Poison in the Colony, page 20
Samuel reaches into a pocket, then holds his two fists out for me to choose one. I touch his right hand, and when he opens it, I see the perfect skipping rock I’d given him for Bermuda. My eyes fill with tears.
“Did we get the empty hand this time?” I ask.
Samuel looks out at the river. “Isn’t that the way it always is in life? Depending on how you see it, you always get the empty hand. And if you look at it another way, you always get the prize.”
I hear my own voice in my head. But it’s supposed to be fun every time.
“I’m not having fun right now,” I say.
“But you will,” Samuel says. “We will laugh again and be joyful again. You still have your sisters and mother and father.” He touches my chin and turns my face toward him. “And you have me.”
I blink and tears run down my cheeks. He puts his arm around me and I lean against him. The river swishes by and the birds sing.
* * *
. . .
Over the next few weeks, we receive more news about the state of the colony. The plantations and outposts have all been abandoned. The surviving colonists have moved back to James Town and the more central settlements. They are in shock. They are terrified for their lives. And they are angry. Men have begun to organize retaliatory raids against Indian villages, killing and burning. We are at war.
We receive one piece of news that makes me feel that the whole world has gone mad: Our military men, especially the high-ranking ones, are admiring Chief Opechancanough’s military strategy. They say he was brilliant the way he planned the attack and bided his time, waiting for us to become completely comfortable with his tribesmen living and working among us. They are impressed with the chief’s military skills and hold him in high regard. War, and skill in war, is fascinating to them.
One day, Samuel and I are working together to plant potatoes in our garden plot. Samuel digs a trench with the hoe, and I follow him, dropping seed potatoes with their long, ghostly sprouts into the trench.
“Do you think Chief Opechancanough will get what he wants?” I ask Samuel. “Do you think people will clamor to leave on the ships that come this spring and he will be rid of us?”
Samuel shakes his head. “They can clamor all they want. If they are still under contract to the Virginia Company of London, they have to stay.”
I look out at the land we have cleared, where tiny tobacco plants are sprouting. I look at our garden plot with turnip seedlings, peas reaching up their trellis, and dark green onion tips sticking through the ground. “Do you think we will leave?” I ask in a small voice. “Mum’s and Da’s contracts are long over.”
Samuel leans on his hoe a moment. “With you around to tell us whenever someone is going to try to kill us? No, I think we’ll stay.”
I give him a weak smile, but then my face drops again. “Maybe the prophecy can’t be stopped,” I say. “This is our third war with the natives.” I remember the words I have recited so many times: The third battle will be long and filled with bloodshed. My throat tightens. “If this is the third battle from the prophecy, we will be at war for a long time.”
Samuel cuts at the soil with his hoe, deepening his trench. “And if the prophecy is true, then Chief Opechancanough will not get what he wants at all. Instead, this will be the end of his kingdom.”
By the end of this battle, the Powhatan kingdom will be no more.
I shake my head. I think of Samuel’s stories about when he lived with the Warraskoyacks, how he played ball games with the other boys. He had his hair shaved on one side and long on the other, so that his hair would not get in the way when he shot his bow and arrow. He says he looked more native than English in those days. I remember how he sat on reed mats with Captain Smith and Pocahontas and watched an exciting performance of dance and music by young tribal women, and feasted with the tribe afterward. I think of Pocahontas and her husband and young son in the Patawomeck village. I think of Nemattanew, with his magical wings. I remember Sarah, and her baby, and Pipsco and his little sister. I think of Choupouke, how he obviously did not want to carry out his part in the massacre. How could the vast Powhatan kingdom be no more?
“I wish we could have stayed at peace,” I say.
* * *
. . .
Sadness wraps around me like a cloak. In late April, on Good Friday, I steal away to sit near the river by myself. Mum lets me go, leaving some of my work undone.
The sound of the water swishing by is comforting. The river has not changed just because the people who live along it are at war. In two days it will be Easter. We will go to church and Reverend Stockton will speak of the Resurrection and of hope. I shut my eyes and listen to the river. Where can I find hope?
I think of Pocahontas, how she lost so much and yet she found joy with her son Thomas and her adventure in England in the short time she had left to live. I think of Angela, how she has opened her heart to love with Samuel, even after all the love she has lost. With my eyes still closed, I remember my time imprisoned under the storehouse, before my trial, when I thought I might soon be hanged. I remember finding the light inside me that nothing could take away.
The sun shifts from behind a cloud and suddenly there is light full on my face. I smile. “That light is still there,” I whisper to myself. “It is the light of my soul. It gives me the strength to be exactly who God created me to be.”
“Virginia, is that you?” someone shouts from up the river.
I stand and shield my eyes from the sun. Coming toward me on the current is a rowboat laden with barrels and crates, with one man rowing and one woman passenger. The moment I recognize them, I shout, “Yes, it is me!” Then I run up the hill toward our cottage.
“Mum, come quickly!” I cry. “Look who is here!”
At the water’s edge, Mum and Jane fall into each other’s arms. Then Mum pulls back to take a good look at Jane. She is with child. Mum touches her belly gently. “I will help you when your time comes,” she promises.
