Ever since the news had come in of the fall of Bristol Johnnie had come down to breakfast with red eyes, and he had been quiet and moody all the day. When Hester wanted him for work in the garden she had to find him first, and half the time he would be down at the little lake, sitting in the rowing boat, adrift in the middle, slumped in despair over the dripping oars.
“How are the tulips?” she asked.
He nodded, as if he could not take joy even in them. “They’ve done well. For every bulb that went in, we are raising three. It’s been a good year for tulips, if for nothing else.”
Joseph nodded. “I’ve never seen such a crop,” he said. “Something’s going right at least.”
“More than one thing,” Hester said. She tied the ends of the shawl crosswise around her waist and thought it felt like a tight and loving embrace. “I have a letter here from Virginia.”
The shadow left Johnnie’s face and he jumped to his feet from the bed of tulips. “He’s coming home?”
“He’s coming home,” she assented. “At last.”
The waiting was the hardest time of all. She had the money from John Lambert for his order of tulips, and then she took some old Roman coins from the rarities room and offered them for sale to a London goldsmith. The price he gave her was little more than theft but Hester realized that portable treasures were flooding onto the market as one grand family after another tried to survive the war years. She went to Alexander Norman to borrow the rest of the money and took the whole amount to the goldsmith who was known to give and receive credit for Virginia. He signed a note of credit for twenty pounds to John Tradescant by name and then Hester had to take it down to the London docks and find a ship sailing to Virginia.
A vessel was waiting to go, almost ready to cast off: the Makepeace, going to Virginia by the southern route and stopping at the Sugar Islands.
“I have to see the captain,” Hester said to one of the sailors. She was jostled by a family throwing their bundles on board and pushing their way toward the gangplank. “Or a trustworthy gentleman.”
“We’ve got a brace of vicars,” the man said rudely. “And half a dozen cavaliers. Take your pick.”
“I need a gentleman to assist me,” Hester said stoutly. “I shall see one of the clerical gentlemen.”
The sailor laughed, turned his head and shouted below. Hester smoothed her cape and wished that she had brought Johnnie with her, or even allowed Alexander Norman to come too. Eventually a white-haired man looked down from the ship’s side and said quietly, as if he would not raise his voice over the din of the ship, “I am the Reverend Walter de Carey. May I help you, madam?”
Hester stepped quickly up the swaying gangplank and held out her hand. “How do you do, I am Mrs. Tradescant, wife of John Tradescant of the Ark, Lambeth.”
He bowed over her hand. “I am honored,” he said.
“I am sorry to ask a favor of a stranger but my husband has been-” Hester paused for a moment. “Plant collecting in Virginia and finds himself without money. I have a note of credit for him but I need to find a trustworthy gentleman to take it to Virginia and give it to him.”
The man smiled wearily. “I am so little trusted that I have been expelled from my church and the blacksmith stands in my pulpit and tells my congregation what revelation he has gleaned that week from his forge fire,” he said. “I was twenty years in my vicarage and I baptized every single one of those young men and women who now tell me that I am in league with the Antichrist and a worshipper of the whore of Babylon. They would not call me a trustworthy man.”
Mutely, Hester held out the sealed and folded paper. “If you were twenty years in the vicarage and a good parish priest then you are the man for me,” she said. “These are hard times of change for us all. Will you help me try to bring my family back together? This is my husband’s passage money home.”
He hesitated for only a moment and then he took the paper. “Forgive me, I am too absorbed in my own sorrows. I will take the paper; but how will I find your husband?”
“He’ll find you,” Hester said with certainty. “He’ll be waiting for this. All you have to do is to tell people in Jamestown that you are looking for him and he will find you. Whereabouts are you going in Virginia?”
“I hope to settle there and found a school,” the vicar said. “The times are against men who believe in the king and God in this country. I trust that the new world will be a refuge for men of steady faith. Half this ship is filled with men like me, who cannot bear the new rule of Parliament and the wild heresies of madmen and self-taught preachers and the like in our own churches.”
“My husband left at the outbreak of the war,” Hester said. “He could not bear to watch the country being torn apart, and it was tearing him apart too.”
“He will come home to difficult times,” the vicar remarked. “The fighting may be nearly over, but the bitterness of these years will not be easily restored. And what is to become of the king in the hands of such a crew?”
There was a shout from the bridge and an answering shout from the shore.
“I must go,” Hester said hurriedly. “I do thank you for accepting the letter for John. He will do all he can to help you when he meets you, I know he will. He will be grateful.”
The vicar bowed. Hester turned for the gangplank and went down it as the lumpers on the dockside shouted to the sailors on the ship and finally cast off from shore.
“God speed,” Hester called to the ship. “Tell him I am waiting.”
The vicar put his hand to his ear, so Hester waved with a smile on her face and said more quietly, so he would be certain not to hear, “Tell him I love him.”
Autumn 1645, Virginia
John found that he had learned patience from the Powhatan, as well as the skill of living off the land. When he knew for certain that nothing he could do or say could save Opechancanough from death he went back to the farmer at the edge of the forest and agreed with him that he would work four days a week for his food and bed and a pittance of a wage, and three days of the week he would be free to go collecting in the near-virgin woods around the plantation.
Only a year before he would have been irritable, longing for the ship to come to release him from this service so that he could go home. But John found a sense of peace. He felt this was an interlude between his life with Suckahanna and the Powhatan, and the return – which must be a difficult experience – to Hester and the Ark at Lambeth.
In the days when he worked in the fields he was employed in harvesting the tobacco crop, taking the leaves to the drying sheds, baling them up and then loading them onto the ships which stopped at the little quay as their last port of call before setting off across the Atlantic.
In the days when he was free to roam he took his duckskin satchel, now properly cleaned, and went out into the woods with nothing more than a knife, a trowel, a bow across his shoulder and a couple of arrows in his quiver. It was a secret life he lived once he was out of sight of the planter’s house. As soon as he reached the shelter of the trees he stopped and shed his heavy clothes and kicked off his painful shoes. He wrapped them and hid them in a tree, just as Suckahanna the little girl used to do with her servant’s gown, and then he went barefoot and naked but for his buckskin through the forest and felt himself to be a free man once again.
Even after his years in the wilderness he had not lost his sense of awe at the strangeness and beauty of this country. He longed to bring it home entire, but he forced himself to choose the best of the shrubs and trees that he found on his long, loping surveys. He found a type of daisy that he thought had never been seen before, a big-flowered daisy with curious petals. He dug up half a dozen roots and packed them into damp soil, hoping they would survive until he had a ship for home. He took cuttings of the vine which Suckahanna had planted at his doorstep all that long time ago. He recognized it now. It was a favorite of hers: a sweet woodbine which some people called honeysuckle, but growing here with long scarlet flowers like fingers. He had a new convolvulus which he would name for himself, “Tradescantia.” He found a foxglove which was like the English variety but stronger-colored and bigger in shape. He potted up a Virginian yucca, a Virginian locust tree, a Virginian nettle tree. He found a Virginian mulberry which reminded him of the silkworms and the mulberry trees at Oatlands Palace. He found a wonderful pink spiderwort, the only flower his father had put his own name to, and kept the corms dry and safe, hoping they would grow in memory of his father. He dug up the dry roots of Virginian roses, certain that they would grow differently alongside their English cousins if he could only get them safe home to Lambeth.