“A cup of ale, for the love of God!” Bertram called loudly from his bed.
Sarah turned and poured him a little pot of water from the pitcher.
“I’ll get you some more,” John muttered, and took the pitcher and went outside.
He walked slowly down to the river, filled the pitcher, and strolled back, taking the chance to think. If he left Sarah to fend for herself he was signing her death warrant as clearly as if he were the king in Whitehall condemning some poor soul in the Tower. She and Bertram and Francis would die in the forest and the trees would grow through their earthen floor and the trumpet vine strangle their chimney. There was no chance at all that they would survive in this fruitful, overwhelming land without help. In contrast, Suckahanna and the children would be guarded by Attone, and fed and protected by the village. The land was no danger to Suckahanna, she fed from it as easily as a deer nibbling green shoots in the woods.
John squared his shoulders, picked up the pitcher and went back to the house.
Francis was outside, stacking firewood. “Go in and guard your master,” John said. “I must take Mrs. Hobert out into the wood and teach her how to gather fruits and roots and berries. You have been starving in the midst of plenty here. Why did you not tell her?”
“Me? How should I know?”
“You must have eaten nuts and berries in your own country,” John said irritably. “Gathered them in the forests?”
The man raised one eyebrow. “My own country is not like this one,” he said. “So we don’t have the same fruits. And in any case, I had my meals served to me by my wife or by my slave. I didn’t go out clambering in trees for cashew nuts like a monkey.”
“You’re a savage!” John exclaimed. “What d’you mean, slaves, and being served?”
The black man looked from the remnants of his own breeches and shirt to John’s embroidered buckskin loincloth and his stained and tattooed skin.
“I see only one savage here,” he remarked.
John swore under his breath and pushed open the door. “Mrs. Hobert!” he said. “Come out and let me show you how to find nuts and roots for your dinner.”
She brought a basket, Indian made, John observed, and she was quick to learn how to identify roots which could be cooked and eaten, and roots which could be sliced and eaten raw. John showed her nut-bearing trees and pointed to the wild plum and the wild cherry trees which would blossom and bear fruit later in the year. They came home with a basket full of good things and she sliced the roots to supplement the remainder of the elk in the cookpot for their dinner.
Hobert had lapsed into a deep sleep, the sweat thick and cold on his forehead.
“We won’t wake him,” his wife decided. “The fever may be breaking and he will need his rest.”
“The Powhatan have physic,” John said. “For fevers and also for frostbite. I could ask the werowance, or one of the physicians, to come and see Bertram. Or there’s a wise woman very gifted with herbs, she made me well. She might come.”
Sarah shook her head in absolute refusal. “They would poison us and hack us up to eat,” she said. “You may have been lucky, John Tradescant, that they chose to keep you alive. But they have been our enemies since we came here. At first we traded with them and gave them little trinkets for food and for goods. Then we tried to make them come and work for us, clear the land and dig the fields. But they were lazy and idle and when we whipped them they stole what they could and ran away. After that Bertram has shot at them whenever he has seen them. They are our enemies. I won’t have them near me.”
“They have skills that you need to learn,” John persisted. “This dinner you are eating is Powhatan food. You have to learn how they live in the forest in order to live here yourself.”
She shook her head. “I shall live as a God-fearing Englishwoman and I shall make this land into a new England. Then they can come to me to learn.” She closed her eyes briefly in a prayer. When she opened them she was looking sharply, critically, at John.
“I have unpacked a shirt and pair of breeches belonging to Bertram,” she said. “You can have them in return for the service you have done us by coming to our door in our time of need. You will not want to walk around half naked as you are.”
“This is how I live now,” John said.
“Not in a Christian home you don’t,” she said sharply. “I cannot allow it, Mr. Tradescant, it is not fit. It is lechery to show yourself like this to me. If my husband were well and in his right mind he would not permit it.”
“I had no thought of lechery, Mrs. Hobert-”
She gestured to the clothes spread at the fireside. “Then dress yourself, Mr. Tradescant, please.”
John stayed with the Hoberts for a full week, dressed in English clothes again, but still barefoot. The shirt chafed at his neck, the breeches felt hot and constricting around his legs. But he wore them out of courtesy to Sarah’s feelings, and he did not feel he could leave her until Bertram was well again.
The fever broke on the third night, and the next day Bertram was well enough to hobble down to the river, leaning on John’s arm.
The little green tobacco shoots were showing through the earth of the nursery beds. Bertram paused and looked at them as dotingly as if they were sleeping children. “Here is my fortune, Tradescant,” he said. “Here is my fortune growing. If we can survive the rest of this cold weather without starving, without falling to the savages, then this will be the making of me. I shall see it sold on the quayside at Jamestown. I shall see it packed and sailing for England. I shall hire a servant, a brace of servants, and I will make myself a life here.”
“God willing,” John said.
“Stay with us,” Hobert said. “Stay with us and you can take a share in this, John. I doubt I can manage without you and Sarah cannot do it all on her own. Francis has no skill with plants, I am afraid to let him touch them. If I am sick when they need planting out who is going to do the work? Stay with me and see my tobacco plants safely into the field.”
“I can’t stay,” John said as gently as he could. “I have made a different life for myself in this country. But I can come back to you and see that you are well. I’ll come back gladly and work for you. I’ll set out the seedlings for you and show you how the Powhatan plant their food crops so you never need go hungry again.”
“You’ll come back to plant out my tobacco? You swear it?”
“I swear,” John said.
“Then we won’t need food crops,” Hobert said buoyantly. “We shall buy all we need with what I can earn from the tobacco. And I’ll see you right, John. Next season I shall come to your headright and work for you, as we promised, eh? As we always said we would do.”
On that promise John left the Hoberts and crossed the river just above the falls where he could jump from boulder to boulder in the fast-moving stream. On the far side he stripped off the breeches and the shirt that he had been given and bundled them up into the crook of a tree. It reminded him of Suckahanna’s girlhood and her attempt to live in the two worlds. She used to wear a long gown and sometimes a bonnet in Jamestown, but when she was free in the woods she wore her buckskin pinny and nothing more.
The air felt good on his skin again, he felt more of a man in his nakedness than he ever could do in his breeches. He stretched as if he were freed from a constriction greater than a linen shirt, and set off at the Powhatan hunting stride for his home.
Suckahanna greeted him with the careful courtesy of a deeply offended wife. John neither explained nor apologized until they were alone on the sleeping platform, in the darkness of their house, when the soft sighs from both children showed that they were asleep.
“I could not come back when I said I would come,” he said to her smooth naked back. “Bertram was sick, his wife was hungry and their slave didn’t know what to do.”