She clasped John’s hand, but turned to the reverend. “Do we have some time to ponder it, before we send our response?”
“Of course.”
“Then let me at least take the news to my family. I believe it will be of interest to them.”
Pocahontas watched from the rail as Jamestown receded, a gray smudge against a deep blue-green palisade of trees. Thomas rode on her hip, clinging to the laces of her bodice, staring wide-eyed about the deck of the Lady Grey. The commotion of the ship’s crew was enough to silence even his chatter. All about them, sailors chanted as they hauled on lines. From the vantage of the great wheel, the captain shouted his orders.
John lingered uncertainly in the shade of the mast. Pocahontas knew he still had his hesitations about the voyage to England, but he had accompanied her to Orapax the week before, and had seen for himself how keen the old mamanatowick was to send his daughter to England.
Powhatan had seized eagerly at Pocahontas’s proposal. His dream of possessing guns was now only a distant and foolish memory. A far more urgent need now haunted Chief Powhatan’s spirit: he wished to know how many English there were. There must be an end to them—an end to this flood of tassantassas that seemed to run deeper and faster with each passing season, scouring more and more of Tsenacomoco away.
“Go,” Powhatan had told her. “I cannot believe what the white men tell my chiefs when they sit down to trade. But I know I can rely on your account, Pocahontas. Learn what you can of the English, of their mamanatowick and his designs. Think on what you learn, and tell me what we can do if their ships keep coming. Tell me what of our world we might save.”
When John understood Powhatan’s desperate need for knowledge, he took pity on the old man and relented. “It’s naught but a ploy by the Virginia Company,” he grumbled as he helped her pack a pair of trunks, “but if you are certain it will do your people some good for you to see London with your own eyes, well . . .”
Pocahontas was not the only Real Person who would look upon the capital of the English king. She glanced over her shoulder to where Utta-ma-tomakkin crouched on the deck beside John. The priest’s dark eyes flickered along the riverbank as the ship made its way swiftly toward the sea. Pocahontas had convinced him to don white men’s clothes for the sake of blending in, and the priest looked awkward and uncertain in his trousers and linen shirt.
She had already begun schooling him in the English tongue. The charge Powhatan gave the priest was nearly as important as her own task: Utta-ma-tomakkin was to find the English god, to look upon the deity, and learn all he could about its power. Understanding the white men’s god might provide the Real People with some small advantage as the tide of tassantassas continued to rise. Or so Powhatan and Opechancanough hoped.
As Pocahontas watched him, Utta-ma-tomakkin clutched at a large stick thrust like a sword through his tassantassa belt. He had been instructed to count the English by notching the stick with his knife each time he saw a white face. Pocahontas frowned as she watched Utta-ma-tomakkin worry at the stick. She suspected a whole forest of sticks would be needed to tally the English in all their numbers.
Matachanna made her way across the deck to Pocahontas. She, too, had agreed to wear tassantassa clothing, though, like Pocahontas in her days as a captive, Matachanna found she could not tolerate the restrictive bodice and sleeves. Pocahontas had given her a linen shift and it flowed about Matachanna’s bare feet as she stepped with exaggerated care. The pale linen made her face sickly and green.
Matachanna held out her arms for Thomas. She had offered to care for the child while Pocahontas observed the English in their own lands. Pocahontas planned to learn all she could of London and the king—she knew she would be busy in England, and was grateful she would not be obliged to hand the boy over to an Englishwoman to tend. Thomas was learning his words faster than ever now, and she wanted him to speak the Real Tongue as readily as he spoke English. But she was more grateful still that she had a friend—her sister—with her. Matachanna understood all that was at stake for the Real People.
Pocahontas handed Thomas over to her sister with a smile. “You look ill already. One would think you’d never been in a canoe.”
“This is no canoe,” Matachanna said direly. “It’s the size of two longhouses. The Okeus never meant for man to travel in such a way.”
“John tells me the real adventure begins when the ship leaves the river and rides upon the open sea.”
