Virgin Earth

  My greatest advisor in these difficult times is your father’s friend and your uncle, Alexander Norman, who has the most immediate news of anyone. Since he sends out the ordnance from the Tower of London he always knows where the fiercest fighting has been and how much munition was used in every battle. He comes out to see us every week and brings us news and satisfies himself that we are well. He treats Frances as a complete young lady and Johnnie as the head of the household, and so they always welcome his arrival as their most favourite guest. Frances is never naughty when he is with us but very sober and careful, an excellent little housewife. When I told him of the man who had offered money for her he was more angry than I have ever seen him before and he would have challenged the man to a duel if I had given his name. I told him that the man had been punished enough but I did not tell him how.

  And as for myself, husband, I will speak of myself though we were not married for love and have never been more than mere friends and for all I fear you do not think of me kindly since we parted on a disagreement. I am doing my duty according to my promise made to you at the altar and to your father on his death bed to be a good wife to you, a mother to your children, and to guard the garden and the rarities. The beauty of the rarities, of the garden and of the children is my greatest joy, even in these difficult times when joy is hard to find. I miss you more bitterly than I had thought possible and I think often of a moment in the yard, a second in the hall, a letter which you once wrote to me which sounded almost loving, and I wonder perhaps if we had met each other in easier times whether we might have been lovers as well as husband and wife. I wish I had felt free to go with you on this venture, I wish you had held me so dear that you would not have gone without me, or felt as I do, tied to the house and the garden and the children. But you do not, and it is not to be, and I do not waste my time in mourning the failure of a dream that perhaps I am a fool to even think of.

  So I am well, a little afraid sometimes, anxious all the time, working hard to keep your father’s inheritance together for you and for Johnnie, watching Frances, and praying for you, my dear, dear husband, and hoping that wherever you are, however far away you are from me and in such a strange land, you are safe and well and will one day come home to your constant wife, Hester.

  John dropped to his knees on his mattress and then hunkered down. He read it all over again. The paper was fragile in parts where it had been wetted by sea water or rain, the ink had run on one or two words but the voice of Hester, her idiosyncratic, brave little voice sounded across the sea to her husband, telling him that she was keeping faith with him.

  John was completely still. In the silence of the house he could hear the scratch of a squirrel’s claws on the roof above his head. He could hear a log shift in the hearth in the room below. Hester’s love and steadiness felt like a thread that could stretch all the way from England to Virginia and could guide him home, or it might wrap around his heart and tug at it. He thought of Frances growing up so mischievous and so beautiful, and of his funny little scholarly son who prayed for him every night and thought he was wrestling with bears, and then he thought of his wife, Hester, a true wife if ever a man had one, fortifying his house with her little drawbridge, managing the business and showing people the rarities even while she watched the progress of the war and planned their escape. She deserved better than a husband whose heart was elsewhere, who exploited her skill and her courage, and then left her.

  John dropped his head in his hands. He thought that he must have been mad to leave his wife and his children and his home, madly selfish to leave them in the middle of a war, mad with folly to think that he could make a life for himself in a wilderness and mad with vanity to think that he could love and marry a young woman and make his life all over again, to his own mad pattern.

  John stretched out on his mattress and heard a low groan of pain, his own sick heart.

  He lay very still for some time. Down below Francis the Negro came in with a load of wood and dumped it by the hearth. ‘You in here, Mr Tradescant?’

  ‘Here,’ John said. He dragged himself to the ladder and came down, his knees weak, the very grip of his fingers on the rungs seemed powerless.

  Francis looked more closely at John and his face slightly softened. ‘Was it your letter? Bad news from your home?’

  John shook his head and passed his hand over his face. ‘No. They’re managing without me. It just made me think I should be there.’

  The Negro shrugged, as if the weight of exile was unbearably heavy on his own shoulders. ‘Sometimes a man cannot be where he should be.’

  ‘Yes, but I chose to come here,’ John said.

  A slow smile lightened the man’s face, as if John’s folly was deliciously funny. ‘You chose this?’

  John nodded. ‘I have a beautiful home in Lambeth and a wife who was ready to love me, and two healthy children growing every day, and I took it into my head that there was no life for me there, and that the woman I loved was here, and that I could start all over again, that I should start all over again.’

  Francis kneeled at the hearth and stacked wood with steady deftness.

  ‘I’ve been in my father’s shadow all my life,’ John said, more to himself than to the silent man. ‘When I came here for the first time it was virgin earth for me, because it was somewhere he had not been, with plants that he had not seen, a place where he had not made friends and where people would not always know me as his son, a lesser copy of the real thing.

  ‘At home, I worked in his trade, I did what he did. And I always felt I did it less well. And when it came to loyalty to a master, or certainty about my own course –’ John broke off with a little laugh. ‘He always knew what was the right thing to do. It seemed to me that he was a man of absolute certainty. And I have spent my life blown this way and that with my doubts.’

  Francis gave him a brief glance. ‘I’ve seen Englishmen like that,’ he observed. ‘It always makes me wonder if you are so uncertain, why you are so quick to make rules, to make war, to go into the lives of other people?’

  ‘What about you?’ John asked. ‘Why did you come?’

