Virgin Earth Read online

  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