She nodded. ‘It was like this. The soldiers were hunting us down, every month they came a little closer. It was like a hunting trip for them, they came out in spring. Winter we were left alone to starve and freeze but spring and summer they came out and destroyed our fields when they could find them, and broke down the fish weirs, and tracked us with their dogs.’
John flinched at the matter-of-fact solidity of her description. ‘Attone wanted to lead us upriver and north, away from the white men. We thought that another People might take us in, or if they would not then we could fight the white men and die in the fighting rather than be picked off one at a time. Others thought that the white men would grow weary of the sport of hunting us and start to hunt for food. They would leave us alone after a while. I think Suckahanna was with Attone. She said we should go.
‘We started to move out in the winter. We had not enough stores of food, and it was not safe to light fires. A slave saw us.’ She was suddenly alight with anger, animated with resentment. ‘A black slave who thought more of his master than anything else – the white man’s dog, the white man’s fool – he ran and told his master, who brought out some other planters and they hunted us through the snow and we were easy to track in the deep snow, and slow-moving with old people and babies to carry.’
John nodded. ‘I remember. I was with them when they went to the marshland.’
‘We left the people who could not keep up with us. We thought perhaps they would be taken up by the hunting party behind us and sent back to Jamestown for servants. But they did not take them for servants, they killed them where they lay in the snow. The white men cut their throats and scalped their heads where they lay. It was …’ she sought the word to describe it and found none, ‘… ugly.
‘Attone said we should make a stand and fight the hunting party and then we would be safe to go on. They sent the older women and the babies ahead and the rest of us made a trap, a pit in the road, and we hid in the trees, and waited.’ She paused. ‘It was desperate, digging and trying to hide the pit with branches and fresh snow scattered on top, and knowing they were so close behind.’
‘You were there?’
‘I was there. I had my bow and my quiver of arrows. I was ready to kill.’
‘And?’
‘They had horses and guns and dogs,’ she said. ‘They were hunting dogs, they would keep coming even with an arrow in their eye. They got me at the shoulder and pulled me down. I thought they would eat me alive. I could hear the crunch of their jaws on my bone and smell their breath on me.’ She swept back her hair and John saw the ragged scars where a deep bite had been gouged out of her neck and shoulder. ‘It’s odd to feel an animal licking your blood,’ she said.
‘My God,’ John whispered.
‘Half a dozen of us were still alive at the end, and they made us walk back to Jamestown.’
‘Suckahanna?’
‘Dead.’
The word was like a blow in the pit of his belly, it fell no lighter for being expected. He had known that Suckahanna would never have been taken alive. He had known from the very start that what he was seeking in this strange diminished village was the news of her death.
‘Attone?’
‘Dead.’
‘Suckahanna’s son?’
‘He got away,’ she said. ‘He could be anywhere. Maybe dead in the forest.’
‘The baby? The little girl?’
‘Died of hunger or fever or something. Before we tried to leave the village of bad water.’
There was a silence. John looked at the girl who had seen so much, who was indeed a child of winter.
‘I shall go.’ He paused. ‘Is there anything I can do for you or for the People?’
‘Would they set us free if you asked them?’
‘No,’ John said. ‘They would not listen to me.’
‘Do you think that they will hold us here forever?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that they mean us to have enough land to plant, but nothing that we can enjoy, nowhere we can run free? Do they think that now we will do nothing more forever than just cling to life at the edge of the white man’s land?’
‘No,’ John said. ‘I am sure not. There is a new government in England and it is pledged to care for the poor and for the men and women who are driven off their land by enclosures. It gives rights to tenants and people who live on the land. Surely they will give you the same rights here.’
She looked at him and for a moment he saw Suckahanna in her eyes with that delicious sense of the ridiculous which had been so often and so lovingly directed at John. ‘Oh, do you?’ she said and then turned and went back to her work.
John walked home dryshod in his English boots across the wooden causeway, not touching the earth, forgetting the marsh flower, not seeing anything but the winter battle in the snow and Suckahanna going down, fighting to the last minute, and Attone falling beside her.
He could see nothing else for the long walk back to Jamestown, not the new and beautiful houses nor the pretty sailing ships which the planters now used instead of canoes on the river, not the settled prosperity of the fields drawn like a net of squares thrown over the landscape, ignoring the contours of hill and slope and stream and imposing their own order on the wildness. He did not see the outskirts of Jamestown with the little shanty town of poor wooden houses, nor the town centre with the governor’s beautiful house and the new assembly room for the burgesses where they were doing their best, by their lights, to build a new country in this place.
That night when he went to bed he thought he would dream of the battle and the defeat of the Powhatan and the dreadful death of Suckahanna in the cold snow with dogs snapping at her throat.
But he did not. He dreamed instead of the Great Hare leaping over the winter snows, with its coat pure white, winter-white, and only its long ears tipped with chocolate fur, gathering his love Suckahanna, and his friend Attone, into its gentle mouth and taking them back into the darkness away from the world which was no longer safe for the People.
