Sweet Savage Eden

  There had been vast changes in the dwelling. The floor was laid with boards, and the carpenters had fashioned a sweeping staircase that led up to a gallery. The entryway stretched into a long hallway like his house in England; at the end was a large, beautifully oiled, polished dining table, with a bowl of flowers atop it. To either side lay the els, and up the stairs, he knew, were the family bedrooms.

  He took the stairs two at a time and found that the right side of the upper floor, behind the gallery, was intended for his use. An arched opening broke the long room into two, one a bedroom—where the bed he had ordered in London would lie but now held a lumpy pallet on a boxed wood frame—and one where his desk was set, and where the walls were lined with shelving for his books. A stone hearth lay to the side, which he had specifically requested. He did not care for the colonial habit of building open fires beneath flues.

  Jamie left the bedroom and looked across the hall and found two more bedrooms, then he came back down the stairs. To the right he found a row of small rooms, sleeping quarters for household servants. To the left of the hallway was a large room that held a dais to the rear and had numerous chairs. It could be a ballroom or a courtroom, and certainly would be used as both.

  The house in no way compared to the magnificent manor in England, but Jamie was pleased with it. It had been hewn from a raw wilderness, and it was a beginning. Each ship that came would bring more comforts, and eventually it would be a grand manor.

  When he came to the entryway, William was there. “Well?”

  “It looks fine.”

  William exhaled with pleasure, then grinned. “Well, the hog is about to sizzle. The sailors have come ashore and are causing havoc with the unmarried servant girls and the daughters of the laborers. But, as I said, Lord Cameron, there is business.”

  After Jamie settled a few disputes among people living in the hundred and William introduced him to the new house servants they came out to the hallway and sat around the dining table. Jamie stretched out his legs upon the table and cast his plumed hat over his head.

  “An order of rum sounds in good standing,” Jamie declared, and William laughed, approving heartily. Jamie called for Mrs. Lawton, the housekeeper, and the woman brought them a bottle and small glasses, and then discreetly departed again. The men filled their glasses, and William talked more about the events of the time passed—four infants had been born, but two of them had died soon after birth and were buried in a plot of hallowed earth outside the compound. A group of men from Jamestown and the surrounding hundreds had visited with Opechancanough, and they believed that the Indians were as pleased with the peace that lay between them all, as the white men were.

  Jamie frowned. “I don’t know. He is a warlike man. Clever, like Powhatan.” He shrugged. “But I am for peace. It is productive. And my wife will be here soon. She has glorious golden hair, and I’d not like to see it worn upon a warrior’s mantle.”

  “A wife!” William said. “Ah, so one of the fawning London beauties caught you at last!” He chuckled.

  “She is not from London,” Jamie said. The day lay upon him hard; the prospect of a hanging was not a pleasant one. He wondered what William would think if he told him that he had married a bastard scullery wench who had once come to him as a whore and a thief. He said nothing but swallowed more rum. “She is from the outskirts and travels with at least one of her sisters, Robert Maxwell, and a few serving maids, no doubt.”

  William arched a brow with a bit of a smirk. “You’d bring a lady here, milord? From your fine marble-and-brick manor to a house of wood and daub?”

  “I have done so,” Jamie said simply. He stood. The room was growing dark with the shadows of the late afternoon. “Come, William, I can smell the roasted pork, and I am famished.”

  In the center of the compound, the pork was indeed nearing completion. The people were gathering around the fire with contributions of their own: fresh Indian corn, bread, summer peas swimming in rich butter. The laborers, artisans, and gentry gathered together, and though Jamie and Sir William were given respect accordingly, there was a camaraderie here that could not exist in England. The men who served him welcomed him. Daughters were shyly introduced to him; wives came to offer him bounty from their kitchens. He sat cross-legged upon woven mats on the ground with them. Rum flowed along with the good food. Instruments appeared in the compound, fiddles and trumpets and drums and even a spinet, and soon there was dancing on the grass and dirt. Jamie was soon pulled to his feet by a group of giggling girls, and he gallantly bowed to each and, one by one, danced with each girl beneath the moonlight. When the night lay full upon them at last, he excused himself to the remaining revelers, found his own door, and stumbled up the stairs. Exhausted, he stripped, then cast himself down upon his pallet, and was startled to hear a soft giggling sound. He moved his hand across the bedding and encountered bare flesh.

