‘We would have the children,’ she went on. ‘The little boy and my own baby. You would have to promise to love them and care for them like a father.’
‘And where would we live? You said you would not live in my house?’
‘We would live here,’ she said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. ‘Among the People. You would become a Powhatan.’
‘I would learn your language? Live among you as an equal?’
‘You are learning it already,’ she observed. ‘You laughed at Musses the other day and she was not speaking English.’
‘I can understand some, but –’
‘You would have to join the People, as a brother.’
‘They would accept me?’
‘We would accept you.’
John was silent, his head spinning. This was a far greater step than his adventure to Virginia, this was a step into the unknown beyond the plantation, into the darkness of unknowable lands.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You would have to decide,’ she repeated patiently, as if she had led a child around a circle of explanation and returned to the key point at last. ‘You would have to decide, my love.’
John hesitated at the endearment. ‘Do you want me to be with you?’ he asked.
At once her hands returned to their work, her head bowed and her veil of dark hair tumbled over her face hiding her expression, brushing her naked brown shoulder. ‘You would have to decide, without advice from me,’ she said to the earth. ‘I don’t want a man with half a heart.’
At midday the women rested. The fields they were working were distant from home, too far to return to the village for the usual meal, prayers and rest. They ate a little cold gruel and fruit which they had brought with them, they said their brief prayers to the sun which stood precisely above each and every one of them, blessing each and every one with light and warmth on the exact centre of her head. Then they rested in the shade of the trees. Suckahanna’s baby was at her breast as she lay back, the little boy playing stalking or marksmanship with his tiny bow and arrow, with the others. John rested near Suckahanna, listened to the ripple of talk, picked out words, one word after another, all of them making more sense to him. He watched her openly now, wondering how it would be if they were married. If she could indeed leave her husband and come to him. If he could indeed become a Powhatan. If he could ever be recognised as a man among the People.
When they returned to camp he touched her arm. ‘I need to take advice from a man,’ he said. ‘Can one of the men speak my language? Someone I can trust to tell me how a Powhatan man might see this? Not a friend of your husband?’
At once her dark eyes lit up with laughter. ‘Oh! You don’t trust me!’
‘I do –’ John heard himself stammering. ‘Of course!’
Suckahanna turned her head and babbled a string of words at her sister-in-law who was a few paces ahead. The woman screamed with laughter and turned back, laughing at John, and pointed an accusing finger at him. John picked out among the rapid flow the few words: man, Powhatan, talk, talk, talk, everything.
‘What is she saying?’
‘She says you are a true man, a Powhatan already. She says all men need to talk, talk, talk among themselves, to make the decisions which are already known.’
‘Known?’ John queried.
Suckahanna veiled her eyes with the downward sweep of her eyelashes. ‘Everyone thinks that you love me,’ she said quietly. ‘Everyone thinks that I love you. We are all just waiting …’
‘Waiting?’
‘For you. To decide.’
John went that night before supper to the house of the werowance, the senior man of the village. It stood four-square at the head of the village street, near the dancing ground, at a distance from the smoke of the cooking fires. It was walled with tree bark, and roofed with bark roughly cut in shingles. In the heat of the day the bark walls would be rolled up like curtains, but as the evening grew cold the old men closed out the chill night air. The werowance himself was sitting on a raised platform at the end of the tent; at his side were two of the old men of the tribe. They all carried their sharp hunting knives, John noticed. They all looked grave.
John stood in the doorway, awkward as a boy.
‘You can come.’ The werowance spoke in heavily accented English; but there was neither welcome nor warmth in his voice.
John entered the darkness of the house and sat, obedient to the small gesture, on a pile of soft deerskin. For a moment he was reminded of King Charles’s wordless gestures to his servants, and the thought gave him a little courage in the darkness of the strange house. He had served the greatest king in England, he could surely bear himself like a man before someone who was nothing more than a savage chief clinging to the edge of unknown land.
‘You desire Suckahanna?’ the werowance said briefly.
John found he was looking at the length and sharpened cane blades of the hunting knives.
‘I knew her before she was a married woman,’ he said. His voice sounding weak and apologetic, even in his own ears. ‘We were promised to each other. I promised I would come back for her.’
The werowance nodded. ‘But you did not come back,’ he observed.
John gritted his teeth. ‘When I got to my home in my country my father had died and my children needed care. I had to stay.’
‘She waited,’ the werowance pointed out. The old men on either side of him nodded, their sharp faces like stone eagles on a lectern in church. ‘She trusted your word.’
‘I am sorry,’ John said awkwardly.
‘You have a new wife and children in your own country?’
John thought of a swift lie, thought he might tell them that the plague had taken both his children as well as Jane. But a fearful superstition halted his tongue. ‘Yes, I have children,’ he said quietly. ‘And a wife.’
‘And is your wife now the one who waits?’
John nodded.
The werowance sighed as if John’s infidelity was a riddle, too tedious and complex to unravel. There was a silence that stretched for a long time. John’s back ached, he had sat awkwardly and now he felt too uneasy to wriggle back on the pile of skins and lean against the wall of the house.