Sir Josiah’s house was one of the grander stone-built houses and his garden was richer than John could have imagined. His wife greeted them and ordered rum and lemons and hot water despite the heat, and then Sir Josiah took John, punch glass in hand, down the steps to the garden.
It was a garden poised between two worlds. In many ways it was an English cottage garden: on the far sides were plants for cutting, for drying and for medicinal use in a scramble and a muddle of richness. John strolled over and saw, in their springtime growth, the familiar herbs and flowers of England, thriving in this virgin earth.
Immediately before the house Sir Josiah had laid out a serpentine knot, an attempt at the formality of the English great gardens. It was edged in bay and planted with daffodils, and between the daffodils were growing some white daisies. John admired the colours and felt the familiar lift to his heart at the sight of spring bulbs but then he looked a little more closely.
‘Did you bring these daisies from England?’
‘No,’ Sir Josiah said. ‘I found them growing here. There’s a place down by the river, a patch of grassland, I found whole clumps of them and dug them up, and planted them here and they have thrived and multiplied.’
John, oblivious of the snort of laughter from Lady Ashley on the terrace, dropped to his knees and took a closer look. ‘I think this is a new kind of daisy,’ he said. ‘A Virginian daisy.’
‘I thought it was just a daisy I might have for very little effort,’ Sir Josiah said carelessly.
‘And it’s very pretty,’ John said. ‘I’ll take a couple home with me when I go. I should like to see it growing in London, I have a good collection of daisies. Could you show me where it grows in the wild?’
‘Of course,’ Sir Josiah said cheerfully. ‘We can go out this afternoon. And you must have a good roam through my woods. And when you have done with me I’ll give you a letter of introduction and you can go upriver and stay with my neighbours and see what they have that
takes your eye.’
Lady Ashley came floating across the grass towards them. ‘Is this your first time in Virginia?’ she asked with the slight drawl that the planters all shared.
‘No,’ John said. ‘I was here more than ten years ago for a long stay.’
‘And were you plant collecting then?’
‘Yes,’ John said cautiously. ‘But it was not like this.’
Sir Josiah wanted to lend him a horse but John preferred to walk in the woods. ‘I miss too much if I am too high and going too fast,’ he said.
‘I’m sure there are snakes,’ Lady Ashley pointed out.
‘I have good thick boots,’ John said. ‘And I was much in the woods when I was last here.’
Sir Josiah had left a good stand of timber to the north of his estate and John started to walk there and then found himself following a stream which drew him deeper and deeper inland. He walked as he always did, as his father had always done – with only the occasional glance towards the horizon and the path ahead and with his eyes mostly on his boots and the little plants under his feet. He had been walking all morning when he suddenly exclaimed and dropped to his knees. It was a sorrel, but what had attracted him was the tiny indentations of the leaves. It was an American version of the familiar plant. John swung his satchel down, took out the trowel and carefully lifted the plant from the moist, dark earth, wrapped it in a broad leaf and tucked it into the pocket of his satchel.
He straightened up and walked on, his eyes glancing up at the trees, and then down to the path. After a little while, amid the buzz of the Virginian spring, the birdsong, the loud cry of the occasional flight of ducks and migrating geese, there was a new sound: a soft tuneless whistling. John was happy.
1655
John stayed in Virginia for two years, travelling from one beautiful house to another, and staying for months at a time enjoying the famous Virginian hospitality. When he went deeper into the country and there were no large stone houses with slave cabins at the back he stayed instead with more humble planters who were building in wood but hoping for greater things. John found that he preferred the humbler sort of man, no-one could help admiring the determination that they showed to cross such a wide sea to find a new land, and to struggle – and John knew what a struggle it was – to wrest a living in a new country.
Sometimes he slept on an earth floor before a fire, in the warm humid days of summer he slept under a tree in the forest. He was never tempted to shed his English clothes and make himself a clout and a buckskin apron. He would have felt a mockery of the People if he dressed in their way and lived in their way, when they were still kept like ferrets in a box. But he could not unlearn the skills they had taught him, and he would not have wanted to forget them. Even wearing his heavy boots he moved through the woods quieter than any Englishman. His eye for plants and trees was his trained Tradescant eye, but he looked the more sharply because these were woods that he had known and loved as his home.
‘Don’t you fear the woods?’ one of the planter’s wives asked him curiously as she saw him ready to set out, walking to the next plantation.
John shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ he said.
‘There’s wolves, I sometimes hear them at night.’
John smiled, thinking of his old terror in his little house when he heard the wolves howling and thought that they would come in through the gaps in the walls when his fire went out. ‘I lived here once, a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I learned to love the country then. It feels as familiar to me as my own garden at Lambeth.’
The woman nodded. ‘Well, if you keep to the wide track you won’t get lost,’ she assured him. ‘The next plantation starts just three miles up the road. There’s only a little stand of trees between their tobacco fields and ours.’
