ROCKY POND BOOKS

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First published in the United States of America by Rocky Pond Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2024

Copyright © 2024 by Alena Bruzas

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Ebook ISBN 9780593616222

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Cover art © 2024 by Adam Parata

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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CONTENT NOTE:

Please be advised that this novel includes depictions of domestic abuse, cannibalism, and self-harm.

“Now famine began to look pale and ghastly in every face so that nothing was spared to maintain life and to do those things which seem incredible.”

—George Percy

One

Master Collins says I can call him Henry, though yet it feels strange to say it. He says will I get water and wait in the storehouse line for the grain. But oh it is hot. My head hurts from it and my eyes feel swollen and my skin is tight and red. It already peels like birch bark. But I go outside where the heat is sharp, with buckets banging against my legs.

Henry, Master Collins, is already brown from the sun. His face and forearms. When he took off his shirt I saw the white skin of his chest and shoulders and stomach. I shouldn’t have looked, but I did. I am either white or red and peeling.

In the line there is some number of whispering women ahead of me. I set my buckets down by my ankles and scratch a bite through my hose.

Jane Eddowes slips through the line. She pokes her mother in the side as she passes and Mistress Eddowes jumps and smiles at Jane, who is wicked with her grin and her eyes like the deepest part of twilight. Mistress Eddowes waves Jane away from the chore of waiting for our grain. I’m standing, shifting in the hot hot sun, burning my cheeks and forehead and nose.

When the cape merchant allows me inside the dark building to collect our grain, it is less again. I watch the kernels as they slide into my basket, lined with linen to save every precious grain. Another measure he pours. One and one and one and one and one and one. I don’t know how to count but I know the rhythm and he stops too soon.

I look up at him but he won’t answer for it. “Go now,” he says.

The Sea Venture was supposed to arrive in August. At the same time as Jane. At the same time as me. We left home at the same time in our fleet of ships. But there was a hurricane. In the humid dark, we were battered against the sweating walls of the hull, the sounds of retching, the smell of vomit, praying, crying. They said we couldn’t have any light to avoid fire but I kept my eyes closed anyway.

The men on the bulwarks watch for the Sea Venture every day, their necks craning. Jane says that our food was on it. Salt pork and beef, dried peas, hard biscuits, onions, and limes. It was lost in the hurricane, but perhaps it didn’t sink. Perhaps it will come tomorrow morning. And tomorrow. And tomorrow. But it doesn’t come.

Jane is in the wellhouse. “Do you know?” she says. Her hair is white from the sun and her skin is dark gold because her father is indulgent and lets her play outside though yet she’s too old for it.

“What?”

“Master Adam and Master Franz, they went back to the country people.” Jane pulls her bucket from the well. Her sleeves are pushed up and her muscles roll under her skin. “But they killed them.”

“Who?”

“The country people killed Master Adam and Master Franz. And why should they trust them, I wonder. Master Adam and Master Franz are faithless. They had their heads beaten with clubs until they were dead.” She splashes water on her flushed cheeks. “Ellis,” she says, putting her wet hand on my arm. “Upriver there is a place where the water is shallow and slow and Rowan says the country people let us be. Come with me! We can swim.”

“I can’t swim,” I say, but I don’t move her hand from my arm.

“We can wade. You don’t have to swim.”

Her eyes are bright and I want to please her and be naked with her in the water, but I shake my head. “Master Collins says I must tend to Mistress Collins. She’s unwell.”

Jane rolls her eyes. “Again?”

I reproach her with my frown but then I can’t help it and smile, waving as she walks the buckets back to her house and then, I suppose, to go swim, perhaps with Rowan, though yet she is too old to be playing naked with boys. We are both too old. In a year or two we could be married and yet still she plays like a child.

*   *   *

At home I was lost. I had lost everybody and everybody was lost to me. Here, I have food to eat. Some complain it is not enough, but it is enough for me. Here, I have a home with Master and Mistress Collins. I have Jane.

Here, it is beautiful.

I don’t know if we had a good life when I was small. I know that the things I worry about now, like food and warmth, are not things I worried about when I was small. Then, I only knew about the things they told me, and they didn’t tell me much.

I remember once that Papa brought me with him to haggle at the meat market, and he bought me roasted chestnuts and said not to tell Mama. When I asked why not, he didn’t answer. He only smiled and tugged me along the quay to look at the birds riding the wind. I know now that we didn’t have the money for chestnuts and he didn’t want Mama to be angry with him.

I don’t know why Papa had to leave to come here. I don’t know why he believed it was his only choice. Sometimes we bought the good flour, the fine white sugar. Sometimes we made marzipan or cakes. Sometimes Papa brought home mutton instead of fish or salt beef. Mama had time to play. She would kneel on the floor with me and play kings and queens with the small toy people Papa whittled. Or she would play cracht cradle. I remember when she taught me Jacob’s ladder. I tied my finger in a knot by accident and Mama giggled at me like she was small.

But then Mama would never play. We never had honey or cream for our porridge anymore. Mama took in the little girls from the room above us for pay, and she bent over her bone lace by the rushlight late, after I was supposed to be asleep. And though yet there were times she wasn’t doing work, she would only sit and stare and rub her calloused fingers together.

Papa said there was a place for him on a ship. He said we could follow him later when he had land and a house. He said it was the only place we could ever hope to own land and not always pay rent. He said maybe he could get out from under debt, finally finally.

Mama cried. She didn’t want him to go. She was afraid to be without him. What if something happened to him? What would she do? Where would we go?

I would push my cold toes into Franny’s legs and listened to them argue. Franny slept through it, like she always did. She slept deep and hard, even when I had bad dreams and woke up screaming.

And then, some number of months later, Papa was gone.

*   *   *

Our house has no roof yet, only walls. A length of canvas covers the frame, but sun streams through gaping corners. We have only been here for two weeks. When we came, there were row houses and a small wooden church and the storehouse. We stayed on the ship and some of the families stayed in tents. Already there have been settlers here for some number of years. All the families who come, some of us stay in the row houses, some of us have gone to stay with the country people, and some smaller number, we build houses for ourselves. Some men build and some thatch and others gather reeds. When I am not attending Mistress Collins, Master Collins bids me to help with the building. Mostly, I gather reeds.

Mistress Collins is moaning and her arm is over her face. I pinch my skin, just above my elbow. I tell myself that I am glad to be here.

The rushes are thick and soft beneath my feet. I gathered them when we first landed, when Henry started framing the walls. They smelled sweet and fragrant. Now I keep them sweet with ferns and holly, dried and scattered. Rowan says the winters here are so cold that a person can’t find any green things growing. It’s all brown and dead until spring again.

Mistress Collins smells like vomit. I help her sit up. I hate the way her oily hair feels, and her head, lolling against my arm. I hold the wooden cup to her dry lips and I close my eyes as she drinks. After, I grind the grain and I check the ale. A warm sour smell wafts up and I know it’s almost ready. If it smells sweet, it will be too strong.

Mistress Collins, who I am not allowed to call by her Christian name of Blythe and who Master Collins calls Birdie, is unwell. She was unwell the whole way here. I remember most the smell of her vomit as she retched, all the way over.

Henry comes in through the doorway with no door yet, carrying one of the baskets that was still on the ship. He goes to Mistress Collins and kneels by her. Their pallet is in the corner of the unfinished house. The sun beats on her face, her skin sweating and her eyes clenched tight shut. He murmurs close to her ear and then he stands up and gestures to me.

“Ellis, come help,” he says. I can see his sweat through his shirt and where the white linen sticks to his skin. His face is pretty and fine with delicate bones and bright eyes, intense and captivating, hooded by heavy dark brows. He pushes his dark curling hair out of his face and pulls a coverlet out of the basket. The fine stitching swirls and flows over the layers of different kinds of cloth.

“We’ll use it for privacy,” Henry says. I hold the coverlet as high as I can, stretching my arms over my head. He ties it to corner posts of the half-finished house and a shadow falls across Mistress Collins’s face. She sighs and Henry puts his hand on her cheek and I let the coverlet fall so I can’t see them anymore.

Even in the shade it is still stifling hot. “We’ll finish the roof as soon as we can get outside the walls,” Henry says.

*   *   *

Outside the walls there are others. The country people. They were here first. Sometimes it is safe to leave the walls and sometimes it is not. I never know when is which and I am not permitted to leave.

One of them, his name is Mark, is sitting in the dirt against a wall. I pass him as I walk to the wellhouse. He’s working on something with his hands, something close to his body that I can’t see. I feel his eyes on my peeling skin. I rub salve on my skin every night because the sun hurts me here. Mark doesn’t have to. My skin doesn’t belong here but his does. I am the stranger here.

