He waited. The child, he could not even tell if it were a boy or a girl, wearing an apron of buckskin but otherwise naked, squatted in the doorway of the hut and regarded him with solemn dark eyes. John tried to smile. The child’s face was grave. John leaned back against the wall of the hut and waited.
He could see the shadows lengthen in the little square of the doorway, and then he heard the sound of singing from far away. From the child’s silent alertness he guessed that it had heard them some minutes ago. John looked at the child and raised his eyebrows as if to ask what might be happening. The child was solemn as a warrior, and like a powerful warrior merely shook its head.
John leaned back again and waited.
The chorus of singing came nearer. John listened more intently. He was sure, he was certain, he could hear Suckahanna’s voice. Reason told him that it was not possible, that he had heard her speak only once or twice, that he surely could not hear her voice among many; but still he felt his heart pound and still he leaned forwards, his ears aching with the effort to hear more clearly.
‘Suckahanna?’ he whispered.
The child, recognising the name, nodded, and then made a simple, graceful gesture to the door, and she was there, framed by the golden evening light, taller than he remembered, her face a little graver, her hair grown on both sides of her head but still braided away from her face on the right-hand side, wearing buckskin leggings and a little buckskin dress, and her arms and cheeks painted with red spirals.
‘Suckahanna!’ he said.
She stood before him and looked him over, unsmiling, and then she drew a little closer and put out her hand. John, hesitating, not knowing what he should do, put out his hand in reply, and then, as solemn as Parliament men, they shook.
Her fingers, warm and dry, closed on his and John felt an extraordinary sense of desire at that light touch. His eyes went to her face and he saw, only half-believing, the slow smile spread from her eyes to her lips till her whole face was lightened and joyful.
‘John,’ she said sweetly, her accent lilting on his name. ‘Welcome to my people.’
At once he stumbled into explanations. ‘I meant to come, I meant to come when I said. I didn’t plan to betray you. It was my intention to come to you. But when I got home my father was dead and my children needed a mother –’ He broke off as he saw her shake her head and shrug.
‘I knew you meant to come,’ she said. ‘But when you did not come my mother and I had to leave Jamestown and find our people. And then it was time that I should be married, and so now I am married.’
John would have withdrawn his hand but she held him fast. ‘This is my son,’ she said with a smile to the child in the doorway.
‘Your son!’
‘The son of my husband. His first wife died and I am now mother to this boy, and I have a girl-child of my own.’
John felt regret wash over him as painful as sickness. ‘I never thought –’
‘Yes, I am a woman grown,’ she said steadily.
John shook his head as if he would deny the passing of the years. ‘I should have come. I meant to come.’
‘Your hand is hurt? And you have been sick?’
‘The sickness was my own fault,’ John said. ‘I went hungry for too long and then ate the eggs you sent me – was it you?’
She nodded.
‘They were so good. But I ate them too fast. And I burned my hand on the cooking pot and then the wound broke open …’
She took his hand and bent her head over it to see the wound. John looked at the crown of her dark head and smelled the faint, familiar smell of her warm skin and the bear-grease fat which deterred insects, and felt desire spread through him until he thought he must draw her close, and that whatever it cost him, he must hold her in his arms, just once, before he died.
She looked up and at once recognised the desire in his face. She did not flinch back as an Englishwoman would have done. But she did not come forward either. She stood very still and steadily took him in, reading his desire, his fear, his need.
‘I think we can heal the wound on your hand,’ she said gently. ‘Come.’
The little boy at the doorway stepped aside for the two of them and Suckahanna led John out of the hut into the evening light.
