They got intoxicated that night. Dazed and riotous and then stupefied and giggly, then dancing and leaping and singing under a big yellow midsummer moon. They smoked the sacred tobacco until their heads rang with it and their very eardrums grew hot and itchy. They smoked until they saw dozens of moons cavorting in the sky and they danced on the dancing ground beneath them, following the lunar steps. They smoked until they were whimpering for cool water for their aching throats, and they ran down to the river and exclaimed at more moons, floating in the water, like stepping stones into the darkness. They smoked until they grew hungry like children and raided the stores for anything sweet and spicy and ate handfuls of dried blueberries and popped corn on the embers of the fire and burned their tongues in their hurry. They smoked in a great orgy to celebrate that the Eagle had passed the test and put his head on the block, and that a woman of the People had laid her head down beside him for love of him, and such a thing had never been seen since the time of Pocahontas, when Princess Pocahontas herself had laid her head down to save John Smith, though she had been little more than a girl and hardly understood the risk she took.
Suckahanna’s story was more passionate and the women made her tell it over and over again. How she had met John and feared him, how he had treated her gently and never known that she had understood every word he said, that she had heard him tell her that she was beautiful, that she had heard him say that she was lovable. The women sighed at that and the young braves giggled and dug each other in the ribs. Then Suckahanna told them how she waited and waited for him, in the cruelty of the white man’s world at Jamestown; and that when she gave him up she had been glad of a refuge with the People and glad of the kindness of Attone, who had been a husband that any woman might admire and love. And at this part of the story the young women nodded and glanced over to Attone in neutral judicial appreciation as if it had not occurred to any of them that Attone was now a free man. Then Suckahanna told them how she had heard of a new white man who had made a clearing in the wood and built a house and had planted a flower at his doorstep. She told them that at that word, at that single piece of news, she knew at once that John had come back to the land of the Great Hare and she went alone to stand in the shadow of the trees and see him. And that when she saw him, her heart went out to him and she knew then that he was still the only man she had ever loved and ever would love and she went straight to Attone and to the werowance and told them that the man she loved was an Englishman living alone in the forest and asked their permission to go to him.
But they were wise, she said now, and cautious, and they made her wait and watch him. And they realised as they watched him that he did not have the skill to keep himself. He could not feed himself and dig his fields and keep his fire in. It was too much work for a single white man to do. Even the children of the Great Hare live together so that the women can garden and the men can hunt and they can all work together. Then Suckahanna went to the werowance and to her husband Attone, and told them that she would like to be released to go to the Englishman and help him to make his home in the land of the Hare.
But again, they were too wise. They said that the Englishman could not be trusted with the children of Attone. That when Suckahanna returned to him he might take her as a servant and not as a wife. Or he might take her and then abandon her, as white men like to do. They said she should wait and watch.
She waited and she watched and she kept him alive with little gifts and then finally she saw him so near to death and to despair that he got in his canoe and could have drifted forever down to the Great Sea. Then, and only then, was Suckahanna allowed to take his life in her keeping and bring him to the Powhatan.
It was a good story and it lasted through the last hours of the night when the smoke started to disperse from their wild, dazed heads, and the laughter subsided and the men and women and children drifted away from the dancing ground and the great fire they had built for their revels, and found themselves falling asleep with only an hour left of the night.
Suckahanna and John were among the last to leave. At last there was no hurry, there was no urgency in their meeting. They had their house, the werowance had allowed them to use one of the empty store houses, another house would be built soon. Suckahanna had put deerskin on the sleeping platforms and hung her baskets on the walls. The baby was slung up in its papoose, her little boy was lolled, his heavy head in her lap. Suckahanna smiled at John.
‘I’m sleepy too,’ she said.
John got to his feet and lifted Suckahanna’s son into his arms. The warm boy clung to him in sleep, with the easy trust of a child who has only ever known a loving touch. John followed Suckahanna to their new house and laid the boy, as she directed, on his little sleeping platform in the corner. Then he sat on the warm skins and watched his wife unbraid her hair, untie her little skirt and drop it to the floor. She stood before him naked.
