by Angela Hunt
She answered their questions as best she could, and held the baby patiently as a stream of villagers came by to take a look. After a moment, the crowd parted like the Red Sea as the minister came forward, his eyes weary and blood-shot. Defeat covered him like a mantle.
“My wife is dead, then.”
Eleanor shook her head slightly. “I know not. Perchance she has a little life left—why don’t you go to her?”
He paused, and Eleanor remembered his reluctance to associate with the Indian woman he had called a “heathen.” But then the Indian woman came out of the house, murmured something to Ananias, and left with her husband in the same dignified manner in which she had come.
The minister stepped back and surveyed the crowd as if he would say something, then he seemed to change his mind. He stooped through the low door of the house and closed it, leaving the villagers to their speculations.
And, outside, Eleanor Dare wondered why he had not even looked at his new daughter.
Thomas marveled that anyone could go through such agony and look so peaceful. Jocelyn lay under her blanket as if sleeping, her hair brushed away from her forehead, a gentle smile curving upon her lips. He stepped forward and took her hand in his, and was surprised to find the skin still warm.
“Thomas?” The sleepy murmur jolted him.
“Yes?”
She opened sleepy-cat eyes, and smiled. “I saw the baby. A girl.”
“Yes.” He could not trust himself to say more, so full was his heart. Had God heard his prayer? He didn’t deserve an answer, for he had played the fool and the coward, but God was sovereign, and sent his mercy to the just and unjust . . .
Jocelyn said nothing more, but seemed to sleep, and he pulled up a stool and sat silently, holding her hand, until Eleanor came into the house and placed the baby into an empty trunk Jocelyn had prepared as a cradle.
Thomas released his wife’s hand. “Mistress Dare, I must know. What evil did the savage woman commit in this house?”
Eleanor turned, a spark of fire in her eyes. “Evil? Why none, sirrah! Though I’ve never seen anything like it, she cut Jocelyn with a sharpened shell and dug a hole. Together we propped her upright, and the baby came swiftly after that.”
Thomas crinkled his nose. “And that smell?”
Eleanor shrugged. “A paste to stop the bleeding. Nothing of importance, reverend, and nothing of evil.” She stood by the door a moment. “Shall I send Audrey?”
“Yes,” the minister answered, wishing her gone. “Send her later.” When he heard the door close and latch behind him, he picked up his wife’s hand once again.
As Eleanor nursed Jocelyn’s baby, Audrey nursed Jocelyn back to health. One lovely afternoon Eleanor sat outside with the baby under the sun-shot leaves of an oak tree. A medley of spring flowers bobbed in the gentle breeze, and the turquoise sky beyond the rim of the palisade seemed filled with gold radiance and the promise of prosperity. Covering herself modestly while the baby suckled, she spied the minister walking through the clearing.
“Reverend, this baby must be named,” she called, glancing up at the preoccupied minister. “And we already have a Virginia, in honor of our virgin queen.”
Thomas came toward her and thrust his hand behind his back for a moment, then gave Eleanor a polite smile. “Then this child shall be called Regina,” he said, “for she is a queen in her own right, and in a new country.”
Eleanor felt a twist of unreasonable jealousy. ‘Twas bad enough that Margery Harvie had given birth to a daughter only days after Eleanor, but now her own cousin’s baby had a name to rival Virginia’s. But her daughter, at least, was the governor’s granddaughter . . .
“I have heard criticism that you allowed a savage to tend your wife,” Eleanor said, shifting the baby in her arms and adjusting the cloth covering that preserved her modesty. “They say you should have lain down before the door to keep the heathen out. They say your faith in God is small.”
Thomas gave her a smile that did not reach his eyes. “And what do you say, Mistress Dare?”
She tilted her head to look at him. “I say you are ofttimes a fool for God,” she answered slowly, wondering if he would threaten her with hell fire for what surely amounted to blasphemy in his eyes. “But I recall that you sent me to fetch Ananias to save your wife, therefore you are not as foolish as I first thought. Howbeit, I cannot judge your faith.”