John blinked. He was in the centre of a town square, all around were other long huts, built of wood, and walled with reeds, intricately woven. Each hut had a little spiral of scented smoke above its roof, and a flock of children playing in the doorway. In the centre of the square sat a handful of men, at their ease, talking in low, confident voices, one of them tightening a bow string, another sharpening reeds for arrow tips. They glanced up as Suckahanna led John by, but they made no comment, nor even acknowledged his presence. They took him in, as one animal takes in another. They saw in one devouring glance the way he walked, the prints his boots made on the ground, the scent of him, the matted, ill-kept hair and the pallor of sickness. They assessed his ability to fight, to run, to hide. They sensed his fear of them and his trust in Suckahanna. Then they turned back to their work and their talk as if there was nothing to be said about him or to him – as yet.
Suckahanna led him towards a little street with the houses set on either side. At the end of it was a large fire and half a dozen of the black pots sitting squat among the embers, and skewers of meat resting on a rack. John felt his stomach clench in hunger but Suckahanna took him past the food to a hut opposite the fire.
She stood outside and called a word, perhaps a name, and the curtain in the doorway opened and an old woman looked out.
‘Suckahanna!’
‘Musses.’
The woman spoke in a rapid flow of language, and Suckahanna replied. Something that she said made the old woman snort with laughter and she shot a quick smiling look at John as if he were the butt of the joke. Then she stretched out her hand to see the burn on John’s palm.
Suckahanna gestured that he should show her. ‘This is a wise woman, she will cure the wound.’
Hesitantly, John opened his fingers to show the scar. It was getting worse. Where the blister had burst the raw flesh had got dirty and was now smelling and oozing. John looked at it fearfully. If he had such a wound in London he thought that a barber surgeon would have cut the hand off, to prevent the infection spreading up his arm to his heart. He feared the infection only slightly less than he feared these savages and whatever treatment they might prescribe.
The woman said something to Suckahanna and Suckahanna laughed, a spontaneous giggle, like the girl John had known. She turned to John. ‘She says you should be purged, but I told her you had already done that for yourself.’
The woman was laughing, Suckahanna was smiling, but John, in fear and in pain, could muster only a grim nod.
‘But she says you should still sweat out your illness before we cure the wound.’
‘Sweat?’
‘In a –’ Suckahanna did not know the English word. ‘Little house. In a little house.’
The woman nodded.
‘We’ll go there now,’ Suckahanna said. ‘Then we can get the herbs for the wound before nightfall.’
The woman and Suckahanna led him to the boundary of the village. There was a smaller round hut on the very edge of the little town, its roof at ground level, and thick smoke billowing out from the hole in the centre of the roof.
‘It’s very hot,’ Suckahanna explained.
John nodded, it looked like hell.
Suckahanna laid a gentle hand on his dirty shirt. ‘You must take off your clothes,’ she said. ‘All of them, and go down into there, naked.’
Instinctively, John’s hands gripped the belt of his breeches and then he gave a little yelp of pain at the touch of the cloth on his raw palm.
‘There!’ Suckahanna said, as if that proved the point. ‘Take your clothes off and go down into the little house.’
Reluctantly, John pulled his shirt off. The old woman regarded his pale skin with interest, as if he were
a ham ready for smoking. John shot a swift, frightened look at the little house.
‘Suckahanna – am I to be killed?’ he asked. ‘I would rather die with my breeches on.’
She did not laugh at his fears. She shook her head. ‘I would not lead you to your death,’ she said simply. ‘I kept you safe in the woods for a month, didn’t I? And then I told you that I loved you. Nothing has changed.’
It was like that easy rush of desire that he had felt when he met her. All at once he trusted her. He untied the laces of his breeches and dropped them to the floor. He heel-toed out of his boots and shucked off his stinking stockings. He stood before the two of them naked and felt his genitals shrivel at the curious, bright gaze of the old woman and Suckahanna’s evident lack of interest.
‘Go down in there,’ she said, gesturing to the steps which led down into the smoke-filled darkness. ‘There is a bed. Lie down. You will be hot, you will sweat like a fever. When Musses calls you, you can come out. Not before.’
John took one step towards the hut and hesitated. Suckahanna’s familiar hard little hand pushed him in the small of the back. ‘Go on,’ she said insistently. ‘You always are thinking, John. Just do.’
