Virgin Earth Read online

  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