‘Where do you want to be?’ the werowance asked him. ‘With Suckahanna or your wife?’
‘With Suckahanna,’ John said.
‘You will care for her children as if they were your own?’
‘Gladly.’
‘You know the children are not to be taken to your people? They will stay with the Powhatan?’
John nodded.
‘And their mother stays with us too. She will never go to your country with you.’
John nodded again. ‘She told me this.’ He could feel a squirm of excitement starting to grow inside him. This had all the signs of an interrogation of a bridegroom, it was not the preamble to a refusal.
‘She came to us for a home, she could wait for you no longer. She made her choice and now she is our child. We have taken her to our hearts.’
The older men nodded. One said something low in their language. The werowance nodded. ‘My brother says that we love her. We would avenge her hurt.’
‘I understand,’ John said. He was afraid they would hear the beating of his heart, it sounded so loud in his own ears. ‘I don’t want to take her from you. I know she has made her choice, and that she and her children will be with you.’
‘And any children you may have with her,’ came a low growl from another man, speaking clearly in English. ‘They will not be Englishmen, remember. They too will be the People of the Hare.’
John had not thought of his children being born here, being raised by Suckahanna, being rocked in the papoose, learning deadly accuracy with a reed arrow. He felt his heart leap at the thought of fathering such a son. He swallowed. ‘Yes.’
‘If you choose her, you choose to be with her, to be with us,’ the werowance repeated.
John bowed his head.
There was a silence.
‘Do you wish to be our brother?’
John drew a breath. Lambeth seemed a long way away, Hester more dead to him than his first wife, Jane. His own children half-forgotten. The pulse in his blood, the drumming beat in his ears, was for Suckahanna. ‘I will,’ he said.
Faster than the eye could follow, like a striking snake, the werowance snatched at John’s wrist, twisting it so that he fell to his knees before the basilisk gazes of the three old men. The pain shot up John’s arm to his shoulder, the grip on his wrist joint was so powerful that he had to stay on his knees.
‘Against your own people?’ the werowance demanded.
‘It won’t come to that,’ John gasped. He could feel the bones in his arm starting to bend, an ounce more pressure and they would break. ‘I know that they have treated your people badly but they have the land they need now, it won’t come to a war.’
‘They have driven us back like helpless deer,’ the man said, his grip unchanging. ‘And they will drive us back and back, every time they need an inch more land. Is that not so?’
John did not dare to answer. He felt the sweat standing on his back, the muscles in his arm singing with the pain. ‘I can’t say.’
‘They use the land and leave it, like a hog in a stall, don’t they? They foul it and then it is good for nothing. So always they need more land, and more land, and then more?’
Abruptly the werowance let John go and he pitched face down on the rushes of the floor, biting his lips to keep from crying out. He could not contain his panting breath, he whooped like a hurt child.
‘So there will come a time when every inlet of the river and every tall standing tree sees an Englishman hammering in a stake.’
John sat back on his heels, fingered his forearm, his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he conceded unwillingly.
‘So when you say you are our brother, you must realise that we will call on you as our brother. You will die beside us when we run forward. Your hands will be red with the blood of white men. You will have their scalps tied to your belt.’
John thought of the Hoberts in their little house hidden among the trees, and the inn at Jamestown, the serving maid at the governor’s house, the rough kindliness of the planters, the hopeful faces of the emigrants when they first docked at the quay. The werowance clapped his hands, a sharp ringing sound.
‘I knew you couldn’t do it,’ he remarked, and rose to his feet and walked from the house.
John scrambled to his feet and took three rapid strides after him. One of the old men stuck out a bony leg and John tripped and pitched down to the skins on the floor.
‘Lie still, Englishman,’ the old man said, his speech perfect, his diction Oxford-pure. ‘Lie still like a fool. Did you think we would give our daughter to a man with half a heart?’
‘I love her,’ John said. ‘I swear it.’
The two old men got slowly to their feet.
‘Love is not enough,’ said the old man. ‘You need custom and kinship as well. Love her all you like. There is no shame in it. But choose your people and stay with them. That is the path of a brave.’
Without another word the old men went out, their bare feet passing within an inch of John’s face. He lay on the skins, the very symbol of a man brought low, and let them walk past him.
It grew dark. John lay still. He did not notice the thickening of the light and the spreading shadows on the wall. He heard the distant sound of singing and knew that dinner had been cooked and eaten and that Suckahanna’s people were at the dancing circle, singing down the moon, singing the fine weather in, singing the herds of deer towards them, singing the fish into the weirs and the seeds strong and tall out of the ground. John lay face down in the skins and neither wished nor wept. He knew his own emptiness.
A light came to the doorway, a twig of burning candlewood, bright as the best wax in London. Beneath it, half-lit, half-shadowed, was Suckahanna.
‘You told them you did not want me?’ she asked from the doorway.
‘I failed a test,’ John said. He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face. He felt immensely weary. ‘They said I should have to fight against my own people and I could not agree to do it.’
‘Very well.’ She turned to go.