His jaw tightened. “I have faith aplenty.” The words fairly hissed from between his clenched teeth. “Faith that God will punish evildoers. Faith that God will hold men accountable for their dark deeds. ‘Twas this faith, Mistress Dare, that convinced me that Jocelyn would die if left to me. For I am guilty, you see, and do not deserve a wife, or a child, and would not have them had your uncle and God himself not forced them upon me.”
Eleanor felt her blood run cold. “Why?” she stammered, suddenly wishing she could escape him, but his strong gaze held her fast.
“You would know why?” he asked, a confused and crazily furious light in his eye. He took a deep breath as if he would continue, but suddenly stopped and closed his eyes. Thirty seconds elapsed with neither sound nor movement from him, then he opened his eyes again and his mouth tipped in a faint smile.
“You must excuse me, Mistress Dare. I am not myself these days.”
Eleanor said nothing, but studied him carefully.
“I cry you mercy,” he cleared his throat. “I have accepted my situation. I will be a good husband to your cousin, a father to the child—”
“A good husband? In truth, do you think you can call yourself that?” Eleanor watched his smile stiffen. “Jocelyn gives continually, sir, and receives very little from you. Yet she is devoted to you, she works harder than any woman in this village so that none may criticize her husband—”
Abruptly, he thrust his hand up, cutting her off. “I cannot allow myself to kindle fires of love in her heart, for she would only be hurt.”
Eleanor gave him a brittle, one-sided smile. “Don’t worry.” She rose to take the baby inside. “She is devoted, as I said. But she loves you not at all.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The disaster John White expected finally arrived on the fifth of May. Thirty leagues out of Madeira, a sixty-ton French ship from La Rochelle overtook the Brave. From the bridge, Arthur Facy made friendly overtures to the passing vessel, even inviting the captain aboard to share a bottle of wine. When White protested against wasting time in such a frivolous encounter, Facy rudely adjured him to go below and keep quiet.
White ignored the sounds of drinking and rioting above deck as the seamen cavorted. His colonists huddled below in quiet groups, many of the men praying for God’s mercy for themselves and divine judgment upon the drunken crew. The women, who had seen more uncouth behavior in the past week than they had in their entire lives, sat with their eyes glued to their prayer books as Mistress Sampson read aloud.
As the passengers below watched the dark come on, the sounds of riotous partying finally ceased and the French ship pulled away at nightfall. But on the morrow, as the Brave prepared to raise anchor and make sail, Facy was surprised by a round of cannon fire from the ship that had returned with its consort, a one hundred-ton warship. “What the devil?” Facy stammered, and White, who had come up the companionway, nodded in grim satisfaction. “They have taken your measure,” he said, throwing a dark glance of dislike toward the rheumy-eyed captain. “And they mean to have you for dinner, my friend.”
The French ships wasted no time as they closed in for the kill. The English guns boomed in the Brave’s defense until the seamen ran out of powder; then the French sailors spilled like rats over their boarding nets and roamed the upper deck of the Brave at will. For more than an hour the sounds of hand-to-hand combat raged over the heads of the frightened colonists below decks, then several of the enemy streamed down the companionway and roared in delight at the sight of the quaking passengers cornered like animals in a slaughterhouse.
White
directed the women to a hidden area behind a group of barrels and pulled his sword from its scabbard. The fighting was fierce and not of his doing, but ‘twas time to fight or die.
Within an hour and a half after the enemies’ boarding, the ship, crew, and passengers of the Brave lay firmly in the hands of the French. Twenty-three lay dead on the upper deck, among them the Brave’s first mate and master gunner. Three of the colonists were injured; a French sword had pierced one man nearly a dozen times.
White himself had been cut in the head twice, once by a sword and again by a pike. He wiped blood from his head and tore a strip of cloth from the lining of his doublet to bandage his upper thigh where he had been shot. Limping badly, he stood with the surviving seamen and Arthur Facy on the upper deck to formally surrender.