  The man’s face shone in the flickering light from the fire. ‘I’ve been in the wrong place all my life,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Being in the wrong place and longing for home is no new thing for me.’

  ‘Where is your home?’ John asked.

  ‘The kingdom of Dahomey,’ the man replied.

  ‘Is that in Africa?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Were you sold into slavery?’

  ‘I was pushed into slavery, I was dragged into slavery, I was kicking and screaming and biting and fighting from roadside to marketplace to gangplank and down into the hold. I didn’t stop fighting and screaming and breaking away until …’ He suddenly broke off.

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Until they brought us up on deck for washing and I saw the sea all around me and no land in sight, and I realised I didn’t know even where my home was any more, that if I escaped it would do me no good because I didn’t know where to go. That I was lost, and that I would stay lost for the rest of my life.’

  The two men fell silent. John measured the enormity of that journey across the sea which could suck the courage out of a man, a fighting man.

  ‘Did they bring you to England?’

  ‘Jamaica first, but the captain brought me on to England. He wanted a slave. Lost me in a game of cards to a London merchant, he sold me to Mr Hobert who wanted to bring a horse to Virginia to do his ploughing for him but was advised that he couldn’t ship a horse but a man would do the job as well. So now I am a plough-horse.’

  ‘He doesn’t treat you badly,’ John said.

  The man shook his head. ‘For a horse I’m doing well,’ he said with quiet irony. ‘I get to live in the house and I eat what they eat. And I have a piece of land of my own.’

  ‘You will grow your own food?’

  ‘My own food, my own tobacco, and I will
trade on my own account, and when I have earned fifteen shillings Mr Hobert has agreed to sell me my liberty and then I will be his indentured servant, and not his slave, and when I have earned enough to keep myself I shall buy more land and then I shall be a planter, as good as you.’

  ‘You will be freed?’

  ‘Mr Hobert has promised it, the magistrate has witnessed it, and the other black men tell me that it is not uncommon. In a country as big as this a man has to agree with his slaves how long they shall work for him. It’s too easy for them to just run from him to a master who will offer better terms. There are always other planters who would give them work, there is always more land for them to plant for themselves.’

  ‘Don’t you want to go back to Africa?’

  An expression of deep pain passed swiftly across the black face and was gone. ‘I have to believe that I will be there at the hour of my death,’ he said. ‘When they talk of paradise and going to heaven that is where I think I will be. But I don’t expect to see it again in this life.’

  ‘Did you leave a family behind?’

  ‘My wife, my child, my mother and two little brothers.’

  John was silent at the enormity of this loss. ‘You must hate us,’ he said. ‘All of us white men for taking you away.’

  The man looked directly at him. ‘I don’t hate you,’ he said. ‘I have no time left for hate.’ He paused. ‘But I don’t know how you can pray to your god and hope that he hears you.’

  John turned his head away. ‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ he said bitterly. ‘We do a clever little trick, us Englishmen. We start by assuming that everything in the world is ours, everything that ever was, everything that ever will be.’ He thought of the king’s elegant assumption that the world was constructed for his pleasure, that every work of art should belong to him, almost by right. ‘In our own country anyone who is not powerful and beautiful is a lesser person, not worth thinking about. When we go overseas we find many men and women who are not like us, so we think they are lesser still. When we find people whose language we can’t understand we say they can’t speak, when they don’t have houses like our houses we say they can’t build, when they don’t make music like our music or dance like we dance we say they can only howl like dogs, that they are animals, that they are less than animals because less useful to us.’

  ‘So Bertram Hobert takes me as his plough-horse.’

  ‘And I swagger around, thinking that I can come to this country and that the land is empty and I can take a headright, and the woman could have no better future than to love me,’ John said bitterly. ‘And so I walked away from the land I already owned and the woman to whom I owed a duty. Because I am an Englishman. Because the whole world is to be made for my convenience.’

  The door opened and Sarah Hobert stood in the doorway, mud encrusting her boots. ‘Pull them off,’ she said abruptly to Francis. ‘I’ve come to make dinner.’

  Francis kneeled at her feet. John stepped back into the darker corner of the room. Sarah came into the room in her stockinged feet and pulled off her cape, spread it out on the hooks to dry. ‘It’s raining again,’ she said. ‘I wish it would stop.’

  She put the cooking pot on the edge of the fire and stirred it briskly. It would be suppawn for dinner again. Francis took four bowls from the fireside and put them on the rough trestle table, and pulled up the two stools and the two logs which served as chairs. Bertram came into the room, heeling himself out of his boots, carrying a pitcher of fresh water from the river.

  They bowed their heads while Bertram spoke a blessing on their food and then they ate in silence. John looked covertly at Bertram and his wife while they ate their gruel. This land had changed them both. Sarah had been a redoubtable, God-fearing woman in England, the wife of a small farmer, and a trader in her own right. This land had made her hard. Her face was pinched and determined. The fat had been rubbed off Hobert too. In England he had been round-faced and ruddy-cheeked but here he had faced death and terror. His face was engraved with lines of suspicion and hatred. This was a country in which only a man of remarkable courage and persistence could survive. Prosperity was harder and took even longer.

