Over the Seas

by Josephine Bell

  Anne scarcely noticed her companion’s distress. She was longing to confide in her and had merely sought a suitable opening. When Polly failed to give her one she said tartly, ‘Well, well, so Sandy holds no interest for thee and makes I suppose no advances. Not thus my John.’

  Polly roused herself at this direct news.

  ‘Thy John! Who be he, pray?’

  ‘John Laydon. One of them as hath been here since the settlement began. He attended upon Master Wingfield but had no more wish to go back home with him than my mistress. So now he works here, carrying water and firing and suchlike services. He hath a small hut just within the palisade and a shed near the river where he makes glass. He saith he will glaze our windows by midsummer if he can get the lattice frames built for them.’

  ‘What is he then, this John? A gentlewoman’s attendant or a witch, to make glass windows from the air.’

  ‘From sand and wood ash, thou ignorant country wench!’ laughed Anne.

  ‘He told thee this, I’ll be bound,’ Polly answered, ‘I’ll swear thou knew’st it not before.’

  John Laydon certainly knew his trade and had brought out with him enough of the right tools to pursue it. He had only taken employment with Master Wingfield to support himself until his glass became profitable. He had not asked for money, for there was nothing to buy in the settlement. But he had rightly judged that the Council, having control of the stores, would not go short of food themselves.

  John did not pretend to consider his fellows. He had been born independent; he had worked hard as a boy apprentice to a master glazier. When he developed ideas unfamiliar to his master and the latter refused to accept them, they quarrelled, John ran away and after trying in vain to get a living, had joined the would-be settlers of the London Company. He had been reared on the simple principle of each man for himself, sink or swim. In James Town he was not exactly swimming, but yet treading water with his head well above it.

  Anne’s feeling for her admirer was less romantic than Polly’s was for Alec. She was older than the farmer’s daughter. She was a few years older than her swain, but a Londoner herself, as he was, and more sophisticated than either of her two friends. She was very willing to be loved and quite prepared to fall in love herself provided it would be to her advantage. Even at home John Laydon would be a desirable husband. Here, she knew, he would be a prize.

  Mistress Forrest was well aware of this situation and of her maid’s friendship with Polly Sugden. She admired and liked John as an honest tradesman and an upstanding young man. Sandy Nimmo had intrigued her greatly by reason of his strange position in the country folk’s household. She summoned him to her presence, determined to discover to her satisfaction the story of his coming to James Town. There was little indeed to interest, far less amuse her, in those mainly squalid surroundings. She hoped to relieve her present boredom at his expense.

  But she had met her match. Alec, in his turn, admired Mistress Forrest for staying in the settlement when she had every inducement to leave it with Master Wingfield. He too had a wish to satisfy his curiosity about the lady, since he had had no opportunity to do so on the voyage, when Captain Newport kept the four women so close it was a standing joke and secret irritation to most of the men on board.

  Consequently he put on a clean shirt and his most respectable pair of breeches, found his pork-pie hat, long discarded, and made his way with Polly, who was to introduce him, to Mistress Forrest’s house. Very sensible, the weather being by now both hot and steamy, he had discarded his tight-fitting, high-collared jacket, working on the vegetable patch or at the building of the pinnace naked to the waist, and preserving his few remaining shirts for the house and for visits to the houses of friends such as Captain John Smith.

  Polly brought him to Mistress Forrest who greeted him with friendly condescension, making a gesture at the same time to Polly, who withdrew.

  Alec, inwardly amused, bowed in the manner he had learned at King James’s court, but a trifle awkwardly, not having used such airs since he fled from London nearly two years before.

  Mistress Forrest was impressed. She begged him to be seated and leaning forward a little from her own rough stool, said ‘Our Company here lacks the grace that you, sir, are evidently familiar with. Of the gentlemen adventurers that came here to seek their fortunes, to find gold and other treasure or a passage west to the great sea that lies beyond this place, many have died, some have deserted. We are much the poorer for it.’