In a group around the mainmast, the four women wept silently into their handkerchiefs as the French captain walked over the decks of the captive ship with an imperial air. The English sailors in line with John White stood with their heads down, bloody and bowed. White glared at the conquering captain. The Frenchman would certainly order the execution of all English survivors since so many French lay dead and injured.
The captain’s second-in-command walked behind him and caught White’s eye. Returning White’s glare, the man gave a furious speech to his commanding officer. The captain, White noted with relief, seemed not to care for the man’s words, but gave a simple order and gestured toward the line of English survivors. Another French sailor pointed to the after deck, and the English survivors were herded to the back of the vessel while the French seamen swarmed over the ship and began to carry away everything of value.
For the rest of the night and through the morning of the following day the French hauled away everything of value, including the passengers’ personal belongings and the supplies intended for Virginia: food, barrels of wine and water, tools, copper utensils, maps, charts, even the sketches White had drawn in his idle hours at sea. Most disturbing was the abduction of Pedro Diaz, the ship’s pilot. Without Diaz, White knew the ship would never reach America.
In their haste to strip the Brave, the French sailors overloaded their shallops, sinking one and severely damaging another. White breathed a sigh of relief when the French were forced to cease their plunder while the Brave still had her sails, cables, anchors, and ordnance. If they had taken any more, the Brave would have been only a helpless floating hulk.
While the French ship sailed away, the remaining crew and passengers of the English vessel bound their wounds and began to repair the rigging. The women mended the sails while the men recaulked splintered beams. After three days the English ship gingerly edged her way back to Bideford. They arrived on the twenty-second of May, exactly one month after leaving. To White’s sharp disappointment, the Roe arrived back in port a few weeks later.
‘Twas a cruel fight at sea, he wrote in his journal, but just punishment by God for the thievery of our evil disposed mariners. Both vessels returned to England without performing our intended voyage for the relief of the planters in Virginia, which, thereby, we were not a little distressed.
But the ones who would suffer the most were the colonists who waited in Virginia.
THIRTY-FIVE
At the City of Raleigh, Ananias Dare waited for the last of his twenty men to board the pinnace, then gave the order to raise the anchor. As the ship slipped past the beachhead near the village, the men aboard called jaunty farewells to the women who had gathered on the shore. Eleanor waved tentatively, unhappy to see Ananias leaving again, and ten-month-old Virginia managed a childish wave from her mother’s arms. Ananias saw Jocelyn Colman waving weakly at the minister, her baby held close in a maternal embrace. He had not wanted to take the minister on this trip, but Thomas Colman had insisted upon journeying back to Roanoke and Croatoan.
Ananias frowned. The minister insisted on entirely too much these days, and usually got his way.
The pinnace sailed easily through the waters of the Chowan River, and Ananias turned from his thoughts of the minister and looked over the bow of the ship. John White and his relief supplies were long overdue, and Ananias knew ‘twas time to check on the welfare of the men holding a lookout on Croatoan Island. An unsettling thought haunted him: would the thirty men on Croatoan come to the same bloody end as the fifteen caretaker colonists Grenville had left on Roanoke?
The crew aboard the pinnace spotted Roanoke Island after two hours, and as they sailed round to the fort, Ananias heard frantic whispers from the men behind him. Even from this distance they could see that the fort had been razed, but whether by an act of nature or hostile savages they could not tell. The once tall timbers of the palisade stood as blackened stumps behind the sandy beach.
They lowered the shallop and disembarked. As soon as the shallop hit soft sand, Ananias jumped out and waded toward the beach. The structure of the palisade still stood, though ‘twas burned, and the timbers that had supported the houses stood as well, though blackened by the same fire which had ravaged the palisade. But through an act of God’s mercy, the timber carved with the word “Croatoan” stood unmarred and Ananias breathed a sigh of relief. If John White had come here, he would have gone to Croatoan. And if God was faithful, his men still waited there. Perhaps they entertained Governor White even now.
