would be in London within a year. And then he started his march on his rebellious capital city itself. Alexander Norman sent a message to the Ark at Lambeth.
Dear Cousin Hester,
I suggest that you hide your most precious treasures in your safe place and pack necessary clothes and goods for yourself. The king is marching on London from the north and the City is preparing for a siege. However, if the king should circle London to besiege it, then I should think it most likely that Lambeth will fall and the Parliamentary forces stand back and hold their ground north of the river. If the fighting is prolonged then you may well be caught between two armies. Therefore, be ready to leave the moment I give you the word and I will take you back to Oatlands.
Alexander.
Hester put the letter at once into the tiny fire of coal dust and kindling and watched it burn sluggishly. She felt very tired, as if the war had gone on forever, and would go on forever, without victory, without peace, with nothing but the wearisome task of surviving. For a moment she sat by the fireside, her head leaning on her hand, watching the note flame, turn to ash, and then fall in soft flakes into the red embers. Then she gave herself a little shake, brushed off her skirt, tied on her hessian working apron and went to the rarities room.
Johnnie was showing a visitor out of the front door.
‘What is it, Mother?’ he asked as soon as the door was safely closed. ‘Not bad news from Vi
rginia?’
She shook her head. ‘Not that, thank God. It is a note from your uncle. He says that the king is marching on London and that we must be prepared to leave if the fighting comes close. We must pack up the most precious things for safety at once.’
He nodded, his little face grave. ‘I’ll call Frances,’ he said. ‘We’ll all help.’
Frances came down from her room, her hair pinned in a new style. ‘How do I look?’
‘Awful ugly,’ Johnnie said with a grin.
Hester was drawing out the big wooden chests which were stored beneath the display cases. ‘You pack the glass and porcelain, Frances, you’re the most careful. Johnnie, you pack the coins.’
Hester unlocked the cases and then started folding and packing the clothes, vests and coats from all around the world, savages’ clothes of feathers and beads, beautifully worked scarves from India and China, and King Henry’s own gloves which King Charles himself had given to the Tradescants. She glanced over, Johnnie was carefully laying every coin with its label in the chest.
‘You’ll have to just pile them in,’ she said. ‘And when we unpack them we’ll have to label them again.’
His little face was shocked. The order of the rarities room had been a sacred charge for the whole family for all of his life. ‘But these are Grandfather John’s labels!’
‘I know,’ Hester said grimly. ‘And I hope that he would understand that we’re doing the best that we can to keep his Ark and all its contents safe. Just tumble all the coins in the chest, Johnnie, and then we can hide it and, even if a dozen regiments come through, when the war is over we can dig it all up and start again.’
He looked reluctant, but did as he was told. Frances, at the other side of the room, was wrapping precious pieces of glass in silks and scarves, and packing them tightly in a wooden box.
Hester looked around the room. It was a collection that had been amassed over years of work, all she could do was to choose the most precious pieces from it and try to save them. ‘The little toys,’ she said to Frances. ‘The mechanical toys. Do them next.’
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