Tidewater: A Novel of Pocahontas and the Jamestown Colony

by Libbie Hawker

  They moved toward the steps of the estate. Beneath the tight stays of her bodice, Pocahontas’s gut twisted with anxiety. She lifted her silk skirts to ascend the steps, but before she could, the dark wooden doors of the home swung open. Lady De La Warr appeared between them in a sudden eruption of sound and color.

  “My dear Rebecca Rolfe,” she cried. Her voice was loud but melodious, and seemed to come from deep in her middle, from the narrowest point of her squeezed-slender waist. Her dress was made of bloodred silk, and shimmered with hundreds of flowers embroidered in golden thread. She flung her arms wide in welcome. “What a delight to meet you at last. And your honorable husband—do come in, do come in!”

  Pocahontas hurried up the steps and sank into the smooth curtsey she had practiced before the mirror at the inn.

  “Now, now,” the lady said, “let us have no formalities between us. We must be the best of friends, you and I.” She beamed. Her chestnut hair was formed into a column even taller than Pocahontas’s own. A stiff collar of lace fanned out below her chin, so that her head with its soaring pile of hair seemed to float above her graceful shoulders. “You must call me Cecily.”

  Pocahontas dipped her head as far as she dared. “And I am Rebecca. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  A cluster of ladies in bright gowns milled in the hall behind Cecily, barely visible past the impressive jut of the lady’s lace collar. They whispered behind their hands, peering out at Pocahontas.

  “My goodness,” Cecily said, “your elocution is simply superb. I confess I did not think to find a natural of Virginia so articulate.”

  Pocahontas felt John stiffen beside her. She laced her arm through his to calm his temper.

  “But look at me,” the lady went on, stepping back from the threshold, “keeping you out on the step. Please, be welcome.”

  The home of Lord De La Warr and his voluble wife was the most elaborate setting Pocahontas had yet seen in England. Every surface, every object, gleamed. Afternoon sun lanced through the windows, its warm glimmer dancing on polished wood floors and gold-leaf frames surrounding portraits painted in bright colors. A cut-glass vase on a table scattered rainbows across a wall. A brown-and-white spaniel wove its way past men’s legs and women’s skirts, and even the little creature’s neck glinted with a golden collar that sparkled as the dog danced on its hind legs for tidbits from the ladies’ fingers.

  Soon enough John was engaged with a circle of gentleman, telling them all he knew about the cultivation of tobacco. Cecily pulled Pocahontas away from her husband and led her toward the staring, whispering women.

  “You must tell us,” Cecily said, “all about Virginia. Oh, how I desire to see it!”

  The ladies murmured their agreement. A few of them fluttered fans before their faces, and behind the wispy barriers of their bright plumes, Pocahontas saw the ladies’ eyes travel to her neckline, staring at the black lines of her tattoos.

  “Surely you know my husband, Lord De La Warr, president of Jamestown.”

  Pocahontas clenched her jaw. “Yes,” she said carefully, “all of Tsen . . . that is, all of Virginia knows his name.”

  “Have you met him, dear Rebecca? Do tell me, what is your impression of him?”

  She thought of Wowinchopunck’s wife and children. A swell of illness rose in her stomach. “He is . . . very bold,” she managed.

  Cecily’s chin lifted with pride, which only heightened the unearthly floating effect of the lace collar around her face. “He is a great man, and no mistake. His mother’s father was treasurer to Queen Elizabeth, you know, and . . . but Rebecca, you look pale. Is aught the matter?”

  “The journey from Virginia was long,” Pocahontas said. “I suppose I am still weary—that is all.”

  “Fresh air will do you good. And supper. The musicians are already playing, and the garden is splendid in the afternoon light. Come, one and all! Let the feast begin!”

  It was past midnight by the time they returned to the inn. A sickly crescent of moon rode dim and low in the sky, barely shining through the thick smog that blotted out all but the brightest stars. Pocahontas leaned on John’s arm as they climbed the steps of the Bell Savage. Her feet ached in her fine slippers, and her scalp was tender with the weight of her piled hair and its ridiculous white crest of a hat.

