Roanoke (The Keepers of the Ring)

by Angela Hunt

  Life didn’t seem fair. She could read and write and dance and sing and had a smaller foot than Jocelyn, but she had been born common just as Jocelyn had been born gentle. No man but another commoner would marry her, and as he had to work for a living, so would she. It mattered little that Jocelyn was a kind mistress. Audrey knew that unless she miraculously found gold in the sands of Virginia or conjured up a gentleman willing to marry her, she’d be of the common serving class and doomed to the lower decks of life forever.

  Audrey forced herself to look past the bilge boy’s tired face. Stained with fatigue and despair, ‘twas a mirror of what hers would look like in another year or two unless—

  She caught sight of William Clement in the line behind her, and the brazen fool winked at her in front of his aging master, Roger Bailie. Audrey knew she ought to be offended, but the young man had a casual charm and fair good looks that made conversation with him easy. William was as common as an old shoe, but he stood on the tall side of six feet and moved with languid grace in his lanky frame. His high cheekbones were nearly hidden under locks of shaggy blonde hair, and his country-green eyes pinned her in an interested search.

  She pressed her lips together to hide a smile, and when she was sure Roger Bailie wasn’t looking, she grinned and returned William’s wink.

  The seamen aboard the Lion had their duties; the passengers each had his or her own way of combating boredom. John White divided his time between complaining about Simon Fernandes (certainly a Spanish spy, he confided to Jocelyn), and sketching pictures of the Indians he had met in his previous journeys to Virginia and the island of Roanoke. Eleanor spent her time sitting with Agnes or Ananias, but when the wind began to freshen and the ocean to roll, she went to her straw mattress, placed her hands on her belly, and begged God to calm the sea.

  Margery Harvie, another heavily pregnant woman, laughed at Eleanor’s constant nausea and went about her business. When Jocelyn mentioned that Margery had no trouble with seasickness, Eleanor retorted that Margery had no refinement and no manners. Gentle women were of a more delicate nature. The delicate were meant to suffer.

  Whenever she could, Jocelyn left Audrey to keep Eleanor company while she went to the upper deck to visit her uncle’s small cabin. In rare moments when the cabin was empty, she sat at her uncle’s desk and wrote long letters to her father. She wrote the first letters when her father was still alive, and she felt foolish putting her deepest thoughts into a letter that would never be read. But as she popped the first missive through the porthole, she felt a ringing impulse of hope. Her father would soon be in heaven with God, and God knew her thoughts, so why couldn’t the master of the universe relay her thoughts and feelings to her beloved father?

  At the time she heard about her father’s death, she wrote to her father and God as joint recipients, and by the time the Lion had headed out to sea, her letters were addressed to God alone. As she struggled to pen her hopes, fears, worries, and concerns, she felt a still, patient voice of encouragement speaking to her soul.

  I know, Father God, that you have not left me alone, she wrote, and heard the answer within the recesses of her heart: Nor will I. I will not leave you nor forsake you.

  In her loneliness, through her letters, Jocelyn came to know God as one who listened and understood and healed. She had always known him as creator, savior, master, and teacher, but in the throes of grief, God revealed himself as a father.

  She did not always find her uncle’s office empty. Often John White sat at his desk, hunched over maps, journals, or sketches. When she entered, his wide eyes would blink as if he had never seen her before, then his easily distracted memory would return from wherever he had wandered. “Jocelyn!” he would cry, standing and extending his arms to embrace her. “How glad I am to see you! And how is my favorite niece today?”

  After returning his embrace, she would take a seat on a stool and listen to him describe the progress of their journey. Captain Fernandes was amazingly tight-lipped and told the governor little about the sea voyage, but John White had travelled the oceans enough to know that the ships would follow the coast of Portugal and North Africa to avoid the westerlies which would blow the ships back to England. “At the Canaries we will catch the northeast trade winds to blow us across the miles of the great western ocean,” her uncle told her, pointing at a rough map on his table. “With a good wind, we will reach land in twenty-eight days or less.”