He was here when we came. He and his people. Back home, they told us there were already people here but that they are simple and live in a state of nature and that they want to learn from us. They told us that the people here would welcome our knowledge and our ways of life and our god. They told us that the people here would love our god, if only we would teach them.

But Mark, who is a little older than me, I think, he seems angry. He seems afraid. He is compelled to live here, within our walls. The council traded some of our young men for him. He is here to learn our language. Some of our young men, like Thomas Savage, went to live with his people to learn their language.

Rowan says Thomas Savage loves them like his own family and they love him. Thomas Savage says they are kinder and more gentle to their children. He says it is so because look at us, look at me and Rowan and others like Robert Poole and Henry Spelman. We are all young and yet working alone here in this place where we are strangers. He says the children of the country people live with their parents until they are older, because they love them and want them to be close and to care for them.

The walls, they’re made of wood, some whole timbers, some split. They are all crooked so there are gaps in between, where eyes can peer or the barrels of guns can slide or arrows can fly.

When we first came, even before I came, we started naming things. The country people already had names for everything, of course. But we named everything on top of those names. It makes things ours. It means we’re taking over.

We make the house from things we find here. Henry has never made a house before. His hands were not used to that kind of work and so they cracked and bled and scabbed over and cracked and bled again.

He used mud and straw and reeds and wood. Here, it is warm all night and I’ve never seen so many stars. Last night I heard Mistress Collins crying, quiet as though she didn’t want anybody to know it.

Jane can read and write. She has a slate she is supposed to practice on but instead she draws funny pictures. She sits in the square outside the church where the settlers gather and sometimes trade with the country people. She draws Master Percy, slouched and thin. She draws him shaking his finger at Master Smith, broad and stern and not listening. She draws a bird on Master Percy’s head.

The space between the walls is small. We’ve half built so many small houses that walking through them to the storehouse or the church is like dodging through a maze, walls and corners and the posts of unfinished rooves jutting into the sky like dead trees, and mud underneath my feet that bakes and cracks in the hot hot sun.

I set my buckets on the ground and squat next to Jane, watching her quick fingers. Rowan leans over her shoulder and laughs at the picture and asks, “What does it say?”

“You’re supposed to be dead by now,” she says. Master Percy is saying it to Master Smith. Master Smith is president of the colony but Jane says some of the men don’t like him. He sent home for all his rich clothes and he looks ridiculous here in the mud wearing his ruff and silk hose and purple velvet gown.

“Master Percy should be dead by now more like,” Rowan says. Master Percy is ill. Always wheezing and sometimes he has coughing fits, hacking and choking like he can’t breathe.

Jane squints at me and scribbles with her chalk on her slate. I look down but she touches my chin. “Hold still,” she says.

I close my eyes and let the sun sit warm on my face. I let it settle into my skin. I let Jane’s gaze touch me. I let it fill me up with something I don’t know, something that makes my heart beat harder.

“You may look now,” she says.

It’s me, I think. My image. I haven’t seen my face for a long time but there is my bottom lip, the dimple that I feel when I touch it. Jane draws me older than the last time I saw my face, when my sister shared her looking glass with me. My face is thinner. My eyes are open. Though yet I sat with my eyes closed, she drew them open. My image looks back at me, deep and serious but I am smiling just a little. A secret smile.

“Is that how you see me?” I say.

“Yes,” she says, and her gaze flickers to my mouth and then she looks down and scrubs the picture away with her sleeve. My face is a white smear on the slate.

Jane is supposed to be writing verse. Small Mary comes running, ready for a lesson. She has time to learn and Jane is sweet to her.

*   *   *

We borrowed the ladder from the other Smiths and Henry says I can frame the roof just as well as him and I am smaller and lighter and so I will be safer. I ignore my shame as I kirtle up my smock and climb. From up here I can see over the walls of the fort. I have never seen so much. Before it was always only dingy walls and only as far as the alley twisted and only a dirty gray grin of sky.

“Are you ready?” Henry asks, and hands timber up to me. The wood is already notched so it balances on the ridge, the highest part of the roof. Over and over he hands me timbers until my shoulders and arms are aching and my hands are raw and there are splinters woven into my skin.

Then he climbs up and straddles the ridge in front of me. “You’re a good girl, Ellis,” he says. I shade the sun out of my eyes. I can smell him when he’s so close. He smells grown-up, an adult man. I can feel his heat. He smiles at me and I hold the timber while he bores a hole into it.

Below us is Mistress Collins. She lies facing the wall while the roof goes up above her. “I’m worried about her,” Henry says, low and close. “She should be better by now.” She only gets up from her dusty dirty bed when one of us makes her.

He hammers the wooden peg into the hole. It jolts my hands, my arms, my whole body, each blow of the mallet. When it’s done, he says, “Do you see? You can carry on now, can’t you, Ellis?”

He leaves and I work alone, except for Mistress Collins, trying not to exist beneath me. Jane comes careening around the edge of a house. Her hair is wet and curling at the ends. Clouds of white surround her clean face. “Ellis!” she calls up to me. “I can see all the way up your leg!”

I wave my hand to hush her. My cheeks are hot and itchy. Jane smiles at me shamelessly. I can’t stop myself and I smile back and I feel her eyes on my skin as though she’s touching me. But then her gaze shifts and I see a shadow lengthen at her feet. It’s Henry.

He looks up at my leg, bare but for my hose and garter and my skirts kirtled up. And then he looks at Jane looking at my leg. I can’t see his face anymore but I can see his expression reflected in Jane’s. He’s angry. How dare she look at me like that?

Jane says, “You’re lucky it hasn’t rained with your roof not done.” She grins like an imp and runs off.

“Ellis, I want you to start collecting reeds for thatching while I finish the framework. We need to finish the roof before the weather turns. We’re lucky it hasn’t rained yet,” he says, just like Jane.

He tells me to stay safe from the country people. “Never forget,” he reminds me, “they don’t want us here.”

*   *   *

Rowan and Jane come with me because I am afraid to go alone. Rebecca North, who is younger than me but acts older, crosses by with a basket over her arm. A trail of linen escapes, blue embroidered flowers snapping in the wind. Her eyes pass over me with no expression but she smiles at Rowan and Jane. “Where are you going?” she asks. “Can I come?”

Jane glances at Rowan and giggles. “Away, wart,” she says.

Rebecca flushes and turns, her neck blotchy under her cap. As she leaves I look at Jane for an explanation but she just giggles again and elbows Rowan.

We slip through the back gate. This is the first time I will leave the walls since we came. It is a tiny space in here but I forgot how small. Outside, it is so wide. Swept open like the ocean. The tall grass sways in the wind and the bugs hum and the grass whispers and there are birds singing and above those noises there is nothing but sky and silence.

“What?” I say, about Rebecca.

“Tell her,” Jane says to Rowan.

“Troll,” Rowan says to Jane. He’s embarrassed but I don’t know why.

Jane rolls her eyes and threads her arms through ours, connecting us. “Miss North fancies Rowan.”

“Stop,” Rowan says.

“You don’t like her?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“She thinks she’s so special,” Jane says.

I follow birds with my eyes, quick bursts and flutters, and here and there a flash of red. At home red is a color I only saw on rich people’s clothes. Here, this red bird wears it feather to feather, like the color red belongs to him, like it was made for him.

Rowan came with a group of boys to work as laborers. He says he will have land here someday, as part of his indenture, all his own. I wonder why he doesn’t like Rebecca. Why Jane doesn’t. Rebecca thinks she’s special, Jane says. But Rebecca seems special. Special like Jane. Loved and cared for. Protected and safe.

As soon as we’re in the woods we start to run. Spider runs alongside us, Rowan’s little spotted hound he brought from home. Rowan has brown hair and brown eyes and freckles and he is always jolly. I wonder if that’s why Rebecca fancies him. Or is it the possibility of his owning land? He left his family at home, a father and two brothers, to come here.

Spider barks up the trunk of a pine tree, so tall I can’t see the top of it. Rowan nudges Jane with his foot. “I bet I can climb higher than you,” he says.

Jane jumps for the lowest branch. Rowan runs to the other side and I hear him scrabble against the bark. Jane swings her legs up and I glimpse her thigh, round and mesmerizing.

“Ellis!” Jane calls down to me, her feet swinging by my head. “Come up!”

“I can’t,” I say. I wish I could.

“Of course you can,” she says. She reaches her hand down to me and I take it, warm and calloused. “Brace yourself on the trunk.”

I skin my knee and catch my kercher on the bottom of the branch and it comes loose and I scrape my arm against the bark and then I am up, belly on the branch, dangling. Jane pulls herself to the branch above. Rowan is already some distance higher than us. Spider barks frantically, clawing the trunk.