  She sighed at the sight of her bed, but she could not climb into it still dressed in the blue silk gown. She woke Matachanna, and together they undid Pocahontas’s finery by the flickering light of a candle.

  “And how was the garden delight?” Matachanna said through a yawn.

  “Somewhat less than delightful.”

  “Oh?”

  “Lady Cecily—that is, Lord De La Warr’s wife—seems to have taken the same liking to me that she takes to her little pet dogs. She kept me by her side the entire evening, and all she wanted to hear was how much I admire her lord husband.”

  Matachanna met Pocahontas’s eyes in the mirror. Her look was flat with disgust.

  “You can’t imagine how I longed to tell her what I truly think of him. And whenever she was not speaking of that manitou she calls her husband, she was asking insulting questions, or making ignorant remarks about the ‘savagery’ of the Real People.”

  Matachanna tugged the pins from Pocahontas’s hair. Pocahontas hissed in pain as the black tower collapsed. Her sister’s gentle fingers massaged her scalp until the throbbing ache abated.

  “It made me feel sick,” Pocahontas went on, “to be so false. But what could I do, except tell whatever kindly lies I could think up about Lord De La Warr, and answer Cecily’s silly questions with dignity? If I turn the English away with rudeness, we may not learn what we need to know.”

  Matachanna nodded. How to stop them, her sober eyes said.

  “And what do you suppose you’ll tell our father when we return home?” Matachanna said quietly.

  Pocahontas sighed. “I wish I knew. I ask myself the same question a hundred times each hour. He won’t like to hear anything I can tell him. He wishes me to find some weakness to exploit, but as far as I can tell . . .” She fell silent, staring at the candle flame but seeing only the image of Powhatan. He looked in the vision as he had looked the last time she saw him: old and weak, reclining on his bed of furs, his lined face alight with one final hope that Pocahontas would return from England with the secret of the tassantassas clutched in her hand like a shining fish in an osprey’s talons.

  “They have no weakness.” Matachanna finished the dark thought for her.

  “No,” Pocahontas said. “They must. All people do.”

  “After all, we have only been here a few days, and you’ve barely begun to go out in society. There is still time to learn, to find the secret we need.”

  “Oh, yes.” Pocahontas stood, allowed Matachanna to slide the sleeves from her arms and loosen the ties of her bodice. Together they wrestled the skirt off Pocahontas’s hips. “There will be many more opportunities.

  “Ever so many more,” Pocahontas imitated the Englishwoman. “Cecily intends to pack me all over London like a babe in a cradleboard, showing me off at every supper and dance and grand event she hears of.

  “I’m terribly popular now, you see.”

  Matachanna frowned. “Just as you always wished.”

  “Don’t tease. It’s unsettling. It seems someone has written a book.”

  “A book? Who wrote it?”

  “I don’t know. A man from Jamestown, who returned to London. Some claimed it was John Smith, but how can that be? He is dead.”

  “Another man, then,” Matachanna said sensibly. “Nearly all these tassantassas are called John. Cecily and her friends might have confused one John for another. The Okeus knows I can hardly tell them apart.”

  “That must be it,” Pocahontas said. “Whoever this John is, he wrote about me, and now all of London thinks
I’m a princess. Oh, Matachanna, all the suppers and parties to come—Lady Cecily and her friends will all expect me to act just like one of their royal princesses. How will I do it?”

  Matachanna watched Pocahontas pull on her nightshift. “You must bear up. These suppers and dances will allow you to earn the tassantassas’ confidence. You’ll find good news for Powhatan, Sister. I know it.”

  When Matachanna had returned to her own room, John slipped back inside. He blew out the candle and turned down the dusty bedcover, holding up its corner so that Pocahontas could slide beneath the linen sheet. In the dark of their close, melancholy room, she curled against her husband’s body and let her silent tears fall on his skin. Outside, the sounds of drunken song and slurred shouts of anger broke the stillness of the night. John stroked her hair until her breathing was smooth and regular, and then he settled himself against his pillow to sleep.