John doffed his hat to her and left. She was right, here and all over the country there were only little stands of trees left between the riverside plantations. For rare plants he had to go deep into the countryside, high into the hills, following rivers and living off the land. He hired a canoe for a few months and took it down the coast to the marshy area that Suckahanna had showed him when she was a little girl. He even went to the place of the bad water where the People had made their stand, and tried to survive before they were hunted down. He found a little plant there, an exquisite valerian, and packed it carefully in damp earth wrapped in leaves to take back to Jamestown with him. He thought if he could persuade it to thrive in Lambeth then it would remind him of the People, even when all other traces of them were gone.
He returned to Jamestown several times during his visit, to pack barrels of plants and send them back to the Ark and on the second visit he found a letter from Hester.
September 1655
Dear Husband,
Your new maple has arrived safely and been planted into the garden near to your first Virginia maple so that men may make the comparison and see that it is a little different. I shall write and tell you if it too changes the colour of its leaves in autumn to scarlet.
Some of the daisy plants were spoiled by salt water by the negligence of the sailors but Frances has potted up the others and says they will live. She says that your Virginia convolvulus must be called Tradescantia. It flowered this summer and is most beautiful with huge flowers very prettily marked. They only live a day but are succeeded by many others. You did not say whether it will over-winter, so we have taken it into the orangery and we also collected seeds and took cuttings. Lord Lambert has begged some seeds for his rare garden and we sold them to him at one shilling for half a dozen.
Frances is well and stayed with me for the summer, and there have been many other guests too, come to see the rarities and stay to enjoy the garden. Elias Ashmole has been a constant visitor and many other of your friends send their regards.
You may not have heard but the Lord Protector has established the rule of major generals – one to each county to supervise the work of the magistrates and the churchwardens and the parish overseers. The innovation is not much welcomed in Lambeth, but I will say no more in a letter.
I am caring for your rarities and your garden as ever and I am well.
Your loving wife,
Hester
March 1656
In March, when the worst of the winter storms had died down, John loaded his Virginia treasures on to a ship bound for London. A couple of planters had come down to the quayside to see him off and press him with commissions to complete for them in London. John accepted packages and errands but never took his eyes from his barrels of plants and boxes of rarities.
He was importing a dozen saplings in tubs which would have to stand on deck and be shielded from the spray by a little shelter woven of reeds. Three of them were new Virginian walnut trees, never seen in England before; the others were new poplar trees and whips of Virginian cypress. Safely packed in tubs of damp sand were the roots of some new asters and some new geraniums, and a new vine. Sealed with candlewax in a waterproof chest were seeds that John had gathered the previous autumn: of the aconitum, which the Americans called wolfsbane, Virginian parsley, the exquisitely pretty Virginian columbine, the leopardsbane of America – a flower like a daisy but with a flaming orange petal and a black heart, as bright as any marigold.
John looked at his treasures with the joy of a wealthy merchant bringing home gold. He stuffed letters and packages in the deep pockets of his coat and stepped back from the ship’s railing as they ran the gangplank ashore.
‘Goodbye!’ he called.
‘When will we see you again?’ Sir Josiah shouted.
‘In another few years,’ John called back over the widening gulf of water. ‘When my stocks are low again. When I want new marvels.’
‘Be sure you come!’ Sir Josiah called. ‘This is a land of marvels.’
John laughed and nodded and waved goodbye, and then stood on deck to watch the town recede swiftly as the current and the wind took the little ship down the river and towards the sea. br />
‘I would never have thought it,’ he said to himself. ‘From the time when I first came here. I would never have thought that they could have survived and built such a town, almost a city, from the forest.’
The new manicured banks of the river slipped quickly by. John looked upriver, to where the shimmer of light on the water gave the illusion that nothing had changed. ‘Goodbye,’ he said softly, to the landscape and to the woman he had loved.
April 1656
John came back to his garden, to the Ark and to his wife as the tulips were starting to fatten and show their colour. The wagon rumbled across the familiar bridge and into the stable yard and Hester, looking out of the window of the rarities room at the noise, saw John sitting beside the carter and came running down the terrace and into her husband’s arms.
‘I should have known you wouldn’t miss another spring,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t really expect you till midsummer.’
‘I was ready to come home,’ John said. ‘And lucky to get a fast ship.’
They drew back a little and inspected each other, as old friends will do after a long absence. Hester’s hair under her neat cap was nearly as white as the linen, and her face was thinner and more severe. There were lines of grief on her face which would be there forever. John, aged forty-eight, was leaner and fitter than when he had gone away, the days on horseback and on foot had tanned him brown and skimmed off the fat of easy living.
‘You look well, but your hair has gone white,’ he said.
She gave a little smile. ‘It was starting to go as you left,’ she said. ‘At Johnnie’s death.’
John nodded. ‘I stopped at his tomb on the way home. I felt I wanted to tell him I was back. I always promised that he would come with me on the next trip. Someone had planted little daffodils.’