Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

Frances clapped her hands. “Let’s go!” she said. “I’d rather weed my own garden than the king’s any day!”

Alexander took her hands and turned them palms upward. They were filthy from lifting the bulbs and her fingernails were broken. “You’ll never be a lady with hands like these,” he said. “You should wear gloves.”

“Oh phoo,” Frances said, pulling her hands away. “I don’t care about being a lady. I’m a working woman like Mother.”

“Well, you’ll never sew silk with calloused hands,” Alexander replied. “So I shall never bring you ribbons again.”

She knew him too well to fear his threats. “Then I shall never dance for you or sing to you or speak to you kindly,” she said.

“Enough,” Hester remarked. “There’s enough warfare in the kingdom without it starting at home. We’ll finish lifting these tulips and then we’ll pack and go home. I am longing to sleep in my own bed again.”

John had not thought it possible that he could become one of the Powhatan, but by the autumn he felt as if his London life was left far behind him. There was so much for him to learn that every day was completely absorbing. He was all but fluent in the language – an easy task since once he was adopted into the People not one of them would speak English to him. Within weeks he was speaking nothing but Powhatan, and within months he was thinking in their rich natural imagery. It was not just the language he had to master, but their very way of thinking, of being. He had to learn the pride of a man whose land has been directly given to him, as a favor from the Great Hare. He had to learn the joy of providing food for his family, and for his village to eat. He had to learn the tiny pleasures of family and village life, the easy jokes, the sudden flare-ups of irritation, the appeal of gossip, the danger of making mischief, the delight of Suckahanna’s growing boy and baby, and the dark, constant pleasure of the coming of the night.

They never talked when they made love. They never spoke of it. With his first wife, Jane, it had been that some things were not to be mentioned because they were secret, almost shameful; but with Suckahanna the pleasures of the sleeping platform where anything was possible, where any pleasure might be sought and any sensation given, were pleasures of the darkness and silence. In the daytime and during speech they were in abeyance, waiting for the darkness that would come again.

John had thought in the first months of his marriage that he would go insane, waiting for the sun to set and the children to sleep so that he could take Suckahanna into his arms. Then he was glad that the autumn season made the nights longer, and that the cold weather drove the families of the village indoors earlier and earlier. The children would be rolled together in a thick rug on their sleeping platform, the fire at the center of the house would glow with a warm light and fill the little house with hot smoke, and in the darkness and warmth Suckahanna would enfold him and hold him in her mouth, in her body, until he ached with the urgency of his desire and then finally found the rush and release of his passion, as she closed her eyes and slid into her own joy.

Even on the coldest days the braves went hunting. When the snow was thick on the ground they wore thicker moccasins on their bare feet and buckskin jerkins for warmth. They would laugh at John when they came home if his lips were blue with cold. They threatened to send him stalking stripped naked since his white skin blended so well with the snow.

Attone had John’s old gun, but there was no powder for it. However, he insisted on carrying it on every hunt, and after he had felled a wild goose or duck with a superbly placed arrow and it came spiraling to earth, he would pull the gun from the deerskin holster he had made to carry it on his back, sight the falling bird and solemnly remark “Bang.”

“Good shot, sir!” John would say in English, the words awkward and alien on his tongue.

And Attone would turn and beam. “Good shot,” he would confirm.

Attone was at John’s side for all of the autumn hunts, prompting, reminding, explaining. But all of the Powhatan people were quick to teach John the things he needed to know to live among them. That ceremony of adoption and marriage in one had been all they needed. John was one of the People.

He shared their dangers as well as their pleasures. As autumn turned into winter the stores grew low and the people began to go hungry. The food was set aside for the strongest small children and for the braves on the hunting parties. Old people, the weak, and the sickly accepted that when there was scarcity, the food had to go to those most likely to survive. John offered his portion to Musses but she laughed in his face.

“Do you think I am afraid to die?” she asked him as he brought her a bowl of suppawn.

“I thought only that you were hungry,” he said.

“You thought right,” she said sharply. “I am hungry for meat. So eat your breakfast, Eagle, and go out and drop from the sky onto a deer. The People need food. The hunters must do their work.”

He nodded at the wisdom of what she was saying, but he could not understand how she could refuse a bowl of porridge when his own belly growled with hunger at the sight of it.

“I love the People more than I love a fat belly on myself,” she explained. “And I was fed from my grandmother’s bowl when she went hungry to feed me, and she was fed from hers.”

John dipped his head and ate his porridge and gave thanks for the filling warm sweetness of it.

When he looked up her bright hungry eyes were on him. “Now go and kill a deer,” she ordered.

It was not always easy to hunt. The days were short and icy cold, and when they had shot a white-coated hare, or a deer, or a skunk, or a foolish foraging squirrel there was less meat on the bones than on summer carcasses. The fish weirs froze and the little treats that supplemented the Powhatan diet, the fruits and nuts and berries, were gone. There were edible roots which the women could dig for, and there was the great temptation of the storehouse.

“Why can we not eat from the store?” John asked Suckahanna.

“We do,” she said. “But we share it very carefully when there is no food to be had in any other way. It has not come to that yet. It may not come to it this year.”

“But there is enough in the store to keep the village for the whole season!” John exclaimed. “It will spoil if we don’t eat it!”

