The fire which she had faithfully kept glowing for all the days of their stay she now damped with water, and then scuffed over with sand. The cooking sticks which they had used as spits for fish, game birds, crabmeat and even the final feast of lobster she broke and cast into the river. The reeds which had thatched the walls and the leaves which had thatched the roof she scattered. In only a little while their campsite was destroyed, and a white man would have looked at the clearing and thought himself the first man there.
J found that he was not ready to leave. “I don’t want to go,” he said unwillingly. He looked into her serene uncomprehending face. “You know… I don’t want to go back to Jamestown, and I don’t want to go back to England.”
She looked at him, waiting for his next words. It was as if he were free to decide, and she would do whatever he wished.
J looked out over the river. Now and then the water stirred with the thick shoals of fish. Even in the short weeks that they had been living at the riverside he had seen more and more birds flying into the country from the south. He had a sense of the continent stretching forever to the south, unendingly to the north. Why should he turn his back on it and return to the dirty little town on the edge of the river, surrounded with felled trees, inhabited by people who struggled for everything, for life itself?
The girl did not prompt him. She hunkered down on the sand and looked out over the river, content to wait for his decision.
“Shall I stay?” J asked, secure in the knowledge that she could not understand his rapid speech, that he was raising no hopes. “Shall we build ourselves another shelter and spend our days going out and bringing in fine specimens of plants? I could send them home to my father, he could pay off our debts with them, and then he could send me enough money so that I could live here always. He could raise my children, and when they are grown they could join me. I need never go back to that house in London, never again sleep alone in that bed, in her bed. Never dream of her. Never go into church past her grave, never hear her name, never have to speak of her.”
She did not even turn her head to look at him, to see if there was meaning in his quiet whispering.
“I could make a new life here, I could become a new man. And this year, next year, you will be a beautiful woman,” J said, his voice very gentle. “And then…”
She turned at that, as if she understood the tone of his voice. Turned and looked directly at him, without shame, as if she were about to ask him what he meant – if he were serious. J broke off and flushed. He managed an awkward smile.
“Well!” he said. “Just as well this all means nothing to you! Better be off!”
She rose to her feet and gestured to the river. Her half-tilted head asked: “Which way?” South into the country, which neither of them knew, or upriver to Jamestown?
“Jamestown,” J said shortly, pointing northwest. “I have been rambling like a fool. Jamestown, of course.”
He seated himself in the canoe and steadied it with his paddle. It was easier now that they had gone out every day and he had grown skillful. She pushed off the prow of the boat and stepped aboard. They paddled as a team and the boat wove easily along the shoreline, and then they felt the stronger push of the river.
An hour out of Jamestown, where the river started getting dirty and the bank was pocked with felled trees, she called a halt and they ran the canoe ashore. Slowly, unwillingly, they washed off the grease in the water. She took a handful of leaves and scrubbed his back so that his white skin shone through the dark grease and the familiar smell, which he had hated so much on the first day, was dispersed. Together they put on the clothes they must wear in the town, and she shrank into the confines of the ragged shift and looked no longer like a deer in dappled sunlight but instead like a sluttish maidservant.
J, shrugging back into his shirt and breeches after the freedom of the buckskin loincloth, felt as if he were taking on the shackles of some sort of prison, becoming a man again with a man’s sorrows and no longer a free being, at home in the forest. At once the cloud of insects settled greedily on his sunburned arms and shoulders and face. J swatted at them and swore, and the girl smiled with her lips but with no laughter in her eyes.
“We’ll come out again,” J said encouragingly. He pointed to himself and to her and to the trees. “We’ll come out again someday.”
She nodded but her eyes were dark.
They got into the canoe and began to paddle upstream to Jamestown. J was plagued all the way by the biting moths and the sweat in his eyes, the tightness of the shirt across his back and the rub of his boots. By the time they came alongside the little wooden quay he was sweating and irritable. There was a new vessel in port and a crowd on the quayside. No one wasted more than a quick glance on the little Indian girl and the white man in the dugout canoe.
They ran the canoe aground at the side of the quay and started to unload the plants. From the shadow of the 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.