Jane follows Rowan and I follow Jane and we climb and climb until my knees shake at the height and I stop looking down. We climb so high I can feel the trunk groan and bend and I sway with it, riding the wind. We climb until I am standing in the sky, blue all around me. Jane shrieks, so loud, so right here, she is all I know.

“Quiet, troll!” Rowan calls up. Jane won the bet. She is the highest. I am at her hip. Rowan is sitting below us, swinging his legs.

Rowan goes back now, because he has the minding of the chickens and is expected to feed and water them and to take the goats out to graze when he is finished, but Jane and me go swimming.

I leave my smock on and lay my kirtle and hose on the beach and run into the water that is warm and slow. I stop when the river is up to my knees. Jane yelps and plunges deeper and deeper where I know she can’t touch the riverbed and so I can’t follow her. I stand here frustrated, stuck.

But then Jane wades back toward me. Her smock is wet and it clings and I can see her skin through it. Her belly and her breasts.

We lie in the shallows, side by side, and the water eddies around my legs in a warm current.

I close my eyes. The light is red and hot through my eyelids. I feel Jane’s body next to mine. I open my eyes and she is smiling close to my face and she touches my lip with her finger. A drop of water slides from her finger to my mouth. It tastes like salt.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins is crying. She gasps and sobs behind the coverlet. I build the fire and put the bread in to bake.

I don’t want to. I don’t want to.

I bring Mistress Collins her beer. Her cheek is swollen and her eye is purple and she is crying into her fists. I wonder what she did, how she got the bruise. She ignores me and I set her beer on the floor and go around the coverlet again.

When Henry comes home I have his bread and soup ready. I bartered with the other Smiths for a pig bone for the soup and I thickened it with ground-up biscuit and I smile as I slide the bowl to him across the table. But he doesn’t smile back at me.

Mistress Collins is quiet now.

“You were with Jane Eddowes,” he says.

He’s angry with me but I don’t know why. Is it wicked of me, to play with Jane? How does he know? The guards might have told him, or anyone might have. We didn’t try to hide it.

But there are the reeds for thatching to prove how hard I worked. They are piled up by the door. I glance at them, then back at my feet.

“Jane Eddowes is not a good friend to you. You should not be spending time with her.”

But why? I try to hide my thoughts from him but he sees them anyway.

“Jane Eddowes is wicked. Her father does not discipline her the way he should. She runs wild all over this place and spends time alone with young men. She is not a good friend to you.” He pauses and his eyes move from my face to my stomach to my thighs. “And I didn’t like how…” But then he stops and rubs his mouth and I remember the way Jane looked at my bare leg and the way Henry saw her and was angry. “I do not want you associating with Jane Eddowes.”

I nod. But I want to. I want to spend time with Jane.

But he says I should not. He seems to be satisfied with my nod. He smiles and slurps the soup.

I stand against the wall while he eats. He combs his hair back from his forehead and puts his hat on. The empty bowl is on the table. He touches my arm, nods, and leaves again.

I bring Mistress Collins her soup now. She is awake, staring at the ceiling with her hands clasped on her belly. Only when she is done eating will I get what is left.

Two

Henry watches from his chair as I get Mistress Collins ready for church. She resists me. She doesn’t want to stand up. “Mistress Collins,” I say, and I hate the wheedling sound of my voice. “Mistress Collins, it’s time to wash. Morning ablutions! “ ‘Look thy hands be washed clean, that no filth on thy nails be seen,’ ” I recite in a jolly voice. She looks at me sharp like she wants to smack me. But she doesn’t move. Her limbs are heavy and damp and hot.

“Blythe,” says Henry. He glares at her and looks away again.

So she complies. She faces the wall, away from Henry. She is so petty and childish. I pull her smock over her head and she is naked. There is a wind on her skin and it must feel so nice, but she shivers and clasps her hands around her skinny elbows.

She won’t let me turn her as I scrub her body. Henry notices my frustration though yet I try to hide it, and I see him look up, a blurry shape in the corner of my eye. He keeps looking.

He stands up and Mistress Collins hunches her shoulders, her arms going around her belly. Henry puts his hand on her shoulder and pulls her around to face him. She puts one nervous foot on top of the other.

There is silence. I back away into a corner. I am not here.

“Blythe?” he says. I look up at him through my eyelashes. He is rapt, like he is in our little church and looking at God. He stares at her downturned face and then at her.

Her limbs are spindle thin and everything is thin and stretched, even her skin over her womb, just a little swollen. I suppose he didn’t know. Her courses stopped during the crossing, but then it was the same for so many of the other women, with never enough to eat.

“Birdie, is it? Are you?” he asks. His voice makes my heart feel swollen, pregnant like her womb. He is so hopeful, so soft, so gentle with her.

“Birdie,” he whispers into her neck. He loves her, I can tell. The way he looks at her. She is some miracle. Some sacred thing.

I pull her smock on over her head. I twist and cap her hair. He gives her a flower, a puff ball of tiny purple blossoms, and she hands it to me to tuck into her braid.

I follow behind them, watching my feet, to the little wooden church that sweats sap in the heat. From the back with the other maids and servants, I watch as he promenades her from person to person, one hand on her belly. She nods and smiles and blushes pretty.

The church is small and stifling. The heat pounds in through the walls. It beats against my head and sweat runs down my temples while the woman sitting next to me nods like a dandelion in the rain. It smells like sweat and dust. It smells like no air. Jane walks in with a gust of wind. Her hair blows in her face and she brushes it out of her eyes, laughing. She should wear it in a knot, she is old enough. But I love to see it. Feathers and silk and white like the inside of an apple.

But I should be listening. “Preach preach preach preach preach preach preach,” the minister says. “More more more more more,” he says. I can’t make his words mean things. They just sound like words. Listless words to fill up listless hot air. I lean forward and really stare at him. I try to find the meaning in his words, find God in his words.

After church the settlers mill about in the open space where there used to be tall seagrass, but now it is hard baked dirt, cracked in the heat. Some men gather and play a song, so sweet and sad I feel tears welling up and it’s hard to keep them back. The song, I think, is about home. A home they long for, somewhere cold and gray and rainy. Somewhere different from here.

I long for home too, but my home died with Mama. That’s why I’m here. To find my home. To find my papa. He’s here. Somewhere.

*   *   *

Henry told me to get more rushes for the roof. But how can he expect me to go out alone? Jane comes with me. We wade into the marsh. The sun shines on the slow-flowing stream.

I am hunched over, my neck aching. I can’t see anything but my hands on the sickle, cutting the reeds. I need Jane with me.

When I have all I can carry, I kneel and twine the reeds with hemp.

“Rowan says there is a place we can find tuckahoe. Down the marsh, by the Back River,” Jane says. “Will we go?”

Henry is waiting, I know. But I want the tuckahoe. It’s a swamp plant the country people showed us. We can cook the root down, grind it into flour, and bake it into bread. Jane grasps my hand and tugs me along, running with my bundle of reeds banging against my back.

I feel weak and my cheeks are throbbing hot and I slow to a walk but Jane still runs ahead of me. I’m afraid to be left alone, so I hurry to catch up. “Jane, I’m hot!”

“Take off your hose,” she says, and then she reaches for my head. “And your cap! It’s only me. It’s only us here.”

We take too long, lingering by the river. We find a small shrub with sweet blue berries on it. We eat until we are full and Jane’s mouth is stained purple. With Jane next to me, I forget that Henry says I can’t. When she is next to me, her heat, her smell, her hair that brushes my shoulder, the side of her mouth turning up in a smile, that is all I see.

When we walk back the light is dim and silver around the edges, and I’m afraid it means I’m late and Henry will be angry. We can see between the trees forever, but it is not what it seems. I don’t know how to hide here but the country people do. And they don’t want us here. That’s what Henry told me. They don’t want us here.

And then Jane clutches my arm.

It is a hunting party. Men in their breechclouts, painted with mud and naked all over, with their hair long and knotted up on one side and shaved on the other and their bows ready.

I feel their presence like a throbbing bruise, like a headache. They’re more than us and they’re blocking our way. The country people talk to each other but I don’t know what they’re saying. Are they angry because they don’t want us here? Are they angry because we dig up their tuckahoe and take it for ourselves?

A tall man speaks to us, stern. He gestures at us. I think he’s telling us to go. No, he’s telling us to come to him. Jane walks toward them, bold, pulling me behind her.

He gestures again, reaching for our baskets. But we need the tuckahoe! I look at Jane for help but she surrenders her basket, so I do mine as well. Another man takes my basket, and they dig through the roots, taking several out of each basket. I pinch my arm, watching.

