Virgin Earth Read online

  Spring 1638, Virginia

  J opened his eyes and saw, instead of the whitewashed walls and ceiling of his Lambeth home, a thatched roof, close to his face. Beneath him, wooden boards, not even a straw mattress; a pace away, a young man on a pallet bed, still deep in sleep. He took in, slowly, the watery smell of something cooking, the discomfort of the hard floor, and the irritating itch of a fresh fleabite. He sat up cautiously, his head swimming. The solid wooden floor of the loft heaved under his gaze with the illusion of movement.

  ‘You can stir yourselves or it’ll be cold!’ came a shout from the woman who kept the lodging house. In one fluid movement the lad, her son, was up and out of bed and down the ladder to the kitchen below. J pulled on his boots, brushed down his breeches, shrugged his waistcoat over his grubby shirt, and followed him.

  The woman was spooning a pale yellow mixture from the pot, suspended over a miserly fire, into four wooden bowls. She slapped them onto the table and bowed her head over her callused hands for a brief grace. Another man who had stayed the night sleeping on the floor beside the fire drew up his stool, took out his own spoon and ate with relish.

  ‘What is it?’ J asked cautiously.

  ‘Porridge made with Indian corn,’ she replied.

  ‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ the man said. ‘Indian corn is almost all we eat.’

  J smiled. ‘I wasn’t expecting milk and honey.’

  ‘There’s many that do,’ the woman said shortly. ‘And many that die still hoping.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘You here prospecting?’ the man asked.

  ‘No,’ J said. ‘I’m a gardener, a plant collector. I’ve come to collect plants. Authorised by King Charles himself.’ He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should tell them about the great garden in Lambeth and his father’s reputation as the greatest gardener that had ever been, advisor to the Duke of Buckingham, gardener to the king and queen, one of the greatest collectors of rarities in the world. He looked at the woman’s enfolded, bitter face and thought that he would not.

  The man nodded. ‘Will you see the king when you get home? If you get home,’ he added.

  J nodded and took a spoon of the porridge. It was bland, the corn boiled to the consistency of paste. ‘Yes. I work for him in his garden at Oatlands Palace,’ he said.

  ‘Well, tell him that we can’t do with this governor,’ the man said bluntly. ‘Tell him that we won’t do with him, and that’s a fact. We’ve got enough worries to deal with here without having a fat fool set over us from England. We need a general assembly with a voice for every planter. We need a guarantee of our rights.’

  ‘You’d be imprisoned if you spoke like that in England,’ J pointed out mildly.

  ‘That’s why I’m not in England,’ the man said shortly. ‘And I don’t expect to live as if I were. Which is more than can be said for the governor who expects to live like a lord with servants in a land where men and women have come to be free.’

  ‘I’m not his advisor,’ J said. ‘I speak to the king – when I ever see him – about plants and his garden.’

  The man nodded. ‘So who does advise him now?’

  J thought for a moment. It all seemed a long way away and of little interest in this new country. ‘The queen,’ he said. ‘And Archbishop Laud.’

  The man made a grimace and turned his head to spit but then checked the movement when he saw the woman glare. ‘Beg pardon. So he hasn’t called a parliament?’

  J shook his head. ‘He hopes to rule without one.’

  ‘I heard he was halfway to being a Papist.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘I heard that he has taken so many fines and so much wealth into his own hands that he does not need to call a parliament for them to vote taxes, that he lets his wife worship openly as a Papist, and that daily there are men and women in the country crying out for him to change,’ the man said precisely.

  John blinked at the accuracy and malice of the description. ‘I thought you were royalists in Virginia?’

  ‘Not all of us,’ the man said with a hard smile.

  ‘Where are you going to find your plants?’ the woman interrupted. ‘There’s nothing grown up and down the river but tobacco.’

  ‘Surely people farm other crops?’