He smiled at the truth of that and went down the steps in a little rush of temporary courage, and pitched headlong into the darkness.
The hut was filled with acrid herbal smoke and the heat was intense. He understood now that the hut was set deep like a cellar so that the very earth was like an oven, holding the heat inside. At the very centre of the hut was a small fireplace heaped with red embers, and a jar of dried leaves beside it. There was room for a little bench of stones which were so hot to the touch that John had to sit gingerly, and let his skin become accustomed to their warmth.
‘Put the pot of herbs on the fire!’ Suckahanna called from the outside.
Reluctantly, John poured the dried leaves on to the fire. At once the hut was filled with a billow of black smoke which sucked the very air out of his lungs and left him choking and whooping for breath. The smoke felled him, like a helpless tree, so he stretched out along the stones and felt his eyes run with tears against the acrid fumes. His nose hurt with the heat, the very coils inside his ears ached with the intense heat and the airless, powerful scent. He felt himself drifting into an extraordinary dream state. He saw Frances with a trowel and a watering pot in the garden of Lambeth, he saw the Duke of Buckingham throw back his dark head and laugh, he saw Johnnie at the moment of his birth, scarlet, wet and squalling, he saw Jane smiling through the candlelight on their wedding night. He saw his father dying in a bed of flowers, he saw the Rosamund roses he had sent down the river for Jane’s memorial service at her father’s chapel.
From far, far away he heard a voice call something in a strange language and he opened his eyes. The smoke had cleared a little, the heat seemed less intense. His skin was pink, like a baby’s. He was damp all over with sweat and his skin was smooth as a sun-warmed lizard.
‘She says you can come out!’ he heard in English. But it was not the command but the sound of Suckahanna’s voice which brought him from his daze, up the steps and out into the sunlight.
‘Ah,’ the old woman said with pleasure at his appearance. She nodded at Suckahanna, and then tossed a buckskin cape around John’s shoulders to keep the chill of the evening air from him.
John looked around for his clothes. Everything was gone except his boots. Suckahanna was standing among a small group of women, they were all looking at his nakedness with a cheerful curiosity.
Suckahanna stepped forward and held out a bundle of clothing to him. As John took it he saw that it was a clout – a piece of cloth to twist between his buttocks and tie on a strap around his waist – a deerskin kilt and a deerskin shirt. He recoiled. ‘Where are my clothes?’
Suckahanna shook her head firmly. ‘They smelled,’ she said. ‘And they had lice and fleas. We are a clean people. You could not wear those clothes in our houses.’
He felt ashamed and unable to argue.
‘Put those on,’ she said. ‘We are all waiting for you.’
He tied the strings of the clout around his waist and felt better with his nakedness hidden from so many bright black eyes. ‘Why are they all here?’
‘To find the herb for your hand,’ she said.
John looked down into his palm. The wound was cleaner from the sweating, but there was still a crease of rotting flesh at its centre.
He pulled on the shirt and straightened the kilt. He thought that he must look absurd with his big white legs under this beautifully embroidered skirt and then his own heavy boots on his feet; but none of the women laughed. They moved off, one trotting behind another, with the old woman at the front and Suckahanna at the rear. She glanced back at John. ‘Follow,’ was all she said.
He remembered then the unbearable steady pace she would use when they were in the woods together. All the women moved at that remorseless trot which was too fast for him to walk and too slow for him to run. He walked and then ran after them in short, breathless bursts and Suckahanna never turned her head to see if he could keep up, but just kept her own steady pace as if there were neither thorns nor stones under her light moccasins.
The old woman in the front was running and watching the plants on either side of the path. John recognised a master plantswoman when she stopped and pointed a little way into the wood. She had spotted the one she wanted, at a run, in the twilight. John peered at it. It looked like a liverwort, but a form that he had never seen before.
