London

by Edward Rutherfurd

  It was three years since they had seen him. From Oxford, instead of returning to London, he had gone to Italy with a friend, studied there a year and spent another in Paris. In that time, he had changed from a sallow student to a man. Dressed in black, with the same silver flash in his hair, you could see at once that he was his father’s son. But as he joined them now, and the two men rode along the canal, exchanging news of London, Paris and the French and English courts, it was evident from their bearing and conversation that there was a subtle difference between them. If Sir Jacob was a gentleman, young Henry was an aristocrat; if the Puritan alderman was severe, the polished traveller was hard; if the father believed in order, the son believed in dominion.

  As they went along, Julius could hardly take his eyes off him, and his heart swelled with pride to think that this family could be so fine. “Are you now returned for good?” he dared to ask, at last. To his delight, Henry gave him his strange sardonic smile. “Yes, little brother,” he promised. “I am.”

  1620

  On a star-filled night in July 1620, a crowd of some seventy people stood in a semicircle by the bank of the River Thames and waited for the dawn. Some of them were nervous, some excited; but as Martha gazed across the glinting water, she felt only a great rejoicing in the glory of the Lord.

  For years, godly folk in London had spoken of this enterprise. But who could ever have dreamed that she would be part of it? Who could have foreseen the extraordinary change in the Dogget family? Or the unexpected attitude of the boy. Or, most wonderful of all, the recent but mystifying circumstances that had brought the family to the water’s edge this morning. She looked up at her husband and smiled. But John Dogget did not smile.

  John Dogget loved his wife. When Jane Fleming had disappeared from the Globe twenty years before, Dogget had been deeply upset, but time had passed, and two years later he had married a lively girl, a waterman’s daughter, and had known great happiness until her sudden death. The months that followed, however, had been so miserable that when he married Martha he had scarcely known what he was doing.

  He would never forget how he had brought her home on their wedding day. He had tried to prepare the house by the boatyard, but the family had always lived in cheerful chaos, and God knew what she had felt. Nor did their wedding night, though the essentials were duly accomplished, bring her, he suspected, much joy. He went to his work the next morning in a thoughtful and uncertain mood. But returned that evening to a transformation. The house was clean. The children’s clothes had been washed. On the table stood a large pie and a bowl of apples stewed with cloves; and from the grate there came the aroma of freshly cooked oatcakes. The family had not eaten so well in a year. That night, overcome with gratitude, he made love to her with tenderness and passion.

  How quietly she had won the children over too. She never forced them to acknowledge her, just went about her work, but they quickly noticed that their home smelled fresh instead of stale, their clothes were mended, the larder stocked; an air of pleasant calm descended upon the house. Nor did she ever ask for help; but it was not long before the eight-year-old-girl wanted to cook with her, and a few days later the oldest boy, seeing Martha sweeping out the yard, took the broom from her and said: “I’ll do it.” The following week, as they were working on a boat, he remarked to his father: “She’s good.”

  She still puzzled him. The Doggets were a merry family by nature: hardly a day went by without them finding something funny. But when they were laughing, he noticed that Martha would sit, quietly smiling, because she saw they were happy, but not laughing herself. He began to wonder whether she had seen the joke. And did she really like their sexual life? Certainly she became aroused, but if she always gently welcomed his advances, he couldn’t help noticing that she never took the initiative herself. Perhaps she felt it was ungodly. But when she asked him, after three months – “Am I a good wife?” – and he had answered, with real feeling – “None better” – she seemed so pleased that to introduce any hint of doubt seemed unkind.

  And in due course they had a child.

  The change had come so slowly that for a time he hardly noticed, but gradually he came to understand that something had happened to his family. Even in rowdy Southwark, the better sort of stallkeepers now gave him and his children a polite smile – something they had certainly never done before. Still more startling was the day when the parish beadle, speaking of some noisy drunkards, apologized to him for the disturbance to “godly people like yourselves”. But the true turning point had come one day when, pointing to a handsome young waterman and remarking to his ten-year-old daughter, “There’s a husband for you,” the girl had seriously replied: “Oh no, father, I want to marry a respectable man.” He supposed she was right. But something died in him that day.