  Jocelyn hoped for a speedy journey. She had already been aboard the ship for longer than she cared to be, and shipboard life was neither pleasurable nor luxurious.

  Only Simon Fernandes and John White had private cabins aboard the Lion; everyone else shared the decks equally. No one slept on the lower deck, where barrels of water and supplies served as ballast, and the bilge rats crowded themselves together among the passengers’ trunks and supplies on the first deck. The second deck was divided into two halves: men slept aft and the women bedded down on their straw mattresses at the fore. At night on the upper deck, the sailors of the Lion wrapped themselves in canvas and slept under the stars.

  At its best, life on the ship was miserable. After sunset, every man and woman went to their assigned deck, rolled up in a blanket, and tried to sleep as best they could on the damp and slimy floor. The straw mattresses used by the women were soaked by the first rain, and stench of the resulting mildew required the women to pitch the straw bundles overboard. ‘Twas better to sleep on a hardwood floor than to retch from yet another nauseating odor.

  The lower decks were hellishly cramped and the air unbreathable, particularly in the hottest part of the day, but Simon Fernandes and his crew never allowed more than one or two passengers at a time on the upper deck. If by chance more than a few managed to slip up for a breath of air, Fernandes bellowed “Clear the deck!,” sending all passengers and idle crew to the stifling lower levels. Jocelyn suspected that Fernandes considered the passengers no more than living cargo.

  The stores of oatmeal, cheese, and butter remained fresh for four weeks only. Twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays, passengers were served a hot meal. Food was cooked on a fire built on sand ballast in the forward section between decks while smoke permeated the ship and sent the passengers scurrying to the upper decks for a breath of fresh air. The rest of the week the passengers ate salt beef, pork, and fish with biscuit, a hardtack so dense it had to be broken with a mallet.

  One day Jocelyn saw Agnes hurrying Eleanor away from the food line. “What’s wrong?” Jocelyn called, taking a step after her cousin.

  “The barrel leaks, the biscuit is wet,” Agnes answered, struggling to move Eleanor from the sights and smells of food. “How can they feed a lady such garbage?”

  “Wet? It is softer, then?” Jocelyn asked.

  “Aye,” Agnes answered. She tossed a sour smile over her shoulder. “‘Tis turnin’ blue with mildew before my eyes. ‘Tis squirming with maggots, too. Even the beer is full o’ life.”

  But crowded conditions and inedible food seemed like trivial concerns when the ships encountered bad weather. Eight days out to sea, a pillaring thunderhead in the west inexorably advanced toward their fleet. The sea rose up to snarl at them in the midst of gray-green gloom, and when flinty-eyed Fernandes bellowed “clear the decks” in the face of the storm, the passengers hurried toward the companionways like frightened rats. Jocelyn joined the huddled stream of passengers into the belly of the ship, and covered her ears as women shrieked, children cried, and men shouted at one another as fear unleashed their tempers.

  ‘Twas only noon, and yet the sky darkened and congealed around them. Through the small openings in the side of the ship came but little light, and Jocelyn could hear the pounding of seamen’s feet overhead as they rushed to take in the sails lest the ship be blown terribly off course by the approaching storm.

  Suddenly the hold darkened and the cries of her fellow passengers quieted into piteous weeping and soft prayers: “Lord, have mercy upon us.” From ninety throats the refr
ain echoed around her, and Jocelyn joined in, looking with dismay at the wooden timbers that stood as their only protection from a furious and fathomless ocean. For a dark moment she felt as if she were entombed in a large coffin, soon to be buried in the depths of the sea.

  Thunder roared overhead, cracking like a whip through the prayers around her. The ship shuddered as rain poured down on their heads through cracks in the wooden floor of the upper deck. The ship lifted and fell, rocked and listed, backward and forward, left and right. None stood on their feet. Even those who had been devoutly praying on their knees now lay prostrate on the floor, bodies piled upon one another like an odd assortment of rag dolls. The air was horribly thick and close, and Jocelyn threw herself on the floor next to Audrey and struggled to breathe a prayer: Father God, are you there?

