J made a little bow to her, and meant the gesture of respect.

She smiled, that little gleam of pride again, and then pulled the arrow from the tree trunk, discarded the broken arrowhead and replaced it with another, put the arrow back in her quiver and led the way from the forest clearing at her usual trot.

“Slower,” J commanded.

She glanced at him. He was clumsy with tiredness, his leg muscles singing with pain, and unbalanced by his burden of seedlings. Again he saw that small smile and then she turned and walked before him with a loping pace which was only a little slower. She paused for a moment in the clearing where he had thrown off his jacket and picked it up, dusted off the leaves and handed it to him. Then she led the way back to the hollow tree at the edge of the forest. She hid her bow and arrow in the trunk and drew out her servant’s shift.

J, after a long day of jogging behind her dappled flanks, was now accustomed to her nakedness. He found that he liked the gleam of her skin better than the crumpled mess of the shift. He thought she was diminished by the gown, she looked less modest than in her proud tattoos and buckskin. He made a little shrug to show his sense that she was returning to some sort of unnatural constraint and she nodded at his sympathy, her face grave.

“You will stay at my inn tonight,” J said, pointing down to Jamestown where there were already lights showing and chimneys smoking.

She neither nodded nor shook her head, she was frozen still, her eyes never leaving his face.

“And tomorrow we shall go out into the forest again. Mr. Joseph said you should come out with me every day for a month, until your mother is freed.”

She nodded her consent to that. Then she stepped forward and pointed at the little plants in his pocket and gestured toward the river. She mimed the strong paddling of a canoe, out toward the sea. Her hand gestured to the right, they should go south, she waved, a long way, waved again, a very long way; then she stepped back from him and with her arms spread and her shoulders rounded she mimed for him a tree: a tree with branches that bowed down, bowed down low over still water, spread her fingers: with branches that trailed into the water.

J was entranced. “But can we get a canoe?”

The girl nodded. She pointed to herself and held out her hand, pointing to her palm, the universal mime for money. J proffered a silver coin, she shook her head. He drew out his tobacco pouch. She nodded and took a fat handful. Then she pointed his face toward Jamestown, looked into his eyes again as if she were reluctant to trust so stupid a man to find his own way home, and then she nodded at him and turned toward a shrubby bush.

In a second she had disappeared. Disappeared without trace. J saw the little branches of the bush quiver and then she was gone, not even a glimmer of the servant’s smock showing in the darkness. For a moment he waited, straining his eyes against the failing light to see if he could spot her, but she had disappeared as surely as a roe deer will vanish by merely standing still.

J, realizing that he would never find her against her will, knowing that he had to trust her, turned his face toward Jamestown as she had bid him and trudged home.


When the lodging-house woman knew that J had spent all day with the Indian girl in the woods, and would spend nights away with her, she was scathing.

“I’d have thought a man fresh out of England could have done without,” she said. She dumped in front of him a wooden bowl filled to the brim with a pale porridge.

“Suppawn,” his fellow lodger said out of the side of his mouth. “Indian cornmeal and milk.”

“More corn?” J asked.

The man nodded grimly and spooned his portion in silence.

“I’d have thought you could have brought a woman from England, if your needs are that urgent,” the woman said. “God knows, the town needs more women. You can’t make a plantation with nothing but soldiers and fools.”

J bent his head and slurped porridge from his spoon.

“Don’t you have a wife you could have brought?” the woman demanded.

Grief stabbed J like a knife in the belly. He looked up at her and something in his face silenced her nagging.

“No,” he said abruptly.

There was a short embarrassed silence.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “if I spoke wrong…”

J pushed away the bowl, the familiar feeling of grief choking him from his belly to his throat.

“Here,” the man offered. He produced a leather bottle from the folds of his breeches and poured a slug over J’s unwanted porridge. “Have a drop of Barbados rum, that’s the thing to give it flavor.” He poured a measure for himself and stirred it in. He waved to J with his spoon. “Eat up,” he said with rough kindliness. “This is not a land where a man can go hungry and eat later. Eat up and drink up too. You never know where your next meal is coming from here.”

J pulled his bowl toward him, stirred in the rum and tasted the porridge. It was much improved.

“The girl is guiding me to plants and trees,” he said to them both. “As I told you, I am a collector. Neither the governor nor Mr. Joseph could think of anyone else who could assist me. But she is a good little girl. She is not much older than my own daughter. I should think she is little more than thirteen. She leads me to the forest and then waits quietly and leads me home.”

“Her mother is a whore,” the lodging-house woman remarked spitefully.

“Well, she is but a little maid yet,” J said firmly. “And I would not be the man to abuse her.”

The woman shook her head. “They’re not like us. She’s no more a maid than my young mastiff bitch is a maid. When she’s ready she’ll couple like an animal. They’re not like us, they’re half beasts.”

“You speak badly of them because of your losses,” J’s fellow lodger said fairly. He nodded to J. “Mistress Whitely here lost her man and her child in the Indian rising of ’twenty-two. She doesn’t forget. No one who was here at the time can ever forget.”

“What happened?” J asked.