  ‘Nay, madam,’ Alec answered. ‘I think they be no loss. For here is no easy fortune. Captain Smith is convinced there be no gold. I believe there is only a Irving, but a good, free, adventurous living, for any man that truly seeks it, maybe needs it.’

  ‘Thou hath need of it?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Aye, madam,’ he told her, but said no more and she understood that no more would be said at this visit, perhaps never.

  Nor had she courage to pursue the attempt when she saw his mouth close in a firm line and his blue eyes grow hard.

  To keep him with her a little longer Mistress Forrest said, quietly, ‘Free we all are here, but many use this freedom for idleness. In all those months while Captain Newport returned to England, made his report and got together his stores and new recruits, ourselves in fact, those hundred men neither builded nor sowed. It hath astonished me that they could do so little, even for their own comfort, even for their safety.’

  ‘They were idle for the most part because they were sick,’ Alec said gravely. ‘Sick, aye; slain by an enemy they knew not how to fight. An enemy more deadly than these capricious naturals, who feed us one week and shoot their arrows at us the next.’

  ‘An enemy we have still no means to subdue,’ Mistress Forrest said, after a silence. ‘They tell me our own shipmates, we newcomers, have been attacked by that silent, unseen foe.’

  ‘More than that, madam. Know ye not they fall daily and many have already died of the ague, the fever or the bloody flux?’

  ‘Is it indeed so grave?’

  Alec nodded. Already the ranks of tile newcomers had been thinned and though this promised a better daily ration of food for the healthy until the harvest time of the corn, it spoke very ill for the continuance of a colony in that place. Already William Trent had brought news from his friend the werowance of the Pamunkeys that the settlement farther north at Sagadahoc had collapsed and its survivors had embarked in their boats and gone farther north still. Nothing more was known of their fate.

  ‘I have led a sheltered, complaining and uncertain existence since I landed here,’ Mistress Forrest said when Alec remained silent. ‘As idle as those n’er-do-wells and jail birds we complain of. I see now that the old way of life is not possible. Not even desirable—’

  She broke off, her eyes filling with tears at a sharp memory of former times.

  ‘What brought ye here, madam?’ Alec asked, gently.

  ‘A great loss and a sore grief,’ she answered, looking at him with the same sternness he had showed to her own question. ‘Mayhap God hath punished me for an early happiness I had in no way deserved.’

  ‘We are all in His hands,’ Alec said, thinking of his own childhood’s misery in a household where the Devil and Hell took precedence over God’s Mercy and even the remotest possibility of a future Heaven.

  Seeing that Mistress Forrest had retreated into her past and was no more willing to disclose it than he was to speak of his own adventures, he got up and took a formal most respectful leave of her. She had shown she was a true settler, having the courage to make a new life without any conception of the full meaning of her decision, but yet determined to adapt herself. When he reached home he told Mistress Sugden of the interview and begged her to make a friend of the gentlewoman.

  ‘Happen she’ll disdain my friendship,’ the former said. ‘I’ll have no truck wi’ grand manners and such-like silliness.’

  ‘Show her thy loom and the new thread Polly spins when she can tear herself away from young Anne Bu
rrows.’

  Mistress Sugden laughed, but she was touched by Alec’s concern for the lonely woman. They were about of an age, she knew. Anne would soon be married, according to the Reverend Master Hunt, who gossiped freely with his small congregation of believers. Then perhaps Polly would find a suitor, too. She dared not hope for Alec, who had shown no more than a brotherly interest in Poll. But with both the girls wed as in the natural order of things they would be, she and Mistress Forrest, middle-aged if not elderly, would have to depend upon one another.