  Someone tugged on her skirt, and Jocelyn looked up, expecting to find Eleanor in hysterics. But a boy crawled beside her, and in the white light of a lightning flash she recognized George Howe, the eleven-year-old son of one of her uncle’s assistants.

  “I cry you mercy, Miss,” the boy whimpered, struggling manfully to hide his fear, “but I can’t find my father.”

  Jocelyn looked about, but in the dim light of the hold she could see only huddled forms and the darkly wet forms of prostrate women. She turned back to the boy, about to tell him to wait until the storm had passed, but the sight of his quivering chin bade her pause. “Come, we’ll find him together,” she said, reaching for his hand. She tried to rise , but the erratic rocking of the ship made balance impossible, so she crept forward, placing the boy’s hand on her wet skirt.

  “Don’t lose me,” she said, yelling to be heard above the din as she crawled forward on her hands and knees. “Your father’s probably in the afterdeck—isn’t that where you sleep?”

  She thought the boy nodded, but in the darkness she couldn’t be sure. She continued through the black hold, stumbling over bodies, trunks, tools. Her progress was further hampered by the boy’s tugging at her skirt in the uneven rhythm of his crawling. Every five or ten feet she stopped, raised her voice, and cried, “Master Howe? I have your son!” But no one called out above the voices clamoring in panic and prayer.

  For half an hour she crawled over the wet floor and searched for the boy’s father. Amid the crack and roll of thunder and cries of honest fear, rain thrummed on the upper deck and sloshed in the ship’s belly as the vessel thrashed in the storm. Was George Howe on this deck? She prayed so, for she could not bring herself to go higher, where waves could wash her away, nor lower, where rats and roaches darted uneasily among the trunks and barrels upset by the storm.

  At one point Jocelyn slipped and fell, her head hitting a mast. She sat in dazed pain for a moment, rubbing the knot on her head, and felt again the insistent tug on her skirt. “Miss White—my father!” The pathos in George’s voice drove her back to her hands and knees. Young George Howe needed his father, just as she needed hers, and in that frightened cry she recognized the same pain that had driven her to write letters to God. She had tried to tug on the heart of God just as George tugged now on her skirt—

  Jocelyn turned her face to the boy in the darkness and hoped he could not hear the hopeless panic in her voice. “I don’t know where your papa is, George.” She bit her lip, fighting back tears of frustration, and suddenly a hand fell upon her shoulder.

  “Seek you Mister Howe?” Thomas Colman knelt beside her, his wet hair plastered to his face like dark silk ribbons. But his eyes, thank God, were capable and confident.

  She nodded wordlessly, hoping he wouldn’t see the fear in her eyes.

  “Wait here. I’ll take the boy to his father.” Jocelyn nodded again and pulled her raw and splintered hands into her lap. Thomas took young George’s hand and led him across the deck, in less than a moment he had returned and knelt again by her side.

  “Master How is against the far wall,” Thomas said, yelling to be heard above the thrashing of the storm. “The boy is safe now, thanks to you.”

  “He went down too far, to the deck below this,” she tried to explain, her voice ringing above the baritone prayers rising all around her. “But the lower hold is truly vile. There’s no light, and the boy couldn’t breathe—”

  “You were good to help him,” Thomas Colman said, studying her in an oddly detached manner. He said nothing for a long moment, then smiled and lifted a wet hand to indicate the storm. “This tempest is a fright, but we can bear this, and worse, if God be for us.”

  Jocelyn nodded and shivered, wrapping her arms about herself, too exhausted to move. In the dim gray light she saw Thomas Colman’s eyes crinkle as he gave her a confident smile. “I may owe you an apology, Miss White, if I’ve made you uncomfortable in the last few days. It seems your uncle has been playing the matchmaker.”

  Jocelyn bit back a burst of hysterical laughter. How could he think of such things in the midst of this gale? But his calm attitude soothed her; he might as well have said, I apologize for stepping on your foot during the waltz. Perhaps her fears were overblown; surely seamen weathered storms like this every week.