We accept our baskets back. They left most of the tuckahoe. The other men ignore us. Two boys our age laugh and jostle each other. They don’t look at us at all, as though we don’t interest them. As though none of this really matters. The tall man talks to us sternly again. Jane nods as though she understands and I think perhaps I do as well.

This is their place. We should not come here again. It feels not like a warning nor yet a threat; it’s simply true. We do not belong here. We are not safe here. They do not want us here.

We bob our heads and hurry away, my skin prickling as we go. Through the trees we weave, and though it is all flat and bare and empty, when we turn back we can’t see the men anymore. We run. Jane laughs and I shudder. I feel like I’ve been scolded. I’m ashamed and resentful.

“Stupid dorbels,” Jane says.

*   *   *

Henry is waiting for me. He sees me with Jane. He told me not to. He said Jane Eddowes is no friend to me. But she is! I needed her. It’s not safe to go out alone.

Once we are inside the little house he says, “I told you I did not want you spending time with Jane Eddowes. Did you not hear me?”

“I did, sir,” I say to the floor.

I’m sorry. I’ll be good. I was wicked. I say it in my head but I’m saying it to him.

“You heard me and yet you defied me?”

I feel a bead of sweat on my upper lip. Mistress Collins is silent behind her coverlet. “Yes,” I say.

“I cannot hear you, Ellis.”

“Yes sir,” I say, louder this time. Please don’t be angry with me.

He is quiet. Then, “Go cut a switch.”

Out there? Alone? I wait a moment but he doesn’t offer to follow me. I take the knife and go. The guard in the bulwark lets me pass when I tell him my errand. He laughs at me. I’ve been wicked and now I will be punished. But it’s not my fault. But I knew I shouldn’t. But I didn’t want to go alone. But he told me not to spend time with Jane.

I walk through the tall grass. My hands are shaking and raw from cutting reeds. I find a switch. It is a good one. Master Collins will be glad of it. I am a good girl. I breathe in, breathe out. It’s happened before. Even Papa would whip me sometimes. It won’t hurt that badly.

I’ll do better. I won’t be wicked again. I’ll be good.

He does it inside, where it is private. Mistress Collins doesn’t watch. I grip the door post. Press my forehead to the rough wood. I am ashamed. I am angry. I am defiant. I am wicked. He whips my bare skin with the switch. I can’t count but he says ten lashes. I flinch each time. One and one and one and one and one. He steps back. He takes a deep breath. I hear his shirtsleeves rustle as he wipes sweat from his brow. It doesn’t hurt yet but it will. I feel his heat as he steps forward again. One and one and one and one and one.

I lower my skirts. I won’t cry. I am not a child. I will not shame myself with tears.

*   *   *

I beg his permission to go get water, to go find kindling, to go, to go. He makes me ask sweetly. He makes me show him my eyes so he can see straight into my thoughts.

Jane is playing with children by the church. In the dim twilight she is like a wisp of fog. She smiles when she sees me. “Ellis!” she says.

I tug her away from the others and she laughs as she follows me. She is glad I want her all to myself.

“Ellis, what is it?” she asks as we round a corner. A sea breeze blows through the cracks in the walls. It smells like salt and cold and damp.

Nobody is close by.

“Ellis?” Jane says again. Her cheeks are pink. Her eyes are bright in the shadows. I feel Henry at the back of my neck, wondering where I am. I banish him. I just want Jane.

I move my hand up her bare arm. Her skin is cool. She starts to breathe a little faster. Her lips part and she steps closer to me and then I to her. “Jane,” I say, and I close my eyes and touch my lips to hers and her hair is so soft under my hand and I can feel her heart pounding as she presses into me, her breast into mine. Our hearts beat together.

I don’t, though. I don’t do any of that. We don’t kiss. I just imagine it. I see it and feel it and taste her mouth, all in my mind.

She smiles at me as though she knows what I am thinking. Her smile is like a cat’s. She touches her pink tongue to her lip.

“Jane,” I whisper. I want her I want her I want her.

Rowan bursts into our quiet, chasing Spider. The little dog darts between our legs. Rowan runs hollering through us, breaking us apart.

Jane laughs and turns back to me. Her expression changes. It mirrors mine. “What is it?” she says.

“I can’t—” But it’s impossible to say.

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t spend time with you anymore,” I say.

She rears back in surprise. “Why?” Her voice is fierce.

“Henry says—”

“Henry?” she sneers.

“Master Collins,” I say.

“Why, though?”

“Jane,” I say, leaning forward. She draws me to her, like she is a flame and I am a moth. But I can’t. Henry says I can’t. I turn to leave.

“Ellis,” Jane says, insistent. She touches my arms, slides her hands along my waist. “Don’t listen to him. Don’t, do not, do not let me go,” she says.

Three

I learned how to make bone lace from Mama. When I interviewed with Master and Mistress Collins, Mistress Collins spoke to me first. She asked my connections, of which I have none. She asked about my qualifications. I can bake and brew and mend and launder. Yes mistress, I can mind babes. I told her about my sister Lizzie. I didn’t tell her what happened to Lizzie. Or what happened to Mama. Or even what happened to Papa, that he is here, maybe. That I am looking for him.

She seemed dissatisfied. Was it my lack of connections? Was it my lewd family, with no land or money or education?

I told her I could make bone lace, then. That I learned it from Mama. I showed her a small piece. Her slim fingers looked pretty against the white. She touched a flower in the pattern. “What is this?” she asked.

I lowered my head. “Hemlock,” I said, soft, afraid. What would she think of my wicked plant?

Master Collins came bustling in then. He was striking, his hair so dark it was almost black. It curled over his forehead, into his eyes. His eyes, so beautiful.

He looked between Mistress Collins and me. “Well?” he said.

Mistress Collins still watched me, her fingers on my witch flower in the lace. “I’ll have her,” she said.

*   *   *

Henry tries to get Mistress Collins up for church again. He wants to flaunt the swell under her kirtle that nobody can yet see but he puts his hand over it so they know it’s there. He wants to flaunt this thing that he’s created, this thing he’s put in her. His babe.

But her color is bad. Her skin is clammy. She swallows again and again as I brush her hair, pat her sweat dry and clean. Henry waits outside in his velvet. His eyes snap to her face when I bring her into the sun, and I think he is unsatisfied. He wants her to be well. He wants her to be happy.

I follow behind them, sit in the back. Watch as he tries to socialize, flaunt. Watch her listlessness. Watch his knuckles turn white as he gives up and guides her to a bench.

They sit next to Rachel Hughes. Rachel is one of the country people. She married Master Hughes and now she is called Rachel but she didn’t used to be. They were married here in the church. I waited behind her in the line for our grain yesterday. The wives and daughters gossiped, but Rachel didn’t say anything to anybody. Her eyes were straight ahead staring at I don’t know what. Her eyes are straight ahead now. She is very still. Her husband, Master Hughes, scratches his neck. He adjusts his shoulders. He wipes sweat from his eyes. He looks at his wife, whose name is now Rachel.

There are other country women living here in the fort. Not all of them have changed their names. Not all of them got married in the church, though yet they live like wives, sharing homes and beds with men.

Mistress Collins sits next to Rachel. She bows her head forward as the minister talks.

*   *   *

I watch Jane from far away. She plays like she is still a child. She sheds her clothes as the days progress, becoming more and more naked like the small country people who come with their fathers and mothers to trade. Jane runs in her smock, all white and transparent and it sticks to her skin as she sweats and she doesn’t wear her hose but runs barelegged and barefooted.

I look at my red hands on the quern, grinding grinding grinding the meal. Henry says Jane Eddowes is not a good friend to me. I feel wickedness bubbling within me. Rebelliousness. I want Jane.

Henry brought things from home. We are not part of that lewd company that brought nothing. I am; I brought nothing. But not Henry and Mistress Collins. They brought the kind of good food that you can’t find here. Rosemary and clover honey and thyme. But now that we’re here, those things can’t sustain us. So Henry trades for winter wheat to grow. There is a plot outside the walls where we grow things, like maize and beans. Mark, he knows how to grow maize. It is too late to plant it, but we tend to what is already growing.

The maize kernels are red and blue and yellow and white. The cape merchant once let me see a whole basket of them, and all together they made my head feel funny like I had a hundred eyes and a hundred more. They grow on a big shank on a stalk of grass that is taller than me or even taller than Henry, Rowan says. Now the maize is about half as high as me. It won’t be full grown for some number of weeks.

