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 behaviour 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 backwards and backwards towards the mountains. They used to live always on the move you see: winter inland, summer down towards 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.’
At dawn J was down at the quayside, Jamestown silent behind him and only the gleam of the fires in the bread ovens showing that anyone was awake.
The girl was there before him. She had a small dugout canoe bobbing in the dark water. J surveyed it uneasily. It too much resembled the tree it recently had been. The bark had been stripped off and the sides roughly chiselled so that it was shaped to a point at both ends, the inside had been scorched and then scraped clean; but it still looked nothing more than a small tree: stripped, shaped, and hollowed.
She was seated in the prow, a paddle in the water, waiting for him. When she saw him she looked up and gestured, with a tiny authoritative movement, that he should take his place behind her.
‘Won’t it sink?’ J demanded.
Again she made that small gesture.
J assumed that she could swim, and reminded himself that they were alongside the dock and the ship which had brought him from England was moored at the quayside, within hailing distance. He put his little travelling satchel in the boat and then stepped in himself. At once it rocked and nearly overturned.
J dropped to his knees, and found that the canoe steadied immediately. Before him was a paddle. He drew it out, careful not to move too fast, and put it in the water, on the same side as hers.
She glanced over her shoulder, her child’s face serious, and shook her head. J transferred his paddle to the other side and was rewarded by a grave nod. Then she leaned forward and dug the blade of her paddle into the lapping river water, and they moved slowly away from the wooden pier.
At first J could see nothing, but all his other senses were fully alert. He felt the canoe moving smoothly and easily on the water, the current of the river and the ebb of the tide together drawing them out to sea. He sensed the immensity of the water around them, a great desert of water, and their canoe moving among it like a sleek, dark fish. He could smell the land ahead of them: the salt mud, rank tidewash weed and rotting driftwood; and from Jamestown, falling away behind them, the homely smell of woodsmoke and the rancid stink of the household waste which they tipped at the water’s edge for the tide to take away.
Slowly the sky lightened and J could see the girl’s outline, kneeling in the canoe ahead of him. She bowed forward, digging her paddle into the inky black water. J tried to copy her motion and the canoe suddenly skidded as he got the stroke right. She did not turn her head, she was absorbed in her own task of weaving air and water together.
He could hear the birds stirring in the woods on either side of the river. A thousand single calls and coos and cries were building to a cacophony of sound that drifted over the glassy water towards them. There must be hundreds of thousands of birds in the wood to make such a sweep of sound, and then the river birds started to wake. J heard a clatter of quacking and a huge flight of ducks took off from the bank on his left and headed towards the brightening sky. Gulls were swirling and calling overhead, and then the whole world suddenly went dark as a flock of pigeons, innumerable birds, fled across the sky, blocking the light for minutes and filling the whole shadowy world with the creaking of their wings and the rush of their passage.
J had a sense of a virgin world: a place where man was a stranger, an interloper, who had not left a mark, a world where vast flocks and herds of animals and birds moved, obeying their natural order, and nothing could prevent them. It was a new world, another Eden, a paradise for a plant collector. For the first time in years, for the first time since Jane’s death, J had a powerful sense of hope, of the possibilities before him. If men could make their home in this new land they could make a country like a paradise, rich and easy. Perhaps even he could make a home here. Perhaps he and the children could make a new home here and the old life at Lambeth, London, and the old losses of Lambeth, could be left far behind.
They paddled for an hour to cross the wide river and reach the other bank. Then they turned and followed the south bank eastward, towards the sea. Even though the ebbing tide was taking them downriver they had to paddle to hold the canoe on course, and J’s shoulders and arm muscles were tight with strain after the first hour, but the girl still moved fluidly and easily, as if the delicate feathering of the paddle and the deep digging movement to push the boat forward were nothing to her.
As they drew closer to the bank J saw the virgin woods coming down to the water’s edge and brightly coloured birds flirting from trees to water and back again. Every now and then there was a clearing in the woods and the bare earth of a ploughed field. Sometimes there were black men and white men planting side by side, and they raised their heads to watch the canoe go by. J waved, but the girl stared straight ahead as if she were a little statue, with no curiosity about her fellow men at all.
The sun came up, a pale yellow sun