Matachanna stared downstream. The river was vast here, opening lazily to the salt water. The comforting, forested banks were far distant to either side. Far ahead, the land fell away entirely, and an endless blue curve of ocean waited beneath a sunlit haze.
“Spirits help me,” Matachanna muttered, and held Thomas tightly against her.
When the Lady Grey did gain the sea, Pocahontas did not smile quite so easily. The first several days went hard with her. The pitching, heaving roll of the ship confused her senses. She hardly seemed to know which direction was up. She was plagued by nausea, and resisted the sailors who implored her to come out of the hold and take air on the deck. They swore her sickness would abate if she could see the horizon, but she refused to believe it. After her second day of retching into a pot and listening to poor little Thomas wail, she finally climbed the ladder to the open air.
The sailors were right. Almost at once she felt better, and chided Matachanna up onto the deck, too. Thomas recovered himself and giggled at the flock of white birds that trailed the Lady Grey like a plume of bright smoke, but Matachanna huddled into her shift, wedging herself between two crates. She could not be brought out of her misery.
The tang of the sea air sent a thrill racing through Pocahontas’s blood. Even when the skies were gray and the waves rough, she spent her days on the deck with Thomas and John, only retreating to their small quarters in the hold when rain drove her below. She watched great silver fish with pointed snouts, which John called dolphins, leap and play in the spray of the ship’s bow. In the mornings, when the sun was still rosy over the sea ahead, misty pillars of whales’ breath would rise in the distance and hang dissipating over the sleek black arches of their backs. She grew so fond of sailing that one warm, mild day the laughing crew hoisted her up the foremost mast in a rope sling. She hung there, calling out and waving to John far below, while the mast swayed gently side to side like the crown of a massive tree in a summer wind. All around the flanks of the Lady Grey, the vast sea stretched and stirred, rippling endlessly like a huge blanket shaken between uncountable, unseen hands.
At last the Lady Grey found European waters. They tracked north along sere brown coasts, and then found the land growing lusher, painted in shades of green. Finally, early in the month of June, they were surrounded by a great whirl of birds that made Thomas laugh until he was breathless with delight, and they coasted into the harbor of Plymouth.
“Thank the Okeus,” Matachanna muttered, hitching up the hem of her shift. “If I didn’t want to return to Orapax so badly, I would never set foot on an English ship again.”
POCAHONTAS
June 1616
The coach bounced and squealed on its springs as it left the dirt road for the hard-packed gravel of London’s outer lanes. Pocahontas lifted the coach’s shade to peer out at London and felt a jolt of horrified awe. The city was a solid mass of stone stretching as far as she could see, clinging to the banks of a dismal, treeless river. Smoke hung like a fogbank over the pointed roofs of uncountable houses. And everything—from walls to steeples to roads, from the puddles the horses splashed through to the people they passed—was gray.
Plymouth had been a large enough village, but at least she could see green fields stretching away from the homes, and forests beyond the fields. Pocahontas gaped at the stifling grayness of London. How did these people eat? Where did they find food, if not in gardens and forests? There were neither fields nor forests anywhere near.
She sat back, gazing around the interior of the coach, at a loss for words. Matachanna was huddled close to Utta-ma-tomakkin, whose stoic silence could not mask his turmoil. Even in Plymouth he had realized his counting stick would be useless. He had abandoned the task after cutting the hundredth notch with his knife. But London seemed as large as a thousand Plymouths.
Pocahontas turned to John with wide eyes. He reached across her to tug the shade closed again.
Only the sounds and smells of London intruded as the coach maneuvered through its crowded streets, but that was intrusion enough. The coach rocked as they turned, and voices called out from all sides. “Cockles! Cockles by the pound! Fresh cabbages!” There was a burst of breaking pottery; a man cursed, and a woman screeched insults. She heard the rising snarls of two dogs fighting, and men laughing and shouting their wagers. There was a thick odor of horse dung and human urine, of musty wool and rot. It clung to Pocahontas like a shroud.
