Philippa Gregory: Virgin Earth

J opened his eyes and saw, instead of the whitewashed walls and ceiling of his Lambeth home, a thatched roof, close to his face. Beneath him, wooden boards, not even a straw mattress; a pace away, a young man on a pallet bed, still deep in sleep. He took in, slowly, the watery smell of something cooking, the discomfort of the hard floor, and the irritating itch of a fresh fleabite. He sat up cautiously, his head swimming. The solid wooden floor of the loft heaved under his gaze with the illusion of movement.

“You can stir yourselves or it’ll be cold!” came a shout from the woman who kept the lodging house. In one fluid movement the lad, her son, was up and out of bed and down the ladder to the kitchen below. J pulled on his boots, brushed down his breeches, shrugged his waistcoat over his grubby shirt, and followed him.

The woman was spooning a pale yellow mixture from the pot, suspended over a miserly fire, into four wooden bowls. She slapped them onto the table and bowed her head over her calloused hands for a brief grace. Another man who had stayed the night sleeping on the floor beside the fire drew up his stool, took out his own spoon and ate with relish.

“What is it?” J asked cautiously.

“Porridge made with Indian corn,” she replied.

“You’ll have to get used to it,” the man said. “Indian corn is almost all we eat.”

J smiled. “I wasn’t expecting milk and honey.”

“There’s many that do,” the woman said shortly. “And many that die still hoping.”

There was a short silence.

“You here prospecting?” the man asked.

“No,” J said. “I’m a gardener, a plant collector. I’ve come to collect plants. Authorized by King Charles himself.” He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should tell them about the great garden in Lambeth and his father’s reputation as the greatest gardener that had ever been, adviser to the Duke of Buckingham, gardener to the king and queen, one of the greatest collectors of rarities in the world. He looked at the woman’s enfolded, bitter face and thought that he would not.

The man nodded. “Will you see the king when you get home? If you get home,” he added.

J nodded and took a spoon of the porridge. It was bland, the corn boiled to the consistency of paste. “Yes. I work for him in his garden at Oatlands Palace,” he said.

“Well, tell him that we can’t do with this governor,” the man said bluntly. “Tell him that we won’t do with him, and that’s a fact. We’ve got enough worries to deal with here without having a fat fool set over us from England. We need a general assembly with a voice for every planter. We need a guarantee of our rights.”

“You’d be imprisoned if you spoke like that in England,” J pointed out mildly.

“That’s why I’m not in England,” the man said shortly. “And I don’t expect to live as if I were. Which is more than can be said for the governor, who expects to live like a lord with servants in a land where men and women have come to be free.”

“I’m not his adviser,” J said. “I speak to the king – when I ever see him – about plants and his garden.”

The man nodded. “So who does advise him now?”

J thought for a moment. It all seemed a long way away and of little interest in this new country. “The queen,” he said. “And Archbishop Laud.”

The man made a grimace and turned his head to spit but then checked the movement when he saw the woman glare. “Beg pardon. So he hasn’t called a parliament?”

J shook his head. “He hopes to rule without one.”

“I heard he was halfway to being a Papist.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“I heard that he has taken so many fines and so much wealth into his own hands that he does not need to call a parliament for them to vote taxes, that he lets his wife worship openly as a Papist, and that daily there are men and women in the country crying out for him to change,” the man said precisely.

John blinked at the accuracy and malice of the description. “I thought you were royalists in Virginia?”

“Not all of us,” the man said with a hard smile.

“Where are you going to find your plants?” the woman interrupted. “There’s nothing grown up and down the river but tobacco.”

“Surely people farm other crops?”

She shook her head. “We keep beasts – or at any rate they keep themselves. But with the fish jumping out of the river and the animals in the forest it’s not worth the labor of doing more than fishing and hunting. Besides, we can trade for anything we need with the Indians. They can do the labor of farming for us. We can all be squires here.”

“I thought I’d travel ’round,” J said. “Hire a horse and ride ’round the country, see what I can find.”

They both looked at him and rudely laughed in his face.

“Hire a horse!” the woman exclaimed. “There’s not more than half a dozen horses in the whole plantation. You might as well ask for a coach and four.”

J kept his temper. “I see I have much to learn.”

She rose from the table and went to the fire. “Dark morning,” she said irritably. She bent to the fire and lit what looked like a little twig of kindling. To J’s surprise it burned with a bright clear flame at the very tip, like a specially made taper. She rested it on a small holder, placed on the stone hearth for that purpose, and came back to the table.

“What’s that?”

She glanced back without interest. “We call it candlewood. I buy it from the Indians every autumn.”

“But what sort of wood is it?”

“Candlewood,” she said impatiently.

“But from what sort of tree?”

She looked at him as if he were foolish to be asking something that no one else cared about. “How should I know? I pay the Indians to fetch it for me. D’you think I go out into the woods to gather my own candlewood? D’you think I make my own spoons from spoonwood? D’you think I make my own sugar from the sugar tree or my own soap from the soapberry?”

“Candlewood? Spoonwood?” J had a moment of wild imagining, thinking of a tree growing candles, a tree growing spoons, a bush growing soap. “Are you trying to make a fool of me?”

“No greater fool than you are already – what else should I call them but what they are?”

“What you want,” the man said pacifically, pushing away his empty bowl and taking out a pipe and filling it with rich golden tobacco leaves, “is an Indian, a savage. One to use as your own. To take you out into the forest and show you all these things. Take you out in a canoe up and down the river and show you the things you want to know.”

“Don’t any of the planters know those things?” J asked. He felt fearful at the thought of being guided by an Indian. There had been too much talk in London of brown men armed with knives of stone who crept into your house and cut your throat while you slept.

The woman hawked and spat into the fireplace. “They don’t hardly know how to plant!” she said. “Everything they know they learned from the Indians. You can find yourself an Indian to tell you what the soapberry tree is. Civilized folks here aren’t interested in anything but gold and tobacco.”

“How shall I find an Indian to guide me?” J asked. For a moment he felt as helpless as a child, and he thought of his father’s travels – to Russia, to the Mediterranean, to Europe. He had never asked his father if he had felt fear, or worse than fear: the babyish whimper of someone lost, friendless in a strange land. “Where would I find a safe Indian?”

“No such thing as a safe Indian,” the woman said sharply.

“Peace!” J’s fellow lodger said quietly. “If you’re serving the king, you must have papers, a safe pass, that sort of thing.”