There is mist on the ground this morning that will burn away as the day gets hotter. Henry adjusts his grip on his musket and holds it pointing down at the ground. Jane says the sound of our guns used to scare the country people but not anymore. Now they know how poor the range is, how bad the aim is. It’s just the noise that is frightening. One of their arrows is more deadly than one of our guns. But Henry assures me that we are safe.

Quickly we are behind the gates of the garden. There are wives and children already working, here and there a young man, and over there is Mark. His skin is painted gray with mud and it crumbles and flakes as he moves. Rowan says it’s to keep the sun from burning and the pests from biting. I feel damp and itchy already, covered in my clothes and my knotted hair beneath my cap.

I kneel in the dirt. It’s still black from when they burned it. Our spot is bare and hard. Here, new things will grow, green and eager.

There are rows of mounds that others have sown, plants with long green leaves reaching their fingers up. I touch one and Mark says something to me, sharp and irritated. I withdraw my hand and turn back to my dirt.

We imitate the straight rows and mounds of dirt. Henry uses a bore to make a small hole and then I drop a kernel in and cover it with dirt, again, again, again.

We must haul water now. The well is rationed and the river is brackish and salty closest to the fort. But we are allowed well water for the crops. I carry the chauntplure, a strange sort of water jug with holes on the bottom. I stop the flow with my thumb on the hole at the top. It is slippery in my sweaty hand. My shoulder hurts and my arm hurts and my hand hurts. At home, we had no garden. I didn’t know how to use the chauntplure until Henry showed me after Mark showed him.

We water the wheat and again the next day and the next day again. Back and forth and back and forth with the gun on his shoulder and the chauntplure in my hand. There are no green things sprouting yet. Henry crouches and glares at the bare baked earth and he looks up at Mistress Smith tending to her rows of sweet baby greens. Henry looks back down at our rows of nothing. “We should water more than once a day, I think. We’ll water again tonight.”

He seems sure that we’ll be allowed to. But the cape merchant steps in front of Henry as we go back for more water. “You have used more than your share,” he says.

Henry tries to laugh and be jolly. But the cape merchant doesn’t smile back.

“We’ve planted wheat. We need the water for it to grow, you can understand that, can’t you?”

“Where is your mistress? Does she take her share?” he says to Henry.

“I’ll take hers,” Henry says.

“See that she gets it,” the cape merchant says, and then he allows us past and I can feel Henry vibrating with anger as we go.

It is a relief to be in the shade. The well is in a cellar. I feel strange in the dark and quiet with Henry. I can smell his sweat. But he’s not paying attention to me as I lower the bucket and draw up our water. Mistress Collins’s water. See that she gets it. That’s what the cape merchant said. But she won’t; the wheat will get it. Henry is standing with his arms crossed, staring over my head. His face is blank.

We pass back by the cape merchant and he nods at us as we go but Henry doesn’t nod back.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins still isn’t well. It is hot and the air is wet and her skin is red and sweaty. Henry wants her to eat the fat gray bird he killed. I pluck its feathers and cook it over the fire and the grease sizzles. Mistress Collins covers her mouth with her kercher.

He wants her to be well. He wants her to be happy.

The smell is making her sick. She lurches off the bed and vomits into the rushes. Henry leaves the house with a quick sudden sweep of his shirt, and the door slams behind him.

She is bent over the edge of the bed, head down, hair hanging in her face. I pinch my skin, just above the elbow, and hold my breath. I wipe the sweat and bile from her cheeks. I rearrange the rushes so they cover the vomit and the smell is diminished.

She doesn’t eat the bird but Henry does. He gets shiny grease all around his mouth.

After dinner I rinse the plates outside and sit drying them, the evening air cool on my skin. There’s a melody weaving between the houses. It’s soft and sad. I try to hum it but I can’t find the tune. Jane steps around a house into a patch of golden light, almost as though she’s walking on the melody. Her mother is with her, a covered basket on her arm.

Mistress Eddowes looks like Jane. Still young and pretty, her yellow hair darker than Jane’s and her skin fair but thinner somehow, like worn linen. “Hello Ellis,” she says. She reaches into her basket and hands me a biscuit. It is warm and the sweet buttery smell rises to greet me. She calls into the open door, “Hello! Mistress Collins?”

Jane watches her mother go in and then kneels next to me. “Ellis,” she says, smiling, “you must come. Rowan caught a big eagle and he’s cooking it over a spit! Come have some.”

She isn’t trying to be quiet. I look over my shoulder, afraid that Henry will hear. I shake my head. My cheeks are burning. I want Jane to leave. I don’t want Henry to be angry.

“We can be stealthy,” she whispers. “He won’t know.”

I shake my head again.

“Please Ellis.”

“I can’t.” I say it to the ground.

“Ellis, I want to be with you,” Jane says. “I know you don’t want to get in trouble. I understand.”

But it’s not just that. There’s something more than fear of getting in trouble. I’m afraid of being bad. I want to be good.

Mistress Eddowes comes out again, without her basket. She waves Jane along and they leave, Jane looking at me over her shoulder, hurt.

I bring the biscuit to my nose and inhale. It smells like home. But it tastes strange, hot and coppery.

*   *   *

The other Smiths lent me their ladder again. Henry tells me I must finish the roof today. But I am afraid to go out collecting rushes and reeds without Jane and without Henry’s gun.

Rowan is there, at the back gate. “Where are you going? To collect more reeds?” he asks.

I don’t think Master Collins would like me going with Rowan. But he hasn’t said that I can’t. But I don’t want him to be angry at me. I am a good girl. But I’m scared to go alone.

A shift happens; I feel it in my head. When I change from being a good girl to being wicked and disobedient. Rowan brings Spider and she trots along next to him, proud and lively. Mark watches us as we go. He is working on something, chipping away dark and shiny flakes. He clucks to Spider and she trots up to him and he scratches behind her ear.

“What are you making?” Rowan asks, bold.

“Where are you going?” Mark asks back without answering.

“Ellis needs to finish her roof before the rains come,” Rowan says. He points to where you can see the roof of my little house, dark gaping holes between the bundles of rushes.

“Reeds won’t keep the rain out,” Mark says.

“That’s the way we do it at home,” I say.

“You’re not at home anymore.” He looks down at his work. He’s done talking to us.

“What do you think he means about the rushes?” I ask Rowan when we’re outside the walls.

Spider spots a squirrel. The squirrel freezes and Spider doesn’t move either, except for her quivering nose. Then she surges forward and the squirrel claws up a tree, disappearing in a shower of pine needles.

“The country people use tree bark to make their rooves,” Rowan says. “Or they have a special way of making mats with reeds that keeps the rain out. It comes down harder here. Not like at home where it’s just a drizzle.”

Once we cross the Back River, Rowan leads me up a sloping hill.

“The rushes, Rowan,” I remind him.

“I know but I want to show you something.”

“What is it?” I say.

“When I earn my land, this is where I’ll build my house,” Rowan says. “I found it yesterday.” On top of the hill the ground is flat and the grass is tall.

I close my eyes and breathe in. Home feels so far away. I am here.

Here, in this wide-open sweet-smelling sky. Here, where there is no smoke or foul air. Here, where nobody I love lies dead in the ground. Here, where I might be free.

*   *   *

Jane sees us coming back. She watches until Rowan passes out of sight. She darts forward, catches my wrist, pulls me into the shadow of a house.

I tug my wrist. “Let go. Henry will see,” I whine.

“You can be with Rowan but not with me?” She’s angry.

“He didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“Ellis, he’s wrong about me!”

But he’s not wrong about me.

I am wicked.

I want to shed my proper clothes, shed my duties, shed my good behavior. It’s everything I know to be wicked, what I want. Everything I long for: freedom, knowledge, to kiss Jane, to lie with her, to explore her body.

I bite my bottom lip to stop the tears from coming. I am not a child. I am not a wicked girl. I tug my wrist again and Jane releases me, tears welling in her eyes.

“I hate you, Ellis!” she says.

*   *   *

“The country people use tree bark for their rooves,” I say. “Mark says the rushes won’t keep out the rain.”

“Why were you talking to Mark?” Henry asks.

“I wasn’t. We were just walking by.”

“You and who?”

“Me and—” I say, and then I stop. He didn’t tell me that I should not spend time with Rowan but I know that he doesn’t want me to.

“You and who?” he says again.

“Rowan.”

“You are too old to be spending time alone with young men, Ellis.” He says it gently, as though he believes I didn’t know. I only need to be taught.

“I’m sorry, sir.” I pinch my arm.

“And I don’t want you talking to Mark. He’s one of them. They don’t want us here. You aren’t safe around them. Never forget that.”

“Yes, Master Collins.”

“You may call me Henry,” he says to me.