‘Wait here,’ Suckahanna ordered him and followed the other women as they went towards it. They seated themselves down in a circle around it and they were silent for a moment, as if in prayer. John felt a strange prickling on the back of his neck as if something powerful and mysterious was happening. The women held out their hands over the plant as if they were checking the heat over a cooking pot, and then their hands made weaving gestures, one to another, above and around the plant in a constant pattern. They were humming softly, and then the words of a song emerged, softly chanted.
The darkness under the trees grew more intense; John realised that the sun had set and in the upper branches of the trees there was a continual rustle and chirping and cooing of birds settling down for the night. On the forest floor the women continued to sing and then the old woman leaned forwards and picked a sprig of the herb, and then the others followed suit.
John shifted restlessly from one sore foot to another. The women rose to their feet and came towards him, each chewing on the herb. John waited, in case he too had to eat it, but they walked around him in a circle. Suckahanna stopped first and gestured that he should hold out his hand. John opened his fingers and Suckahanna bent her mouth to his palm and gently spat the chewed herb into the wound. John cried out as the juice accurately hit the very centre of the rotting flesh, but he could not pull his hand away because she was holding it tight. The other women pressed around him and each spat, as hard and as accurately as a London urchin, so that the chewed juice from the herb did not rest on the wound but penetrated deep inside. John yelped a little at each blow as he felt the astringent juice entering the rotting flesh. The old woman came last and John braced himself. He was right to think that her spit would be as hard as a musket ball, right into the very centre of his damaged palm. As he cried out she whipped out a leather binding from the pocket of her apron, spread a leaf on top of the wound and tied it tight.
John was half-dizzy from the pain and Suckahanna ducked under his arm and supported him as they walked back to the village.
It was growing dark. The women turned off to their own huts, to the cooking fire. The men were already seated, awaiting their dinner. Suckahanna raised a hand in greeting to one of the men who solemnly watched her supporting John back to the hut. They went through the doorway entwined like lovers and she helped him lie down on the wooden bed.
‘Sleep,’ she said gently to him. ‘Tomorrow you will be better.’
‘I want y
ou,’ John said, his mind hazed with pain, with the smoke, with desire. ‘I want you to lie with me.’
She laughed, a low amused laugh. ‘I am married,’ she reminded him. ‘And you are ill. Sleep now. I shall be here in the morning.’
Spring 1643, England
On a cold day in spring, Alexander Norman took a boat upriver, disembarked north of Lambeth and strolled through the fields to the Ark. Frances, glancing idly from her bedroom window, saw the tall figure coming towards the house and dived back into her room to comb her hair, straighten her gown, and rip off her apron. She was downstairs in time to open the front door to him, and to send the maid running out into the yard to look for Hester and to tell her that Mr Norman was come for a visit.
He smiled very kindly at her. ‘You look lovely,’ he said simply. ‘Every time I see you, you have grown prettier. How old are you now? Fifteen?’
Frances cast down her eyes in her most modest gesture and wished that she could blush. She thought for a moment that she should lay claim to fifteen years, but then she remembered that a birthday invariably meant a present. ‘I’m fifteen in five months’ time,’ she said. ‘October the seventh.’ Without lifting her gaze, modestly directed to the toes of her boots, she could see his hand moving towards the flap on his deep coat pocket.
‘I brought you these,’ he said. ‘Some little fairings.’
They were very far from little fairings. They were three large bundles of ribbon of a deep scarlet silk shot through with gold thread. There would be enough to trim a gown and make ties for Frances’s light brown hair. Despite the shortages of the war, the fashion was still for gowns with sleeves elaborately slashed and trimmed, and Frances had a genuine need as well as a passion for ribbon.
Without taking his eyes from her absorbed face, Alexander Norman said: ‘You do love beautiful things, don’t you, Frances?’ and was rewarded by a look of complete honesty, empty of all coquetry, when she looked up and said: ‘Oh, of course! Because of my grandfather! I have had beautiful things around me all my life.’