“Does he have a court?” J asked.
“Knock on his door,” the woman said impatiently. “Court indeed! He’s lucky to have a girl to open the door for him.”
J stood up from the table. “Where shall I find his house?”
“Set beyond the Back Road,” the man said. “I’ll stroll over with you now.”
“I have to wash first,” J said nervously. “And get my hat and coat.”
The woman snorted disparagingly. “He’ll want to paint and powder next,” she said.
The man smiled. “I’ll wait for you outside,” he said and went out, closing the door gently behind him.
There was neither jug nor ewer in the attic, nor a mirror. Everything that had to be brought from England was at a premium in the new colony. The most trivial things that J had taken for granted in England were rare luxuries here. J washed under the pump in the yard, flinching from the icy splash, and unconsciously keeping his lips tight shut, fearful of drinking the foul water.
His fellow lodger was waiting for him outside the house, in the shade of a tree, sipping from a mug of small ale. The sun beat down on the blinding dust all around him. He nodded when he saw J and slowly got to his feet. “Don’t rush,” he advised him. “A man can die of hurry in this climate.”
He led the way down the track that ran between the houses. The road was no dirtier than a back road in London, but somehow it seemed worse, with the heat of the sun beating down on it and the bright light which dazzled J and made him squint. Hens clucked around in the dust and shied away from their strolling feet at every street corner, and every garden, every drainage ditch, was filled with the ungainly sprout and flapping leaves of the tobacco plant.
The governor, when J managed to gain admission to the small stone-built house, did nothing more than repeat the lodging-house woman’s advice. “I shall write you a note,” he said languidly. “You can travel from plantation to plantation and the planters will make you welcome, if that is what you wish. There’s no difficulty there. Most of the people you meet will be glad of the company and a new face.”
“But how shall I find my way around?” J asked. He was afraid that he sounded humble, like a fool.
The governor shrugged. “You must get yourself an Indian servant,” he said. “To paddle you in a canoe. To set up camp for you when you can find nowhere to stay. Or you can remain here in Jamestown and tell the children that you want flowers from the woods. They’ll bring a few things in, I dare say.”
I shook his head. “I need to see things where they are growing,” he said. “And see the parent plants. I need roots and seed heads, I need to gather them myself. I need to see where they thrive.”
The governor nodded, uninterested, and rang a silver bell. They could hear the servant trotting across the short hall and opening the badly hung door.
“Take Mr. Tradescant to Mr. Joseph,” the governor ordered. He turned to J. “He’s the magistrate here at Jamestown. He often puts Indians in the stocks or in prison. He’ll know the names of one or two. He might release one from prison to you, to be your guide.”
“I don’t know the ways of the country…” J said uneasily. “I would rather have a law-abiding guide-”
The governor laughed. “They’re all rogues and criminals,” he said simply. “They’re all pagan. If you want to go out into the forest with any one of them, you take your life in your own hands. If I had my way we should have driven them over the Blue Mountains into the western sea. Just over the distant mountains there – drive them back to India.”
J blinked, but the governor rose to his feet in his enthusiasm. “My plan is that we should plant the land from one river to the other – from the James River to the Patowmeck River – and then build a mighty fence and push them behind it, expel them from Eden as if we were archangels with flaming swords. Let them take their sins elsewhere. There’ll be no peace for us until we are undisputed masters of all the land we can see.”
He broke off. “But you must take your choice, Mr. Tradescant. The only people who know anything of plants or trees in Virginia are the Indians, and they may slit your throat once you are in the woods with them. Stay here, safe inside the city, and go home empty-handed; or take your chance. It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I cannot rescue you if you are in the woods with them, whatever the king asks of me, whatever safe passes you have in your pocket.”
J hesitated. He had a moment to appreciate the irony that he had thought he might die on the voyage and had welcomed the thought of his own death, which he had recognized as the only thing to ease his grief. But the thought of meeting his death violently and in fear in unknown woods at the hands of murderous pagans was a different matter altogether.
“I’ll speak to this Mr. Joseph,” he said at last. “See what he advises.”
“As you wish,” the governor said languidly. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Virginia. Please assure His Majesty that I did everything in my power to assist you, when you get home; if you get home.”
“Thank you,” J said levelly, bowed and left the room.
The maid would not take him even for the short walk to Mr. Joseph’s house until she had tied a shawl around her shoulders and put a broad-brimmed hat on her head.
“It’s cool,” J protested. “And the sun is not even overhead.”
She shot him a swift defensive look. “There are bugs that bite and a sun that strikes you down, and the heat that comes off the marshes,” she warned. “The graveyard is full of men who thought the Virginia sun was not yet up, or that the water was good enough to drink.”
With that she said nothing more but led the way to the magistrate’s house, past the fort where the bored soldiers whistled and called to her, and inland up a rough dirt road until she stood before a house that was grand by Virginia standards but would have been nothing more than a yeoman’s cottage in England.
“Mr. Joseph’s house,” she said shortly, and turned and left him at the rough wood front door.
J knocked, and opened the door when a voice shouted to him to come inside.
The house was divided into two. The largest room, where J was standing, served as the kitchen and dining room. There was no separate parlor. There was a ladder at the back of the room leading to attic bedrooms. A light wooden partition, hardly a wall, divided the master bedroom on the ground floor from the rest of the house. Mr. Joseph was sitting at the roughly made table in the living room, writing in a ledger.
“Who are you?”
“John Tradescant, from England,” J said, and proffered the governor’s note.
Mr. Joseph read it quickly. “I’ve got no native guide for you,” he said abruptly. “I’ve got no messengers due to arrive either. You will have to wait, sir.”
J hesitated. “I wonder if a white person might be free to take me out, now and then. Perhaps a servant or a laborer might be spared from their work.” He looked at the man’s unhelpful expression. “Perhaps just for a few hours?”
Mr. Joseph shook his head. “How long have you been here?” he demanded.
“Just arrived.”
“When you have been here a little longer you will realize that there is never a spare hour,” the man said grimly. “Never a spare moment. Look around you. Every single thing you see here has to be wrested from this land. Remember your ship – did you see houses as cargo? Plows? Baker’s shops? Market stalls?” He paused for emphasis and then shook his head.
“You did not, and that is because we can ship hardly anything. All that we need has to be made or grown or wrought here. Everything. From the shingles on the roof to the ice in the cellar. And this by people who did not come here to farm; but came hoping to pick up gold plates from the seashore, or emeralds from the rivers, or pearls from out of every oyster. So not only are we farming with wooden plowshares that we have to carve ourselves, but we are farming with laborers who have never seen a plowshare before, wooden or metal! Who have to learn every step of the way. Who are taught by men who came out to mine gold but find themselves growing tobacco. So there is no one, not a man nor woman nor child, who has a moment to do anything but work.”