Thomas slept on Pocahontas’s lap. She envied the boy’s ability to slip into the peace of his dreams amid the shouting and chaos. I shall never have a restful dream again, she thought sadly, stroking her son’s black hair. She tried to imagine what she could possibly tell her father when she returned to Tsenacomoco. Her thoughts were bleak and wearying. He had spoken of a flood of tassantassas and wondered how to quell it. But she now knew the sea could not be quelled.
She closed her eyes to ward away the threat of tears.
When they arrived at their inn, the horses came to a stamping, blowing halt. A footman in a patched blue coat opened the carriage door. Pocahontas took the man’s hand and stepped down into the inn’s courtyard, glad to be on her feet again after the long ride from Plymouth.
She looked about the square yard. The wings of the inn surrounded the court entirely, blocking the view of the London streets. Patches of thin grass reached like an old, worn buckskin fringe between the cracks of paving stones. A row of weedy roses straggled along the rough-made bricks of the building, dropping yellow and pink petals among the thorns. She recognized the flower from the books John had shown her, but when she bent to sniff a pale bloom, it had none of the sweet scent the books promised. It smelled wan and thin as an overused cloth. The eaves above the upper story were overhung with tendrils of some twining plant, not unlike the passion-fruit vines of Tsenacomoco. Swallows darted in and out among the vines, the sun glinting on their blue-black wings despite the smog that tried to stifle its warm rays. A thick line of white droppings showed clearly in the grass below the swallows’ nests.
John stepped down beside her, the still-sleeping Thomas now propped against his shoulder. He glanced up at the inn’s door and frowned. A veil of anger, tightly controlled, darkened his features.
Pocahontas followed her husband’s gaze. A red sign swung from an iron bracket above the door, and she squinted at the letters painted in curling white script. She seldom read script, and it took her a long moment to puzzle out the inn’s name.
The Bell Savage.
“A fine jape,” John muttered, “courtesy of the V.C.”
A small troop of men in faded blue coats carried their trunks and bags inside. The inn’s hostess, an old woman with white hair drawn up in a voluminous bun, showed them to their rooms, tutting and fussing as she went. When their trunks were deposited in their rooms and the old woman withdrew with a final hen cluck of warning—“Meals are served at the times indicated, and sharp, too!”—Pocahontas shut the door with a sigh of relief.
Matachanna took Thomas from John’s arms. She lay with the boy on the bed, a great canopied thing with yellow velvet drapes. The bed creaked beneath Matachanna’s slight weight, and when she tried to tug the drapes closed—to hide the sight of her tears, Pocahontas suspected—a great puff of dust rose up beneath her hand.
“Let’s have some fresh air,” Pocahontas said in the Real Tongue. She pulled back the curtains that covered the room’s window. Their quarters were on the third floor, the highest. She could look down from her window to the narrow street, flanked as far as she could see by three stories of dingy brick. Across from the window, a crooked alley wound between two dark-sided buildings, affording a glimpse of a flat gray expanse of the river, and, spanning it, the arches of a huge stone bridge. The road that ran along the bridge was crowded on either side with houses as tall and thin as saplings and wooden stalls where merchants hawked their wares. A rapid movement in the alley caught Pocahontas’s eye. A small dog with a coat like moth-eaten wool trotted down the lane, dodging the puddles of muddy water that gathered in the alley’s pits and divots. As she watched, a man staggered out of a door, singing in a broken, howling voice. He opened his trousers and urinated against the wall.
Pocahontas turned away.
John was bent over a trunk—not one of theirs, but one far finer, with brass bands and a polished and carved mahogany face. He lifted the lid tentatively. She could see a bright fold of cloth inside.
“What is it, John?”
He held a folded piece of parchment up to the window’s light. “For Lady Rebecca Rolfe: It is our pleasure to provide you and your retinue with these tokens of our esteem, for the duration of your stay in London. Signed, The Virginia Company.”
John propped the trunk’s lid open. Together they lifted out and examined several gowns and other articles of fine clothing. Matachanna, distracted from her misery by the bright fabrics, joined them in laying out the garments. They laid finespun wool atop soft linen, and sturdy, bright velvet side by side with the cool smoothness of silk. There were skirts and sleeves in every shade of blue, and greens as rich as a forest in summer. Pocahontas compared a deep-gold silk with a russet wool while Matachanna toyed with a black braid edging a cream-colored bodice.