“Yes, Henry.” His name feels strange in my mouth.

“And we will use the rushes. That is how we’ve done it for generations. That is how we’ll do it here.”

“Yes sir.”

And I think we’re done. But then he says, “Get the switch.”

*   *   *

I can’t stop thinking about Rowan’s hopeful little plot of land. Where he thinks he might live and be free someday. Can I own land like Rowan?

I look at my hands. They are rough with calluses. Cracked skin covers my thumbs and there is a blister on my palm. I am not free. Henry owns me. He owns my labor. The skin under my skirts stings with the marks of the switch, the marks of his ownership.

For some number of years I will be taking care of Mistress Collins in all her madness and all her pain. Until I am married to some man here and perhaps then I will have some measure of freedom, as the mistress of my own house. But I won’t have Jane.

I press my hands into my closed eyes. There is darkness. And now there is Jane. Her smile. Her hair in the blinding sun.

*   *   *

I watch it build and build between them.

Mistress Collins has been lying in bed all morning. She vomited twice. Once when she woke up and once when she tried to eat. Her blankets are over her face though yet it has been hot all day.

Henry paces in the small space while I gather his church clothes. His starched collar and his brushed velvet. He has chosen the purple again, because here he can. At home it is practically illegal for people like him to wear purple.

He forces a smile. So bright it almost fools me. “Blythe,” he says after dressing, but she doesn’t show her face. “Birdie,” he tries again, softer this time. He kneels next to the bed, searches under the blankets with his hand.

She uncovers her face and her eyes beg him, please please, they say, just please give me pity. “I can’t, Henry, I can’t.”

He stands up and yells, “Why?”

I keep my face blank. It’s not my fault; it’s hers. He won’t be angry at me. I am good.

There is a little shelf. Made of sanded wood with tiny curling details and painted in a way that could only be from home. No such fine work could be done here. It was one of the first things Henry did when we moved into this half-finished house: He fixed it on the wall while Mistress Collins watched. I think that was the last time I saw her smile. “Like home,” she said. And Henry looked upon her like he wanted her to be happy and was pleased that he had made her so. On the shelf she set her little Book of Hours. A painted miniature of a young boy. And a porcelain clock with curling blue flowers and a glass jar covering it.

Henry kicks his stool over and it falls with a thump onto the rushes and he sweeps his wooden cup and plate off the table. It seems dissatisfying somehow, like he did not do enough to show how angry he is. So he hurls his hat right at the shelf.

He meant to. He wanted it to break. The book and the miniature fall silent to the floor, but the clock shatters into chips and chunks and cracks.

Mistress Collins’s face is white and round-eyed as she looks upon the broken clock, and I see on her face that she accepts it. Of course. It couldn’t be any other way.

Henry rages and storms and his anger is so loud and insistent and I don’t know where to put my eyes so I put them on the floor, and then he leaves. Mistress Collins begins to sob, slow and then fast and gasping and louder than I’ve heard her and then she quick smothers her sounds and disappears under the blankets again.

I pick up the pieces of the broken clock and put them back on the shelf next to the book and the miniature. I squeeze one jagged piece into my palm. I squeeze until I feel a sharp cold pain as it cuts into my skin.

Henry doesn’t come back. The house feels so little I think it will choke me, so I slip outside. I sink, shaking, to the ground, my fist clenched around the shard of porcelain.

*   *   *

Papa told me what it would be like here. He said how the land flowed with milk and honey, a good spacious land like God gave to the Israelites. How gold was scattered over the beaches for any man to find. We could have land here. We could have a home of our own.

He held me while I fell asleep one night. I was frightened of bad dreams.

I’ll put a good dream in your head, Papa whispered. When I have earned land I will build a house for us on a hill. In the new world there are pine trees so tall you can’t see the tops of them. Will I cut one down to build our house?

Yes, I murmured.

Wind will blow all around our house and wolves may howl but I will keep you safe. I will build a good strong house, with a door that latches and windows that shutter. In the morning the warm yellow sun will wake us. In the new world there are fruits so sweet they taste like nectar. In the new world, Mama can have a garden. You can help her plant. Would you like that, Ellis?

You will be safe there, he said.

We will be happy.

Four

When we first came here, before the Collinses and me, a lot of people died. They got sick because the air is different here and the water is brackish and bad. There are pests we’ve never seen before and their bite made us sick or dead. And there’s something they call muskeetas. When they bite, a red bump rises that itches. When I scratch it, the bump gets bigger and bigger until I scratch it so much it bleeds.

Yesterday I found a little brown thing like a beetle in our grain. I didn’t grind it up. Rowan says it’s called a contemptible-little-caterpillar but caterpillars are sweet and fuzzy, not like this thing that smells. I scooped it up and threw it on the ground and it skittered away. I shivered, looking at it. I hope it didn’t ruin the grain. There are always weevils and worms in there. I don’t know how many I’ve eaten, but probably a lot.

The people who died, from fevers and fluxes, they vomited and had diarrhea over and over until they were shriveled and withered because none of their waters were left in their bodies. Then the bile and the feces made the flies come and the flies brought more sickness and then more people died.

*   *   *

We’ve been watering the wheat and maize every day, Henry and me. He wakes me up before it is light, and we water again in the cool evenings, when there is some relief from the heat.

This morning the birds wake me. There is a rustling in the bed, I can hear it from my side of the coverlet. Henry murmurs to Mistress Collins and then comes to wake me though yet I am already awake.

The sky is beginning to lighten when we leave the walls of the fort. “Ellis!” Henry calls. He is ahead of me, already within the walls of the garden. “Ellis, come quick!” He sounds so young, his voice thrilled and high. There, in the dim gray light, are tiny shoots where before there was nothing. Henry kneels over them, the tiny green fingers reaching for the sky. He looks at them, his hands still hovering over the shoots like something precious. His face, so full of awe.

*   *   *

Henry left with a group of men. I don’t know for how long. I want to ask him to look for Papa. But, though yet I don’t know why, I don’t want Henry to know about him. But where is he? Where is my papa? Is he alive?

The council, the leaders of the colony, are making some of us leave to go settle new land. Master Smith makes them go because it will help. If Master Martin takes some number to Nansemond territory, and Master West takes another number to the town called Powhatan, they will have game and food to forage and they will be comfortable through the winter or at least fed.

Henry says it’s our duty to settle new land. Our duty to the King. Our duty to God. If they find new land, perhaps he will move us there, he said. We could have a bigger house. Our own garden.

Some of the tribes, the ones who are not under the rule of Powhatan, they see us as allies. The Accomac of the Eastern Shore say they want us to settle near them, though yet I do not know if that’s where the men will go to.

When Henry leaves, Mistress Collins sleeps. She sleeps for the whole day.

“Take care that she eats,” he told me before he left, and so I do. I wake her up in the evening and guilt her and pressure her and scare her into eating.

She sighs and chews through a heel of bread and falls asleep again. She ate the last of the bread. I will have to wait until tomorrow’s grain to eat. My head aches as I leave to get water from the wellhouse.

I’m supposed to be watering the wheat but I’m afraid to leave the walls of the fort alone. Mark finds me, hesitating by the gate. Rachel Hughes, the country woman, is behind him. She doesn’t say anything. “Are you afraid?” Mark asks. His eyes are kind. He is still young, his skin smooth and unmarked.

I nod.

“I’ll walk with you,” he says. “I should water mine.”

I use the chauntplure and water the sweet little shoots.

Mark walks to his rows of thriving tall plants. Rachel has moved off to water and tend her patch of garden. She kneels in the dirt, one hand on the ground and one wrapped around her pregnant belly. She wears clothes like mine, a blue kirtle and a smock of pale linen.

I point to a bright yellow flower growing from a vine beneath his maize. “What will that be?” I ask. I remember last time I touched his crops and he told me not to.

“You do not have these where you’re from?”

I shake my head.

“Squash,” he says.

“When they’re ripe we roast them or stew them or boil them or dry them. It’s been hard to grow. There has been a drought for a long time. Not enough rain to grow much. There is enough to survive but not enough to share.” He doesn’t look at me as he says it but I know what he means. The leaders, the council, they think the country people should give us food. Maize, meat, whatever we ask for.

Mark points at my rows of wheat, reminding me of my duty.

There are not very many plots here. The women plant things, but most of the men don’t. Rowan says as president, Master Smith makes all the men, even the gentlemen, work and plant. But they don’t want to and resent him for it. They say we should make the country people give us food. For some number of years, since the men first came here, Master Smith has negotiated with the country people, but they grow tired of our demands.