  “What’s this?” he said. Groping for a candle, he carried it to the low-burning hearth and lit it.

  A girl lay within his bed, as naked as he, propped up on an elbow and staring at him with huge green eyes. He had danced with her that evening, he realized. Her name was Hope, but it had once been something else, though she did not remember what. She was a Pamunkee Indian who had been taken in at Jamestown, since her green eyes had convinced him that she was a descendant of some white settler from the lost Roanoke colony. She was a bewitching child, no more than seventeen, with glowing copper skin, fascinating eyes, and full breasts with huge brown nipples. He did not resist the temptation to look at the length of her, for from the tip of her coal-dark hair to her dusty feet she was sensual and fascinating.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

  “I have come to serve you.”

  Jamie paused for a moment. Now his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and the candlelight, and a soft glow played over both of them. He had missed the heady passion he had discovered so briefly with his wife, and he was a man with heavy appetites. He had never refrained from such an invitation before, and his body ached to accept the girl now. It was a novelty to be wanted so. It would be interesting to lay with a woman he needn’t fight. Especially this exotic creature from two worlds.

  He knelt down beside her, and he took her hands between his palms. He smiled ruefully, because something inside of him revolted at the idea. She wasn’t Jassy. She had sultry, beautiful eyes, but not eyes that burned with crystal-blue spirit. She had wide, sensual lips, but not Jassy’s defined mouth with the lovely color and pouting lower lip. Her breasts were tempting, but they did not cause the breath to leave his body, his fingers to itch with anticipation, his mouth to water for the sweet taste of their crests.

  “I am married,” he told her.

  She frowned, and Jamie smiled, because she was apparently accustomed to men who gave the matter little thought. Perhaps he was a fool to do so. If he had any sense, he would lay with the little white Indian again and again and cleanse his ever-grasping, calculating, but exquisite wife from his system.

  “Married?”

  “I have a wife. A woman of my own.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is coming. She sails across the sea.”

  “But she is not here now.”

  “No. And still, she is my woman.”

  Hope smiled. “Sir Tybalt said that I was to be a surprise for you.”

  So that was what William had been planning. He had probably sent the girl still, leaving the matter to his own discretion.

  “You are a beautiful surprise.”

  Her eyes lit straight upon his loins, caressing a certain part of his anatomy. She stared at him with pleasure and triumph. “You are pleased with me. I will stay.” She snuggled down into the pallet.

  Jamie laughed and lifted her up, and set her on her feet. “Hope, you are a sweet surprise, but I must wait for my wife.”

  “You are ready for Hope.”

  Her hands came upon him, encompassing his shaft. He caught her wrists. ?
??Hope, no. You will meet her soon.”

  “She is so beautiful?”

  “Yes, she is beautiful.”

  “And you—you love her so very much?” Her green eyes were wide, questioning. She was a precocious girl, and she had lived several years with the settlers in Jamestown, but she still seemed something of the pagan with her long, thick dark hair and demanding, uninhibited gaze.

  “I—she is my wife,” he insisted. “Now come, dress. I have had a very long day and I must sleep.”

  He paused then. “Hope, you speak the Powhatan language well, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  The language the tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy spoke was a derivative of the Algonquin family, the Indians many of the explorers had met in the northern regions while searching for a northwest passage. Jamie knew many words himself, but he preferred having an interpreter when he traveled into the Powhatan lands.

  “If you want to help me, Hope, you may come with me on a trip. I wish to find Opechancanough and offer him some things. You will come with me?”

  “When?”

  “Oh, maybe a week. I have a few things to settle here, and then we will go. I must bring letters and documents from the king to Jamestown on the ship, and from there we will travel inland.”