‘Suckahanna!’ he cried and the desperation and passion in his voice would have made any woman pause but a woman of the Powhatan. She did not even hesitate. She did not drag her feet. She went out as lightly stepping as if she were about to join a dance. John leaped up from the floor and ran out after her. She must have heard him coming, she knew the rhythm of his stride from her girlhood, but she did not hesitate nor look around. She walked without breaking her pace down the little street to her own house, parted the deerskin at the door and slipped inside without even glancing back.
John skidded to a standstill and felt an urge to scream and hammer his fist through the wall of the light, beautifully made house. He took a sobbing breath and turned towards the fire at the dancing circle.
They were dancing for joy, it was not a religious ceremony. He could tell that at once since the werowance was seated on a low stool with only an ordinary cape thrown for warmth around his shoulders, and no sacred abalone shells around his neck. He was clapping his hands to the music of the drums and flutes, and smiling.
John went towards the light but knew that he was not suddenly revealed. They would all have seen him in the shadows, sensed him running after Suckahanna and then turning back to them. He skirted the beaten earth of the dancing floor and worked his way around to the werowance’s seat. The three old men glared at him with the bland amusement of cynical old age which always enjoys the diversion of youthful pain.
‘Ah, the visitor,’ said the werowance.
‘I want to marry her,’ John announced without preamble. ‘And my children will be Powhatan, and my heart will be with the Powhatan. And you may command me as a brave.’
The sharp, beaky face gleamed with pleasure. ‘You have changed your mind,’ the werowance observed.
‘I have learned the price,’ John said. ‘I am not a changeable man. I did not know what Suckahanna would cost me. Now you have told me and I know. And I agree.’
One of the men smiled. ‘A merchant, a trader,’ he said, and it was not a compliment.
‘Your children to be Powhatan?’ the other old man confirmed. ‘And you to be our brave?’
John nodded.
‘Against your own people?’
‘I trust it will never come to that.’
‘If it ever does?’
John nodded again. ‘Yes.’
The werowance rose to his feet. At once the drumming stopped, the dancing halted. He put out his arm and John, uncertainly, went towards him. The thin arm came down lightly on John’s broad shoulders but he could feel the strength of the sinews in the hand as the werowance gripped him.
‘The Englishman wants to be a brave of the Powhatan and marry Suckahanna,’ the werowance announced in Powhatan. ‘We are all in agreement. Tomorrow he goes hunting with the braves. He marries her as soon as he has shown he can catch his own deer.’ John scowled at the effort of understanding what was being said. Then the beaky face turned towards him and the werowance spoke in English.
‘You have a day to prove yourself,’ he said. ‘One day only. If you cannot mark, hunt and kill your deer in the day from dawn to sunset then you must go back to your people and their gunpowder. If you want a Powhatan woman then you have to be able to feed her with your hands.’
Suckahanna’s husband grinned at John from the centre of the dancing circle. ‘Tomorrow then,’ he said invitingly in Powhatan, not caring whether John understood or not. ‘We start at dawn.’
At dawn they were in the river, in the deep, solemn silence of the prayers for the rising of the sun. Around the braves, scattered on the water, were the smoking leaves of the wild tobacco plant, acrid and powerful in the morning air. The braves and the women stood wais
t-deep in the icy water in the half-darkness, washed themselves, prayed for purity, burned the tobacco and scattered the burning leaves. The embers, like fireflies, swirled away downriver, sparks against the greyness.
John waited on the bank, his head bowed in respect. He did not think he should join them until he was invited, and anyway, his own strict religious background meant that he shrank in fear for his immortal soul. The story of the Hare and the man and the woman in his bag was clearly nonsense. But was it any more nonsense than a story about a woman visited by the Holy Ghost, bearing God’s own child before kneeling oxen while angels sang above them?
When the people turned and came out of the water their faces were serene, as if they had seen something which would last them all the day, as if they had been touched by a tongue of fire. John stepped forward from the bushes and said in careful Powhatan, ‘I am ready,’ to Suckahanna’s husband.
The man looked him up and down. John was dressed like a brave in a buckskin shirt and buckskin pinny. He had learned to walk without his boots and on his feet were Powhatan moccasins, though his feet would never be as hard as those of men who had run over stones and through rivers and climbed rocks barefoot since childhood. John was no longer starved thin; he was lean and hardened like a hound.
Suckahanna’s husband grinned at John. ‘Ready?’ he asked in his own language.
‘Ready,’ John replied, recognising the challenge.
But first every man had to check his weapons, and sons and girls were sent running for spare arrow heads and shafts, and new string for a bow. Then a woman ran after them with her husband’s strip of dried meat which she had forgotten to give him. It was a full hour after sunrise before the hunting party trotted out of the village. John suppressed a smug sense of satisfaction at what he regarded as inefficient delays; but kept his face grave as they jogged past the women, setting off for the fields. There were cat-calls and hoots of encouragement at the men’s hard pace and at John, keeping up in the rear.
‘For a white man, he can run,’ a woman said fairly to Suckahanna, and Suckahanna turned her head to look after them as if to demonstrate that she had not been watching and had not noticed.