He watched his box being unloaded and then took hold of it and dragged it through the slush up to the inn where he was absolutely certain that he would find the landlady as sour tempered and as inhospitable as four years before.
His first visit was to Mr. Joseph.
“Of course I remember you,” the magistrate said. “You went out into the woods in an Indian canoe and came back with barrelfuls of plants. Were they any good in England?”
“Most of them took,” John said. “Some of them did very well. One of them, the spiderwort, is one of the most beautiful flowers I have ever grown. We had the purple one before, but this is white like a little three-petaled star.”
“And what news of the king?” Mr. Joseph interrupted.
“Good news. Prince Rupert’s cavalry had a great victory at a place called Powick Bridge,” John said, repeating the popular belief. “They say he can’t be stopped now.”
Mr. Joseph nodded. “Well, thank God for that,” he said. “I don’t know what would have been our case if Parliament had won. We’re a royal colony. Do we become a Parliament colony? No one thinks of these things. What about you? Would you have been a gardener to Parliament?”
“I’m here because I don’t know what I would have been,” John admitted. “I couldn’t see my way clear at all.”
The magistrate nodded. “Now what can I do for you? D’you want another Indian guide?”
“I want the same one,” John said, keeping his tone deliberately casual. He wondered if the man could hear the pounding as his heart raced. “I want that girl again. Do you know where she is?”
“What girl?”
John had to force himself to speak quietly and steadily. “You sent me out with a girl, d’you remember? Her baptized name is Mary. Her mother was in prison for a month for accusing someone of rape. You had the girl in service here, d’you remember? When I came back her mother met us and took the girl away. She said they might go back to their own people. Have you seen her since then?”
“Oh, the harlot and her daughter,” Mr. Joseph said, remembering. “No. They must have gone into the woods. I’ve not seen them.”
John had expected anything but this blank refusal. “But… but you must have?”
Mr. Joseph shook his head. “No. D’you want another guide?”
“I want that girl!”
The man shrugged. “I can’t help you, I’m afraid.”
John thought rapidly. “How could I find her? D’you know of other Indians who come in from the forest who might know her?”
Mr. Joseph shook his head again. “They’re settling down at last,” he said with satisfaction. “The ones who have been taken into service are kept here, in town, or safe on the plantations. The ones who have kept to the forest are pushed back, almost every day, farther and farther away from the river, away from the coast. We’re cleaning the land of them. We’re getting them out of the way. If she’s out in the forest with them you’ll not see her again. She could be over the mountains or the other side of York River by now if she’s got any sense.” He paused for a moment. “What d’you want her for?”
“I promised I would take her into my service,” John said smoothly. “I said when I came back and built my house she could come to work for me. She’s skilled with plants.”
“They’re all skilled with plants,” Mr. Joseph said. “Get another one.”
Every new immigrant to Virginia was awarded a headright of land, fifty acres a person. John, arriving for the second time, was awarded a farther fifty acres, marked solemnly on a map held in the new building of the burgesses’ assembly. His father had been persuaded to purchase two headrights when the Virginia Company was founded, so John had his land put together in one spreading acreage of two hundred acres: as big as an English farm. It was upriver from Jamestown, not the most desirable of sites since the tobacco ships would not go too far upstream. The earliest assignments had all been around Jamestown or downriver. Latecoming planters had to ship their goods in their own boats downriver to Jamestown and catch the oceangoing boats there.
John looked carefully at the burgesses’ map. The lines of rivers and mountains were indistinct and vague. The only part of the country that John knew well was the woods where he had lived for the month with Suckahanna, and they were indicated with a rough scribble suggesting inlets and islands and swampy ground. It hardly mattered. There was so much land to be had in the new colony that disputes over boundaries had been left behind in overcrowded England. No one in this new huge country was going to quibble over a mile to the east or ten miles to the west, scale was a different thing in this vast emptiness.
Bertram Hobert was consulting the map alongside John. “Next to my land,” he remarked. “What d’you say we build one house together and then live in it while we work on the other?”
John nodded thoughtfully. “When could we start?”
“Not till spring. We’d die of hunger and cold out there in the winter. We’ll stay snug in town until spring, and go out as soon as we can.”
John looked out of the open slit of the window at the iron-gray sky and the falling snow and thought of Suckahanna, barefoot in the frozen woods where the snow was dozens of feet deep and the wolves howled at night. “How could anyone survive out there in winter?”
Hobert shook his head. “Nobody can,” he said.
Winter 1642-43, Virginia
Bertram Hobert rented lodgings in town for himself, his wife, Sarah, and his slave, a black man called Francis. After John complained of the treatment he got at the inn, Hobert said he could stay with them until the spring, and then the whole party would go upriver to look at their new land.
John found the town much changed. A new governor, Sir William Berkeley, had arrived from England and had equipped the official residence with beautiful furniture and goods. His wife, who was already a byword in the community for her looks, was giving parties and all those who could remotely pass as a gentleman and his lady were dressing in their best and walking up the drive to the governor’s house. The roads were paved now, and the tobacco was no longer grown at the street corners and on any corner of spare land. A man could buy or sell using coin and not pinches of tobacco or bills drawn on a tobacco merchant’s. “It’s become a town and not a camp,” John remarked.
Those were the beneficial changes of the four years. There were others that filled him with worry for Suckahanna and her mother. The river was now lined with plantations from its mouth right up to James’s Island. Before each of the planters’ houses the land had been cleared and the fields stretched down to the little wooden piers and quays. On James’s Island itself the fields ran into each other, there was no forest left at all. On the more distant banks the land was black where it had been burned and not yet plowed. John could not see how Suckahanna and her people could survive in a country which was turning itself into fields and houses. The woods she had roamed every day for mile after mile, hunting turkey or wood pigeon, or looking for roots or nuts, were burned back to a few scorched trees among plowed fields. Even the river, where she had followed the schools of fish ready to catch them wherever the flow of the water was right, was enclosed by riverfront acres and penetrated by landing piers.
John thought he might be imagining it – or perhaps it was the effect of the freezing-cold weather – but it seemed to him that the flocks of birds were fewer, and he no longer heard the wolves howling outside the walls of Jamestown. The countryside was being tamed, and the wild animals and the people who lived alongside them were being driven inland and away. John thought that if Suckahanna was with her people they might have been driven far away to where the burgesses’ map showed nothing more than a space marked “forest.” He started to fear that he would never find her again.