John rose to his feet, his fingers fumbling for the tie of his own loincloth, found it and dropped the buckskin to the floor so that he was as naked as she. Her eyes travelled all over him, without shame, dark with desire, and she smiled a little, as a woman smiles when she sees that her man desires her: partly in vanity, partly in joy.
She turned with a proud little toss of her head and then stretched out on the sleeping platform, pulling the soft deerskin to one side so that it framed the bronze, smooth length of her, her dark hair spread, her lips half-parted, her breath coming a little faster and her eyes hazy with desire. John moved towards her and kneeled on the sleeping platform, moving over her with a sense of unreality, as if, after all his years of dreaming, this could only be another dream. He bent his head and kissed her and at the warmth and taste of her lips he knew himself to be awake and alive, and more powerfully alive than he had ever been in his life before. He gathered her warm buttocks into his hands and entered her with a quiet sigh of pleasure. Suckahanna’s dark eyes flickered shut.
Summer 1643, England
Hester woke on the morning of 31 May to the sound of gravel rattling against her bedroom window. For a moment she had the absurd thought that it was John, locked out of his own house, summoning her to let him in, to a reconciliation, a return, and to the end of her loneliness and waiting.
She jumped out of bed, ran to the window and looked down. It was a man, wrapped to the eyes in a cape, but she would have recognised the hat, heavy with plumes, anywhere.
‘God rot him,’ Hester swore under her breath, threw a jacket over her nightdress and ran barefoot down the stairs to let him in at the back door. In the stable yard a dog barked briefly. Hester let the man slip inside and then closed the door behind him.
‘What is it?’ she asked tersely.
‘It’s gone awry,’ he said. He dropped the cape from his face and she saw he was drawn and anxious. ‘I need a horse to get away from here to warn the king.’
‘I don’t have one,’ Hester said instantly.
‘Liar,’ he shot back.
‘I don’t have one to spare.’
‘This is the king’s business. His Majesty shall hear how I am served.’
Hester bit her lip. ‘Will you send the horse back to me?’ she asked. ‘She’s my husband’s horse and the saddle horse for my children, and she works on the land as well. I need her.’
‘The king’s need is greater.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Hester hissed. ‘D’you want to wake the whole house?’
‘Then give me the horse!’
She led the way down the hall to the kitchen at the back. He hesitated when he saw the fire banked in for the night. ‘I need food,’ he said.
‘You’re going to Oxford, not to America!’ Hester said impatiently. ‘Eat there!’
‘Give me some bread and some cheese, and I’ll drink a glass of ale while you are saddling the horse.’
Hester waved him towards the larder. ‘Eat what you want,’ she said. ‘And come out into the yard as soon as you are done.’
She stepped into a pair
of clogs which were on the stone doorstep and unlocked the kitchen door. She pulled the jacket around her shoulders and did up the buttons. John’s mare was in her loosebox, she whinnied when she saw Hester and the dog barked again.
‘Hush!’ Hester called to them both as she went into the tack room to fetch John’s heavy saddle and bridle. The mare stood obediently while Hester struggled with her tack, and then shifted when a shadow fell over the stable. Hester looked up, instantly afraid that it was Parliament men come to arrest the royalist, and arrest her too as a conspirator. But it was the cavalier, his hands full of bread and cheese, his hat tipped back on his head.
Hester led the horse out into the yard. ‘Give me that,’ she said suddenly and snatched the hat from his head. He was too surprised to protest. With one swift movement she plucked the feathers from the hat band and tossed them into the midden heap. ‘Why not carry the king’s colours while you’re about it?’ she demanded.
He nodded. ‘I shall tell His Majesty that the Tradescant house remembers their master. You will be rewarded for this.’
