“Did they bring you to England?”

“Jamaica first, but the captain brought me on to England. He wanted a slave. Lost me in a game of cards to a London merchant, he sold me to Mr. Hobert who wanted to bring a horse to Virginia to do his plowing for him but was advised that he couldn’t ship a horse but a man would do the job as well. So now I am a plow horse.”

“He doesn’t treat you badly,” John said.

The man shook his head. “For a horse I’m doing well,” he said with quiet irony. “I get to live in the house and I eat what they eat. And I have a piece of land of my own.”

“You will grow your own food?”

“My own food, my own tobacco, and I will trade on my own account, and when I have earned fifteen shillings Mr. Hobert has agreed to sell me my liberty and then I will be his indentured servant, and not his slave, and when I have earned enough to keep myself I shall buy more land and then I shall be a planter, as good as you.”

“You will be freed?”

“Mr. Hobert has promised it, the magistrate has witnessed it, and the other black men tell me that it is not uncommon. In a country as big as this a man has to agree with his slaves how long they shall work for him. It’s too easy for them to just run from him to a master who will offer better terms. There are always other planters who would give them work, there is always more land for them to plant for themselves.”

“Don’t you want to go back to Africa?”

An expression of deep pain passed swiftly across the black face and was gone. “I have to believe that I will be there at the hour of my death,” he said. “When they talk of paradise and going to heaven that is where I think I will be. But I don’t expect to see it again in this life.”

“Did you leave a family behind?”

“My wife, my child, my mother and two little brothers.”

John was silent at the enormity of this loss. “You must hate us,” he said. “All of us white men for taking you away.”

The man looked directly at him. “I don’t hate you,” he said. “I have no time left for hate.” He paused. “But I don’t know how you can pray to your god and hope that he hears you.”

John turned his head away. “Oh, I can tell you that,” he said bitterly. “We do a clever little trick, us Englishmen. We start by assuming that everything in the world is ours, everything that ever was, everything that ever will be.” He thought of the king’s elegant assumption that the world was constructed for his pleasure, that every work of art should belong to him, almost by right. “In our own country anyone who is not powerful and beautiful is a lesser person, not worth thinking about. When we go overseas we find many men and women who are not like us, so we think they are lesser still. When we find people whose language we can’t understand we say they can’t speak, when they don’t have houses like our houses we say they can’t build, when they don’t make music like our music or dance like we dance we say they can only howl like dogs, that they are animals, that they are less than animals because less useful to us.”

“So Bertram Hobert takes me as his plow horse.”

“And I swagger around, thinking that I can come to this country and that the land is empty and I can take a headright, and the woman could have no better future than to love me,” John said bitterly. “And so I walked away from the land I already owned and the woman to whom I owed a duty. Because I am an Englishman. Because the whole world is to be made for my convenience.”

The door opened and Sarah Hobert stood in the doorway, mud encrusting her boots. “Pull them off,” she said abruptly to Francis. “I’ve come to make dinner.”

Francis kneeled at her feet. John stepped back into the darker corner of the room. Sarah came into the room in her stockinged feet and pulled off her cape, spread it out on the hooks to dry. “It’s raining again,” she said. “I wish it would stop.”

She put the cooking pot on the edge of the fire and stirred it briskly. It would be suppawn for dinner again. Francis took four bowls from the fireside and put them on the rough trestle table, and pulled up the two stools and the two logs which served as chairs. Bertram came into the room, heeling himself out of his boots, carrying a pitcher of fresh water from the river.

They bowed their heads while Bertram spoke a blessing on their food and then they ate in silence. John looked covertly at Bertram and his wife while they ate their gruel. This land had changed them both. Sarah had been a redoubtable, God-fearing woman in England, the wife of a small farmer, and a trader in her own right. This land had made her hard. Her face was pinched and determined. The fat had been rubbed off Hobert too. In England he had been round faced and ruddy cheeked but here he had faced death and terror. His face was engraved with lines of suspicion and hatred. This was a country in which only a man of remarkable courage and persistence could survive. Prosperity was harder and took even longer.

Sarah bowed her head as she finished her dinner and then she rose from the table. There was not a moment to spare for leisure. There was never a moment to spare for leisure.

“Are you ready to work?” she asked John.

He felt the letter crackle in his pocket. “I’m ready,” he said. The suppawn lay heavy in his belly, and although John knew it was old corn flour and stale water, the pain, the deep pain in the center of his body, was not indigestion but guilt. He should never have left England. He should never have sought and loved another woman. He should have stayed with the woman his father had chosen for him and brought up his children with her. He had run from his life like a schoolboy playing truant and now he realized that a man cannot have two lives. He has to choose. Attone’s rough, sarcastic counsel was right – a man pulled two ways by two threads must cut one of them.

Sarah nodded at him and went out of the house, followed by her husband and Francis. She led the way down to the end of the planting, stumping along with a spade in one hand. Bertram carried the pickax for the stubborn roots. Francis, behind them both, was pushing Sarah’s heavy wooden barrow, loaded with the precious swaying burden of small tobacco plants. John brought up the rear, carrying the two new hoes. He thought for a moment of the carving of his father on the newel post of Hatfield House. That showed a man stepping out to garden for pleasure, with his hat tilted on his head and his hoe in his hand, a rich vase under his arm spilling over with flowers and fruits. All John’s life had been filled with plants grown for beauty, filled with the idea of planting and hoeing and weeding to create a solace for the eyes, a source of joy. Now he was working for survival. Some perverse contradictory desire had driven him away from the ease and richness of his father’s life into a country where it would take all his skill and strength just to survive. His father’s inheritance, the rich joy of his father’s work, he had abandoned and left behind him. He paused and watched Hobert, Sarah and Francis as they went down the path toward the river to start planting out their tobacco crop: a small procession of determined people, planting their hopes in virgin earth.

John stayed with the Hoberts for eight nights and when he left, the field before their house was cleared of all big roots, and they had a crop of tobacco set in the ground and thriving. At his insistence they had planted a kitchen garden at the side of the house and it was set with corn, pumpkin, and beans. John would dearly have loved to grow amaracock between the rows, as the Indian women did, so that the Hoberts could have fruit in their garden as well as vegetables. But they had not tasted the fruit since the Powhatan had ceased to trade with them, and they had not thought to keep the seeds.

“I’ll see if I can get you some seeds,” John said.