  Pocahontas lay awake. Her tears were spent, but the heaviness of her spirit remained. Tomorrow night she was expected at another ball, and there was nothing she felt less like doing than dancing.

  Two days after Pocahontas’s first encounter with Lady Cecily De La Warr, she looked down from her window to see a large coach swinging into the courtyard of the Bell Savage. It was as dark and glossy as a blackbird’s wing, pulled by three pairs of matched white horses, their bridles and harnesses decorated with swaying red plumes.

  The coachman called to the inn’s staff. “I have come for Lady Rebecca Rolfe.”

  John peered over her shoulder. “Has Cecily De La Warr sent for you again?”

  She shook her head. “I was not expected—not that I know of.”

  They soon learned that the coach was sent to convey the Lady Rebecca and her retinue to lodgings of much better quality and vastly higher repute than the Bell Savage. Their trunks were loaded aboard—all but the chest of threadbare gowns provided by the Virginia Company. The coachman insisted that he had strict orders to leave behind any “shabby alms offered by the fine and thoughtful gentlemen of the V.C.”

  Pocahontas paused at the coachman’s words. They seemed rehearsed, as if he had been instructed to repeat them exactly if he were challenged. Something about their cadence and air felt strangely familiar. Thomas was fussing inside the coach and would not settle until he was cradled in her lap, and so she relented, and left the chest of Virginia Company clothing to a very pleased Abigail in thanks for her good service.

  The six-horse team moved swiftly through the streets of London. Along every lane, people stopped to watch the fine carriage pass, and soon they were crossing the impossible span of the bridge. The crowded houses flashed by and even merchants in their stalls stared in the carriage’s wake.

  On the far side of the river, the spacious estates and brick theaters of Southwark spread like a hide of plush fur, warm, inviting, and luxurious. The perfume of carefully tended gardens overtook the looming, sour stink of London and the dismal Thames. At the corners of every lane and beside the doorways of the fine houses grew shrubberies and flowering vines in green profusion.

  The coach carried them to their new lodgings, a small but lovely estate at the crest of a low hill. It was as serene and secluded as any house in a city might be, dreaming quietly behind an ivy-covered wall, buffered by an expanse of manicured hedges and glossy green lawns.

  “Who owns this place?” John asked of the butler who greeted them.

  “Lord Markley of York, sir. But he never visits anymore. He is very old, you see. He was most pleased to make his London home available to you, at the request of your benefactor.”

  “Our benefactor,” Pocahontas mused. “The Virginia Company?”

  But the elegant man was already calling orders to the house staff, directing their trunks to this room and that.

  Pocahontas shared a cautious glance with her husband. John lifted one dark brow.

  In her rooms, Pocahontas found a great standing chest of polished red wood, its doors flung open. Cascades of fine embroidered silk and rich velvets spilled from its hooks and shelves.

  Matachanna cried out in wonder and, setting Thomas down to toddle about on the room’s patterned carpet, she buried her hands in the velvet. “By the Okeus! Look at these colors. I know nothing about tassantassa clothing, but even I would swear these are all new-made.”

  Pocahontas held up a brilliant-yellow sleeve, examined the neat stitches of the embroidery and the thick cuff of lace turned up at its end. “This certainly looks new. And very fine.”

  “Where did it all come from?”

  “I wish I knew. John doesn’t think it’s a gift from the Virginia Company.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’ll look as fine as tassantassa royalty in any of these dresses. You’ll shine among even the best-dressed ladies, just like one of Winganuske’s copper bells!”

  The English summer yielded to a bright, fragrant autumn, and Pocahontas and John attended a supper party nearly every evening. Now and then they accompanied this lord or that investor to one of the many Southwark theaters, Pocahontas charming them between acts with her poise and her stories of life in the wilds of Virginia. Each morning Pocahontas would walk with Matachanna through the gardens of Lord Markley’s estate, watching Thomas chase cats and sparrows while they discussed the English in hushed, careful tones.