‘The only reward I want is for you to send the horse back,’ Hester said. ‘D’you promise you will send her back to me?’
‘I do.’
Hester stood away from the mare’s head as she stepped delicately on the cobbles, and out of the yard and around the house to the road. Hester stood very still and quiet, listening. If the man had been sighted she would hear the horses’ hooves on the Lambeth road as they chased him. There was silence. Somewhere in the garden a thrush was starting to sing.
Hester realised that she was shivering with cold and with apprehension. She turned and crept across the yard to the kitchen door, slipped off the muddy clogs and went to the fireside. If he was captured and named her as his ally and the Ark as a safe royalist house, then she could face arrest for treason against Parliament, and the punishment for treason was death. The cavalier might ride with feathers in his hat and a light heart even in the middle of defeat; but Hester was only too well aware that the country was at war, and it was becoming a war in which there was no quarter given.
She waited by the fire until the little square kitchen window became light and then she went upstairs and woke Frances and Johnnie.
‘What is it, Mother?’ Johnnie asked, seeing her grave face.
‘We’re going on a visit to Uncle Norman,’ she said. ‘Today.’
They took a boat down the river and the boatman was full of news of a royalist plot which had been uncovered only yesterday. Hester nodded. ‘I have no interest in politics,’ she said.
‘You’ll be interested soon enough if these traitors hand the city back to the king,’ the boatman said. ‘If the king brings in murdering Irishmen and damned Frenchmen to cut the throats of honest Englishmen!’
‘Yes,’ Hester said politely. ‘I suppose I will be then.’
The boatman hawked and spat in the water and rowed steadily on.
Alexander Norman greeted them as if their visit had been planned for months instead of thrown together in Hester’s panic. His housekeeper had prepared two rooms in his small town house next to his work yard in the Minories in the shadow of the Tower. Frances and Hester would share a bed and Johnnie was to have a little attic room.
‘My cousin has long promised me this visit,’ he said to his housekeeper as she showed Hester into the front parlour and took her hat and cape. ‘I insisted it should be May before the City is too hot and unhealthy.’
‘There’s nothing worth having in the shops,’ the housekeeper remarked to Hester. ‘So if you were thinking of new fashions you might as well have stayed at home. There are more tailors out of business than you could name.’
Hester nodded. ‘My husband’s first wife’s family are haberdashers,’ she said. ‘I thought they would let me see if they have anything left in stock.’
The housekeeper nodded. ‘They’ll surely have some silk saved for the little miss here. Isn’t she a beauty?’
Hester nodded. Frances was struggling out of the thick cape and the big bonnet which Hester insisted she wore. ‘Yes, she is.’
‘Looking for a husband for her?’
Hester shook her head. ‘Not yet.’
The woman nodded and bustled off. ‘I shall serve you with your dinner in a few minutes,’ she promised.
Alexander drew a chair near the fire for Hester. ‘Was it cold on the river?’
‘A little,’ she said, sitting down.
‘Are you in trouble?’ he asked very quietly.
‘A royalist officer came and took John’s horse. He was looking for John to help them in a plot to claim Lambeth for the king.’
Alexander looked shocked. ‘When was this?’
‘He left this morning. But he came for the first time two weeks ago.’
He nodded. ‘Did he get safe away?’
Hester shook her head. ‘I don’t know. There was no-one waiting outside the house, at any rate, and no-one seemed to be watching us leave today. But he was headed for Oxford and the king. I don’t know if he got there.’
He turned away from her for a moment.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘The boatman said there was some kind of plot.’
‘It’s Lady d’Aubigny,’ Alexander said.
Hester gave a little gasp.
‘You knew her name?’
‘It was a name I heard when he was swearing me to secrecy two weeks ago. I didn’t think that everyone would know it so soon.’
‘She’s a fool. Edmund Waller and she were plotting together to seize London for the king. They were going to seize the Tower and arrest Parliament and the House of Lords was to gather behind them and royalists were to rise up.’