*   *   *

Our roof is done now. It is covered in rushes like Master Collins said. And that’s what the other families have done as well. I suppose we’ll see what happens—if the rooves hold up to the rain that might never come. Henry hung the door as well. Now I hope our little house will feel like a home.

The river is getting lower. The water is murky and black with slime close to the shore. It smells bad, like rot and waste.

I do our wash downstream like they tell us. Yesterday morning I saw Mistress Wainwright doing her laundering right in front of the fort, off to the side where the men in the bulwark couldn’t see her. Mistress Wainwright has twin babies. One of them was sleeping in a basket and the other toddled off again and again. He seemed fascinated with the water where there was a little eddy of silt and slime. He slapped at the black muck and yellow foam until his mother smacked him and he howled. Her husband is lost and she has nobody to help her.

Too, sometimes people wash their things in the well water. Young Mistress Boddington was shamed and her husband whipped when the cape merchant caught her washing their dishes in the well. She said she was afraid to go outside the walls.

Anyway the water is low and it smells bad because there’s no rain. Because there hasn’t been rain all summer. Rowan told me that the country people say it’s been years of dry hot weather, when normally there are storms and downpours to keep the river flowing and the green things growing. Like what Mark said. He said there isn’t enough food to share.

When I come back, Big Mary is with Mistress Collins. Mistress Collins is sitting up in bed with the coverlet pulled to the side and Big Mary is on Henry’s stool. They are laughing, but when I come in Mistress Collins stops and glares at me.

“Where have you been?” she says.

I nod at the basket of linens. “The laundering, mistress,” I say.

“Bring us some fresh water,” she tells me.

When I am outside, Mistress Collins says to Big Mary, “She’s Henry’s little dog, always telling him everything.”

I hover, listening.

“How is it?” Big Mary says.

“I miss home. I miss my mother. She would know how to help me,” Mistress Collins says.

“The first few months are the worst,” Mary says.

“But it’s more than that,” Mistress Collins interjects. “I should be happy. I wanted this. But I’m unwell all the time and I am so tired and I’m sad. I’m sad every day. And I feel wicked for being sad and unwell. Henry wants me to be like I always was, before we left home. But I can’t. I can’t.”

Big Mary hums in sympathy.

“And I’m scared,” Mistress Collins goes on. But I don’t want to hear any more. She’s right. She should be happy.

I pinch my arm hard and walk slow to the water.

*   *   *

Last night after sleeping for most of the day and deep into the deepest part of the quiet night, Mistress Collins got up and stood at the window. She pulled off the oiled cloth that keeps the light out. It’s always covered unless I open it and then I get scolded for letting in the filthy foul air that smells like waste, and for letting in the biting pests that carry sickness.

But Mistress Collins, she opened the window and stood there, dark against the glow of the stars. She sighed and rubbed her arms, then sighed again and leaned out, and the moon shone on her pale skin. Her skin absorbed the shine like milk. She stood like that for a long time. Until she got tired or perhaps until she remembered that she was almost naked and somebody might see. When she moved back toward her bed she smelled like cold air.

This morning I wake up first. The window is still open and the sun slants across my eyes, golden and lovely. Mistress Collins is sleeping deep, her arms up over her head, her stomach rising and falling like a newborn babe’s.

I get dressed and comb my hair back with my fingers and twist it up tight, and I take our jugs to go to the well and get our morning water. Outside, the sun is warm but there is a burst of wind and oh, it is cold. It feels like a winter wind. I round my shoulders against it and duck my head. There are clouds boiling at the edges of the sky.

Later, the whole sky is jagged and disrupted with clouds. There is a strange glow. The sky looks sickly. It’s pale, sweaty green. I can’t see anybody from where I stand. Just back walls and closed windows.

I’m covering our window when the wind hits me with a snap. It burns into the little house, knocking over the stool and whipping the coverlet around, and I see a flash of Mistress Collins’s pale face. I can’t close the door; the wind is too strong. “Help!” I say, finally. “Help!” Mistress Collins clambers out of bed and we fight against the wind and finally we’re able to secure the door and bolt it.

She stands there in the sudden lack of noise and wind, pale and shivering. I look at the ground. “Thank you, mistress.”

She laughs a little and I laugh too. There is a crack then, like the sound of a cannon, and I yelp and cover my ears. It comes again. It’s thunder, I realize. But I’ve never heard thunder so close, so insistent. As though it’s in the house with us.

Then the rain comes. A flood. The floor seeps with rainwater. The roof leaks. I put a bucket beneath a heavy stream, a bowl beneath a trickle. At home, it was never more than a mist. Here it is an assault. Mistress Collins is buried under her blankets. It seems to go on for hours. I try to catch the rain. To save it because it is fresher than the well water.

And then it stops and the light grows around the edges of the window, bright and gold, and it gets hotter and hotter, and I know it is safe to open the window and door.

“Mistress Collins,” I say, later. “I’ve done the laundering and now I must change your smock and scrub your skin clean.”

“All right,” she says, and lets me pull her smock from her body. Naked, she is pallid and waiflike. Her ribs stretch her skin above her swollen womb. I scrub her with a linen body cloth and she stares past me at I don’t know what.

I pull a clean smock over her head and comb her hair with both sides of the ivory comb, broad and fine, to clean out the tangles and the nits. She sits on the little stool and I stand behind her. We are quiet. And then Mistress Collins leans her head back against my stomach and rolls it a little to the side. Her eyes are closed. Her face is smooth. “That feels good,” she says.

She doesn’t lie down after I change the bed linens. She watches me while I pour her beer and slice her bread. A wind blows in the open window and suddenly it smells sweet like late summer blooms. Mistress Collins lifts her chin up and breathes in the fresh air and I realize her eyes are not brown like I thought, but green. I try so to avoid her eyes that I never realized.

“The wind smells good,” I say.

“Like home,” she says. “When I lived by the sea.” And she lies back down on the bed with her feet tucked under her. She pushes her face into the pillow and her shoulders shake for weeping.

*   *   *

Henry returns after some number of days and nights. The light is dim and golden and Mistress Collins is sitting at the table slurping her soup and staring out the window. Henry throws the door open and accidentally knocks the miniature off the shelf. As I’m stooping to pick it up, he asks for his supper. “I have it right here, Master Collins,” I say.

He chucks Mistress Collins’s chin and lifts her head for a kiss. His gaze, his hand, his lips are tender against her skin. Mistress Collins is only in her smock and she’s not wearing her hose. She goes to lie down in her bed behind the coverlet.

Master Collins sighs.

I want to know where he was but I don’t ask. He concentrates on his supper and then looks at me and smiles and I feel my cheeks flush under his sharp and clear eyes.

“I will tell you something, Ellis,” he says. “I went with Martin and Percy to Nansemond territory. Did you know that?”

“No, Master Collins.”

“Ellis, I told you, you can call me Henry.”

“Henry,” I say.

“We went to Nansemond territory to settle it. But when we arrived the salvages wouldn’t respect the terms of the treaty. They harassed us and stole from us. They stole our tools and seized two of our men. Of course we couldn’t let that stand, could we?”

I should have put the fire out. It’s too hot in here.

“So we attacked the salvages, Ellis! We beat them out of the island, burned their houses, ransacked their temples, took down the corpses of their dead kings from off their tombs, and carried away their pearls, copper, and bracelets that they decorate their kings’ funerals with. We took a son of Parahunt as prisoner but he escaped when Percy shot him. He fled upstream with blood flowing behind him.”

He paces, pent up in the small room. “It was good to be out in the woods with the men. Sleeping under the stars in the fresh clean air.” He casts a frustrated look in Mistress Collins’s direction. He turns away and sighs again.

His eyes settle on a pile of laundry, of shifts and hose that I haven’t managed to wash yet. He frowns at me. “Ellis, you must do the wash. I want it done now. Yes?”

I nod and feel ashamed. Master Collins shouldn’t come home to a mess. “Yes sir.” I take the basket and wind my way through the houses, heading for the sea gate.

Now that Master Collins is back, I wonder if he will show me my indenture. Not that I could read it. But I wonder if he will tell me what it says. Tell me if I can own land someday, like Jane, like Rowan.

Jane is playing with Small Mary in front of the church. I hover by the corner of a house, close enough to hear them.

Mary has a pile of maize husks in front of her. She is folding them and tucking them and it looks like she’s making a toy baby to play with. Jane reaches over, bending close to Mary, and helps her tuck a corner of the baby’s dress in.

“It won’t stay,” Mary says to Jane.

“Here, let me try,” Jane says to Mary.

Rowan runs by, hollering at another boy. He nudges Jane with his foot. “What are you doing?” he says.

“What do you think?” she snaps, her elbow up while she struggles with the toy baby.