Robert lifts a crate from the rowboat. “I knew it would be good to get these two friends together,” he says.
Da and Samuel join us and they help Robert unload the boat. They have brought their belongings and are moving to Elizabeth City. They will be living with Anthony Bonall and his family.
“So many survivors of the massacre have moved to James Town,” Jane says. “They are grieving and fearful and angry. All they want is more war. They talk all day about revenge and more killing.”
“We hoped it would be better here,” says Robert.
“It is,” says Mum. “We were spared.” She looks at me proudly.
“I have a present for you, Virginia,” Jane says. She pulls a bundle of rags out of her apron pocket and unwraps them. Inside is a small green drinking glass, slightly lopsided but definitely usable. “Bermuda wanted you to see how his skills improved.”
I stare at the glass. My conversation with Captain Newce echoes in my head. What about Martin’s Hundred? . . . One of the worst hit. Almost everyone is dead. “I’m glad—” I begin. I want to say, I’m glad he had a chance to make glass before he died, since it was his dream. But my words catch in my throat. I bite the inside of my mouth, willing myself not to cry here in front of everyone.
“Bermuda also sent you a message,” Jane says. “That it is too hard for him to get away but he would love for you to come with Samuel next time he comes to James Town.”
My mouth drops open.
“Of course, I’ll bring her,” Samuel says.
“It would cheer him up,” says Robert. “He had just left Martin’s Hundred and returned to the glass house a few days before the massacre. His parents knew how much he missed it and sent him back. His mum and da were both killed, and it has been hard for him.”
“We will go soon,” says Samuel.
“Yes,” I say, finally finding my words. “Very soon.”
“Virginia, come help me lay the table,” Mum says. “We will eat and then get Jane and Robert settled.”
Soon our house is loud with the voices of friends and family, and steamy from the boiling pot of venison stew. Jane bounces Katherine on her knees, making her laugh with a silly song about turnips. Mum slices fresh bread, I ladle up the bowls, and Alice places our new deer-skull spoons around the table. Da, Samuel, and Robert talk about the crop of tobacco that is sprouting nicely.
As I look around the room, I realize that Samuel is right. I have love, and that is the prize.
Forty-Six
I HAVE A dream of ships.
First, they are the ships I know, sailing to shore on the wind with white billowed sails. But then they become huge, sleek ships with wings like birds, sailing high above the earth, pushed by an unseen hand.
The ships carry children, so many of them. They are not the sad children who come to James Town against their will. These children are joyful and excited about this journey to the New World. They know peace inside themselves and so they bring peace to this land. They come here from every corner of the world, with skin of different hues, speaking languages that mix like the notes of music.
They bring a message to all the old ones: the time for fighting is over. The time for life in joy together is here.
When I wake, it feels as though I have dreamed far into the future—too far for this good news to be mine. But it will belong to someone, sometime. And this gives me hope.
—Virginia Laydon, the hungry month of April 1622
Author’s Note
I AM OFTEN asked how much of a book is real and how much is from my imagination. In Poison in the Colony I have recounted the most significant events of those years as faithfully as I could, relying on historical records and accounts that were written by the people who were there. The story is a combination of what really did happen and what could have happened. Each character in the book either was a real person or, in the case of some of the minor characters such as Cecily or William, bears the name of a real person taken from the records. There is one exception to this: Leone, the Italian glassmaker who was kind and helpful to Bermuda. I had no records for him and so I named him after my Italian grandfather.
This book is similar to Blood on the River in that, as I had to do with Samuel Collier, I had to invent a personality and characteristics for my main character, Virginia Laydon. As I pondered who Virginia was and what she would be like, I began to get a clear picture of her as someone with the gift, or curse, of what was called in those days the second sight. In modern times it might well be called having a strong intuitive sense. Virginia calls it “the knowing” because that is how she experiences it and she has no other reference for it. My inspiration for this trait in Virginia came from a good friend of mine who is both extremely intuitive and a descendent of the first Jamestown settlers. Her ancestor plays a bit part in the story. I knew from talking to my friend that this gift has caused grief and danger in her own life and in the lives of her forebearers who also had this ability. She remains steadfast in the knowledge that the gift is from God and is to be used in service to Him only. In the days of witch hunts, this ability was often misunderstood, sometimes misused, and would no doubt have been a potentially lethal liability.
It was only after I had decided upon Virginia having this trait that I discovered some very interesting facts about events in Jamestown. Virginia’s mother, along with Jane Wright (sometimes written Joan or Joane), the left-handed midwife, were assigned to make shirts for the colonists and given bad thread. They were thus framed for the crime of stealing thread from the colony, tried by Governor Dale, pronounced guilty, and brutally whipped. Ann Laydon miscarried the child she was carrying.
Why were they framed? Being left-handed was often seen as witchlike. And being a midwife and a healer with herbs, as many midwives were, was also seen as possible witch behavior. Having a bad outcome for a patient with a birth or an illness could bring on the accusations.