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “I will love the ship. I will take great care of you.”

  “I don’t need great care,” he said. “But I would be glad if you will sail on the ship.”

  He found her simple homespun dress upon the floor. He handed it to her. Unabashedly she slipped it over her head. “I will still serve you, anyway.”

  “Thank you. But I am married.”

  “You can handle more than one woman.”

  He laughed. “In some ways, maybe, but then, I’m not so terribly sure. I will have you work for me, very soon.”

  Hope left him at last. He lay down on his pallet, and her image haunted him. He should have kept her with him and snuffed out all the light.

  It would have done no good. In pitch blackness he would know his wife; he would know her scent. He would know the softness of her hair. He would know the shape of her, and the sound of her, and he would know the feel of her breast and the undulation of her hips beneath him. He would know her forever. He had sworn that she would not forget him. He would not forget her.

  At long last he closed his eyes and slept.

  A week later, with the pinnace loaded for the journey home, the supplies settled, Jamie boarded the ship again with Captain Raskin and the crew. He left Sir William at the palisade with five of the men-at-arms, and he took Father Steven, the chapel’s young Anglican priest, and two of the laborers with him—along with Hope—in the ship on a sail up the peninsula.

  The wind was with them, and the afternoon brought them to Jamestown Island. It, too, had grown, with houses spilling in row after row around the wooden palisades of the town. His ship had been seen coming in, and the royal governor was there to greet him, quick to ask about the most recent affairs in London, and determined that Lord Cameron join him for supper. Jamie stayed, and while he listened to the governor, he thought of the years gone by, of the many mistakes of the London Company of Virginia, of the confusion and mismanagement—and still the colony was thriving. There had been very few white women before 1619, and now there were many wives and sisters and daughters. He assumed the white population—including the various hundreds, bought by subsidiary companies or parceled out by King James—had to have reached three thousand. And in the governor’s house he ate off fine plates with silver, and he saw that the governor’s mantel had been decorated with delft tiles. He would try to remember to order similar pieces, thinking that Jassy would like them.

  Jassy … he could never push the haunting image of her dazed blue eyes and her spread of golden hair far from his mind.

  That afternoon, though he was encouraged to stay, he determined to set out. Opechancanough was at Rasawrack, he had been told, one of the Indian capitals. In Jamestown, he bought several horses accustomed to the overgrown trails and started out.

  That night they slept in the wilderness. Jamie heard the owls and the night creatures and looked through the spidery branches of the trees to the sky. He felt the cool air of late summer, and was curiously at peace. He heard new sounds in the night, but the others slept, and he refrained from bolting up to call out an alarm. Though the footsteps in the night were furtive, he didn’t believe that he was under attack. Nor was it Hope, determined to find him. She knew Father Steven, it seemed, and had already discovered the young priest’s penchant for long sermons on the proper behavior for young women.

  In the morning he discovered footprints, and he knew that the Indians were watching him and allowing him to come forward. He wondered if the chief had sent out the scouting party. The Pamunkees, the Paspaheghs, the Kecoughtans, the Nansemonds, and the Chesapeakes were all under the rulership of the Powhatan Confederacy, and in neighboring areas lived the Chickahominies and the Potomacs and the Monacans. Jamie did not know who followed them, but he sensed they would not be harmed. Still, as he packed up their gear, he was careful to see that his sword was belted at his waist, and that his knife was sheathed at his ankle. Muskets and pikes were little good in forest fighting. To be aimed, the muskets had to set upon rests. One had to carry several feet of burning match to assure that the black powder could be lit when the time was right. Loading a musket was a slow process—load the powder, ram in patch and ball. Though skilled men could fire off four rounds in a minute, it was still a tricky business at best, and near impossible when a lithe Indian leapt down upon a man from the shadow of the trees. Swords and knives were far more useful weapons here.

  It took them three days to reach Rasawrack. Before they came upon the Powhatan capital, warriors came rushing out to greet them. Barely clad and heavily tattooed, they danced and let out curious cries but offered the party no harm. John Smith had once warned Jamie never to give up his weapons to the Indians. They asked him to, but he refused, and they let it be.

