Bertram Hobert, a fellow passenger with John, glanced at him. “Does this change your plans, Mr. Tradescant?” he asked.
“No,” John said discreetly. “My going or staying is nothing to do with the progress of the war. I have interests in Virginia, a plantation there, some land where I have a fancy to build a house. And I made a good sum on the plants I brought back last time. Whether Parliament or the king wins, some day there will be peace and men will want to garden.”
“Are you not for the king? Won’t you join him now? Now that he is on the road to victory?”
“I have been in his service all my life,” John said hiding his resentment. “The time has come for me to do some traveling and gardening for myself. He does not need a gardener now, he needs soldiers, and – you heard that man – he has them.”
Hobert nodded.
“What about you?” John asked.
“I was leaving whatever happened,” the man said. “I can make no progress here. I work as hard as any man; but what the taxes don’t take, the tithes do. I wanted a country where I can see real wealth for me. I’ve seen how a man can prosper in Virginia. I’ll stay a dozen years and come back a rich man and buy a farm in Essex. What about you? Will you stay for long?”
John thought for a moment. It was a question he and Hester had carefully skirted, in all the weeks while she packed for him and took orders in her careful script from gardeners who had heard he was going collecting again. With his boat creaking at the dockside and the wind blowing offshore, with the tide running and a sense of his freedom rising in him, John felt young and reckless again; a young man fit for a young country, full of promise.
“I shall make a home there,” he said. “My wife and children will stay in England and I shall be back often. But Virginia is the country for me. I shall build a house there and…” He broke off, thinking of Suckahanna’s small, sideways smile, her tattooed nakedness, which had become more erotic for him since his first innocent sight of her. He thought that by now she would be a woman, a woman fully grown, and ready for love and desire.
“It’s a country where a man can grow,” the farmer said, throwing his arms wide. “There’s land for the asking, and earth which has never been plowed. There’s a new life there for me.”
“And for me,” John said.
John welcomed the long idle days of the voyage. He became accustomed to the movement of the ship and his stomach stopped swooping with terror at the long, frightening slide into the troughs of the waves. The captain was liberal with the passengers, letting them come up on deck, almost as they wished, as long as they did not distract the crew; and John spent days leaning on the rail of the deck and looking down into the moving green muscles of the ocean. A couple of times they caught sight of a pod of whales, chasing a school of fish that stretched for more than a mile across. Once or twice they saw large white birds whose names John did not know and he asked the captain if one could be shot so that he could have it stuffed for the rarities room. The captain shook his head. He said it was unlucky to shoot a bird at sea, it would summon up a hurricane. John did not press the point, it seemed a long, long way from the rarities room at Lambeth, a long way from Hester, a long way from the children, and a long way from the king and his costumed playacting wars.
John had thought that he would use the time of the two-month voyage to make some plans, come to some decisions about his future. He had thought he would write down his own timetable: how long he would spend building a new house in Virginia, when he would send for the children, even if Hester still refused to come. But as the ship went westward, and still more westward, as he spent every evening watching the sun sink lower and lower through the clouds and then into the sea, he found he could not think or plan; all he could do was dream.
It was not a journey, it was an escape. John’s inheritance of a business which was at the same time a duty had nearly strangled him. He had been bound by loyalty and even in the end a begrudging sympathy in service to a king whom he despised. His father’s choice of his wife had forced him into a new marriage, one he would not have chosen for himself. His burdensome work and his duty to his family conspired to close down the ways that were open to him: like untrimmed hedges overshadowing a lane. John had a sudden exhilarating sense of having vaulted a gate and starting to make his own way across fields toward the open country, where there were no paths and no lanes, and no restrictions. Somewhere he could make his own life, build his own house… even choose his own wife.
He dreamed of her – Suckahanna – almost every night. It was as if his dreams had been locked down inside him, and only freed once he freed himself from England, from Hester, from home. Once the ropes keeping the ship at the quayside were dropped and trailed through the cold water of the Thames, John felt his desires rocking like the boat as it headed for freedom.
He dreamed of the month they had spent in the forest together and the light shining through the leaves to dapple her bare brown skin. He dreamed of the line of her spine as she squatted before the fire, of the asymmetric tilt of her head where the hair was cut short on one side to keep the bowstring free, and black and flowing on the other. In his dreams he could taste the food she had found and cooked for them, the bitterness of the dried blueberries, the richness of the roasted lobster, the nuts, the seeds, the roots. He remembered the clean cold taste of water, an exotic drink for a man who had drunk small ale or milk for all his life. He woke in the mornings to the sudden pang of disappointment that they were still so many days out of Jamestown, and he woke aroused and embarrassed. He had the little enclosed bed with doors around the bunk all to himself, but anyone sleeping outside could have heard him groan in desire in his dreams, and he was afraid that he might have said her name in his sleep.
The cold winter mornings at sea were hard for John. While he had been in Lambeth, trapped between the demands of the king and the duties to his family, he had managed to forget the last words she had called to him – “Come at Nepinough,” the harvesttime. He had not gone back to her as he had promised. Perhaps she had waited, perhaps her mother had waited with her, and met every boat from England for all of the summer season, and then? And then? Would they have waited a full year, would they have waited two, four?
John hoped that they would have heard that England was at war with itself. The Virginia colonists were sworn to the royalist cause but there would have been a ready stream of gossip and fears running around the colony. Enough talk, surely, for the Indian woman and her daughter to realize that perhaps John could not get away? But perhaps they had never thought that he would come. John remembered Suckahanna’s ability to say nothing for a whole month, even though he spoke to her, and laughed with her and worked beside her and watched her every move with tenderness and desire. She had said nothing to him, even though she had understood every word that he had said. She had said nothing to him because she had been ordered by her mother to stay silent. Perhaps, after Nepinough had come and gone, her mother had ordered her to forget him, or to marry a man of her own people, or – worst thought of all – to go and lie with a white man and earn their safety that way. At that thought, John would pull on his boots and stamp up to the deck and look out over the bowsprit to where the horizon of sea and air lay empty and unhelpful, miles and miles away.