‘What about the mermaid’s tail?’ Johnnie asked. ‘And the whale’s jaw?’
‘We can’t even lift them,’ Frances said. ‘What will we do? How can we hide them in safety?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hester said. Her hands kept moving, packing, folding, smoothing, but her voice was full of despair and weariness. ‘We just pack everything we can, I suppose. And for the rest? I don’t know.’
At night Hester and the children and the gardener, Joseph, carried the boxes carefully to the ice house, and stacked them inside. The ice house was lined with brick, it was damp and dark. Frances shivered and pulled her hood over her head, fearing spiders and bats. The boxes filled the small circular room. When they came out they nailed up the door. Hester had an odd, superstitious feeling that it was as if they were mourners before the family vault and that all that was most precious to them had been buried.
‘I’ll plant a couple of shrubs before it tomorrow,’ Joseph promised, ‘and grow some ivy over the door. In a month or so you won’t know it’s there.’
‘I hope we have a month or so,’ Hester said. ‘Cut some branches and lay them over the door to hide it while the ivy is growing. And put a couple of saplings in.’
‘Is the king’s army coming so soon?’ Joseph asked.
‘The king himself is coming,’ Hester said grimly. ‘And please God that whether he wins or loses the battle is over swiftly and the winners bring the country back to peace, because I don’t think I can bear another year like this one.’
Within days in the city of London everything was rationed and nothing could be bought. The king’s army was coming down the Great North Road and no wagons could get into London to feed the people. The Lord Mayor of London himself set up distribution points where people could buy food and set fair prices so that racketeers could not profit from the city’s desperation. Joseph was drafted out every day to dig trenches to protect the city from the cavalry, and there was even an inquiry from the local commander of the trained bands as to how old Johnnie might be, and when he would be old enough to serve.
Johnnie, with his home under siege from the king, was wild to sneak out at night and get to the king’s army. ‘I could be a scout,’ he said. ‘I could be a spy. I could tell the king where the ditches are dug, where the cannon are mounted. He needs me, I should go to him.’
‘Be quiet,’ Hester snapped. The sense of an impending disaster for the house and the children she loved was wearing her patience very thin. ‘The king has enough fools running to his standard. You are a child. You will stay home like an obedient child.’
‘I am nearly eleven!’ he protested. ‘And the head of the household.’
Hester gave him a small smile. ‘Then stay and defend me,’ she said. ‘We hold the treasures of the country here. We need to stay at our post.’
He was a little mollified. ‘When I am a man I shall train and join Rupert’s cavalry,’ he promised.
‘I hope that when you are a man you will be a gardener in a peaceful country,’ she said fervently.
At the end of March there was extraordinary news which came into the city as gossip and was confirmed within the day in broadsheets and pamphlets and ballads. Despite all premonitions and fears, despite all likelihood, the Parliament army, working men officered by those who had never been gentlemen at court, had met the king’s army at Alresford outside Winchester, fought a long, hard battle and won a resounding victory. It was all the more impressive because the battle had turned on a cavalry charge by the royalists which, for once, did not end in a rout of terrified Parliament infantry being cut down as they fled. This time the Parliament men stood their ground, and the king’s horse, thrown back into the twisting, deep lanes of Hampshire, could not come around again, could not regroup, while the Parliamentary infantry doggedly and determinedly slugged their way uphill to Alresford ridge, and were in Alresford before nightfall.
There were bonfires all over Lambeth that night, and precious candles showed at every window. The next Sunday there was not a man, woman nor child who did not attend a service of thanksgiving. The tide of the war had ebbed for a moment, for a moment only; and no cavaliers would be riding through the narrow streets of Lambeth for a month or two at least. And there would be no Papist Irish murdering soldiers either. The news came filtering through that the Parliamentary forces had captured all the Irish-facing ports of Wales. The king could not bring the Papists into England. Even in Scotland the small royalist forces were being driven back.
‘I think the king will have to come to terms with Parliament,’ Alexander said to Hester one evening in April. ‘He’s on the defensive for the first time and the royal army is not one which fights well in retreat. He doesn’t have the advisors or the determination to carry on.’
‘And what then?’ Hester asked. She had a basketful of sweet pea pods from last year in her lap and she was shelling the seeds ready for planting. ‘Do I unpack the rarities from their hiding places?’
Alexander considered for a moment. ‘Not until peace is declared,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait and see. It maybe that the tide is turning at last.’
‘D’you think the king will make peace with Parliament and come meekly home?’
Alexander shrugged. ‘What else can he do?’ he said. ‘He has to come to terms with them. He is still king: they are still Parliament.’
‘So all this pain and bloodshed has been for nothing,’ Hester said blankly. ‘Nothing except to teach the king that he should manage his Parliament as his father and the old queen managed theirs.’
Alexander looked grave. ‘It’s been an expensive lesson.’
Hester threw a handful of dried empty pods into the fire and watched them spark and flare up. ‘Damnable,’ she said bitterly.