  Jamie was taken to the chief’s house, a long, arborlike structure created by implanting double rows of saplings and bending the tops to make the arched roof. The roof was thatched, with a smoke hole in the center. The other houses in the community were much like it, but Opechancanough’s house was larger. They were brought into the large center room, and the chief came out to greet Jamie.

  He seemed pleased, and reminded Jamie that he had been a very small lad when they had first met. What words Jamie did not understand, Hope filled in for him. Jamie was glad to see him, and to hear of his power. Opechancanough smiled slyly, and Jamie again worried that trouble was in the offing. The chief was a very tall man, ten years Jamie’s senior at least, and strongly built, with very handsome features. His eyes were dark, his nose long and flat, his cheekbones very high and proud.

  He invited them to a feast, and Jamie said that he would be glad to attend—as long as it was not a torture feast. The chief laughed and assured them it was not. It was a feast of creation.

  Outside the chief’s house, cooking fires raged, and men in breechclouts danced around long poles. Father Steven appeared frightened and appalled, and Jamie mischievously whispered that it reminded him of May Day.

  “This is creation,” Opechancanough told them. “The Powhatan were created by a giant hare, and he kept us prisoners for many years, while old women battled him for his prisoners. Finally he determined to let us be earth dwellers, and he gave us down to the soil and the forest.”

  Women moved about with bowls of food. Father Steven seemed leery; Jamie knew that the Powhatan were good cooks. For their celebration they had made a tasty stew of rabbit meat. It was eaten with the fingers, with flat bread to sop up the juices.

  The men danced, then naked women in blue paint with leaves about their loins joined the men. They sang and moved with erotic abandon. The men-at-arms enjoyed it thoroughly, Father Steven looked as if he would have apoplexy, and Hope moved back and forth to
the music, her lips parted.

  They stayed with the Powhatan that night, and for the two nights following. Father Steven tried to tell the Indians about Christ, and they were quick to tell him about their gods, Okeus and Ahone. The chief and Jamie spoke affectionately about Pocahontas, and Jamie reminded him that John Rolfe was back living in Virginia, and that he was assuring a future for the princess’s son. Jamie tried to explain the king, and Opechancanough told him about Powhatan’s funeral, about the temples of feathered mantles and war paint and copper and jars that had been prepared for his death.

  When their stay came to an end, Jamie saw that Opechancanough was given a large supply of glass beads in radiant colors, two ivory-handled knives, and a blue linen shirt with inserts of cloth of gold. The chief seemed very pleased, and insisted that Jamie return with numerous bags laden with dried fruits and grains.

  It had gone well, Jamie thought. He and Opechancanough had made a vow of friendship, and he was certain that the Powhatan chief remembered and respected him. But something about the chief was crafty, and made Jamie wary.

  They were longer coming back to the hundred, for they could not make the distance between Jamestown and the Carlyle Hundred by ship. When they came through the trail in the woods to the clearing of the fields and the palisades at last, Jamie was stunned to see that a ship lay out at harbor.

  It was the Sweet Eden.

  Jamie calculated swiftly. It was only the fifth of October. He had not expected the ship for at least another two weeks, but there she lay, in the harbor.

  A thunder came to his head, and to his great irritation his palms went damp, and his fingers trembled where they locked around the bore of his musket.

  He urged his mount forward, galloping hard over the fields to reach the dock. His heart thundered, his loins ached, and his mouth grew dry. He was about to see her again.

  He was properly clad in a silk shirt, leather doublet, fawn breeches, and his high boots, for the Indians understood such things as the proprieties of English dress. He was even clean-shaven, for Hope had performed that barber’s function for him not with a razor but with the Powhatans’ method of a sharp, honed shell. He was clean, for the Powhatan bathed daily in the rivers, and he found it a very palatable custom. Still, he had not planned to meet her this way. He had wanted to see the house, to assure himself that it was ready. He had wanted to have time to think …