Philippa Gregory: Virgin Earth

J swatted and wiped and smoothed his face and his neck and his hands, making a thousand awkward ungainly movements to each one of her gliding paces. She trotted like an animal, with no wasted energy. Her arms were relaxed at her side, her upper body still, only her feet pattered forward in little steps, steadily one before the other in a thin one-track path. J, watching her run, at first thought it was the pace of a little child; but then found he could hardly keep up with her as she crossed the fields and headed for the trees.

The edge of the forest was like the face of a friend with half the teeth knocked out. The girl looked around at the ragged stumps of trees as if she was grieving for the loss of someone’s smile. Then she made that little gesture of her shoulder which said so eloquently that there was no accounting for what a white man might do, and went forward with that slow, very slow trot that was just faster than J’s normal walk, and too slow for his running stride. He was continually walking and then breaking into a run to catch her up and then walking again.

As soon as they were beyond the felled trees she stepped off the path, looked around her, listened for one intent moment and then went to a hollow tree at the side of the path. With one fluid movement she flung the shift over her head, folded it carefully, and stowed it in the roots of the tree.

She was all but naked. A little buckskin skirt covered her privates in front but left her long thighs and buttocks exposed. Her breasts were those of a young girl, pointed and as firm as muscle. J exclaimed, not with desire but with fear, and looked around him. For a moment he thought he might have been entrapped by her, and that someone would spring up to witness that he was with her, looking at her shameful nakedness, and some dreadful punishment would follow.

The forest was silent, there was no one there but the two of them. At once J imagined that she must be inviting him, seducing him; and he could not deny that she was halfway to being desirable. But then he saw that she was not even aware of him, blind to his rapid succession of fears and thoughts. Without fear, without any sense of her own nudity, without the shame she should feel, she bent to the foot of the tree and drew out a small black jug. She dipped in her fingers and drew out a handful of a reddish grease. She smoothed it all over her body as a rich woman will stroke perfume on her skin, and smiled at J when she straightened up and her body glistened with it.

He could see now that the blue and red tattoos that ringed her shoulder blades went down her narrow back in wild spirals. Only her small breasts and belly were bare of them. The grease had added a redder color to her skin and a darker sheen to the tattoos. She looked stranger and older than she had on the Jamestown green. Her hair looked longer and thicker, her eyes darker and wilder. J watched this transformation from a child in someone’s hand-me-down clothes to a young woman in her own gleaming skin with a growing sense of awe. She had changed from a serving maid – the child of a criminal serving maid – into a creature of the wood who looked as if she belonged there, and whose skin, dappled with the light through the shifting canopy of the leaves, was almost invisible against the dappled light of the forest floor.

She held out the pot for him to take some grease.

“No, thank you,” J said awkwardly.

Again she proffered it.

J shook his head.

Patiently she pointed to the cloud of insects around his face and neck, and J noticed for the first time that there were no midges and moths around her. She thrust the pot toward him.

Squeamishly, J dipped his hand into the pot and brought out a little grease on the tips of his fingers. It smelled rancid, like old sweat and well-hung meat. J could not help a swift expression of distaste at the powerful stink, he wiped the grease away on a leaf and shook his head again. The girl was not offended. She merely shrugged and then corked the pot with a bundle of leaves, and put it in a woven bag that she drew out from under the tree trunk along with a small quiver made of reeds holding half a dozen arrows, and a small bow.

The quiver she hung at her side, the bow over her shoulder, the soft woven bag across her body to hang on the other hip. Then she nodded to him briskly, to indicate she was ready. She gestured toward the river – did he want to go along the shoreline?

J pointed toward the deeper trees to their left. She nodded and stepped before him, made that little confident gesture that told him to follow behind her, and led the way.

She moved as quietly as an animal through the shadows and the trees. Not even the arrows in her quiver rattled together. The tiny, almost invisible, track was blocked at every pace by a fallen log or a strand of creeper stretching from one tree to another. She trotted over the one and ducked beneath the other without ever breaking her steady stride. J, out of breath, breaking twigs and kicking stones with his heavy shoes, ducking beneath vines, rubbing his face against the trailing disagreeable stickiness of spiders’ webs and the stinging moths, stamped behind her like a pursuing cart horse.

She did not look around. “Well, she hardly needs to look to know that I am following her,” J thought. The noise alone was enough to alert all of Virginia. But she did not even glance to see if all was well with him. She just went at her slow steady trot, as if having been assigned the task of taking him into the deep forest she need no longer consult him until she delivered him to his destination.

They jogged for about half an hour as J’s breathing went from a pant to a straining, painful snatching for breath, until at last they came to a clearing where she paused and turned. J, who had been watching every step on the treacherous path, though blinded by his own sweat and dazzled by a cloud of stinging insects, dropped to the ground and whooped for air. Courteously she hunkered down beside him, sitting on her heels, and waiting, composed and silent, for the white man to stop panting and mopping his face and grabbing at his side where he had a stitch and at his ankle where he had a sprain.

Slowly J fell silent. The noises of the wood which had been obscured by his trampling progress rose up all around him. There were frogs croaking from the river behind them, there were crickets singing. There were birds singing in the thick canopy of leaves above them, pigeons cooing, jays calling, and an interweaving of sounds which J, a town boy, could not recognize.

He heard the rasp of his own breath subside and he turned to look at her. She was quiet and composed.

J gave her a small, almost apologetic, smile and lifted his hand to the neck of his thick linen shirt and flapped it to indicate his heat. She nodded solemnly and pointed to his thick jacket.

J, feeling every inch a fool, slid his arms out of the sleeves and handed it to her. She folded it as carefully as a housewife in England and put it beside them and scattered a handful of leaves and moss on it. At once it had disappeared. J blinked. He could not even see the outline of it. She had hidden it completely.

She turned and pointed at his breeches and his boots. J shook his head.

Again she pointed at his breeches and mimed pulling them down. J, feeling like an aged virgin clutching to modesty, held the waistband tighter to him. He saw the glimpse of a smile cross her face, but then she molded her expression into impassivity. She gave a little shrug which said as eloquently as any words that he might wear his breeches if he chose to be hot and uncomfortable and keep his boots if he wanted to alert the whole forest by his heavy tread.

She made a small gesture with her hand that said: “Here. Trees,” and then she sat back on her heels and looked at him expectantly.