  She nodded a polite acknowledgement and waited for a moment of relative silence in which to make her reply. The sibilant whispers around her eased, and for a moment the hold seemed to grow brighter and the air still. Like the inhalation of breath, the storm quieted, the howling wind paused, the standing water on the deck floor shimmered in an unearthly gray light. She smiled at Thomas Colman, about to tell him that Audrey had played matchmaker, too, but suddenly lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and a fresh onslaught of rain slammed onto the deck above their heads. ‘Twas the most horrific and powerful sound Jocelyn had ever heard, and the ship shivered under the sound.

  “God help us!” Jocelyn felt the cry escape her lips, and her arms reached out and clutched at empty air as the ship rolled in the sea. Tumbling across the deck, she saw young George and his father clinging tightly to each other as the ship twisted and fell against a wall of water that spewed forth from the openings above and broadside.

  Her fellow passengers toppled from their places like toys caught in a rain gutter. She would have slid helplessly, too, but suddenly she felt the strength of iron about her. In an instant of blinding white lightning she looked up, half expecting to see an angel sent to escort her to heaven. But ‘twas not an angel’s face above her—’twas that of Thomas Colman. One of his arms was tight about her waist, the other securely held the pole of the mizzenmast.

  And in the fury of the storm, when it appeared that at any minute the ship would be tossed from the hand of God to the ocean’s murky floor, she didn’t think to protest.

  NINE

  John White brushed a pile of damp maps and sketches from the bench in his cabin and made a seat for Eleanor. Ananias, his countenance more troubled and worried than usual, nervously stroked his wife’s hand. “We thought our lives were over,” Ananias said, his wide forehead dotted with perspiration even in the cool aftermath of the storm. “I’ve never been through anything like that storm.”

  “Ah, I love a storm at sea,” White answered, thankful that his passengers had not seen his own signs of panic. “‘Tis the might of God turned loose afresh in an echo of the creation. What, Eleanor, were you truly frightened? Think you that I should bring you up just to let you perish at sea? Never fear. This storm was but a thunderhead, though a nasty one, I’ll warrant.”

  “Everyone was frightened.” Ananias lifted his chin defensively. “‘Twas horrible below.”

  “Soft, Ananias,” White warned, “speak not of fear or you’ll breed dissension among our planters. Strengthen your resolve and keep your head high, son, for you are a leader among these people and they must not see anything but strength in you.”

  “Papa, what if the baby comes during such a storm?” Eleanor asked, her eyes wide. Her dark hair hung wet about her face and magnified the pallor of her complexion. “I believe I cannot give birth on board this rollicking ship—why, there wasn’t a woman ab
oard with any wits about her at all. ‘Twas an absolute horror.”

  “Then pray we reach our destination soon,” White smiled and winked at his daughter, “and pray that your child waits until his proper time. Do not fear, Eleanor, God holds us in his hand. If only—” A strident voice outside interrupted; John glanced out his window and saw Simon Fernandes directing his seamen to raise the sails.

  John turned quickly to his son-in-law as a wave of anger surged within him. “A pox on that Portuguese tyrant! He thwarts us at every turn. Have you noticed, Ananias, that Spicer’s flyboat is no longer with us?”

  Ananias moved to the window and scanned the waters. “Cursed be this stormy ocean. has the boat gone down?”

  White shook his head. “Only God knows. The pinnace stayed with us during the storm, but Captain Spicer and his crew now are nowhere to be seen. Fernandes cares nothing for that ship, but we need those men. Manteo and Towaye are our best link to the Indians. We must pray that they will be able to pilot their way to Dominica.”

  “I’faith, Captain Spicer must needs do the impossible,” Ananias muttered, turning away from the window. He lifted his wife’s pale hand. “How many colonists were aboard—”

  “Twenty,” White finished his question. “Twenty strong men who would have made a vast difference in the success of our colony. If God does not bring them to us, we shall desperately rue their lack.”