Earthly Joys

September 1616

The new cottage at Canterbury was little bigger than their first home at Meopham but Elizabeth did not complain, as the front door opened to a proper city street and the finishing of the house was elegant. They cooked and ate and lived in the large ground-floor room and Elizabeth and John slept in a curtained four-poster bed in the room next door. J, now a boy of eight years old, went up the shallow stairs to a pallet bed in the attic. During the day John went and gardened for Lord Wootton, and J went to Dame School where, for a penny a week, he was taught to read and write and to figure sums. They both came home for their dinner at four o’clock on the darkening autumn afternoons, John with a spade over his shoulder, J with his schoolbook clutched under his arm.

Elizabeth, slicing parsley for the soup one afternoon, heard three, not two, sets of boots stamping off mud in the porch of the little cottage and put her sacking apron off in the expectation of company. She opened the front door to John, to her son, and to a young man, brown-faced and smiling, with the unmistakable swagger and roll of a seafaring man.

“Captain Argall,” Elizabeth said without pleasure.

“Mrs. Tradescant!” he exclaimed and swept into the house, kissing her heartily on one cheek and then the other. “The most beautiful rose in all of John’s gardens! How are you?”

“Very well,” Elizabeth said, disengaging herself and going back to the kitchen table.

“I have brought you a handsome ham,” Sam Argall said, looking at the stewpot and sliced vegetables without much enthusiasm. J, his face a picture of moonstruck admiration, produced the leg of ham from behind his back and dumped it on the table. “And a taste of paradise too,” Sam Argall went on, offering a flask of rum. “From the Sugar Islands, Mrs. Tradescant. A taste of sweetness and strength that will bring a taste of the tropics even here, to chilly Canterbury.”

“I find the weather very mild for the time of the year,” Elizabeth said stoutly. “Do sit down, Captain Argall. J will fetch you a glass of small ale if you would like one. We do not serve strong liquors in this house.”

J rushed to do his mother’s bidding while John and Sam sat at the table and watched Elizabeth slice the last pieces of parsley and toss them into the pot hanging over the fire.

There was a silence while they drank. Elizabeth busied herself with setting out the wooden bowls and a knife at each place, and a loaf of bread in the center of the table.

“Sam is to be master of a great venture,” John began at last.

Elizabeth stirred the pot and prodded one of the floating parsnips to see if it was cooked.

“A great venture, and he has offered me a place,” John said.

Elizabeth poured the broth into the three bowls, for the captain, for her husband, for her son, and stood behind them to wait on them. John saw that she would not sit and eat with them as she always did when it was just him and J at the dinner table. He read, correctly, her absolute opposition to Sam Argall and all the adventure and risk that he stood for, concealed behind chilly courtesy.

“Virginia!” Sam Argall exclaimed, blowing on his bowl. “Mrs. Tradescant, I have been entrusted with a great task. I am appointed Deputy Governor of Virginia and Admiral of the Virginia seas.”

“Will you say grace, husband?” Elizabeth asked repressively.

John bowed his head over the bread and Sam, remembering Elizabeth’s strictness in matters of religion, quickly closed his eyes. When he had finished John picked up his spoon and nodded to Sam.

“Amen,” Sam said briskly. “I have come to ask John here to go venturing with me, Mrs. Tradescant. You shall be landowners, madam, you shall be squires. For every place you take on the ship with me you shall have a hundred acres of your own land. For the three of you that will be three hundred acres! Think of that! You, the mistress of three hundred acres of land!”

Elizabeth’s face was as unmoved as if she were thinking of three yards. “This is three hundred acres of good farmland?”

“It’s prime land,” Argall said.

“Cleared and ploughed?”

There was a brief silence. “Mrs. Tradescant, I am offering you virgin land, a virgin land rich with woodland. Your land is standing with tall trees, wonderful rare bushes, fruiting vines. First you cut your own timber and then you build yourself a handsome house. A mansion, if you like. Built of your own timber!”

“A mansion from green wood?” Elizabeth asked. “Built by a man in his forties, a woman, and an eight-year-old boy? I should like to see it!”

He pushed his bowl away and cut a slice of the ham. Elizabeth, the very model of wifely obedience, poured the jug of small ale and stepped back, folding her hands on the front of her apron, her eyes cast down.

“What would we grow?” J asked.