  He discovered something else, too. “I didn’t marry a woman,” he would wryly say. “I married a congregation.” It was not just the prayer meetings, though she went to those; but it seemed that there was an entire network of similar-minded people stretching across all the city wards and far beyond. It was almost like a huge guild to which she could turn for help. It came into play most strikingly on the one occasion when they quarrelled.

  It was over the eldest boy. Though brought up to help in the boatyards, he showed no desire to follow his father’s trade. The slow work with his hands made him restless, and he announced that he wanted to go to sea as a fisherman. Dogget, knowing that the boatyard was a solid little business, expected Martha to support him; but after a day of prayer, she stated: “You should let him go. Our work is worship,” she reminded him. “So if a man hates his work, how can he worship God?”

  “He should obey his father,” Dogget protested.

  “God is his father,” she gently corrected. “Not you.”

  He was so furious, he did not speak to her for days.

  Yet a week later, he found himself with Martha at Billingsgate, being ushered into the large, red-bearded presence of no less a personage than the head of the Barnikel family, one of the most prominent men in the Fishmongers Company, who told him: “Found a good berth for your boy. Know the ship’s master well.” And before Dogget could stammer a reply: “Glad to help. Your wife’s good name goes before her.”

  Now, as the sky grew lighter, those same words seemed to echo in his brain. His wife’s good name. But for that accursed good name, none of this would have happened. Yet what could he do? The wherry was coming to take them. And across the water, moored in the stream just below Wapping, he could see the trap into which he was being led.

  That stout, three-masted ship called the Mayflower.

  By noon, they had passed the Medway.

  The Mayflower was a good little ship: a London vessel, a hundred and eighty tons, a quarter owned by Captain Jones who sailed her – another sign that she was sound. Frequently chartered by London merchants, she had spent much of her time shipping wine in the Mediterranean. Seaworthy, well stocked and with ample space, she was fully prepared to carry her passengers to the New World.

  Martha had been approached in the past by agents of the Virginia Company, asking if she and her family would like to settle there. But that was nothing: so had half London. And she had gently pointed out to the men who approached her that there was little point in crossing the Atlantic only to find King James’s Church when she got to the other side. But this was different. When she had heard about the little Puritan group who planned to found their own community, not in Virginia, but in the wilderness of America’s northern seaboard, she had been fascinated. And try as she might to overcome it, she could not help it: she had felt the pain of envy in her heart. She even mentioned her longing to Dogget. But he had only laughed.

  Until help had come from an unexpected quarter. The eldest boy, arriving home from a fishing trip, calmly announced: “Father, there’s a new venture going far north of Virginia, to the Massachusetts colony. It’s organized by the Merchant Adventurers. We could do well there. Barnikel the
Fishmonger thinks so too.” And when his father asked him why, he replied with a single word: “Cod.”

  This, of course, made the whole venture possible. King James, enquiring how the settlers meant to live, and being told they meant to fish, had wryly remarked; “Like the Apostles,” but he too knew that the settlement lay near some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. “It’s a risk of course,” the boy conceded. “But you build boats and I fish.” But even so, Dogget had not been enthusiastic.

  The mysterious offer came the following day. Though Dogget suspected otherwise, Martha had done nothing to invite it. She was as much in the dark as he, though it was clear that the offer must come from a person, or persons in the Puritan community. Martha even wondered if it might come from Barnikel himself. A message arrived stating that if they wished to join the expedition, a well-wisher was prepared to pay Dogget a handsome sum for the boatyard – far more than it was worth – and to purchase shares in the company for them as well. As his son said to Dogget, in front of the other children: “Where else, father, could you get money for the family like that?” And that was the trouble. He couldn’t. A week later, he had reluctantly given in.

