Cate of the Lost Colony - Lisa Klein [94]
Her complacency irked me. “Our lives were lately held rather cheap, exchanged for a single musket each,” I reminded her. “The food stored in the armory and guarded day and night is more valuable than any one of us. I am worth less than a handful of empty shells.” I thought sadly of Eleanor lying in the cold ground.
“But you are alive! Therefore, thank the Lord.”
Betty tried to encourage me, but hope was hard to come by. November brought cold, sharp rain and two more deaths. The men were so few and so weakened by illness that many tasks went neglected. Ananias was too despondent to lead us. By December the firewood was all depleted and Ambrose Vickers sent out men to cut more. Some of the houses leaked and needed repairs. Alice and her baby came to live in the governor’s house for the sake of thrift. We tried to keep one another from becoming fearful or dispirited.
There was reason to be afraid, for Indians had been spotted lurking in the underbrush nearby. In small bands of three or four, they shot arrows over the palisade, but fortunately these fell harmless to the ground. They ran away when the soldiers fired their muskets. It was Thomas Graham who realized their intention was to provoke us to waste our ammunition. So he ordered the guards not to fire unless the Indians came too near, and he had all the grass and shrubs cut down within thirty feet of the palisade, giving them nowhere to hide. We carried buckets of water from the bay and kept them beside our doors, in the event the Indians aimed burning arrows at the thatched roofs. I wished Manteo were with us, for he might be able to persuade them to stop troubling us.
One December night I was roused by the squawking of hens, and my heart pounded with the certainty that we were being attacked. I listened, dreading to hear whooping and the crackling of flames on the roof. But the intruder was only a wolf that had found a gap in the palisade and slunk into the henhouse. Graham shot the wolf and the dogs quickly devoured the carcass. But a dozen chickens were dead. And before the hole could be repaired—a difficult task, for the blacksmith had gone to Chesapeake and taken all the nails—three pigs escaped and only one could be recovered. Then rats got into the seed corn and ruined half of it. Like lifeblood seeping from a sick patient, our means of survival were trickling away.
Then in the deep of winter, on a night so cold that Alice and I slept in a single bed with her baby and Virginia between us, Indians did attack. Ananias heard them first and woke us, then ran out to raise the alarm. We hid under the bed, and I nearly smothered Virginia in my attempt to keep her from crying out. The skirmish was brief, the gunshots and screeching soon fading to silence. Running outside without regard for the cold, I learned the intruders had scaled the palisade and entered the fort undetected, where they pillaged the armory for food. Two of the guards had been asleep, leaving Georgie Howe to fight them alone. He took an arrow in the leg. By the laws of the colony, the two guards should have been charged with a crime. But there was no one to administer justice, for Ananias Dare, the last of John White’s assistants, had been killed by a single arrow that pierced his throat.
Virginia Dare, the first English child born in this New World only sixteen months ago, was now an orphan. She could barely say “Mama” when her mother died, and now “Papa” was gone, too. Soon she would remember neither of them. I knew, for the memories of my father were already growing faint, and those of my mother were even dimmer.
The child, as if sensing her loss, toddled over to Alice and plucked at her bodice.
Alice shook her head sadly. “You have been weaned, little one. I have no more milk for you.”
“Come here, Virginia,” I said, and held open my arms.
With a chubby fist thrust into her mouth, the trusting child came to me and put her head in my