April 1644, Virginia
John had hoped that he had been summoned to Opechancanough’s war council as a simple brave, companion to Attone. But as the days wore on at the town of Powhatan he found he was summoned every morning to speak with Opechancanough. At first the questions were pointed and direct. The fort at Jamestown: was it true that the town had grown so large that all the people could not fit inside the walls? Was it true also that the walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair, that a proper watch was no longer kept, that the cannon were rusty?
John answered as truly as he knew, warning Opechancanough that he had been nothing more than a visitor passing through Jamestown, and not a resident who knew the town inside out. But as the questions went on Opechancanough revealed that he knew the answers as well as John. The wise old commander had many spies watching the fort. He was using John as a check against them, and they against him. He was testing John’s own ability to tell the truth, proving his loyalty to his adopted people.
Once he was satisfied that John would honestly tell him all that he knew, then the questions changed. He asked instead what hours the white men rose in the morning, what they drank for their breakfast, if they were all drunkards, half-drowned in fiery spirits by the time darkness fell. Did they have a special magic in their use of gunpowder, cannon, or flintlock, or could the Powhatan people seize these goods and turn them against their makers? Was the god of Englishmen attentive to them in this foreign land, or might He simply forget them if the real people rose up against them?
John struggled with the concepts of magic, warfare, and theology in a foreign language, and in a different way of thinking. Over and over again he found himself saying to the older man, ‘I am sorry, I don’t know,’ and saw the dark brows snap together and the crumpled face darken with anger.
‘I really don’t know,’ John would say, hearing the nervousness in his own voice.
Over and over again Opechancanough would return to the English communications. If a settler discovered the uprising, how quickly could he take the news to Jamestown? Did the English have a method of sending signals in smoke? Or a code of drums?
‘Smoke?’ John asked disbelievingly. ‘No. Nor drums. Soldiers only drum the march forwards or
the retreat …’
Opechancanough spat derisively. ‘No. To send messages. Long messages.’
John shook his head in bewilderment. ‘Of course not. How could you do such a thing?’
Opechancanough’s dark smile gleamed. ‘Never mind. So if a man was warned and wanted to take the warning to Jamestown, he would have to go himself? By foot or canoe?’
‘Yes,’ John replied.
There was silence for a moment. ‘In the last war we were betrayed,’ Opechancanough said thoughtfully. ‘It was a couple of our boys who had been treated kindly by their white master and could not bear to hurt him. They warned him. They had grown soft like white boys. They thought they would save him alone; but in warning him they betrayed every one of us. He ran to Jamestown and warned the fort so they were ready for us. And what of the boys who loved their master so much that they betrayed their own people and warned him?’
John waited.
‘Shot by the white men,’ Opechancanough said. ‘That is how the white men reward a faithful servant. We saw it done. And those of us who had fought, and those of us who had not, were all driven further and further away from our villages and watched our fields hoed for tobacco, nothing but tobacco, everywhere the plant for smoke and nothing for life.’
‘When will the new war be?’ John asked.
Opechancanough shrugged. ‘Soon.’
John woke in the night and lay still. Something had disturbed his sleep but he could not trace the noise or the movement or the sense which had woken him. Then he heard it again. From outside the house a twig cracked, and then the skins at the doorway parted and a low voice spoke briefly into the warm darkness: ‘It is now.’
Attone at John’s side was awake and standing. ‘Now!’ he said, and his voice was filled with joy.
‘What is now?’ John asked, as if he did not know, as if he were not near to sinking down on the ground and weeping into the earth for his sense of dread and guilt.
‘We are on the warpath,’ Attone said gently. ‘It is now, my brother.’
Outside the tent the town was in alert silence. Men were stringing their bows and tightening their belts, checking the gleam of the blades of their knives. There was nothing to prepare, for the Powhatan were always ready for travel, for hunting, for war. John fell into line behind Attone and knew that his breath was sluggish and slow beside Attone’s light panting, knew his heart was not in this, knew also that there was no way forwards and away from his allegiance to the Powhatan, and no way backwards to the English.
At a signal from Opechancanough, seated on his throne, dark as a shadow in the moonlight, the men moved off, making as little noise as a herd of wolves, silent in their moccasins, their quivers held still at their sides, their bows strung over their shoulders. The moonlight touched each one like a benison, the white gleam falling on a feather plaited into dark hair, on a pale old scar on one high cheekbone, on a smile of excitement, on the gleam of burnished skin. John went silently in Attone’s steps, watching the pace of his moccasins, the movement of his haunches beneath the leather skirt, concentrating wholly on the moment of the journey so he could hide from himself the knowledge of the destination.
They were to split into two main parties. One was to travel by canoe downriver to Jamestown, taking advantage of the night to move swiftly and to form a pincer around the town by dawn. The other was to go by land either side of the river, and at every house and cabin, every grand, ambitious building and hopeful shack, they were to go in and kill every man, woman and child in the place, leaving none to escape, and none to take the news downriver.
