Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory

smooth, beautiful flank.

      Physically, she was the most beautiful object he had ever seen. Not even his wife Jane had ever been naked before him, they had always made love in a tumble of clothes, generally in darkness. His children had been bound in their swaddling bands as tight as silkworms in a chrysalis from the moment of their birth, and dressed in tiny versions of adult clothing as soon as they were able to walk. J had never seen either of them naked, had never bathed them, had never dressed them. The play of light on bare skin was strange to J, and he found that when the girl was working near him he watched her, for the sheer pleasure of seeing her rounded limbs, the strength in her young body, the lovely line of her neck, the curve of her spine, the nestling mystery of her sex which he glimpsed below the little buckskin apron.

      Of course he thought of touching her. The casual instruction from Mr Joseph not to rape her was tantamount to admitting that he might do so. But J would not have hurt her, any more than he would have broken an eggshell in a drawer of the collection at Lambeth. She was a thing of such simple beauty that he wanted only to hold her, to caress her. He supposed that of all the things he might imagine with her, what he wanted to do most was to collect her, and take her back to Lambeth to the warm, sunlit rarities room where she would be the most beautiful object of them all.

      J would have lost track of time in the woods, but one morning the girl started to take the thatch from the roof of the little hut and untie the saplings. They sprang back undamaged, only a slight bend in the trunks betraying the fact that they had been walls and roof joists.

      ‘What are you doing?’ J asked her.

      In silence she pointed back the way they had come. It was time to go home.

      ‘Already?’

      She nodded and turned to J’s little bed of plants.

      It was filled with heads and leaves of small plants. J’s satchel was bursting with gathered seed heads. With her hoeing stick she started to lift the plants, tenderly pulling at the thin filaments of roots and laying them in the dampened linen. J took his trowel and worked at the other end of the row. Carefully they packed them into the canoe.

      The fire which she had faithfully kept glowing for all the days of their stay she now damped with water, and then scuffed over with sand. The cooking sticks which they had used as spits for fish, game birds, crabmeat and even the final feast of lobster she broke and cast into the river. The reeds which had thatched the walls and the leaves which had thatched the roof she scattered. In only a little while their campsite was destroyed, and a white man would have looked at the clearing and thought himself the first man there.

      J found that he was not ready to leave. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said unwillingly. He looked into her serene uncomprehending face. ‘You know … I don’t want to go back to Jamestown, and I don’t want to go back to England.’

      She looked at him, waiting for his next words. It was as if he were free to decide, and she would do whatever he wished.

      J looked out over the river. Now and then the water stirred with the thick shoals of fish. Even in the short weeks that they had been living at the riverside he had seen more and more birds flying into the country from the south. He had a sense of the continent stretching forever to the south, unendingly to the north. Why should he turn his back on it and return to the dirty little town on the edge of the river, surrounded with felled trees, inhabited by people who struggled for everything, for life itself?

      The girl did not prompt him. She hunkered down on the sand and looked out over the river, content to wait for his decision.

      ‘Shall I stay?’ J asked, secure in the knowledge that she could not understand his rapid speech, that he was raising no hopes. ‘Shall we build ourselves another shelter and spend our days going out and bringing in fine specimens of plants? I could send them home to my father, he could pay off our debts with them, and then he could send me enough money so that I could live here always. He could raise my children, and when they are grown they could join me. I need never go back to that house in London, never again sleep alone in that bed, in her bed. Never dream of her. Never go into church past her grave, never hear her name, never have to speak of her.’

      She did not even turn her head to look at him, to see if there was meaning in his quiet whispering.

      ‘I could make a new life here, I could become a new man. And this year, next year, you will be a beautiful woman,’ J said, his voice very gentle. ‘And then …’

      She turned at that, as if she understood the tone of his voice. Turned and looked directly at him, without shame, as if she were about to ask him what he meant – if he were serious. J broke off and flushed. He managed an awkward smile.

      ‘Well!’ he said. ‘Just as well this all means nothing to you! Better be off!’

      She rose to her feet and gestured to the river. Her half-tilted head asked: ‘Which way?’ South into the country, which neither of them knew, or upriver to Jamestown?

      ‘Jamestown,’ J said shortly, pointing north-west. ‘I have been rambling like a fool. Jamestown, of course.’

      He seated himself in the canoe and steadied it with his paddle. It was easier now that they had gone out every day and he had grown skilful. She pushed off the prow of the boat and stepped aboard. They paddled as a team and the boat wove easily along the shoreline, and then they felt the stronger push of the river.

      An hour out of Jamestown, where the river started getting dirty and the bank was pocked with felled trees, she called a halt and they ran the canoe ashore. Slowly, unwillingly, they washed off the grease in the water. She took a handful of leaves and scrubbed his back so that his white skin shone through the dark grease and the familiar smell, which he had hated so much on the first day, was dispersed. Together they put on the clothes they must wear in the town, and she shrank into the confines of the ragged shift and looked no longer like a deer in dappled sunlight but instead like a sluttish maidservant.

      J, shrugging back into his shirt and breeches after the freedom of the buckskin loincloth, felt as if he were taking on the shackles of some sort of prison, becoming a man again with a man’s sorrows and no longer a free being, at home in the forest. At once the cloud of insects settled greedily on his sunburned arms and shoulders and face. J swatted at them and swore, and the girl smiled with her lips but with no laughter in her eyes.

      ‘We’ll come out again,’ J said encouragingly. He pointed to himself and to her and to the trees. ‘We’ll come out again some day.’

      She nodded but her eyes were dark.

      They got into the canoe and began to paddle upstream to Jamestown. J was plagued all the way by the biting moths and the sweat in his eyes, the tightness of the shirt across his back and the rub of his boots. By the time they came alongside the little wooden quay he was sweating and irritable. There was a new vessel in port and a crowd on the quayside. No-one wasted more than a quick glance on the little Indian girl and the white man in the dugout canoe.

      They ran the canoe aground at the side of the quay and started to unload the plants. From the shadow of the dockside building a woman came and stood before them.

      She was an Indian woman but she wore a dress and a shawl tied across her breasts. Her hair was tied back like a white woman’s and it exposed her face which was badly scarred, pocked all over with pale ridges of scar tissue as if someone, long ago, had fired a musket at point-blank range into her face.

      ‘Mr Tradescant?’ She spoke with a harsh accent.

      J spun to hear his name and recoiled from the bitterness in her face. She looked past him at the girl and spoke in a rapid string of words, fluting and meaningless as birdsong.

      The child answered, as voluble as she, shaking her head emphatically and then pointing to J and to the plants and to the canoe.

      The woman turned to J again. ‘She tells me you have not hurt her.’

      ‘Of course not!’

      ‘Not raped her.’

      ‘No!’