He hesitated at the door and then put his eye to the crack to peer into the firelit interior. It was a sparsely furnished room. A table before the fire; two stools and a hewed tree stump served as chairs. A box bed built into the wall was occupied by a man, his shoulder hunched against the room, his head tucked down. A ladder at the back of the room led to a sleeping platform, a string and a piece of sacking serving as a curtain between the two. John thought of the spic-and-span London house that the Hoberts had left for this venture and felt his heart ache for them, and surprisingly for himself too: another exile in this strange and remote land.
He tapped on the door and called out at the same time: “A friend, John Tradescant.” His own name was awkward in his mouth.
Despite the reassurance he heard a little scream from Mrs. Hobert and heard a stool overturn as Francis leaped to his feet.
“Who?” she demanded.
“John Tradescant, your shipmate and neighbor,” he repeated.
“We thought you were dead!” The door opened cautiously and Mrs. Hobert’s white face peered out.
John kept back in the shadows. “I was with the Powhatan,” he said.
“Savages?”
He bit back a retort. “Yes. So I look strange…”
She stepped a little farther out, female curiosity driving her onward. “Like a savage?”
“Don’t be afraid,” John said and came toward the light.
She clapped her hand over her mouth at the sight of him but her eyes widened with terror. “Is it really you?”
“I swear it,” John said. “Just dressed as a Powhatan.”
“You poor, poor man,” she said and took hold of his hand and drew him indoors. “Good God preserve us all from such a fate. How did you get away from them?”
“I was not captured,” John said. He nodded at Francis, who stood frozen in horror at the sight of him.
“It is me,” John repeated.
Francis nodded, gave a little bow in reply and restored a wood-chopping ax to its place behind the door.
“Sit down, sit down,” Sarah begged him. “Your hair! and – dear God – they have even stained your skin to their color!”
“That’s bear grease,” John said. “It keeps off insects in summer and keeps out the cold in winter.”
“God preserve us! How did you get away?” Then her constant terror of the savage men struck her and she shot a frightened look at the thin wooden door. “Are they after you?”
“No, no,” John reassured her. “They let me go freely.”
“Are you hungry?” The anxious glance she threw at the cookpot suggested that there was not much to be had, even if he was.
“I have eaten,” John said steadily. “But I brought you some meat. We killed an elk.”
“Meat?” She choked as the saliva rushed into her throat. “You have meat?”
John reached for the bundle strapped into the small of his back. “Here,” he said. “It’s smoked; but you could seethe it in a little water.”
She fell upon it and tossed it into the cookpot as it stood by the hearthside. John, remembering his sickness from food heated and reheated in the same pot, winced a little. But she was already stirring in water from a pitcher, and greedily tasting. “Bertram, Bertram!”
The shoulder in the bed shrugged still higher, and then the man rolled over on his back and glared into the room.
“We have meat!” she said triumphantly. “Can you sit up while I spoon you some broth?”
“Meat?” Hobert’s voice was a rough croak.
“Neighbor Tradescant has brought us some steaks from an elk,” she said. “He has been living with the savages but has got away from them now, praise God.”
Hobert heaved himself up to one arm. His face was marked with pain. In the little room John could smell the flesh of his snow-rotted feet and the stench of unwashed blankets.
“John Tradescant?” he asked wonderingly. “Is that really you?”
John went to the bedside and took the man’s hand. “I have been living with the Powhatan and I dress like them and hunt with them,” he said. “They treat me as a friend. I saw you in the woods the other day, and I thought you might be in need. I have brought you some meat and I can bring you more. They have medicines as well which would make you well. I would have come sooner if I had known you were in need, Bertram.”
The man’s red-rimmed eyes wandered over John’s face. “A savage,” he said, bewildered.
“I am indeed John Tradescant,” John said. “But I could not live alone in the forest. Thank God I fell among the Powhatan and they have treated me kindly.”
Sarah Hobert came to her husband’s bedside with a delicate pot filled with gravy. John recognized at once the work of the People: the perfectly smooth walls of one of their dainty black pots.
“That’s Powhatan made,” he said.
She gave him a swift disapproving glance. “We used to trade with them, but they became too demanding and dishonest,” she said. “Now my husband will not have them near his land.” She turned to the wreck of the man in the bed. “Will you taste, Bertram?”
Eagerly he sat up and reached for the pot, eagerly he sucked at it and gulped until the pot was empty.
“Rest now,” John said, remembering his horrors of illness after he had eaten too richly on a starved belly. “You can have more later, and I will bring you other food, corn and berries and nuts.”
Sarah reached out and caught his hand. “Praise God for bringing you back to us,” she said. “For that which was lost is found.”
John hesitated. “I must be a visitor only,” he said.
Her face was shining with relief and happiness, deaf to his reluctance. “Praise God for returning you to your true people,” she said.
It was out of the question for John to leave that night, or even the next day. He slept in the attic on the same side of the makeshift screen as the Negro Francis. In the morning Hobert was in a fever, groaning and counting aloud, counting the sums of money he must save to buy headrights in the new land, counting the percentage of profit he might hope to make, counting the wages he must pay to get his land cleared and tobacco planted.
“Is he mad?” John asked Sarah.
She shook her head. “It’s the fever again,” she said. “When it comes on him he acts like a madman but then the fever breaks and he is coolheaded again. Francis has to tie him up sometimes.”
“This is impossible,” John said. “You will have to go back to Jamestown. You cannot stay here with only a sick man and a slave.”
She looked up, her face shining with new hope. “That’s what I had feared,” she said. “But now you are come, sent by God to help me. You will help me plant the fields, won’t you, John? Help me until Bertram is well again? He will be well now that you can bring him food, and when the summer comes he will be well and strong again. He is a man of much strength. This is only the dreadful seasoning of Virginia. They all say that. A man must be seasoned to work under the hot sun. Bertram is burning up now, no sun will ever be too hot for him again.”
“I cannot stay,” John said awkwardly.
“Where else could you go?” she asked. “Your own headright is overgrown and the savages will have stripped your house of everything you ever owned.”
John felt completely incapable of telling her that he had a new house in the Indian village, and a wife and children waiting for him.