John was in the land party, Attone with him. He thought that Opechancanough was testing his loyalty to the Powhatan by putting him in the group that would kill so early and so immediately – and not against the fighting men at the fort, but against the vulnerable, sleeping men and women with their children bundled up in the same bed beside them. But then he realised that Opechancanough had placed him where, if he were faithless, he could do no damage. He was at the rear, he could not dash ahead and warn Jamestown. All he could do was botch a few killings upriver and get himself shot.
They came upon a little house near dawn. It was set back from the river on a rise of ground, just as John had built his own house, just as Bertram Hobert had built his. Before it was a little cottage garden, neglected and overgrown, and between it and the river were long fields of tobacco, the plants set in straight rows and growing well. A little quay stretched out into the river for loading the tobacco to sail downriver to Jamestown. No light shone in the window and only a wisp of smoke showed that someone had banked the fire in overnight so that it would be hot to cook the morning breakfast.
It was the smell of woodsmoke clean on the air, unmixed with any other scent, that threw John backwards; he physically recoiled and collided with the man trotting behind him. It was such an English smell. Woodsmoke for the Powhatan was the scent of the interior of their huts, mingled with the smell of cooking, of children, of people sitting around. The smell of smoke from a sooty chimney was the smell of an English homestead.
The man behind shoved John abruptly in the back but did not utter a single sound. John touched Attone’s shoulder. ‘I cannot do it,’ he said.
Attone turned and his glance was as cold as the blade of a knife on bare skin. ‘What?’
‘I cannot do it. I cannot go in and kill my people.’
‘Do you want me to kill you now?’
Dumbly John shook his head.
‘The others will kill you if I do not.’
John leaned forwards as if he would take Attone in his arms and lie his unhappy face against the man’s shoulder. ‘They must then. Because I cannot do it.’
‘Will you wait here while we do it?’
John nodded.
‘And not cry out, nor run off?’
John nodded again.
‘My brother will stand guard,’ Attone said simply to the others. ‘Follow me.’
The men trotted past John without a glance at him. He leaned back against a tree, a useless guard, a faithless friend, a broken warrior, and a shamed husband.
They were quick and clean. There was one surprised cry and no more, and in moments they came back, Attone wiping his shell-bladed knife on a piece of European muslin. ‘Go on,’ he said briskly to the others.
They nodded and turned to the trail again. One man had something in his hand. Attone reached out and smacked it down. A stone bottle fell to the ground and rolled away. Attone kicked it with his foot so that it spun round and round, spilling out the raw spirit and making the air stink. Then he turned to John.
‘Can you find your way back to Suckahanna at the village?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then go back there. Wait till the men return.’
‘She won’t have me,’ John said certainly.
‘No,’ Attone said. ‘We none of us will want you, Eagle.’ He paused as a thought struck him. ‘What was your name? Before you were my brother the Eagle?’
‘I was John Tradescant,’ John said, the name unfamiliar on his tongue.
‘Then you will have to be him again,’ Attone said flatly. ‘Now go to Suckahanna before someone kills you.’
‘I am sorry –’ John started.
‘Go to Suckahanna before I kill you myself,’ Attone said abruptly, and disappeared into the darkness.
The village was guarded by Attone’s son, who recognised John’s footfall and called into the grey dawn: ‘Is that you, Eagle?’
‘No,’ John said. His voice was flat and weary. ‘You must call me John.’
‘Is my father with you? Are the braves coming home?’
‘They are at war,’ John said. ‘I am alone.’
The boy checked his loving run forwards into John’s arms and suddenly looked at him as if a terrible fear was invading him, as if his trust and certainty in John was suddenly unreliable. ‘You are not with the men?’
‘I could not do it,’ John said simply. He had t
hought that the worst thing would have been to tell Suckahanna; but the bright gaze of her son was hard to meet. The light went slowly out of the boy’s face.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said plaintively, willing it to be difficult, too complex for his understanding, tempting John to create another explanation.
‘I could not kill an Englishman,’ John said heavily. ‘I thought I could do it, but when it came to it, I could not. I left my home in England because I could not choose sides and kill Englishmen, and now I am here, in this new land, and I still cannot choose sides and kill.’
The boy’s eyes scanned his face. ‘I thought you were a brave,’ he said reproachfully.
John shook his head. ‘No. It seems I cannot be.’
‘But you are my father’s friend!’
‘Not any more.’
‘And Suckahanna loves you!’
A movement behind him made him turn. Suckahanna was standing there, watching John. The man and the boy turned and faced her, waiting for her judgement.
‘So you have decided at last,’ she said calmly. ‘You are an Englishman after all.’
Slowly John dropped to his knees, both his knees, in the gesture he had only ever used before to the greatest queen in Europe, and then unwillingly. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I did not know it until the moment when I could not shed their blood. I am sorry, Suckahanna.’
She looked at him and through him, as if she understood everything about him, and for a moment John thought that he would be forgiven, and that the steady, constant love between them could overcome even this. But then she turned away and snapped her fingers for her boy and walked, light-footed, down the street in the dawn light. She did not look back at him. He knew she would never look at him with love again.