  The voyage of the Mayflower is well recorded. Making her way down the wide Thames Estuary, the little ship proceeded eastward, the long coast of Kent on her right. Then she turned south, rounding the tip of Kent and passing through the Straits of Dover into the English Channel. At Southampton, halfway along England’s southern coast, the Mayflower was to rendezvous with a sister pilgrim ship the Speedwell. The Mayflower reached Southampton just before the end of the month.

  The Speedwell was a very small ship, only sixty tons. As she came up Southampton Water, she seemed to be low in the water and to move in a curious, ungainly manner. Dogget, staring at her, muttered: “She’s overmasted.” And as she drew close, an embarrassed silence descended upon the watchers, broken at last by the eldest boy. “That vessel’s not seaworthy.”

  She wasn’t. Within an hour they heard: “She needs a refit before she can sail on.” Nor was this all. Dogget and his son went aboard her at once only to return, shaking their heads. “They’ve hardly any supplies.”

  It was well into August before they finally left Southampton. The weather was fine, however, and the mood was lighter. They passed the sandy coast below the New Forest, then the long cliffs and coves of Dorset. By dawn the next day they were off the coast of Devon when Martha heard a shout.

  “They’re pulling in.” The Speedwell had sprung a leak.

  At last the Speedwell was declared seaworthy again and the two ships set sail. For five days, in a moderate swell, they ploughed slowly westwards. On the sixth day, a hundred leagues out, gazing back at the Speedwell, Martha noticed that it seemed lower in the water, and that it was falling behind. An hour later, the two ships turned back.

  “The Speedwell can’t go on. She’s rotten,” Captain Jones told the assembled passengers, when they had returned to the westerly port of Plymouth. “The Mayflower can only take about a hundred of you. So twenty must stay behind.”

  In the silence that followed, having held his peace for over six weeks, John Dogget spoke.

  “We’ll stay,” he said. His children nodded, even the eldest boy. “We’ve had enough of you,” Dogget said. And Martha could not blame them. Others too now admitted that they would sooner not proceed. “They’re not going to make it,” the eldest boy confided to her.

  And so it was, in the month of September, in the year of Our Lord 1620, that the pilgrim fathers finally set sail in the the Mayflower from the port of Plymouth, but without the family of Dogget, who returned to London.

  On a bright morning in early October, Sir Jacob Ducket was just returning to his house when he encountered Julius. Seeing his younger son give him a slightly uncertain look, he enquired what was on his mind. After a moment’s hesitation, Julius told him.

  “You remember those people, father, with the funny hands.” Sir Jacob frowned. “Well,” the boy went on, “I’ve just seen them again, with Carpenter. I think they’ve come to live with him.”

  This came as a great blow to Sir Jacob: because earlier that year, anonymously and through a third party, he had paid them a handsome sum of money to leave. That evening, after sitting alone for some hours with a flagon of wine – a thing he never normally did – Sir Jacob Ducket suffered a stroke. Two days later, it became clear that his two sons, Henry and Julius, must take over his affairs.

  It was a familiar sight in those years. Every evening, a little before sundown, she stood there on the low ridge called Wheeler’s Hill, gazing eastwards.

  What was she looking at? The broad fields below; the winding river? On a clear day you could see the Atlantic, but was she looking for the sea? No one asked. The Widow Wheeler kept her thoughts to herself.

  The Wheeler spread was typical of Virginia then – a few hundred acres, a yeoman’s farm. Wheeler himself had never made much of it, but his widow had. She ran everything herself, with sweated labour. There were two slaves; but the day of the slave was only just beginning in Virginia. Most of the labourers were indentured English men – some poor, some in debt, a few petty criminals who had ten years of labour to earn their freedom. She had a name for being fair but ruthless. But the real reason for the farm’s profit was her choice of crop: for, like many others in Virginia, every yard was given to a single crop whose acres of huge green leaves flapped in the breeze like so many floppy pieces of parchment.

