dockside building a woman came and stood before them.
She was an Indian woman but she wore a dress and a shawl tied across her breasts. Her hair was tied back like a white woman’s and it exposed her face which was badly scarred, pocked all over with pale ridges of scar tissue as if someone, long ago, had fired a musket at point-blank range into her face.
‘Mr Tradescant?’ She spoke with a harsh accent.
J spun to hear his name and recoiled from the bitterness in her face. She looked past him at the girl and spoke in a rapid string of words, fluting and meaningless as birdsong.
The child answered, as voluble as she, shaking her head emphatically and then pointing to J and to the plants and to the canoe.
The woman turned to J again. ‘She tells me you have not hurt her.’
‘Of course not!’
‘Not raped her.’
‘No!’
The bowstring-tight line of the woman’s shoulders suddenly slumped, and she gave a sharp sob, like a cough of vomit. ‘When they told me you had taken her into the woods I thought I would not see her again.’
‘I am a plant collector,’ J said wearily. ‘See. There are the plants. She was my guide. She made a camp. She hunted and fished for us. She has been a very, very good girl.’ He glanced at her and she gave him a swift encouraging smile. ‘She has been very helpful. I am in her debt.’
The Indian woman had not followed all of the words but she saw the glance that passed between them and read correctly the affection and mutual trust.
‘You are her mother?’ J asked. ‘Just … er … released?’
The woman nodded. ‘Mr Joseph told me he had given her to you for the month. I thought I would not see her again. I thought you had taken her to the woods to use her and bury her there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ J said awkwardly. ‘I am a stranger here.’
She looked at him with a bitter line around her mouth. ‘You are all strangers here,’ she observed.
‘She can speak?’ J remarked, tentatively, wondering what it might mean.
The woman nodded, not bothering to answer him.
The girl had finished unloading the canoe. She looked at J and gestured to the plants, as if asking what should be done with them. J turned to the woman. ‘I have to fetch some barrels and prepare these plants for my voyage home. I may take a passage on this ship. Can she stay and help me?’
‘We’ll both help,’ the woman said shortly. ‘I don’t leave her alone in this town.’ She hitched her skirts a little and went down to the shoreline. J watched the two women. They did not embrace; but they stood just inches away from each other and gazed into each other’s faces as if they could read all they needed to know in one exchange of looks. Then the mother nodded briefly and they turned side by side and their shoulders brushed as they bent over the plants together.
J went up to his lodging to fetch the barrels for packing the plants.
They worked until it was dusk, and then they worked again the next day, wrapping the cuttings in earth and damp linen, layering them in the barrel separated by damp linen and leaves, and packing the seeds in dry sand and sealing down the lid. When it was done, J had four half-barrels of plants which he would keep open to the air and damp with fresh water, and one sealed barrel of seeds. He shouted up to the ship and a couple of sailors came down and loaded them for him. At least he would have room to care for them on the voyage home. There were only a couple of people making the return voyage to England. The rest of the space was taken up with the cargo of tobacco.
‘We sail in the morning at first light,’ the captain warned him. ‘You’d best get your things aboard tonight and sleep aboard yourself. I can’t wait for passengers, when the tide ebbs we go out with it.’
J nodded. ‘I will.’ He had no desire to return to the inn and the embittered landlady. He thought if she called the girl a beast in his hearing then he would speak in her defence and then there would be a quarrel and perhaps worse.
He turned to the two women. ‘What is her name?’ he asked the mother.
‘Mary.’
‘Mary?’
She nodded. ‘She was taken from me when she was a baby and baptised Mary.’
‘Is that the name you use for her?’
She hesitated, as if she was not sure she would trust him. But then there was a murmur from the girl at her side.
‘She is called Suckahanna.’
‘Suckahanna?’ J confirmed.
The girl smiled and nodded. ‘It means “water”.’
J nodded, and then the fact of her speaking his own language suddenly struck him. ‘You can speak English?’
She nodded.
He had a moment of profound, unhappy bewilderment. ‘Then why did you never …? You never …? I did not know! All this time we have travelled together and you have been dumb!’
‘I ordered her never to speak to a white man,’ the woman said. ‘I thought she would be safer if she did not answer.’
J opened his mouth to argue – it must be right that the girl should be able to speak, to defend herself.
But the mother cut him off with an abrupt gesture of her hand. ‘I have just come from a month in prison for saying the wrong thing,’ she pointed out. ‘Sometimes it is better to say nothing at all.’
J glanced at the ship behind them. Suddenly he did not want to leave. The realisation that the girl had a name, and could understand him, made her intensely interesting. What had she been thinking during their days of silent companionship? What might she not say to him? It was as if she had been a princess under a spell in a romance and suddenly she had found her tongue. When he had confided in her and told her of his feelings, for his home, for his children, for his plants, she had met his confession with an impassive face. But she had understood, she had understood everything he said. And so, in a way, she knew him better than any woman had ever known him before. And she would know that only yesterday morning he was tempted to stay in this new land; to stay with her.
‘I have to go. I am promised in England,’ he said, thinking that they might contradict him, that he might not have to go, as if the breaking of the spell which had kept her silent might release him too.
The two women said nothing, they simply watched the indecision and reluctance in his face.
‘What will become of you two now?’ he asked, as if their plans might affect him.
‘We will leave Jamestown,’ the woman said quietly. ‘We will go back into the forest and find our people. I thought we would be safer to stay here, my husband and my father are dead. I thought I could live inside the walls and work for the white men. I thought I could be their servant.’ She shook her head. ‘But there is no trusting them. We will go back to our