But the more they examined the garments, the more apparent it became that they were not especially fine—or at least, their finest days were behind them. The nap of a velvet sleeve was crushed and worn thin at the elbow. One side of a wool skirt was subtly sun-faded, and a silk hem was pale with frayed threads. Pocahontas surmised they were the cast-off gowns of some gentleman’s wife.
The women let the drape of a skirt fall between their examining hands. John shut the mahogany trunk and sank down on its lid, his frown deepening.
Three days later, just when Pocahontas began to feel that if she did not escape from the stifling rooms of the Bell Savage she would climb the dusty curtains in frustration, the first of the expected invitations arrived. John read it out loud to them: supper and a ball at the London estate of Lord De La Warr, to be hosted by his lady wife in the absence of the lord.
Pocahontas held her breath. Her eyes locked with Matachanna’s own.
At last Matachanna said, “Are you going to go?”
“I don’t believe I have a choice. Not truly.”
“But De La Warr . . . he’s the one who . . .”
“Wowinchopunck’s wife and sons—I know.”
Matachanna helped her into the newest-looking dress they could find. The bodice and skirts were of a soft sky-blue silk. Stiff, wire-framed cuffs jutted from the shoulders to hide the ties of the sleeves. The gown’s low, rounded neckline, edged in an intricate lace, did not entirely conceal the tattoos across Pocahontas’s chest. She surveyed herself in the room’s tall mirror and turned to John, touching the edge of one tattoo, a question on her lips.
“Leave it be,” John said before she could speak. “They’ll like to see your markings. Makes you more of an oddity.” He turned away with a sigh.
Pocahontas could not manage the fashionable hairstyle on her own—the high, voluminous coif swept back from the brow. The innkeeper sent up her niece, a blushing, quiet girl named Abigail with hair as fine and pale as corn silk. Abigail set to work with a pair of combs, teasing and coaxing Pocahontas’s hair into a thick, dark cloud around her face. Matachanna snorted with laughter at the sight, but when Abigail pulled the cloud into a heaped crown and pinn
ed it, even Matachanna exclaimed at the transformation.
“You do look a proper London lady,” John admitted. His eyes warmed, and his smile had none of the cynicism that had twisted it since the day they set sail from Jamestown.
As Lady De La Warr’s supper was to be “a garden delight,” Abigail insisted on adding a tall white hat to Pocahontas’s tower of hair. “’Tis only proper for a married lady to wear a cap out of doors,” the girl said as she secured the hat with a long pin.
Matachanna shook her head. “You look as if you’ve got your head stuck inside a water gourd.”
“Curious,” Pocahontas said in the Real Tongue, “that is exactly how I feel.” She turned her head very slowly to examine her reflection, fearful the hat might topple off. But Abigail had done her job well; it kept its place on her lofty cloud of black hair. “I look completely ridiculous.” She said to Abigail in English, “I thank you kindly for your assistance.”
The estate of Lord De La Warr lay beyond the gray clutter of London proper, amid a patchwork of rolling parks and gardens. Pocahontas was pleased to see that not all the land here had been turned to stone and ash, but even London’s most scenic dells could not compare with the rugged, fierce beauty of Tsenacomoco.
John, refined and foreign in a deep-green coat with a stiff, high collar, helped her down from the carriage into a great courtyard of pale stone that curved out from a manor house. Pocahontas had to roll her eyes upward to see the entire ivy-shrouded height of it. She dared not tip back her head; she still felt as if hair and cap alike might slide from her scalp and collapse in a heap on the ground.
From behind the house, the soft strains of harp and flute lifted and moved on the breeze like birds in lazy flight. She had heard the English instruments a time or two, when she and John had gathered at Jamestown or Henrico for happy occasions. The sound made her melancholy for home. The air was languid with a sweet scent. Roses, she thought. That must be the smell of a proper rose.
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