  So Mistress Forrest’s advance bore a very different fruit from that she had intended when she made Alec’s acquaintance. She too had brought with her a spinning wheel for Anne’s use as well as some linen cloth and embroidery wools for her own. But seeing no sheep and therefore no wool, either in the settlement or outside it, she had thought no more of finding material for dyeing, stitching and making cloth, Polly, on the other hand, working occasionally in the plantation outside the palisade, when Alec took her there, had come across a plant with a fine white blob of hairs attached to its seeds at the head. More in jest than earnest, she had gathered a quantity of these tufts and taken them home washed them, fixed the ‘Wool’ as she called it, on to her spindle and spun a thread that was smooth and white and strong as the sheep’s wool yarn she had made at home. Mistress Forrest, seeing this product, copied it and before long Mistress Sugden set up her loom and began to weave a cloth that was both light and cool and more suitable for shirts and dresses than the heavy wear that was now oppressing the men as high summer approached.

  And so the friendship Alec desired grew up naturally between the two women, cemented in late July by an event that narrowly escaped dire tragedy.

  Alec and Will, seeing such a splendid use was put to a plant they had considered a tiresome weed, had planted the discarded seeds from the fluffy heads the girls had gathered. They chose a piece of land on the forest side of the town where the weed already grew freely. For this reason and also because they did not want to use land cultivated for food they planted their seeds in view of the forest but also not very far from the gates of the palisade.

  When this crop, now called cotton, was ripe they took Mistress Sugden and Polly with them to harvest it. They had gathered some of it into a large osier basket Will had made and were turning to go back to the town when he stopped short, listened, bade the others be silent and then in an urgent, fearful whisper told them to run for their lives. Shouldering the basket and seizing Poll with his free hand he set off at a good pace. Alec did the same with Mistress Sugden but partly from her age and partly her long skirts that she had not girded up as her daughter had done, she was not able to make the same pace and soon began to flag and gasp for breath.

  By this time the distant sounds Will’s keen and practised ear had heard grew louder. They had been seen and what had been a guarded approach in order to surround them, now became an open and deadly pursuit to capture or kill.

  ‘Go thou on, Sandy!’ Mistress Sugden cried. ‘I but hinder thee. Go on and save thyself and God bless thee for all thou’st done for me and mine.’

  Alec wasted no time on argument. He said briefly, ‘Pick up thy skirts, dame!’ and as she did so hoisted her upon his back and with one hand under her seat and the other grasping the hands she had flung round his neck he set off at a much increased speed in spite of his burden.

  Meanwhile Polly and William had reached the palisade. At first the guards there, for a watch was always kept by day and night, made to close the great doors and mount a firing party upon the platform built beside them. They disregarded Will’s pleading as that of the madman they still regarded him. But Polly, seeing Captain John Smith approaching to discover the cause of the hubbub, screamed to him that Sandy Nimmo and her mother were also fleeing the Indians and could be seen now in the distance across the empty ground between the palisade and the forest.

  Smith ordered the gates instantly to be opened wide again, the guards to prepare their muskets but hold their fire for fear they might hit the pursued rather than their pursuers. He himself ran out to cover the desperate retreat and with the greatest boldness, courage and skill checked the first wave of the attackers as they left the cover of the trees.

  The check was only partial. Though the watchers on the platform saw a packed mass move back among the tall trunks, half a dozen brown, almost naked figures, daubed with red and white paint and wearing war feathers on their heads, ran from cover and took aim with their arrows at the moment Captain Smith fired.

  A couple fell. Alec passed the captain, staggering from side to side in his growing exhaustion, but still gripping his burden tightly.

  ‘Fire!’ Captain Smith yelled from the midst of a further flight of arrows.

  Alec was within a few yards of the gates, making a final effort, when Mistress Sugden suddenly screamed, her head fell forward on to his shoulder and he felt her hands go limp in his grasp.

  ‘In, lad!’ he heard Smith’s voice behind him. ‘I have her. She’ll not fall. In, quick.’

  He stumbled on, barely conscious of what he was doing, but aware that helping bands were partly supporting the stricken woman. He heard the great gates close, the volley of gunfire from the platform, the smell of burnt powder. Then his hands were drawn away by other hands and he fell to the ground and lay gasping, feeling his heart pounding so fast it was like to burst through his chest wall.