  Months had passed, yet Pocahontas had learned little that might be of use to Powhatan. She despaired to Matachanna. Despite the peace of the estate, she could not help feeling the weight of London pressing all around her like a bodice laced far too tight. Sometimes, as she and John waited for a coach to carry them off to another ball or masque, Pocahontas would lean from the house’s upper window and watch the dark stain of London spreading beyond the Thames. She thought she could see it growing larger, growing denser, with its choking press of tassantassas day after endless day. For all I know, every last one of them wishes to leave this place and take up residence in Tsenacomoco. The English must outnumber the Real People a hundred to one.

  Often when she strolled with Thomas in the gardens, following the erratic path of his lively, dimpled legs, her laughter would fade from her lips, and Pocahontas would find herself staring after her son in the grip of a sudden, hopeless sadness. For many days she could not identify the peculiar sorrow that cut so deep into her spirit. But at last the pain formed itself into words. She whispered them after Thomas as he ran.

  “Where is your home, my son? Where do you belong? And if you belong in Tsenacomoco, will your home still be standing by the time you are a man?”

  Abruptly, the image of Werowocomoco came back to her, the way it had looked on the night she had become Matoaka: the vines clinging to its exposed bones, and the bones as black as char, as black as still, cold water.

  She caught Thomas up in her arms, holding him close to her heart so she could press her face to his hair and breathe in the comforting scent of him. But he did not smell like the tobacco fields or the turned, damp earth and the pine smoke of their home fire. He smelled like London. It was a bitter, hard smell. But it smelled like certainty—like a future. A form of survival, she thought, recalling with a bleak tremor Naukaquawis chasing the children from the crow tower while she stood at his side, cloaked in the disguise of an Englishwoman. But not the survival you had hoped for.

  She let Thomas slide from her arms again, and stood still while he bolted down a gravel path, away from her, into the English landscape. After a time, when he had disappeared from sight, Pocahontas lifted the weight of her skirts and walked resolutely after her son.

  The bright autumn faded rapidly to weeks of cold drizzle, and finally to a scattered, wet snow that bent the branches of the garden’s hedges beneath its gray weight. Robed in thick velvet and soft furs, Pocahontas, Matachanna, and Utta-ma-tomakkin walked along the garden’s central path. Tiny birds flickered and hopped within the icy palisades of the hedges, chanting chip-chip as Pocahontas p
assed. But their lively voices did not cheer her. She had spent six months in England, and she was no closer to learning what might quell the flood of tassantassas to Tsenacomoco’s shores. In the dark, cold days of winter, she felt surer than ever before that it could not be done.

  She took Matachanna by the hand. Her sister’s palm was warm against her own. “It has been a long six months. Long and tiring.”

  Utta-ma-tomakkin huffed through his nose. “It has indeed.”

  Pocahontas glanced at him from the corner of her eye. “Whatever became of your counting stick? The one Powhatan instructed you to notch for every tassantassa you saw?”

  “That,” Matachanna said darkly. “He broke it into pieces and tossed it in the fire back at that dirty house where we first lodged. Didn’t you, Tomakkin?”

  The priest shrugged. “It’s no use counting them. There isn’t a name for a number so large.”

  “And what of your other task,” Pocahontas said, “to see their god, to learn whether God has a weakness?”

  “I have conversed with many of their priests, discussed their rituals, talked my way into temples to observe their worship. Their god has no form—he is invisible. How can the people of an invisible god be so . . .”

  Great. She was afraid to say the word aloud.

  They walked on in silence, but a furious current swelled in her heart, a rising rush of words and fears that beat at her spirit until she feared she would scream, or laugh. Or run.

  She breathed unsteadily, and then said, “Many of the people I have met here—Cecily De La Warr and others—have asked me if I don’t intend to stay in London.”

  Matachanna grunted in disgust. “For how much longer?”

  Pocahontas stopped walking. “For all time.”

  “Of course you said no.”

  Pocahontas chewed her lip.

  “Oh—Pocahontas! You can’t even consider it. Tell me you’re not considering it.”

  “Hear me, please.”