  Tobacco. Since John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, had introduced it, the burgeoning of the Virginia tobacco crop had been astounding. A few years ago, twenty thousand pounds weight had been shipped; this year – who knew? – maybe half a million.

  From its shaky start, the Virginia colony was growing swiftly. There were several thousand settlers now, taking more land every year. Some of the larger farmers were doing so well they had started importing a few luxury goods from England. But the Widow Wheeler bought almost nothing. Perhaps she was puritanical; perhaps just mean. It was hard to guess for, it had to be confessed, few of her neighbours really knew very much about her.

  They would certainly have been surprised to learn that for fifteen years, the respectable Widow Wheeler had lived with Black Barnikel the pirate.

  Not, in truth, that this really described their strange, wandering, relationship. Jane herself, during those years, would have put it far more simply: “I’m his woman.”

  She had been his woman on that first voyage. She had had no choice. She had been his woman when, already pregnant, he had left her to have the child in an African port to which, months later, he had returned, delighted to find he had a son, and showered her with gifts. Five voyages, a dozen ports, three more children. Her years had passed in strange, exotic places, from the Caribbean to the Levant.

  And how had she felt? It had been strange at first to be in his power, to know he could probably kill her. She had studied him carefully therefore. Yet she had found him surprisingly tender. Whether she wished it or no, he knew how to bring her to physical ecstasy. Did she not think of escape? He was too cunning to give her the chance. He never went near London. What should she do – abandon her children? She found she could not. Take them home with her to London? What would they, with their strange, dark skins, be there? It was when she thought of this that she guessed at Orlando Barnikel’s secret rage, and it was at such times, far more even than those of physical passion, that she recognized that, in a way, she loved him.

  The end had come suddenly. After the third child, a boy, she had lost two more babies. Orlando had been much away. She had not conceived for some years. But it was just after the younger boy, aged twelve, had made his first voyage with his father, that Orlando had announced: “I’m sailing to America. Come with me.” When they reached Virginia, escorting her off the ship at Jamestown he had put a bag of money in her hand and announced: “It is time for you to leave me now.”

  She had been almost thirty. Young enough to marry
and have a family in a colony like that, where settlers were often in need of wives. He had been right.

  Six months later she had found Wheeler, and married. The only catch had been that he had fallen sick and there had been no children. As for Orlando, she had never seen, nor heard of him again. Recently, however, as she stood on Wheeler’s Hill and gazed over the plantation, she had sometimes found her eyes wandering, on clear days, towards the blue glint of the ocean.

  It was some news she gleaned from one of her own indentured labourers that had caused this change. The fellow had come from Southwark where he knew the Globe well. Having no idea who she was, he had told her that her parents had both recently died and her brother gone away to the West Country. The news had left her with a curious sense of freedom. It made no difference to anyone, she realized, what she did now. She would face no awkward questions.

  All the Virginia growers knew that the tobacco plant exhausted the soil. Most plantations at this time were exhausted after seven years. It was not a huge problem, for the whole continent of America lay before the settlers. They just set up a new plantation further inland. In three years, Jane knew, Wheeler’s farm would be exhausted and she would have to move. But by then, also, she would have saved a comfortable sum of money. Enough, perhaps, to do something else, she thought, as she gazed towards the sea.

  Some people might find Henry proud, but Julius could only admire him for the courageous way he had assumed the leadership of the family. Sir Jacob had never recovered from his stroke: his right side was paralysed and he could not speak. He was a sad sight and some children might have wanted to hide him. But not Henry. On his orders, once a week, immaculately dressed and followed by his two sons, Sir Jacob was carried in a litter to the Royal Exchange so that people could pay their respects to him. “And to our family too,” Henry told Julius. “No matter what happens, hold your head high.” Henry had style.