  But not for long. His breath returned, his heart slowed, he was on his feet again, pushing his way through the crowd that had gathered about Mistress Sugden, whose white face and closed eyes sent a shock of concern through him, that increased to terror when he saw her injury.

  For she was lying half upon her left side with the long shaft of an arrow standing from her back below the shoulder blade. Captain Smith was on his knees beside her. Will Trent held her right arm away from her body.

  In an instant Alec was on his knees, too, with his knife out, cutting up the seam of her bodice and sleeve.

  ‘I felt the blow when the arrow struck,’ he muttered, as he worked. ‘But the head did not reach me. Pray God it be not still within her.’

  ‘No,’ Will said, strangely calm. ‘She lives. She does not cough blood. The angle of the shaft is towards the spine.’

  Captain Smith said nothing but continued to support the fallen woman. He had long since made up his mind about Alec’s skill and strength in several fields. He had wished to take him on the voyage of exploration in Chesapeake Bay from which he had only just returned, but though the young Scot had been very willing he had declared his duty was still to look after the two women until Will was more surely recovered.

  About this Will Trent, the so-called madman. Smith had less knowledge. But he had much past experience of prisoners, having been one himself in Turkey long ago, also the year before in the hands of the Indian high chief, Powhatan, and only a short time ago in those of the usurping Council of the settlement, when Wingfield was deposed. He knew the vile practices of the Indians upon the bodies of their victims, as they tortured them to death. This William Treat had learned their ways during his mysterious wanderings. There might be useful knowledge to be learned from him.

  When Alec had the bodice free and turned back it was clear that Will’s conclusion was the right one. The arrow had passed through the flesh outside the rib cage. Its point was just visible to the right of the ample breast. And Mistress Sugden’s colour was returning, her breathing quickened and she began to moan with pain.

  ‘Think ye we can move her?’ Alec asked Will. ‘We have to pull that out and ’twere best done before she come fully to herself.’

  Will nodded, so with Captain Smith’s help they lifted up Mistress Sugden, carried her to her house and laid her on her bed.

  ‘Where’s Poll?’ Alec asked, looking around. ‘She should be here. We need hot water, a basin, some of that cotton we gathered so blithely before those devils attacked us.’

  It was Mistress Forrest who answered, stepping forward
from the fireplace where she had been working.

  ‘She fainted when she saw her mother’s injury,’ the lady said severely. ‘Anne tends her in the room above. You may order me, sir. I have seen wounds before. I shall not collapse myself.’

  No one disputed Alec’s right to do as he pleased. There was now but one new doctor in the settlement, the first physician to go there having died during the late autumn. In any case he would not have undertaken surgical work. So Alec had the men hold Mistress Sugden firmly while he first pushed back the flesh from the point of the arrow until he had the barb clear. When he had cut this from the shaft, he drew the latter from the woman’s back.

  During the operation she cried out once and then fainted away again. The two wounds bled freely, which was not a bad thing, Will said, though there was little chance of poison being carried into his sister’s body since tile arrow had to pass through such a thickness of clothing before it struck the flesh.

  Captain Smith smiled grimly at this. Heavy clothes might add to the settlers’ discomfort but they had their uses, seemingly. He had not looked at it in this light before. On his more dangerous expeditions he and his gentlemen companions had worn their body armour. It was a fine protection against arrows and its brightness frightened the natives.

  When the operation was completed and the two small wounds stanched with cotton waste, the captain suggested cautery.

  ‘Nay,’ Will said. ‘’Tis best we do not close this long wound at either end. ’Twill discharge, I doubt not, but ’tis better so than to seal up the noxious humours within.’

  ‘Master Trent speaks wisely,’ Captain Smith agreed. ‘Moreover the poor creature hath suffered enough from this most necessary surgery. She could scarcely endure a fresh agony.’

  Mistress Sugden opened her eyes at these words.

  ‘Hark to him, Sandy,’ she said in a faint but resolute voice. ‘Bind me up and let me rest. But first give me to drink for I die of thirst.’