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  ‘Very well then,’ he said gently. ‘And I promise I will come home.’

  Spring 1654

  John was at sea, running from grief, once more, and knew that he had chosen the right course. The movement of the ship rocked his sleep at night and the noise of the wind in the sails and the creaking of the timbers were the sounds of mourning to him. He thought of Johnnie constantly and, away from the land and from Hester, he felt free to think of Jane, his first wife, and knew that if there were a heaven and a communion of saints, then she was with her son now. As the seven-week voyage went on, he felt that he could let Johnnie go, as he had once before let Jane go, and love him only in his heart as a memory, and not with that wrenching desire to bring him back.

  He was asleep when the ship sighted the Virginia coast and was awakened by the noise and excitement of their arrival in Jamestown. Bertram Hobert hammered on the little wooden shutters around John’s bunk and shouted, ‘Up, man! We’ve arrived!’ and John tumbled out to find the ship in its usual chaos as sailors slackened off the sails and the look-out man shouted directions, and the passengers still battened-down below the hatches tried to repack their goods which had been scattered during the long voyage.

  ‘Better this time than last,’ Bertram said optimistically. ‘At least we know the dangers now, eh, John?’

  John looked into the face of his old friend. The dreadful hollowed face of hunger had gone, replaced by a rosy round prosperity, but most of Bertram’s teeth were missing and the remainder were black.

  ‘We were greenhorns,’ John said. ‘We knew nothing.’

  ‘Now we do,’ Bertram said. ‘I will be a man of substance in this land yet, John. I will be a burgess and leave a five-hundred acre plantation.’

  ‘I wonder what changes have taken place since we were last here?’

  ‘Nothing but good,’ Mrs Hobert said over her shoulder, throwing linen into a bag. ‘I hear that the savages are quite driven back and there is a road made through the woods from Jamestown down to the sea and westwards along the riverbank inland.’

  A sailor lifted the hatch above them and shouted that they could come up on deck. John hefted his chest through the hatchway, and took his bundle of clothing.

  ‘You’re travelling light,’ Bertram remarked.

  ‘It is going home that I hope to be laden,’ John said.

  They scrambled out on deck and then paused in amazement. For a moment John thought that something had gone ludicrously wrong and they had come to the wrong place. But then he saw that the old wooden fort had gone, the mixture of garrison and town had changed. Before him now was a new town, an elegant town, beautiful and solid and built to last.

  A line of stone-built houses with small ornamental gardens before them lined the front road alongside the river and looked down to the quay. Great trees had been left in place to shade the road, and around each tree they had built graceful circular seats so that passers-by could rest in the shade. Each house had a bright new wooden fence before it, one or two even had low stone walls to mark the division between the garden and the street.

  There was a pavement slightly raised with wooden beams to keep the ladies’ shoes dry and a gutter for storm water and sewage which drained away into the river.

  The houses were built two, even three, storeys high, so close that they were all but adjoining and they were built like good London houses, not flung together with wood and mud; but well-planned, proper houses with a central doorway and a window on either side with well-hung shutters and glass in the windows.

  The people walking up and down the road and strolling down to the quay were changed as well. The sharp division into the one or two wealthy men and the rest, hungry, work-hardened paupers, was over. There was a more gentle gradation of wealth and status that you could see from the shirts and waistcoats of the labourers through the smart dark homespun of the artisans and smaller planters through to the silks and satins worn by the gentry.

  And now there were slaves. John blinked at the numbers of black men and women, fetching, carrying, running at an obedient dog-trot behind a cart, catching the ropes on the dockside and running the gangplank out to the ship, unloading carts and throwing down the bales of cotton, and women with trays on their heads weaving through the crowd at the dockside with fresh produce to sell. Many of them were branded with the mark of their owner on their forehead or cheek. Many of them had the old scars of a whipping on their backs. But some of them, like the women traders, were clearly free to sell their own goods, they walked at their own speed with an arrogant roll of their hips under bright patterned dresses.

  A sailor opened the ship’s railing, made sure the gangplank was secure and then stepped back. John walked down the plank to the new land.

  He had not thought that he would find her again, and he knew she would not look for him; but he did not expect that the country would be emptied of Suckahanna’s people. The last Indian war had indeed been the last. Opechancanough’s execution was the death of the People as well as the death of their last greatest war leader. Some drifted away, inland, and found other nations that would accept them, and then they too had to move, always westwards, always away from coast and the encroaching white men, the noise of falling timber and the scarcity of game. Some went into service, a service more like slavery for they were paid no wages and allowed no freedoms and worked until they died for no thanks. Some were imprisoned for the crime of rising up to defend their own villages and they served their sentences until illness and despair finished the work that the war had begun.

  John stopped every one of the few Powhatan women or children that he saw in Jamestown and asked for Suckahanna, and for Attone, by name, but they all shook their heads at the strange white man and pretended that they could not understand his speech, though he asked them both in English and Powhatan. Ignorance and deafness were their last defence, and they mimed ignorance and deafness and hoped to somehow survive, clinging to the very edge of life in a land which had once been unquestionably their own.

  John and the other men on the ship went to the governor’s office where the maps of the territory were kept and claimed his headright and then sold it on to William Lea, with his original claim alongside it.

  ‘You don’t want it yourself?’ Lea asked.

  John shook his head. ‘I’m no planter,’ he said. ‘I tried it before and I have not the skills or the endurance. I’m a gardener. You’ve paid my passage and more and I’m glad for that, but I will spend my time here out in the woods gathering the most interesting plants I can find – my cargo for the return journey.’

  A gentleman in the office with them turned at the mention of plants and looked at John keenly. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Now I know who you are. I am sure that you must be Mr John Tradescant. I had not known you were coming to visit us again.’

  John felt a little curl of pride at his name being known before him. ‘How do you do, Mr –?’

  ‘Forgive me,’ the planter said. ‘I am Sir Josiah Ashley. I saw your garden when I was last in London and I ordered some plants for my garden here.’

  ‘You are gardening?’ John asked incredulously. ‘In Virginia?’

  The man laughed. ‘Of course, everything will be very much changed since you were last here. I have a house and before it, running down to the river, I have a garden. Nothing compared to the great gardens you will have worked in, I know. But it is a pretty little couple of acres and it gives me much pleasure.’

  ‘And do you only plant English plants?’ John asked, wary of another hopeless attempt at an English garden in foreign soil like the barren attempt in Barbados.

  ‘I grow flowers and plants from the woods too,’ Sir Josiah replied. ‘I have a great love for English plants, of course, they remind us of our old home. But there are some exquisite flowers and shrubs that I have found and brought into my garden and they thrive.’

  ‘I should so like to see them. And if you had any stock I should offer you a very fair price.’

  Si