Hester’s face was pale. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. Everyone in the plot spoke about it from the assemblies to the taverns, and they were arrested this morning. Lady d’Aubigny has disappeared, no-one knows where yet; but Waller is arrested, and half a dozen others.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Who knows you’re here?’
‘The household. I said we were coming for a visit. I thought it might look worse if we went into hiding.’
He nodded. ‘You were right. But I am wondering if you should leave London.’
‘All of us?’
‘Just you. D’you have family somewhere outside the City? Somewhere you can go until this panic is over?’
She shook her head. ‘John said I was to go to Oatlands if I was in danger. He still has his house there. He is still gardener there.’
The housekeeper put her head around the door. ‘Dinner is on the table,’ she said.
‘I’m starving!’ Johnnie exclaimed, and he and Frances, who had been sitting in the windowseat looking at the street below, went to the dining room. Alexander took Hester’s cold hand.
‘Come and have something to eat,’ he said. ‘Nothing is going to happen in the next ten minutes. And I will send one of my clerks to Westminster to see what is happening.’
Hester ate nothing at dinner, and every time a cart went by in the street outside she found she was listening, waiting for the knock at the door.
‘What is the matter, Mother?’ Frances asked. ‘I can tell that something is wrong.’
Hester looked at Alexander.
‘You should tell them,’ he said. ‘They have a right to know.’
‘A royalist spy came in the night and took Father’s mare,’ Hester said.
Frances and Johnnie looked stunned at the news.
‘A royalist spy?’ Johnnie demanded.
‘What was he wearing?’ Frances asked.
‘Oh, why didn’t you wake me?’ Johnnie cried. ‘And I could have helped him!’
‘He was wearing a cape and …’ Hester’s voice quavered on a reluctant laugh. ‘And an absurd hat with feathers.’
‘Oh!’ Frances breathed. ‘What colours?’
‘What does that matter!’ Johnnie exclaimed. ‘Oh, Mother! Why didn’t you tell me? I could have guided him! I could have gone
with him and been his page!’
‘I expect that’s why she didn’t tell you,’ Alexander said gently. ‘Your place is at home, guarding your mother and the Ark.’
‘I know,’ Johnnie said. ‘But I could have gone with him for a battle or two and then come home again. I am a Tradescant! It is my duty to serve the king!’
‘It is your duty to protect your mother,’ Alexander said, suddenly grim. ‘So be silent, Johnnie.’
‘But why have we come here?’ Frances asked, abandoning interest in the colour of the royalist’s hat feathers. ‘What is happening? Is Parliament after us?’
‘Not after you,’ Hester said quietly. ‘But if they know that he came to the Ark for help then I may be in trouble.’
Frances turned at once to Alexander Norman and put her hands out to him. ‘You’ll look after us, won’t you?’ she demanded. ‘You won’t let them take Mother away?’
He took her hands, and Hester saw that he had to stop himself from drawing her close. ‘Of course I will,’ he said. ‘And if she’s in any danger at all I shall find somewhere safe for her, and for you all.’
Frances, still hand-clasped with Alexander, turned to her stepmother and Hester saw them, for the first time, as a couple; saw the tilt of his head towards her, saw her trust in him.
‘Should you go into hiding?’ Frances asked her.
‘I’ll go to the Tower now,’ Alexander decided, ‘and see what news there is. You keep the door locked until I return. They can hardly have found your name and traced you here so soon. We must be a day ahead at least.’
Hester found that her mouth was dry and reached for a glass of small ale. Alexander gave her a quick, encouraging smile. ‘Be of stout heart,’ he said. ‘I will be back within the hour.’
The little family went back into the parlour and Frances and Johnnie took up their posts in the windowseat again, but this time they were not commenting on the passers-by; they were on look-out. Hester sat, in uneasy idleness, by the fireside. The housekeeper coming in with fresh coal made them jump. ‘I’d have thought you would want to go out and walk around.’