Captain Argall smiled down at the bright face of the boy. “Anything you wish. The land is so rich, you could grow anything. But who knows? You might find gold and never trouble yourselves to plant anything ever again!”

“Gold?”

“I thought the first shipment of rocks was nothing more than fool’s gold?” Elizabeth asked. “They tipped it out below the Tower and picked it over and found nothing but quartz. And there it stood for many a long day, a little monument to folly and greed.”

“No gold yet. Not yet, Mrs. T,” Captain Argall said. “But who can say what there might be deeper in the mountains? No one has gone farther than the shoreline and up the rivers a little way. What could be there? Gold? Diamonds? Rubies? And what need have we of these anyway while we can grow tobacco?”

“Why d’you dislike the idea so much, Elizabeth?” John asked her directly.

She looked from him to J’s excited face and Captain Argall’s determined good humor. “Because I have heard travelers’ tales before, but I have heard nothing good of this plantation,” she said. “There’s Mistress Woods at Meopham who lost two brothers to Virginia in the starving time when half the settlement died of hunger. She told me that they were digging over the graveyards looking for meat, reduced to worse than savagery. There’s Peter John who paid for his own passage home and kissed the ground at London docks, he was so glad to be alive. He said the forest was filled with Indians who could be kind or wicked as the mood took them, and only they knew whether they were your enemy or friend. There’s your own friend, Captain John Smith, who swore that he would live the rest of his days there, and yet he was brought home a cripple-”

“John Smith would never say a word against Virginia!” Argall interrupted. “And he was hurt in an accident which could have happened anywhere. He could have been boating on the Thames.”

“He was hurt in an accident but only after he had fought against Indians and been captured by them and been so close to death by execution that he near died of fear,” Elizabeth maintained stoutly.

“The Indians are at peace now,” Argall said. “And I have played my part in that. Princess Pocahontas is Mrs. Rebecca Rolfe now and all the Indians are coming into Christian schools and living in Christian homes. You’re speaking of old fears. It was hard in the early years but it is all at peace now. Pocahontas is married to John Rolfe and other Indians and white men will marry. In a few years all the wars will be forgotten.” He glanced down at J’s attentive face, drinking in the stories. “You will have an Indian playmate to show you the paths through the woods,” he promised. “Perhaps an Indian maid to be your sweetheart.”

The boy blushed scarlet. “How did Princess Pocahontas come to marry Mr. Rolfe?” he asked.

Sam Argall laughed. “You know the story as well as me!” he exclaimed. “I captured her and held her hostage, and all the while she was weaving her spell and capturing John. So go to bed and dream of it, young J. Your mother and father and I will talk more of it later.”

“I have to sleep too,” John said. He and J lifted the board from the trestle legs of the table and stacked it to one side of the little room.

“I hope you will sleep well here?” Elizabeth asked, laying a straw mattress and an armful of bedding in the space.

“Like a babe in a cradle,” Captain Argall assured her. He kissed her hand in his flirtatious way and ignored her lack of response. “Good night.”

Elizabeth watched J go up the stairs to his little bed in the attic and then drew the curtains of the four-poster around her and John.

“I’d have thought you would have leaped at the chance of a fresh start in the new world,” John remarked as he got into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. “You who always want us to be freeholders. We would be freeholders in Virginia of land we could only dream of here. Three hundred acres!”

Elizabeth, pulling her nightgown over her head and only then dropping her skirt and shift, did not answer. John was too wise to demand a reply. He watched her kneel at the foot of the bed to say her prayers and closed his own eyes and muttered his thanks for blessings. Only when Elizabeth was in bed, tying the ties of her nightcap under her chin, did she say, suddenly, “And who is the governor of this new land?”

John was taken aback. “Sir George,” he said. “Newly appointed. Sir George Yeardley.”

“A courtier. Exactly,” she said and blew out her candle with an emphatic puff. They lay for a moment in silence in the darkness, and then she spoke: “It’s not a new land at all. It’s the same land but in a different place. I won’t go, John. It’s just another form of service. We risk everything, we gamble our savings, our livelihood, and even our lives. We put ourselves in grave danger in a country – one of the few in the whole world where you could not earn a living doing your own trade; no one will want a gardener there, it’s farmers they need – we put our son into a forest filled with unknown dangers, and we try to make a living from a land that no one has farmed before. And who makes the profits? The governor. The Virginia Company. And the king.”