The woman lowered herself to the bench opposite him and leaned her chin on her hand. “They were in and out of Jamestown every night and day,” she said. “The children stayed in our houses, our men went out hunting with them. Again and again we would have starved if they had not traded with us – food, fish, game. They taught us how to plant: corn and the rest. They taught us how to harvest it and cook it. We would have died over and over again if they had not sold us food. The vicar was going to have an Indian school. We were going to teach them our ways, Christian ways. They were to be subjects of the king. There was not the slightest warning, not the hint of a warning. The chief had been their leader for years and he came and went through Jamestown as free as a white man. We had his own son as a hostage, we feared nothing. Nothing.”

“Why did you have hostages then?” J asked.

“Not hostages,” she corrected herself swiftly. “Adopted children. Godchildren. Children in our care. We were educating them in our ways. Turning them from savagery.”

“And what happened?” J asked.

“They waited and planned.” Her voice was lowered, the two men leaned forward to hear her, there was something fearful in the way the three white faces went closer together, and her voice dropped to a haunting whisper. “They waited and planned and at eight o’clock one morning – Good Friday morning they chose in their blasphemy – all over the country they came out of the bushes, to each little farm, to each little family, to each lone man, they came out and struck us dead. They planned to kill every single one of us without a word of warning reaching the others. And they’d have done it too; but for one little turncoat Indian boy who told his master that he had been ordered to kill him, and the man ran to Jamestown and raised the alarm.”

“What happened?”

“They opened the arsenal at Jamestown and called the settlers in. Everyone who was near enough came in and the town was saved, but up and down the river, in every isolated farmhouse, there was a white man and woman with their skull staved in by a stone axe.”

She turned her bleak face to J. “My husband’s head was cleaved in two, with an axe of stone,” she said. “My little boy was stabbed through the heart with an arrowhead of shell. They came against us without proper weapons, they came against us with reeds and shells and stones. It was like the land itself rose up and struck at us.”

There was a long silence.

She rose from the table and stacked the bowls, callous again. “That’s why I have no time for even the smallest girl of theirs,” she said. “They are like stones and reeds and trees to me. I hate every stone and reed and tree in this land, and I hate every one of them. I hate them to their death and destruction. This land will never be home for me until every one of them is gone.”

“How many of us died?” J asked. He said “us” without thinking. This was a war of the dark forests against the white men; of course he counted himself among the planters.

“Not quite four hundred,” she said bitterly. “Four hundred men and women who wanted nothing more than to live in peace in a little part of a great great land. And then the hunger came.”

“Hunger?”

“We had to leave the crops in the field, we were too afraid to bring them in,” she explained. “We all crowded into Jamestown and manned the guns over the wooden walls. It was a bitter winter, and there wasn’t enough to eat. And we couldn’t trade with them as we usually did. We had always traded with them for their winter stores, they always had plenty and they always sold to us. But now we were at war with the very people who had fed us.”

J waited for more.

“We don’t talk about that time,” she said shortly. “About that winter. We ate what we could, and no blame to those who found what they could.”

J turned to his fellow lodger for an explanation.

“The graveyard,” the man said in an undertone. “They dug up their dead and ate them.”

The woman’s face was stony. “We ate what we could get,” she said. “And you’d have done the same. There’s no such thing as Christian behavior when you’re starving. We did what we had to do.”

J felt the suppawn dinner rise up in the back of his throat at the thought of what the cook had tasted.

“We survived,” she said flatly.

“I’m sure-” J stammered.

“And when the weather got warmer those who were not dead of their wounds, or of grief, or of starvation, died of the plague,” she went on. “All of us packed in to this little town, all of us sick with grief and fear. Hundreds died that winter, and it was all the Indians’ fault. As soon as we could muster men and supplies we went against them. We passed a law and we swore an oath, that not a man or a woman would be left alive.”

The man nodded. “We hunted them down like dogs and we pushed them further and further away. It was an order – kill all the men and women and enslave the children. We pretended to be at peace for a while and we watched them plant their crops and commit themselves to their fields, and then, and only then, we went in and destroyed their harvest. They make fish weirs, intricate clever things, we destroyed them wherever we saw them. We drove away the game so that they would starve when they went hunting, we burned them out of their villages so they were homeless, we trampled their crops in the field so they would know hunger as we had known hunger. We took our revenge.”

“We had some good hunting,” the woman said reminiscently. She drew three mugs of ale and set them on the table. “I remember the soldiers from the fort coming in with the heads of the savages at their belt, and then setting them up along the gate like a gamekeeper stakes up a dead weasel.”

“And are they finished now?” J could hear the nervousness in his own voice.

“Oh yes,” the man said. “This was sixteen years ago, remember, and there’s not been a word from them since. They cannot live without the spread of land for their game and farming, and we have pushed them backward and backward toward the mountains. They used to live always on the move, you see: winter inland, summer down toward the sea, spring to the fields. Once we built our houses and cleared the forest we drove them out, drove them like a herd of deer into bad foraging.”

“They must hate us as their worst enemies,” J said.

Neither of them answered. The man shrugged and lowered his face into his mug.

“We won, and that’s the main thing,” the woman said firmly. “It’s our land now and if they want to live here they have to serve us. There’s no more schools and teaching of them. There’s no more peace and promises of friendship. If they want to stay in our borders they do as they are bid. They can be our slaves or their blood can water the fields. Nothing else.”