She gave him a sly sideways smile. “No, it won’t,” she said. “The meat is properly smoked and the fish salted down in pots. The oysters and crayfish are smoked and dried and the seeds and nuts are dry and safe. You are pretending that the food will go bad to give you an excuse to eat.”

John made an impatient noise and turned on his heel.

“Why can we not eat the store food?” he asked Musses.

She shook her head. “That is the wealth of the People,” she said. “Our inheritance. We saved it carefully, from good harvests and bad. We keep it through the winter and eat as little as we can. That is the way of this people. They are not Englishmen who eat their seed corn and then find in spring they have nothing to plant.”

“Why can we not eat the store food?” John asked Attone.

“Why not?”

“Yes.”

“Have you asked Suckahanna?”

“Yes, and Musses.”

“And what do the women tell you?”

“One tells me that we may need the food later, though we are halfway through winter already and as hungry as we can be. The other tells me that the People do not eat their seed stores. But these are not seed stores. These are dried oysters.” John felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of oysters, and swallowed, hoping that his hunger did not show in his face.

Attone took his shoulder in a hard, friendly grip and put his face close to John’s. “You’re right. It’s not seed. You’re right, it would be good to eat some of it now. Why do you think we have waited and worked and starved ourselves to store a year’s supply of food?”

John shook his head. Attone’s lips came closer to his ear.

“In the time of the uprising, when our king, Opechancanough, went against the white men, do you know what they did to our fish weirs?”

“They tore them down,” John said, as softly as the other man.

“And what they did to our crops in the fields?”

“They trampled them into the mud.”

“They did worse than that. They let the women plant and weed them, so we thought that they would let us get them in. Then, after we had spent a year of our labor in tending the food they came at harvest time and set light to them and to the forest around them.” He dropped back and looked into John’s face. “They burned anything, without thought,” he said. “I would have understood it if they had stolen the harvest from us. But they did not do that. They just burned it where it stood, ripe and ready for picking. So that winter they went hungry themselves without our food to buy. But we… we starved.”

John nodded.

“I buried my brother that year,” Attone said quietly. “My older brother, who was like a father to me. He died with a belly full of frozen grass. There was nothing else to eat.”

John nodded in silence.

“So now before any brave would lift his hand against a white man he would want to know that he has a year’s supply of food in his house. Don’t you think that, my Eagle?”

John gaped. “This is a supply for war?”

The grip on his shoulder tightened so hard it was like a vice. “Did you think we would let them push us into the mountains, into the sea?”

Dumbly, John shook his head.

“Of course there will be war,” Attone said matter-of-factly. “My son has to have a trail to follow. He has to have deer to kill. If the white man will not keep to his treaties, will not share the land, then he will have to be killed.”

John bowed his head. He felt a great sense of impending doom.

“You grieve for your people?” Attone asked.

“Yes,” John replied. “Both of them.”

The deer were fewer, hunting was hard. The men went out in twos and threes, looking for small game and birds. Attone and John left the usual trails and struck out downriver. Suckahanna watched them go, her baby strapped on her back. She embraced John and then she stood back and raised her hand in a respectful salute to her previous husband. He touched his forehead and his heart to her. “Suckahanna, guard my son and daughter,” he said.

“Go safely, both of you,” she replied. “May the trail be smooth under your moccasins and the hunting rich.”

The two men jogged out of the village. John was used to the steady half-running pace of the hunting party now, and his calves no longer seized with cramp as his feet ate up the miles. But it was hard running in the snow. Both men were shiny with sweat when they paused to draw breath and to listen to the quietness of the winter woods all around them.

There was a mild thaw. John could hear a steady drip drip of melting water from trees where dark-stained twigs were at last thickening with buds. Attone’s head was cocked. “What can you hear?” he asked John.

John shook his head. “Nothing.”

Attone raised his eyebrows. He could never become accustomed to the insensitivity of the Englishman.

At once he crouched and his hand went into the gesture with two raised fingers, which meant hare or rabbit. At once John crouched beside him and they both put an arrow on the bow.

It came slowly, quite unaware of their presence. They heard it before they saw it because it was white against the white snow: a winter hare with a coat blanched like ermine. When it dropped on to its haunches the only sign that revealed its presence was the little dimples of dark footprints behind it, and the occasional betraying flick of an ear.

Attone raised his bow and the little thwack of sound as the bow was released was the first thing that alerted the hare. It bounded up and the arrow caught it in the body, behind the foreleg. John and Attone were behind it at once but the animal raced ahead of them, the arrow jinking and diving with it, like a harpoon in a speared fish.

Attone gave a sudden cry as he tripped and fell to the ground. John knew well enough not to check for a moment. He kept running, following the terrified creature, weaving in and out of trees, jumping over fallen logs, diving around rocks, and finally scrabbling on hands and knees through the winter-thin scrub to keep the wounded animal in sight.

Suddenly there was a crack of a musket shot, loud and startling as cannon fire in the icy silence, and John flung himself backward in terror. The hare was thrown into the air and fell down on its back. John rose up from the bushes, half-naked in bear-grease-stained skin and buckskin kilt and jerkin, and looked into the wan, half-starved face of his old friend Bertram Hobert.