Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

He waited. From the river behind him came a loud splash. John whirled around. But there was only the spreading ring of water where a salmon had leaped or an otter broken the surface in a dive. She was not there. Not in the river and not in the trees.

John shrugged his coat a little closer around his shoulders and went into his house.

John opened a new sack of cornmeal and put his pot on the embers of the fire. He heated up enough water for a wash, a drink, and to make suppawn porridge for his breakfast.

“I must hunt this evening,” he said to the empty house. “I can’t live on this swill.”

He washed his face but did not trouble to shave. “I shall grow a beard and a mustache like my father,” he said to the empty room. “Who is there to see me after all?” He poured half the hot water into a beaker, threw a spoonful of the cornmeal into what was left and stirred it till it thickened. It was warm and he was hungry. He tried to ignore the fact that it tasted of nothing.

He took his bowl, spoon and pot down to the river and washed them, watching the reeds to his left for movement, in case Suckahanna was hiding there, watching him, and laughing at him having to do woman’s work. Then he filled the pot with fresh water and went back up to his house.

The room was still silent and empty. John took down his ax from the hook above the fireplace and went out to cut wood from the felled timber before the house. The great felling of trees to clear land for planting would have to wait. Firewood was the most important. The fire must not, on any account, go out. Enough people had warned him of the danger in Jamestown, and that was in a town, where you could borrow a couple of glowing embers from the house next door and carry them home on a shovel. Here in the wilderness, a fire was like a spark of life itself. If it went out it might take a couple of hours to get it lit again, even with a good tinderbox and dry wood, and if darkness and cold were coming on, that would seem a very long time. If a pack of wolves had found the courage to come to the door, it would feel like an eternity with neither light nor fire to scare them away, and no means of firing the musket.

John cut and split logs for most of the morning and then piled them on either side of the fireplace to dry. He opened the rough-planed door of his house and looked down to the river. He was aching with fatigue and yet all he had done was get in one, perhaps two, day’s supply of firewood. He had nothing for dinner but more suppawn porridge, and nothing at all for supper. He set the pot on the fire to heat the water and felt, for the first time, a dark sense of foreboding that surviving would be a struggle in this country that no longer seemed rich and easy.

“I must think,” John said into the silence of the house. “Suckahanna and I ate like princes, every day, and she was not chopping trees all morning. I must try to live like her, and not like an Englishman.” He scraped the last of the porridge from his wooden bowl and put it to one side. “I’ll put down a fish trap,” he resolved. “And at dusk when the birds are coming back to the trees to roost I’ll shoot a couple of pigeons.”

He felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of roast pigeon. “I can do that,” he promised himself. “I can learn to live here, I am a young man still. And later, when Bertram and Sarah come over, Sarah can teach me how to make bread.”

He set his bowl and spoon to one side and went to his pile of belongings, to find a length of twine. “Now a fish trap,” he said.

John had seen a fish trap in Jamestown, and had watched Suckahanna weave one out of the tendrils of vines and a couple of sticks. She had spent two evenings on it, and on the third evening they had eaten roasted carp. John had bought the withy hoops and the string in Jamestown, all he had to do was knot a net that would keep a fish inside. He took the string and the hoops outside, sat on a tree stump in the afternoon sunshine and started to work. First he made a row of knots around the large entrance hoop. The fish was to swim in, and then through a series of hoops, each one smaller, until it was trapped in a little space at the end of the maze, and could not find its way out. John knotted his first row and then set to work on the second. It was intricate, difficult work, but John was a patient man, and determined. He bent over the task, twisting the string, knotting, moving on to the next row. He did not notice the sun was falling behind the trees until the shadow had chilled his back. Then he straightened and sighed.

“By God, this is weary work,” he said. He took string and hoops inside the house and put them down at the fireside. The fire was burning low. He put on another couple of logs and took his musket down. He loaded it, tipping the powder and then the ball down the muzzle, and then sprinkled a pinch of powder at the top of the powder pan, ready for lighting. He bent over the fire to light the long coil of oiled string which served as the fuse. When it was glowing brightly he held it between first and second finger, well away from the powder pan, and went quietly out of his house.

The trees were so near that John could hunker down on his doorstep, his two vines on either side, and watch the open sky above him for the wood pigeons coming home to roost. A great whirling flock of them came in all at once, and John waited for them to settle in the trees. One plump, confident bird landed on an extended branch that dipped under its weight. John waited for the branch to stop swaying and then took careful aim, touching the glowing string to the powder.

He was lucky. The sound of the shot was like a cannon blast going off in that innocent land and the flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees in a flurry of whirling wings. But John’s target bird could not fly up, it spiraled downward, one wing broken, bleeding from the breast. John dropped his musket and taper and ran across the cleared ground, crossing it in five giant strides. The bird was scrabbling to get away, one wing trailing. John snatched it up and wrung its neck quickly and mercifully. He felt the little heart pound and then stop. He went back to the doorstep, put the bird inside, near the fireplace with the unfinished fish trap, and reloaded the gun.

The light was going fast and it was getting cold and dark. The pigeons, recovering from their fright, circled the little clearing and landed in the trees again. John took aim and fired and the birds dashed skyward again, but this time nothing fell to earth.

“Just the one,” John said. “Well, that will do for my supper at least.”

He plucked the bird carefully, saving the feathers in a fold of linen. “That’ll make me a pillow some day,” he said with assumed cheerfulness to the shadowy room. He gutted and beheaded the bird, tossing the entrails into the water in his cooking pot which he set on the fire for soup. Then he split the pigeon into four, and skewered the pieces carefully on a sharp green stick and set it before the fire with the pot beneath it to catch the dripping juices.

It was a long while for a hungry man to wait but John did not allow himself to hurry, nor to be distracted from the task of turning and turning the fowl while its stubbly skin grew golden, and then brown, and then finally crisp and black. “Pray God it’s cooked through,” John said fervently, his stomach rumbling with hunger.

He took the skewer, and with his knife pushed the pieces off the charred wood on to his trencher. The meat was speckled with burned wood. John flicked the splinters away and then took up a little leg joint. It was wonderful: hot, tasty, and strong. John burned his lips against the hot skin but nothing could have stopped him biting into the flesh. He ate every scrap of meat and then dropped the bare bones reverently into his cooking pot. For the first time in his little house he looked around with something like confidence.