  She shook her head. ‘We keep beasts – or at any rate they keep themselves. But with the fish jumping out of the river and the animals in the forest it’s not worth the labour of doing more than fishing and hunting. Besides, we can trade for anything we need with the Indians. They can do the labour of farming for us. We can all be squires here.’

  ‘I thought I’d travel round,’ J said. ‘Hire a horse and ride round the country, see what I can find.’

  They both looked at him and rudely laughed in his face.

  ‘Hire a horse!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘There’s not more than half a dozen horses in the whole plantation. You might as well ask for a coach and four.’

  J kept his temper. ‘I see I have much to learn.’

  She rose from the table and went to the fire. ‘Dark morning,’ she said irritably. She bent to the fire and lit what looked like a little twig of kindling. To J’s surprise it burnt with a bright clear flame at the very tip, like a specially made taper. She rested it on a small holder, placed on the stone hearth for that purpose, and came back to the table.

  ‘What’s that?’

  She glanced back without interest. ‘We call it candlewood. I buy it from the Indians every autumn.’

  ‘But what sort of wood is it?’

  ‘Candlewood,’ she said impatiently.

  ‘But from what sort of tree?’

  She looked at him as if he were foolish to be asking something that no-one else cared about. ‘How should I know? I pay the Indians to fetch it for me. D’you think I go out into the woods to gather my own candlewood? D’you think I make my own spoons from spoonwood? D’you think I make my own sugar from the sugar tree or my own soap from the soapberry?’

  ‘Candlewood? Spoonwood?’ J had a moment of wild imagining, thinking of a tree growing candles, a tree growing spoons, a bush growing soap. ‘Are you trying to make a fool of me?’

  ‘No greater fool than you are already – what else should I call them but what they are?’

  ‘What you want,’ the man said pacifically, pushing away his empty bowl and taking out a pipe and filling it with rich golden tobacco leaves, ‘is an Indian, a savage. One to use as your own. To take you out into the forest and show you all these things. Take you out in a canoe up and down the river and show you the things you want to know.’

  ‘Don’t any of the planters know these things?’ J asked. He felt fearful at the thought of being guided by an Indian. There had been too much talk in London of brown men armed with knives of stone who crept into your house and cut your throat while you slept.

  The woman hawked and spat into the fireplace. ‘They don’t hardly know how to plant!’ she said. ‘Everything they know they learned from the Indians. You can find yourself an Indian to tell you what the soapberry tree is. Civilised folks here aren’t interested in anything but gold and tobacco.’

  ‘How shall I find an Indian to guide me?’ J asked. For a moment he felt as helpless as a child, and he thought of his father’s travels – to Russia, to the Mediterranean, to Europe. He had never asked his father if he had felt fear, or worse than fear: the babyish whimper of someone lost, friendless in a strange land. ‘Where would I find a safe Indian?’

  ‘No such thing as a safe Indian,’ the woman said sharply.

  ‘Peace!’ J’s fellow lodger said quietly. ‘If you’re serving the king you must have papers, a safe pass, that sort of thing.’

  J felt inside his shirt where the precious royal order was wrapped in oilskin. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Best see the governor then,’ the man suggested. ‘If you’re from the king and you’ve got some influence at court, the governor’ll have time
for you. God knows he has no time for honest working men trying to make a living here.’

  ‘Does he have a court?’ J asked.

  ‘Knock on his door,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘Court indeed! He’s lucky to have a girl to open the door for him.’

  J stood up from the table. ‘Where shall I find his house?’

  ‘Set beyond the Back Road,’ the man said. ‘I’ll stroll over with you now.’

  ‘I have to wash first,’ J said nervously. ‘And get my hat and coat.’

  The woman snorted disparagingly. ‘He’ll want to paint and powder next,’ she said.

  The man smiled. ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ he said and went out, closing the door gently behind him.

  There was neither jug nor ewer in the attic, nor a mirror. Everything that had to be brought from England was at a premium in the new colony. The most trivial things which J had taken for granted in England were rare luxuries here. J washed under the pump in the yard, flinching from the icy splash, and unconsciously keeping his lips tight shut, fearful of drinking the foul water.