Then I discovered that Jane Wright was the first person to be formally accused of witchcraft in the Virginia colony, in September 1626. Something was telling me I was on the right track with giving Virginia this special ability. The testimony given by Charles during Virginia’s trial is taken from the actual testimony during a later witch trial in the Virginia colony, that of Grace Sherwood. Yes, a woman actually said that Grace Sherwood came into her room at night, sat on her, then went out through the keyhole as a black cat!
Poison in the Colony covers the true historical events that occurred during those years, though Virginia’s part in them is of my own invention. All we really know about Virginia Laydon is that she was the first English child born in Jamestown, she and her family lived in Jamestown, then her parents were given land in Elizabeth City, and the family moved there to their own farm. They thrived and survived and were still there with Virginia and her three younger sisters, Alice, Katherine, and baby Margaret, for the census of 1624.
What about Bermuda? He was born on the island of Bermuda, to Mr. and Mrs. Eason, but after that I cannot find him. So for him, too, I had to make up his personality and desires. Did he dream of making glass and become a glassmaker when the glass house was started up again? We will never know. But the events around the glass house—when it was started, when it was abandoned and then started up again with the Italian glassworkers—are all accurate. Vincenzo was a real person and was as violent as I have depicted him. His wife was sent back to Italy because the governor feared Vincenzo would kill her, and he did take a crowbar to the big furnace and break it after the men had worked for weeks to repair it.
The true parts of Angela’s story are that she was brought to Jamestown on the Treasurer as a stolen slave and was either sold or escaped from the ship. It is also true that she was sent to live as a servant for Captain and Mrs. Pierce, who paid her purchase price. Sometimes her name is printed in the records as “Angelo,” but this is incorrect because that is the male form of the name. Anansi tales are believed to have originated in Ghana, and were known from Senegal to Ndongo (located in present-day Angola), where Angela was from.
For the character of Charles, I simply took his name from the census records and gave him that nasty personality. (Apologies to the real Charles.) Choupouke was an Indian youth who lived with the colonists. I do not know if he ever worked or stayed with Virginia and her family, but he was living in Elizabeth City with the colonists after the massacre, in 1624.
What of the controversy about how Pocahontas died? The English version of the events has always been that she fell ill from a common disease such as tuberculosis and perished. However, in 2007, Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star,” representatives of the Mattaponi tribe in Virginia, published The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History (Fulcrum Publishing). In this book, they share the sacred Mattaponi oral history that has been handed down through the generations, beginning with Pocahontas’s sister Mattachanna and her husband, Uttamattamakin (Tomocomo), who were with Pocahontas the night she died. The sacred history says that she was fine and healthy when she went to have dinner with her husband, John Rolfe, and Captain Argall. After dinner, she came to her room and was suddenly ill, vomiting and convulsing, and soon died. It looked very much as though she had been poisoned at dinner. As with so many things in history, we will never know for sure what actually happened.
Mr. George Thorpe really did hang two dogs after natives said they were afraid of them. He was trying very hard to convince the natives to send their children to his school, and somehow thought this would help his cause. The natives were quite insulted by his constant attempts at reeducating their children. When he was killed in the massacre, they treated his body with the contempt reserved for enemies to show their displeasure with him.
Nemattanew was a warrior who wore feathers and swan’s wings on his arms and who was seen as magical and immortal by his people. He had been in many battles and never been injured, and so his fellow warriors believed that English muskets could not affect him. The colonists nicknamed him Jack of the Feather and did not respect him nearly as much as his people did. It is also sadly true that when Nemattanew came back from his trading trip with Mr. Morgan, wearing Mr. Morgan’s cap and unable to explain what happened because of the language barrier, he was indeed shot by the English muskets. As he died, he begged, with his few English words, to be buried in Jamestown so that his people would not find out that he could be killed by a musket after all. Many historians believe that the killing of Nemattanew was pivotal in Chief Opechancanough’s decision to move forward with his plan for the March massacre.
Sometimes it has been reported incorrectly that the 1622 massacre happened on Good Friday. This is why I have shown in the story that Easter came weeks after that fateful day. Dates and calendars that far back can be confusing. The colonists were still going by the Julian calendar, and so for them, New Year’s Day was March 25, which means that the attack actually happened on March 22, 1621. Since our modern calendar has New Year’s Day falling on January 1, the date is officially reported as March 22, 1622. There was another massacre years later, on April 18, 1644, that occurred on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter. It is interesting to note that in both 1622 and 1644, the attacks happened one day shy of the third quarter moon. That is the moon that lit Virginia’s way as she walked past the barn and heard Choupouke’s anguish that morning.
For primary source material about the prophecy that was given to Chief Powhatan by his high priests (pages 47–49), see William Strachey, The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia: The First Book of the First Decade, 1612, reprinted in Edward Wright Haile, ed., Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony: The First Decade: 1607–1617. Champlain, Virginia: RoundHouse, 1998, pages 662–63; and Uttamatomakkin (Tomocomo), “An Interview in London,” reprinted in Jamestown Narratives, p. 881.
