October 1642

The luck of the Tradescants was still running John’s way. There was a ship due to leave for Virginia in October and he could get a place aboard her. Half a dozen new settlers were sailing too, loading their goods and getting ready for their new life. John was on the dock with them when someone shouted that the king had fought a battle and had triumphed, at a place called Powick Bridge.

John joined the crowd that gathered around the trooper. He was a Parliament man and his tale of terror was growing greater with every telling.

“We were serving under my Earl of Essex,” the man said. “And ordered badly, no one can deny it. We were to cut off the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, from the main army. But as we went down the lane toward them there was firing on either side of us, from the hedges. Dirty work, you couldn’t see where it was coming from. The officers shouted ‘Wheel about’ – but none of us knew how to wheel about. Easier to say than do in the narrow lanes anyway. Some were shouting that ‘wheel about’ meant retreat, and they tried to force their way back through the others coming forward. Those at the back still didn’t know of the danger so they were coming on. It was all confusion, d’you see?

“There was a charge from the king’s devils, cavalry, riding like madmen, and we went down and around and were thrown about. It was every man for himself all the way back to our camp and the next day the Earl said we should all be trained properly, and that he would have us trained at once.

“But Prince Rupert trained his men before he took them out. He told them what ‘wheel about’ meant before he marched them into the very jaws of the enemy. Prince Rupert learned his fighting all over Europe. Prince Rupert is going to win this war for his cousin King Charles, he knows all the tricks. Prince Rupert has changed our plans completely, he has beaten us before we began.”

Bertram Hobert, a fellow passenger with John, glanced at him. “Does this change your plans, Mr. Tradescant?” he asked.

“No,” John said discreetly. “My going or staying is nothing to do with the progress of the war. I have interests in Virginia, a plantation there, some land where I have a fancy to build a house. And I made a good sum on the plants I brought back last time. Whether Parliament or the king wins, some day there will be peace and men will want to garden.”

“Are you not for the king? Won’t you join him now? Now that he is on the road to victory?”

“I have been in his service all my life,” John said hiding his resentment. “The time has come for me to do some traveling and gardening for myself. He does not need a gardener now, he needs soldiers, and – you heard that man – he has them.”

Hobert nodded.

“What about you?” John asked.

“I was leaving whatever happened,” the man said. “I can make no progress here. I work as hard as any man; but what the taxes don’t take, the tithes do. I wanted a country where I can see real wealth for me. I’ve seen how a man can prosper in Virginia. I’ll stay a dozen years and come back a rich man and buy a farm in Essex. What about you? Will you stay for long?”

John thought for a moment. It was a question he and Hester had carefully skirted, in all the weeks while she packed for him and took orders in her careful script from gardeners who had heard he was going collecting again. With his boat creaking at the dockside and the wind blowing offshore, with the tide running and a sense of his freedom rising in him, John felt young and reckless again; a young man fit for a young country, full of promise.

“I shall make a home there,” he said. “My wife and children will stay in England and I shall be back often. But Virginia is the country for me. I shall build a house there and…” He broke off, thinking of Suckahanna’s small, sideways smile, her tattooed nakedness, which had become more erotic for him since his first innocent sight of her. He thought that by now she would be a woman, a woman fully grown, and ready for love and desire.

“It’s a country where a man can grow,” the farmer said, throwing his arms wide. “There’s land for the asking, and earth which has never been plowed. There’s a new life there for me.”

“And for me,” John said.

John welcomed the long idle days of the voyage. He became accustomed to the movement of the ship and his stomach stopped swooping with terror at the long, frightening slide into the troughs of the waves. The captain was liberal with the passengers, letting them come up on deck, almost as they wished, as long as they did not distract the crew; and John spent days leaning on the rail of the deck and looking down into the moving green muscles of the ocean. A couple of times they caught sight of a pod of whales, chasing a school of fish that stretched for more than a mile across. Once or twice they saw large white birds whose names John did not know and he asked the captain if one could be shot so that he could have it stuffed for the rarities room. The captain shook his head. He said it was unlucky to shoot a bird at sea, it would summon up a hurricane. John did not press the point, it seemed a long, long way from the rarities room at Lambeth, a long way from Hester, a long way from the children, and a long way from the king and his costumed playacting wars.

John had thought that he would use the time of the two-month voyage to make some plans, come to some decisions about his future. He had thought he would write down his own timetable: how long he would spend building a new house in Virginia, when he would send for the children, even if Hester still refused to come. But as the ship went westward, and still more westward, as he spent every evening watching the sun sink lower and lower through the clouds and then into the sea, he found he could not think or plan; all he could do was dream.

It was not a journey, it was an escape. John’s inheritance of a business which was at the same time a duty had nearly strangled him. He had been bound by loyalty and even in the end a begrudging sympathy in service to a king whom he despised. His father’s choice of his wife had forced him into a new marriage, one he would not have chosen for himself. His burdensome work and his duty to his family conspired to close down the ways that were open to him: like untrimmed hedges overshadowing a lane. John had a sudden exhilarating sense of having vaulted a gate and starting to make his own way across fields toward the open country, where there were no paths and no lanes, and no restrictions. Somewhere he could make his own life, build his own house… even choose his own wife.

He dreamed of her – Suckahanna – almost every night. It was as if his dreams had been locked down inside him, and only freed once he freed himself from England, from Hester, from home. Once the ropes keeping the ship at the quayside were dropped and trailed through the cold water of the Thames, John felt his desires rocking like the boat as it headed for freedom.

He dreamed of the month they had spent in the forest together and the light shining through the leaves to dapple her bare brown skin. He dreamed of the line of her spine as she squatted before the fire, of the asymmetric tilt of her head where the hair was cut short on one side to keep the bowstring free, and black and flowing on the other. In his dreams he could taste the food she had found and cooked for them, the bitterness of the dried blueberries, the richness of the roasted lobster, the nuts, the seeds, the roots. He remembered the clean cold taste of water, an exotic drink for a man who had drunk small ale or milk for all his life. He woke in the mornings to the sudden pang of disappointment that they were still so many days out of Jamestown, and he woke aroused and embarrassed. He had the little enclosed bed with doors around the bunk all to himself, but anyone sleeping outside could have heard him groan in desire in his dreams, and he was afraid that he might have said her name in his sleep.