Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

The bank sloped steeply up from the river, there would be no flooding on his fields, and there was a little hillock, perhaps half a mile back from the river frontage, where John would build his house. When the trees were cleared he would have a fine river view, and he would be able to look down the hill to his own landing stage where his own tobacco would be loaded to take downstream.

John thought his house would be set square to the river. A modest house, nothing like the grand size of Lambeth: a pioneer’s house of one room downstairs and a ladder leading up to a half floor for storage set in the eaves. A fireplace in one wall, which would heat the whole of the little building, a roof of reeds or maybe even wooden shingles. A floor of nothing more than beaten earth in the first few years, perhaps later John would put down floorboards. Windows which would be bare and open, empty of glass, but with thick wooden shutters to close in winter and bad weather. It would be a house only a little grander than an English pauper might build to squat on common land and think himself lucky. It would be a normal house in this new world, where nothing could be taken for granted and where men and women rarely had anything more than they could build or make for themselves.

Thoughtfully, John reached toward a sprouting vine and pulled away a cutting, tucking it in his pocket. He would grow it around his doorframe. It might be a little hovel in a great wilderness but it would still have a garden.

The house did not take long to build. There were men in Jamestown who would work at a daily rate, and Bertram and John hired them as a gang to work first on the Hobert house and then on John’s smaller version of the same design. The gang specified that they were to have their food and their ale, and that the nails, the most costly part of the house, were to be supplied: counted out each morning, and checked in at nightfall. They told John that when he wanted a new house built elsewhere, he should burn his old house down and then sift through the ashes for the nails. New timber could be had simply by clearing the woods around the foundations, but new nails had to come from England.

“But then you never have houses for sale,” John remarked. “You never have houses for newcomers.”

“They can build their own,” the man said in the rough frankness of the new world. “And if they cannot build their own they can go homeless.”

Sarah Hobert cooked for the men while they built her house, roasting meat over a camp fire on long skewers in a way that the colonists had learned from Indian guides. John thought of Suckahanna squatting beside the little fire with trout skewered on green sticks. Sarah made bread in a heavy dark dough from rye flour; the colonists could not grow wheat in this land. When her own house was finished and the builders moved on to John’s house, she came too and cooked for them there, never complaining that she would have preferred to start digging her own fields or planting her own vegetable patch.

“Thank you,” John said awkwardly as the Hoberts got into their native canoe to travel the little way downriver to their own homestead. “I could not have built it without you.”

“Nor could we have built ours so quick without you,” Bertram said. “I will come over in the next month or two to see how you are faring. We will have to be like brothers if we are to survive in this land, John.”

“It’s funny,” John said. He took the rope and cast it off, throwing it into Sarah’s waiting hands. “I thought this was an easy country to live in, easy to build a shelter, easy to find food. But now it seems to me that we are on the very edge of surviving, all the time.”

They looked at him blankly, their pale faces turned toward him as the current nudged the canoe away from the bank.

“Of course it is a struggle,” Sarah replied, stating the obvious. “The Lord God ordains that we should struggle our way through this difficult world to righteousness.”

“But a new world-” John suggested. “A new world of natural goodness, of natural wealth?”

She shook her head and the canoe bobbed. Bertram took up the paddle. “Men and women are born to struggle.”

“See you soon,” Bertram called over the widening gulf of water. “I’ll come over some time, when we are settled.”

John raised his hand in farewell and stood watching them. Bertram paddled the canoe awkwardly, with none of Suckahanna’s easy grace, and Sarah sat stiffly in the front for all the world like a Thames fishwife in a wherry. The current flowing swiftly downriver took them, so that Bertram need do no more than steer. John watched the flowing water for a long while after they had gone from sight around a bend in the river, then he turned and went slowly up the little track to his new house.

It stood, a plain little box made of green wood, in a square of cleared ground. John had felled no more than the trees he had needed to build it, and their unwanted branches and lesser wood was heaped in wasteful confusion all around. He stopped on his way up the riverbank to admire it. It was a square-built house, little more than a shed or a hovel, but he had felled the wood which had built it, and planed the planks of the door, and set the rough frame for the window and packed the reeds for the thatched roof, and he felt proud of it.

Then he looked a little closer. On one side of the door was the cutting he had picked when he first set foot on his new land. It had struck, he could see the fresh green growth of the trumpet vine which would flower in early summer as golden and as prolific as Turkish nasturtiums. But on the other side of the door, which he had not yet touched, someone had dug the earth, cleared it of stones, and planted another creeper, one he did not recognize, which already was putting out a little shoot to touch the new wall so that soon, perhaps as early as this summer, the door would be wreathed in some other new flower, planted by someone else.

His first thought was that Sarah must have put it in, working in an idle moment, while the rest of the building gang had been up on the roof. But then he realized that Sarah would have thought that such a task was a waste of time, and a vanity – neglecting the real work of the day. None of the builders would have troubled themselves with such a piece of frivolity. Bertram Hobert could not tell one plant from another unless it was tobacco from maize. And there had been no one else near the little house in the woods. John paused for a moment and then turned toward the darkening forest.

“Suckahanna?” he whispered into the green shadows. “Suckahanna? My love?”

She did not come to him, though that night he lay wakeful on the bare floor of his house, and waited for her, certain that she was out in the forest, waiting for him. At dawn he lifted the wooden latch on his new door and stepped out into the forest, already singing its way into morning, and looked around, expecting her to emerge from the trees and come to him. She was not there.

He went down to the river, half expecting to see her surface from the icy water, with a knife in her hand and a handful of freshwater mussels in her little purse; but the water was gray and ruffled only with the morning breeze.

John thought with a pang of cold fear that maybe she was tormenting him, to repay him for the delay, to make him wait for her as she had waited for him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, speaking to the indifferent trees, to the blithely singing birds in the high branches. “As soon as I got home I found my father was dead and there was much for me to do. My children needed me, and I had to work-” He hesitated. Even speaking before nothing but thick woodland, he was conscious of the lie of omission when he did not mention Hester. “I never forgot you,” he said. “Even when I was at war and fighting for my king I thought of you every day and I dreamed of you every night.” That part at least was mostly true.