London - Edward Rutherfurd [372]
The Wheeler spread was typical of Virginia then – a few hundred acres, a yeoman’s farm. Wheeler himself had never made much of it, but his widow had. She ran everything herself, with sweated labour. There were two slaves; but the day of the slave was only just beginning in Virginia. Most of the labourers were indentured English men – some poor, some in debt, a few petty criminals who had ten years of labour to earn their freedom. She had a name for being fair but ruthless. But the real reason for the farm’s profit was her choice of crop: for, like many others in Virginia, every yard was given to a single crop whose acres of huge green leaves flapped in the breeze like so many floppy pieces of parchment.
Tobacco. Since John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, had introduced it, the burgeoning of the Virginia tobacco crop had been astounding. A few years ago, twenty thousand pounds weight had been shipped; this year – who knew? – maybe half a million.
From its shaky start, the Virginia colony was growing swiftly. There were several thousand settlers now, taking more land every year. Some of the larger farmers were doing so well they had started importing a few luxury goods from England. But the Widow Wheeler bought almost nothing. Perhaps she was puritanical; perhaps just mean. It was hard to guess for, it had to be confessed, few of her neighbours really knew very much about her.
They would certainly have been surprised to learn that for fifteen years, the respectable Widow Wheeler had lived with Black Barnikel the pirate.
Not, in truth, that this really described their strange, wandering, relationship. Jane herself, during those years, would have put it far more simply: “I’m his woman.”
She had been his woman on that first voyage. She had had no choice. She had been his woman when, already pregnant, he had left her to have the child in an African port to which, months later, he had returned, delighted to find he had a son, and showered her with gifts. Five voyages, a dozen ports, three more children. Her years had passed in strange, exotic places, from the Caribbean to the Levant.
And how had she felt? It had been strange at first to be in his power, to know he could probably kill her. She had studied him carefully therefore. Yet she had found him surprisingly tender. Whether she wished it or no, he knew how to bring her to physical ecstasy. Did she not think of escape? He was too cunning to give her the chance. He never went near London. What should she do – abandon her children? She found she could not. Take them home with her to London? What would they, with their strange, dark skins, be there? It was when she thought of this that she guessed at Orlando Barnikel’s secret rage, and it was at such times, far more even than those of physical passion, that she recognized that, in a way, she loved him.
The end had come suddenly. After the third child, a boy, she had lost two more babies. Orlando had been much away. She had not conceived for some years. But it was just after the younger boy, aged twelve, had made his first voyage with his father, that Orlando had announced: “I’m sailing to America. Come with me.” When they reached Virginia, escorting her off the ship at Jamestown he had put a bag of money in her hand and announced: “It is time for you to leave me now.”
She had been almost thirty. Young enough to marry and have a family in a colony like that, where settlers were often in need of wives. He had been right.
Six months later she had found Wheeler, and married. The only catch had been that he had fallen sick and there had been no children. As for Orlando, she had never seen, nor heard of him again. Recently, however, as she stood on Wheeler’s Hill and gazed over the plantation, she had sometimes found her eyes wandering, on clear days, towards the blue glint of the ocean.
It was some news she gleaned from one of her