Wasting no further time on Roanoke, Ananias called for the others to rejoin the ship.
Jocelyn placed her baby to sleep in the trunk and stretched out on her bed, her strength utterly gone. Childbirth had left her weaker than she had imagined it could, and the demands from working for survival and nursing an infant dwindled her feeble strength to nothingness by the end of the day. If not for Audrey’s and Eleanor’s help, Jocelyn knew she would never have been able to keep her home and family together.
And as much as she wanted Thomas to feel a part of the family, she was relieved that he had gone with Ananias to Croatoan. She could not tell if he resented the baby or thought that overt affection was frivolous, but he watched her disapprovingly when she cooed at Regina and his critical attitude made her uneasy. On several occasions after the infant’s birth she had asked him to hold the baby, but he refused with a somber look that broke her heart every time she saw it.
His brooding, sober presence made her feel self-conscious as she tended the baby, and the way he averted his eyes when she nursed the child at first made her feel guilty, then angry. By heaven, she was doing nothing wrong! Why did he refuse to enjoy his own child?
But he explained nothing, and treated her little better than he would a casual friend. Ofttimes when the baby was asleep he would read something or tell Jocelyn a story, and on those rare nights she felt that mayhap his heart would thaw in time. But then the baby would cry, or stir in sleep, and Jocelyn would rush to Regina’s side. When she returned, the walls would once again stand behind Thomas’ eyes.
God had answered her prayer and given her a daughter, but since the baby’s birth all signs of his affection had vanished. She used to think his heart distant; now she wondered if he had a heart at all.
She sighed and closed her eyes as she stretched out in weariness on the bed. He had left home once and come home a changed man. Mayhap God would work a miracle again.
Thomas stood at the side of the pinnace and stared at the mighty western ocean. Its vastness never ceased to awe him, and as he gazed at the distant horizon, he felt a sudden urge to flee. ‘Twas the same urge that had propelled him into John White’s dockside office.
I’faith, it felt good to get away from the village. Everything he had left behind in England had surrounded him again in the City of Raleigh—the snooping Pharisees, the rigid standards of behavior, the tendency for lawlessness that corrupted peaceful living. He had run from a dead wife and a son in England, here he longed to escape from a living wife and a daughter.
He chuckled bitterly. Who can say, God, that you do not laugh at your servants? Jonah, running from his calling, fled the great fish only to find himself parched by a desert
sun. From the water to a desert, from a son to a daughter, from a dead wife to a living one. There was no escaping God’s justice.
The men on Croatoan embraced their fellow colonists eagerly, then led them to their small circle of huts inside a high palisade. “These men,” explained Richard Taverner, secure in his role as leader, “live simply, with fish for food and water from the rain barrels. We have a watch posted on the beach during every daylight hour.”
“Do you light signal fires at night?” Ananias asked.
Taverner shook his head. “No. The danger—”
Ananias pounded his fist upon his palm in frustration. “What danger? Our danger of starvation is greater than any you might face, man! If John White does not see your fires here, he’ll go round to Roanoke and waste precious time.”
Taverner pressed his lips together firmly. “With respect, sir, you don’t know what you are talking about. Two days ago we spotted a sail off the coast and ran down to the beach. We laid a fire and were about to light it, when one of our men with an eagle eye saw that the ship bore not the flag of England, but of Spain. Spanish marauders, they were, looking for our colony, no doubt. We doused our fires and lay low for the day, hoping they had not caught sight of us. Fortunately, God was on our side, and the ship never came back.”
Ananias caught his breath. Spaniards! Truly, he had been so eager to welcome an English supply ship that he had nearly forgotten about the war on the high seas. If the war had escalated, ‘twas possible that White would not be able to get ships through . . .
“Thank you.” Ananias clasped Taverner on the shoulder. “You’ve done a good work. We pray God will keep you in good health as you serve him and our interests here.”
“Aye,” Taverner answered. “And ask the good reverend to say a prayer for us, will you? John White promised to bring us wives, you know.”
