“That is all this place is to me,” he said softly. “Somewhere else. I am living in somewhere else and I am going to die in somewhere else unless I can get myself home again.”
A sharp, acrid scent reminded him abruptly of his dinner. He turned with a cry of distress. The cooking pot was spewing a dark smoke into the room, it had overheated and the porridge had stuck to the bottom of the pot and was burned.
John lunged to pull it away from the fire and then recoiled as the hot metal handle scorched into his hand. He dropped the pot and cursed, his hand burning with pain. He had a little water left in his cup and he poured it over the burn. The skin puckered up and turned white. John felt the sweat break out on his face at the pain and he cried out again.
He turned from the room and ran out of the door, down to the river. At the little beach before the house he knelt down to the water and plunged his hand in. The cold water felt like a blow from a whip against the damaged skin, but slowly the pain eased. “Ah God, my God,” John heard himself saying. “What a fool! What a fool I am!”
When the pain had eased a little he took his hand from the water and looked at it fearfully. The handle of the cooking pot had left a white stripe along his palm. The skin was dead-looking, swelling fast. John tried to flex his fingers; at once a sharp pain ran like a blade across his hand.
“So now I have only one good hand,” he said grimly, “and burned dinner.” He looked again at the sky. “And night coming on.”
He turned and walked slowly back up to the little house, his head full of thoughts and fears. The fire was still lit, which was one good thing. He pushed the overturned cooking pot with his booted foot. It rolled on the earth floor. It was cool, he had been down by the river for perhaps an hour. He had not known that the time was passing. He set it on its little feet and peered inside. There was nothing that he could eat. The porridge was blackened and charred almost to ashes.
John took the pot and went down to the river once more, picking his way in the twilight, which was coming on in a rush like a dark cloak thrown over the forest. He left the pot to soak in the water while he looked at his fish trap. It was empty. John went back to his pot and arduously, with his good left hand, tried to scrape out the charred remains, swill it and rinse it clean.
He filled the pot with water and, carrying it in his left hand, went back up the beach and up the little hill to his house. Where the trees had been felled before the house the forest was already regaining the land. Small vines and little weeds and ground-covering plants were invading the space. If John did not get out and dig soon the forest would crowd back in and his house would be all but forgotten, marked only on a map in the governor’s office as a headright, once claimed but then neglected, ready for another fool to take the challenge and try to make a life in the wilderness.
In the house John poured his drinking water into his cup, spilling some on the floor in his one-handed clumsiness, then he put a scoop of powdered corn flour into the water and set it to heat. This time he did not take his eyes from it, but stood over it, stirring as it thickened and came to the boil, and then set it to one side to cool before serving it into his trencher. He had made enough for breakfast tomorrow so he could eat when he woke in the morning. His stomach rumbled. He could not remember the last time he had eaten fruit or something green. He could not remember when he had last eaten meat that was not wood pigeon. He thought, absurdly and suddenly, of English plums and the sharp sweetness of their flesh. In his father’s garden there were thirty-three different varieties of plum tree, from the rare white diapered plum of Malta, which the Tradescants alone grew in all of England, to the common dark-skinned plum of every cottage garden.
He shook his head. There was no point thinking about home and the wealth his father had left him. There was no point thinking about the richness of his inheritance, the flowers, the vegetables, the herbs, the fruit. There was no point thinking about any food which he could not catch or grow in this unhelpful land. All there was for dinner tonight, and breakfast the next day, was an unappetizing mess of corn porridge. And unless he could find a way to fish and shoot with only one hand, that would be all there was for a day or so, for a week or two, until his hand healed.
With his belly full of porridge John drank water and took off his boots, ready to sleep. His cloak was missing. He looked around for it, cursing his own laziness in not hanging it up every morning. It was nowhere to be seen. John felt a disproportionate alarm. His cloak was missing, the cloak Hester had given him, the cloak he always slept in. He could feel an absurd panic rising up in him and threatening to choke him. He strode to the corner of the room where his goods were piled and turned them over, tumbling them to the ground in his haste. His cloak was not there.
“Think!” he commanded himself. “Think, you fool!”
He steadied himself and his breathing, which had become hoarse and anxious, settled down. “I must stay calm,” John said to himself, his voice quavery against the darkness. “I have left it somewhere. That’s all.”
He went through his movements. He had slept in his cloak in the afternoon and then he had run outside when the fire had burned out. He remembered then. His cloak had been tangled around his feet and he had kicked it away in his haste to get some dry wood to relight the fire.
“I left it outside,” he said quietly. “Now I’ll have to get it.”
He went slowly to the door and put his hand on the wooden latch. He paused. Through the cracks between the planks the colder night air breathed against his face like an icy sigh. It was dark beyond the wooden door, dark with a density that John had never seen before in his life, a blackness which was not challenged by firelight nor candlelight nor torchlight for dozens of miles in one direction, and hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of miles westward. It was a darkness that was so powerful and so completely void of light that John had a foolish, superstitious fear that it he opened the door, the night would rush into the room and extinguish the fire. It was a darkness which was too great for him to challenge.
“But I want my cloak,” he said stubbornly.
Slowly, fearfully, he opened the door a little way. The clouds were thick between him and the stars, the darkness was absolute. With a little whimper John dropped to his hands and knees like a child and crawled over the threshold of his house, his hands before him feeling his way, hoping to touch his cloak.
Something brushed against his outstretched fingers and he recoiled with a sob of fright, but then he realized that it was the soft wool of his cloak. He gathered it up to him as if it was a treasure, one of the king’s most beautiful sacred tapestries. He bundled it to his face and smelled his own strong scent, not with distaste but with a sense of relief at smelling something human in this icy empty darkness.
He did not dare to turn his back on the void. With one arm tucking his cloak to his chest, he backed, still on his hands and knees, into his doorway like a frightened animal retreating into its lair, and then he shut the door.
His eyes, strained wide open against the darkness, blinked blindly when he was back in the fitful flickering light of the cottage. He shook out his cloak. It was wet with dew. John hardly cared. He wrapped himself in it and lay down to sleep. Lying on his back, his eyes still wide open in fear, he could see the steam rising off himself. If he had not been so deep in despair he would have laughed at the sight of a hungry man supping on porridge, a cold man wrapped in damp cloth, a pioneer with one hand. But none of it seemed very funny.