“It’s their land,” John said mildly. “Who else should make the profits?”

“If it’s their land then they can take the risks,” Elizabeth declared bluntly. “Not I.”

Elizabeth’s determined opposition to the Virginia venture could not prevent John investing money. While she watched, with her mouth in a hard ungenerous line, he counted over twenty-five gold sovereigns for two shares. Captain Argall promised that two men – poor men who could not find their own passage money – would be sent on John’s account, and that the land granted to them on arrival in Virginia would be held in part for John.

“You’ll be a squire of Virginia yet,” Argall said to him, stowing the purse of gold beneath his coat with a swift glance at Elizabeth’s stony face. “I shall pick you out a good piece of land, west of Jamestown, inland, upriver. I shall call it Argall Town.”

He broke off as Elizabeth snorted quietly at his presumption.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Excuse me,” Elizabeth said swiftly. “I sneezed.”

“I shall call it Argall Town,” Captain Argall repeated. “And there will always be a welcome there for you, John.” He glanced down at J’s adoring uplifted face. “And for you, J,” he said. “Never forget that you are a landowner in the new world, in virgin earth. When you are weary of this old country you have your stake in the new. When you want to be away from here, there will be your headright in virgin land.”

J nodded. “I won’t forget, sir.”

“And I shall take you to meet Princess Pocahontas,” Argall promised. “She is visiting in England and she has a kindness for me. I shall introduce you to her.”

J’s eyes grew rounder and his mouth dropped into a perfect circle of astonishment.

“She would not want to be troubled with us,” Elizabeth said quickly.

“Why not?” Captain Argall asked. “She would be delighted to make your acquaintance. Come up to London next week and I will introduce you. It is a promise.” He turned to J. “I promise you, you shall meet her.”

“Time for him to go to school,” Elizabeth interrupted firmly. “I am surprised, husband, that you linger so long.”

“I’ll walk with you,” Argall said, taking the hint. “And thank you for your hospitality, Mrs T. It’s always a pleasure to be entertained by such a lady.”

Elizabeth nodded, still unsmiling. “I wish you well in your ventures,” she said. “I hope that you make a profit, especially as it is our money you are venturing.”

Argall laughed without embarrassment. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he reminded her and took her hand in the way she disliked, and kissed it. Then he clapped John on the shoulder and the two men left the house with J bobbing behind, like an agitated duckling in the wake of two grand swans.

Argall was as good as his word and John took his son to London to see the Indian princess, traveling up on a wagon taking fruit to London market, staying overnight, and coming down the next day on the empty wagon.

Elizabeth tried not to encourage J’s excitement, but she could not hide her own interest. “Was she black?” she asked.

“Not at all!” J exclaimed. “Just brown, a beautiful lady, and she had a little baby on her knee. But she didn’t wear bear skins or anything, just ordinary clothes.”

“J was bitterly disappointed,” John said with a smile to his wife. “He expected something very savage and strange. All she is, is a pretty young woman with a little son. She calls herself Rebecca now and is baptized and married. You would pass her in the street and think nothing more but that she was a fine tall woman, a little tanned.”

“She said that there are boys and girls of my age who live in the forest and hunt deer,” J said. “And that they can fire a bow and spear a fish from four years old! And that they can make their own pots and sew their own clothes from deer hide, and-”

“She was making it up to amuse you,” Elizabeth said firmly.

“She was not!”

“She truly wasn’t,” John said gently. “I believed every word she said and I should so like to go, Elizabeth. Not to settle there, but just to take a look at our land and see what the prospects are. Not as planters to be there forever, but just to take a little run over there and see what the land is like. It sounds very fine-”

“A little run?” Elizabeth demanded. “You speak of the ocean as if it were the cart track to your orchards. Lord Wootton could not spare you from his garden. I could not spare you now we are settled here. It is six weeks at sea on a huge sea. Why can you not stay in the same place, John? Why can you not be at peace?”

He had no reply for that, and she knew he would have no reply.

“I am sorry,” he said at last. “I just long to see all there may be for me to see. And a new land would have new plants, don’t you think? Things that I might never have seen before. But you are right. I have my garden here, and Lord Wootton’s garden, and the house, and you and J. It is enough for me.”