  His fellow lodger was waiting for him outside the house, in the shade of a tree, sipping from a mug of small ale. The sun beat down on the blinding dust all around him. He nodded when he saw J and slowly got to his feet. ‘Don’t rush,’ he advised him. ‘A man can die of hurry in this climate.’

  He led the way down the track that ran between the houses. The road was no dirtier than a back road in London but somehow it seemed worse, with the heat of the sun beating down on it and the bright light which dazzled J and made him squint. Hens clucked around in the dust and shied away from their strolling feet at every street corner, and every garden, every drainage ditch, was filled with the ungainly sprout and flapping leaves of the tobacco plant.

  The governor, when J managed to gain admission to the small stone-built house, did nothing more than repeat the lodging-house woman’s advice. ‘I shall write you a note,’ he said languidly. ‘You can travel from plantation to plantation and the planters will make you welcome, if that is what you wish. There’s no difficulty there. Most of the people you meet will be glad of the company and a new face.’

  ‘But how shall I find my way around?’ J asked. He was afraid that he sounded humble, like a fool.

  The governor shrugged. ‘You must get yourself an Indian servant,’ he said. ‘To paddle you in a canoe. To set up camp for you when you can find nowhere to stay. Or you can remain here in Jamestown and tell the children that you want flowers from the woods. They’ll bring a few things in, I dare say.’

  J shook his head. ‘I need to see things where they are growing,’ he said. ‘And see the parent plants. I need roots and seed heads, I need to gather them myself. I need to see where they thrive.’

  The governor nodded, uninterested, and rang a silver bell. They could hear the servant trotting across the short hall and opening the badly hung door.

  ‘Take Mr Tradescant to Mr Joseph,’ the governor ordered. He turned to J. ‘He’s the magistrate here at Jamestown. He often puts Indians in the stocks or in prison. He’ll know the names of one or two. He might release one from prison to you, to be your guide.’

  ‘I don’t know the ways of the country …’ J said uneasily. ‘I would rather have a law-abiding guide –’

  The governor laughed. ‘They’re all rogues and criminals,’ he said simply. ‘They’re all pagan. If you want to go out into the forest with any one of them you take your life in your own hands. If I had my way we should have driven them over the Blue Mountains into the western sea. Just over the distant mountains there – drive them back to India.’

  J blinked, but the governor rose to his feet in his enthusiasm. ‘My plan is that we should plant the land from one river to the other – from the James River to the Patowmeck River – and then build a mighty fence and push them behind it, expel them from Eden as if we were archangels with flaming swords. Let them take their sins elsewhere. There’ll be no peace for us until we are undisputed masters of all the land we can see.’

  He broke off. ‘But you must take your choice, Mr Tradescant. The only people who know anything of plants or trees in Virginia are the Indians and they may slit your throat once you are in the woods with them. Stay here, safe inside the city, and go home empty-handed; or take your chance. It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I cannot rescue you if you are in the woods with them, whatever the king asks of me, whatever safe passes you have in your pocket.’

  J hesitated. He had a moment to appreciate the irony that he had thought he might die on the voyage and had welcomed the thought of his own death, which he had recognised as the only thing to ease his grief. But the thought of meeting his death violently and in fear in unknown woods at the hands of murderous pagans was a different matter altogether.

  ‘I’ll speak to this Mr Joseph,’ he said at last. ‘See what he advises.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the governor said languidly. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay in Virginia. Please assure His Majesty that I did everything in my power to assist you, when you get home; if you get home.’

  ‘Thank you,’ J said levelly, bowed and left the room.

  The maid would not take him even for the short walk to Mr Joseph’s house until she had tied a shawl around her shoulders and put a broad-brimmed hat on her head.

  ‘It’s cool,’ J protested. ‘And the sun is not even overhead.’