  Sarah bowed her head as she finished her dinner and then she rose from the table. There was not a moment to spare for leisure. There was never a moment to spare for leisure.

  ‘Are you ready to work?’ she asked John

  He felt the letter crackle in his pocket. ‘I’m ready,’ he said. The suppawn lay heavy in his belly, and although John knew it was old cornflour and stale water, the pain, the deep pain in the centre of his body, was not indigestion but guilt. He should never have left England. He should never have sought and loved another woman. He should have stayed with the woman his father had chosen for him and brought up his children with her. He had run from his life like a schoolboy playing truant and now he realised that a man cannot have two lives. He has to choose. Attone’s rough, sarcastic counsel was right – a man pulled two ways by two threads must cut one of them.

  Sarah nodded at him and went out of the house, followed by her husband and Francis. She led the way down to the end of the planting, stumping along with a spade in one hand. Bertram carried the pick-axe for the stubborn roots. Francis, behind them both, was pushing Sarah’s heavy wooden barrow, loaded with the precious swaying burden of small tobacco plants. John brought up the rear, carrying the two new hoes. He thought for a moment of the carving of his father on the newel post of Hatfield House. That showed a man stepping out to garden for pleasure, with his hat tilted on his head and his hoe in his hand, a rich vase under his arm spilling over with flowers and fruits. All John’s life had been filled with plants grown for beauty, filled with the idea of planting and hoeing and weeding to create a solace for the eyes, a source of joy. Now he was working for survival. Some perverse contradictory desire had driven him away from the ease and richness of his father’s life into a country where it would take all his skill and strength just to survive. His father’s inheritance, the rich joy of his father’s work, he had abandoned and left behind him. He paused and watched Hobert, Sarah and Francis as they went down the path towards the river to start planting out their tobacco crop: a small procession of determined people, planting their hopes in virgin earth.

  John stayed with the Hoberts for eight nights and when he left, the field before their house was cleared of all big roots, and they had a crop of tobacco set in the ground and thriving. At his insistence they had planted a kitchen garden at the side of the house and it was set with corn, pumpkin, and beans. John would dearly have loved to grow amaracock between the rows, as the Indian women did, so that the Hoberts could have fruit in their garden as well as vegetables. But they had not tasted the fruit since the Powhatan had ceased to trade with them, and they had not thought to keep the seeds.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get you some seeds,’ John said.

  Sarah gleamed at him. ‘Steal them,’ she said.

  John was genuinely shocked. ‘I would not have thought you would have permitted thievery.’

  ‘It is not thieving to take from such as they,’ she said firmly. ‘Do I steal a bone from my dog’s bowl? They have no right to the land, it has been claimed by the king. Everything in the land is ours. When they put meat in their mouths they are poaching from us. This land is a new England, and everything in it belongs to English men and women.’

  ‘You’ll come back to help me harvest, won’t you, John?’ Hobert asked.

  John hesitated. ‘If I can,’ he said. ‘It is not easy for me to come and go.’

  ‘Stay here then,’ Sarah urged him. ‘If they are looking askance then you may be in danger. Don’t go back to them.’

  ‘It is not them,’ John said slowly. ‘It’s me. It is hard for me to come and go between this world and theirs.’

  ‘Then stay with us,’ Sarah said simply. ‘You have your bed in the attic, and when our crop is in we will pay you a share. We will come and rebuild your house and clear your field, as we
promised. You will be our neighbour again instead of leading this mongrel life.’

  John was silent for a moment.

  ‘Don’t press him,’ Hobert said gently to his wife. ‘Come,’ he said to John. ‘I’ll walk up the river with you.’

  He took his gun from the hook behind the door, and lit the fuse from the embers in the hearth. ‘I’ll bring back some meat,’ he said, forestalling his wife’s protest that there was work to be done in the field. ‘I won’t be long.’

  John bowed to Sarah and nodded his head to Francis, and the two men left.

  Hobert walked beside John instead of jogging behind him. John found it strange to have a man at his shoulder, strange to have to curb his stride to a pace as slow as a child’s, strange to hear the noise they made as they moved so broad and heavy-shod through the wood. John thought that all the game for miles around would be scared away long before Hobert arrived.

  ‘Is the hunting good now the spring is bringing the deer back into the woods?’ John asked.

  Hobert shook his head. ‘Less than last year,’ he said. ‘It is the savages. They are taking too much and they are driving the animals deeper and deeper into the woods in the hopes that they can starve us out.’

  John shook his head but did not have the energy to contradict him.

  ‘There was news from England at Jamestown,’ Hobert said. ‘The Scots have come over the border, they’re in the war.’

  ‘Against the king?’ John asked, astounded.

  ‘Against the king and, more important, on the side of Parliament. There were some saying that the king would have to make terms with Parliament or the Scots. He could never fight against them both.’

  ‘How far south are they?’ John asked, thinking of the little house south of the Thames in Lambeth.

  ‘By now? Who knows?’ Hobert said carelessly. ‘Thank God it is not our war any more, eh, John?’

  John nodded absently. ‘My wife is still at Lambeth,’ he said. ‘My son and my daughter.’