Rory Clements - Revenger

Boltfoot was close behind her, lighting one of the pitch torches they had brought with them. He looked around. It was cold, damp, and empty, a two-room house with bare stone walls and no hiding places. Each room had a single window, but neither of them had glass, so they were exposed to the wind and rain; all the building provided was a roof over their heads.

They had loaded their pack-saddles with meats, cheese, bread, ale, water, and blankets. Soon they had a fire going in one of the rooms and ate their fill in silence, wondering where they might seek a more permanent shelter on the morrow. Outside, the wind hammered against the door. The torch and candles inside guttered in the draft and threw strange shadows across the walls.

Shakespeare stood up. “We are sitting here like targets. Boltfoot.”

Boltfoot nodded his head and growled. He knew what to do. He rose, unslung his caliver, took the dry powder horn from beneath his hide jerkin, and handed it and the firearm to Shakespeare. Then he thrust his cutlass into his belt and stepped out into the squally darkness.

The rain and wind blew in at the opening of the door, extinguishing the candles. The torch stayed alight.

At last Shakespeare turned to Eleanor Dare. “This is a most curious way to meet, mistress,” he said. “I must confess that when my lord of Essex asked me to find you, I had never thought that this day would come.”

“Thank you for helping me.”

“I confess, too, that I was not happy when I discovered you were here, for it seemed you had brought evil with you. Men are dying because of this curious quest to find you.”

Catherine put an arm around the woman. “Do not be hard, John. Eleanor has told me a little of what she knows. There is a story within her that burns her like a fever. Perhaps she will tell it, while we sit and wait for morning…”

“As you wish. Tell it as best you may and I will listen.”

H ER VOICE WAS QUIET, SCARCE MORE THAN A WHISPER. “We were on this shore,” she said. “Watching the boats depart, waving God speed.”

That had been her last sight of her father. “Tears streamed down my cheeks. Ananias, my husband, was at my side. I held Virginia tight to my breast, where she was suckling. I pointed at my father as he grew ever more distant. ‘There is your grandfather,’ I whispered to her. ‘He will return to us soon.’ ”

It had been a forlorn hope, for the darkness of war hung over England and no English ships would reach Roanoke again until three years later. And so they had to make the best of their new homeland. She described the island in disparaging terms, with loathing, even. Yes, she said, it was sheltered and wooded, but it had little in the way of food for foraging or hunting and they had arrived too late for planting.

Worse than that, though, was the feeling that it was somehow haunted, that eyes watched them wherever they went, that they were not welcome and never would be. And their fear was not mere imagination, for most of the native Indian tribes in the area had come to loathe the settlers from across the sea. There had been clashes. A local chieftain had been killed. The danger of reprisals was always present-and the Indians could no longer be relied on to help when the colonists were short of food.

“Our home was a small wood-built cottage with wattle-and-daub panels,” Eleanor said. “The first colonists had put it up and it was serviceable, though it was ill-equipped for the winters, when the wind rattled through the gaping holes and thatch. We were outside the main fort, but nearby in case of attack. We all wished, though, that the houses had been within the palisade, for we would have slept more soundly.”

That late summer and autumn of 1587, after the ships had gone, the settlers began to realize that it was going to be bad. If the men went fishing or deer hunting, they had to go in numbers, with arms, for fear that the savages would pick them off. Just going to the midden, away from the palisade, filled them with terrors.

One of the assistant governors, George Howe, had been murdered even before John White left with the ships. Eleanor reeled off the names of others who soon fell victim. “Thomas Stevens was the next, filled with arrows and his eyes taken. Then Agnes Wood and Jane Jones vanished together one day while foraging for nuts. They were never found, neither dead nor alive.”

Eleanor Dare paused, her eyes closed as if remembering something, a face of a long-dead friend, perhaps. Catherine Shakespeare reached out and took her hand. “What had made you go there, Mistress Dare?”

Eleanor sighed. Outside the stone cottage, the wind gusted and the rain beat down. “I never did want to be on that heathen shore, but Ananias was full of zeal. ‘We’ll be able to worship free, Ellie,’ he would say, ‘as God intended for us. We will never be free in England.’ Ralegh had promised us five hundred acres of virgin land. My father and the others-Harriot, Hakluyt, Sir Walter, and the corporation-they said it was a land of untold riches. The men believed every word, but not me. My mother, God rest her soul, did always call me Doubting Ellie, for my suspicions; whenever others cheered, I always held my counsel.”

She spoke then of the long journey there, when she was already with child, and how she had become increasingly wary. The voyage had been full of sickness. Two and a half months long, from early May through the summer, “in weather so hot the ship’s bilges threw up a stink, like the bowels of hell.” The mariners did not like them and gave them the worst of the food-salt pork with maggots, biscuit that had turned blue-gray with mold. But Eleanor, at least, found some kindness. Perhaps it was her prettiness or the fact that her belly was swelling with each passing day, but one of the crewmen had looked out for her, bringing her the best of the meats and butter, cheese and ale. He made certain that she was as comfortable as could be, despite the sour looks of Ananias, who did not like the attentions the man paid his wife. “I am sorry if Ananias was unhappy, but in truth I doubt I would have seen my baby to term without that man’s help.”

Eleanor shivered and folded her arms about her chest. She paused, summoning up the memories so long suppressed. The first winter had been terrible, she said. They had been told it would be warm and mild all year round, being so far south, but that was not how it was. Winter there was more bitter than any they had encountered in England. The wind cut in from the sea like a knife forged from ice and steel.

Ananias, her husband, was killed on Christmas morning. He had gone out from the palisade alone to check on the traps and bring in some firewood. When he did not return by noon, some of the men went out after him, but all knew there was no hope. They found him stretched out on the ground, tied by his ankles and wrists to four stakes. A fifth stake had been driven through his belly and he had been left there to die. He must have screamed in pain, but they did not hear him. Or if they did, they took it for the howling of the wind. The men went out to avenge him, but that brought no comfort.

The rift was so deep then that none of the tribes would trade with them, not even those that had held back from open hostility. When the settlers approached their villages, the Indians fled for the woods.

“Thomas Topan was next to die, then Mark Bennett. Horribly murdered and mutilated, both of them. There was sickness, too, and by spring a half dozen were gone with the bloody flux, including Margery Harvey’s baby, who had been born soon after my Virginia. Our only hope then was that my father would return with supplies. But the summer came and went and there was no sign of him.”