  She shot him a swift defensive look. ‘There are bugs that bite and a sun which strikes you down, and the heat that comes off the marshes,’ she warned. ‘The graveyard is full of men who thought that the Virginia sun was not yet up, or that the water was good enough to drink.’

  With that she said nothing more but led the way to the magistrate’s house, past the fort where the bored soldiers whistled and called to her, and inland up a rough dirt road until she stood before a house which was grand by Virginia standards but would have been nothing more than a yeoman’s cottage in England.

  ‘Mr Joseph’s house,’ she said shortly, and turned and left him at the rough wood front door.

  J knocked, and opened the door when a voice shouted to him to come inside.

  The house was divided into two. The largest room, where J was standing, served as the kitchen and dining room. There was no separate parlour. There was a ladder at the back of the room leading to attic bedrooms. A light wooden partition, hardly a wall, divided the master bedroom on the ground floor from the rest of the house. Mr Joseph was sitting at the roughly made table in the living room, writing in a ledger.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘John Tradescant, from England,’ J said, and proffered the governor’s note.

  Mr Joseph read it quickly. ‘I’ve got no native guide for you,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got no messengers due to arrive either. You will have to wait, sir.’

  J hesitated. ‘I wonder if a white person might be free to take me out, now and then. Perhaps a servant or a labourer might be spared from their work.’ He looked at the man’s unhelpful expression. ‘Perhaps just for a few hours?’

  Mr Joseph shook his head. ‘How long have you been here?’ he demanded.

  ‘Just arrived.’

  ‘When you have been here a little longer you will realise that there is never a spare hour,’ the man said grimly. ‘Never a spare moment. Look around you. Every single thing you see here has to be wrested from this land. Remember your ship – did you see houses as cargo? Ploughs? Baker’s shops? Market stalls?’ He paused for emphasis and then shook his head.

  ‘You did not, and that is because we can ship hardly anything. All that we need has to be made or grown or wrought here. Everything. From the shingles on the roof to the ice in the cellar. And this by people who did not come here to farm; but came hoping to pick up gold plates from the seashore, or emeralds from the rivers, or pearls from out of every oyster. So not only are we farming with wooden ploughshares that we have to carve ourselves, but we are farming with labourers who have never seen a p
loughshare before, wooden or metal! Who have to learn every step of the way. Who are taught by men who came out to mine gold but find themselves growing tobacco. So there is no-one, not a man nor woman nor child, who has a moment to do anything but work.’

  J said nothing. He thought of his father who had travelled half way round the world and never came back without his pockets filled with treasures. He thought of the debts at home which would be mounting and only his father and two young children to care for the business of nursery plants and rarities.

  ‘Then I shall have to go out alone. On my own. For I must go home with plants and rarities.’

  ‘I can give you an Indian girl,’ the man said abruptly. ‘Her mother is in prison for slander. She’s only in for the month. You can have the child for a month.’

  ‘What good will a child be?’ J demanded.

  The man smiled. ‘This is an Indian child,’ he corrected. ‘One of the Powhatan people. She can pass through the trees as quiet as a deer. She can cross deep rivers by stepping on stones that you cannot even see. She can eat off the land: berries, roots, nuts, the earth itself. She’ll know every single plant and every single tree within a hundred miles of here. You can have her for a month, then bring her back.’

  He threw back his head and shouted an order. From the yard outside came an answering shout and the back door opened and a child was thrust into the room, her hands still full of the flax which she had been beating.

  ‘Take her!’ Mr Joseph said irritably. ‘She understands some English, enough to do your bidding anyway, she’s not deaf, but she’s dumb. She can make noises but not speech. Her mother is a whore for the English soldiers, or a servant, or a cook, or something. She’s in prison for a month for complaining of rape. The girl knows enough to understand you. Take her for a month and bring her back here three weeks on Thursday. Her mother comes out of prison then and she’ll want her back.’