“Troll.” Rowan kneels next to her. “Let me show you how the country people do it.”

Jane thrusts the baby at him, rolling her eyes as if of course he can’t fix it. But Rowan twists a new piece around the waist of the baby and tucks and folds. He holds it up, smiling at Mary. Her brown eyes are big looking at him, Rowan, who is bigger and stronger and older than her and who fixed her toy baby like it was nothing.

I smile a little, looking at her looking at him. Her father died this summer and it’s just Small Mary and her mother, Big Mary. They are alone here.

Jane is looking at me, hiding around the corner, and I meet her eyes.

She looks away. Nobody else notices me. If Jane didn’t look at me sometimes, I would think I was a ghost. Drifting along. Haunting her.

*   *   *

Master Collins comes with me to visit the wheat. “The salvages don’t want us growing wheat or maize here,” he says. “They don’t want us doing anything that means we’re here to stay. Growing crops, building houses, expanding beyond the walls of the fort. Do you know we always have one of our men guarding the crops?”

“No sir.”

“Because otherwise the salvages would burn everything.” He points to a man slumped against a cannon, a broad brimmed hat over his head.

I follow him between the rows of tall grass swooning in the heat. Master Collins crouches, his thin fingers on our leaves. They’re small and curled and limp. They are unimpressive, not beautiful. He looks at me with his brows low and straight across his shadowed eyes. “Did you water while I was gone?”

I nod. “And it rained.” He keeps looking at me. “I was afraid, Master Collins. I was afraid to go.”

“You may call me Henry,” he says, gentle. He forgives me. “We will be very diligent. The wheat will thrive, I promise, Ellis.”

Beneath his understanding smile, I feel absolved. I am a good girl.

But still he uses the switch on me, when we are back in our little house.

*   *   *

When he tells me to call him Henry, it feels strange. I feel as though I should not. It is above my station to call him by his Christian name. But when he invites me to, I feel as though I belong to him, a little. As though he is not just my master and I his servant. I feel as though he is my protector, that he cares for me, that I could have a home with him. A real home.

And anyway, he tells me to, so I must though yet it is strange and perhaps wrong.

*   *   *

I overhear talk of Master Smith as I wait for our daily grain. Behind me Rebecca talks to Bina, who is now called Mistress Bickford because she’s married, though yet she’s only a little older than me. Bina acts like she’s a grown-up woman and Rebecca talks big to her like she knows everything all the time.

Rebecca says that on the way back from Francis West’s settlement Master Smith was grievously injured. She says that Parahunt, a son of Powhatan, and his people attacked the settlers. Master Smith had gone there to help West but it didn’t work because the settlers wouldn’t stop their attacks on the country people, though yet Master Smith ordered them to so he could negotiate. The settlers robbed from the country people’s gardens and beat them and broke their houses.

Rebecca notices me listening and says, “Well Ellis, does nobody tell you?”

Bina laughs and I turn back toward the front. My neck is hot.

“Not even Jane?” Rebecca says. I can hear the sneer in her voice. She must have noticed that Jane and me don’t spend time together anymore. That Jane won’t even look at me.

Rebecca and Bina stop talking about the country people because Rachel Hughes joins the line.

Of course the country people would fight back. That’s not what Rebecca said, but I think it is fair that they would defend themselves. So it must have been a constant battle between the country people and the settlers.

Henry already told me some of that. I wonder if he will tell me more. Henry doesn’t like to speak of Master Smith. He thinks Master Smith is an upstart who would do better to know his station.

When I ask him, while I grind the grain in the quern, he considers me before speaking.

Tell me. Tell me. Why won’t he tell me? I can’t get angry. If I get angry he won’t tell me anything. I smile at him, bury my wicked thoughts.

Finally, he tells me. Master Smith left West’s settlement, giving up his attempt to negotiate with the country people on West’s behalf. On the boat back to the fort a man was smoking his pipe and a spark landed on Master Smith’s powder bag, which he was wearing on his belt, and the bag lit aflame. It tore the flesh from his thighs and he was in such a great pain that he jumped into the river and was almost drowned before the men pulled him out.

He is back at the fort now and senseless with pain and will sail home with the ships when they leave. Henry thinks what happened to Master Smith was an attempted sabotage or murder. The men of the council hate Master Smith because he is not a gentleman like them and yet he was president here. Now that he will sail home, he has given up the presidency, or been forced out depending on who speaks of it, and Master Percy is president.

But council won’t let him leave until they have collected relations of his crimes. The Dutchmen say he poisoned them with rat poison and others say he starved them. There is a rumor that he schemed to marry a princess of the country people to gain favor with their king, Powhatan, but I’ve seen this princess and she plays naked with the other children. She is too young to marry.

Powhatan is named after the tribe that he leads and the tribes that pay tribute to him. Jane says he leads many of the tribes along the rivers and the watersheds: the Pamunkey, the Appamattuck, the Mattaponi, and some others as well. They are Powhatan, all of them, so that is what we call him. The country people have more than one name. Some of them are private. I don’t know what he is called by his own people.

Henry says that all the many days before we came here when men died of the bloody flux and summer sickness and starved and wanted to give up this place and leave for home, Master Smith wouldn’t let them. When Gabriel Archer commandeered the Discovery to sail home, Master Smith fired on his own men until they gave up their attempt to leave. That is how fierce Master Smith is.

So now the leaders of this place go about collecting gossip and rumors of Master Smith before they send him back home instead of doing work or hunting or farming. But Henry says there will be enough food. Henry says there are only some five hundred of us left here.

The rest of us who came to this place have died.

Five

After Papa left, Mama was pregnant. She said she couldn’t have any more babies, but I suppose she was wrong, because then she had Lizzie. Franny had her first position, a maid in a merchant’s house, so she wasn’t at home anymore. I was old enough to know that Mama was worried about the rent. And she was worried about taking in work. And she was most worried about what would happen if we were turned out of our room.

We didn’t know what had become of Papa. A ship returned, but there was nothing on it for us. And then another ship, and still nothing. When would he be ready for us to come? When would he have his own land and a house? Somewhere we could be happy again.

But maybe we were never happy. Maybe I was simple. Maybe I am simple. Because sometimes I think I didn’t notice when things were bad. Not until Mama was screaming in my face that we were going to starve and die because Papa was gone and he wasn’t coming back, but as far as we knew he wasn’t dead and so Mama couldn’t marry again and there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.

*   *   *

The ship is casting off. John Smith is returning home, injured and in disgrace. The men sailing with him are going to solicit more funds from the Virginia Company and woo more settlers to come build their lives in this place. I think about the promises that were made to us before we came here, of land and wealth. I think about the small crooked houses crowded into the small fort lined with wooden walls to keep out the country people who don’t want us here. I think about the settlers who surround me, thin and sunburnt and confused, and I wonder if we all wish we were on the ship going home with Master Smith or if we are all still grateful to be here despite the hardships.

I wonder if I am still grateful to be here despite the hardships.

I see Jane with her mother and father. Her hair is braided and wound with a blue ribbon. She is flushed, excited, watching the ship. I miss her.

I think about Master Collins. I think about the way I feel when I’m with him. How when he looks at me, sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe. How that feeling is exciting but also it’s oppressive.

I think about Papa. I wonder where he is. I wonder if I will ever find him.

I don’t know if I’m grateful to be here. I can’t know. Not yet. Not until I know what happens next.

One by one people come to watch. The weathered men with lines in their skin and sun-faded clothes, they come to mourn, I think. The ones who have been here since the beginning. The ones who Master Smith was leader to.

Jane says he’s arrogant and he’s bullheaded. Henry says he is a usurper and a fraud and he should better know his place. Rowan says he was hard and not always fair but he knew how to make men work and how to get food from the tribes up and down the river and how to keep the settlers alive, at least.

Master Smith is propped up, watching us as we watch him.

A man to the right of me, one of the original settlers, he’s talking to another man. “He hated baseness and sloth and pride and he would never see us want what he had the means to get us. We nearly starved. But for him, we would have. And now we have lost him and his loss will be our deaths.”

*   *   *

It is time to water the wheat again, after we watch the ship cast off and drift away. Mistress Collins didn’t come to watch. She lay in bed, unwell and strange, refusing to speak.

“She is mad,” Henry says when we’re at the garden. His eyes are like ocean water, blue and unfathomable. We planted beans and they are starting to sprout and grow. He winds a vine, training it up a cornstalk. “She wasn’t, before. Or I suppose perhaps she always was but I didn’t see it until we came here. She’s not happy about the babe. I don’t think she is unwell anymore, at least not in her body. She’s not happy about the babe,” he repeats. It’s as though he can’t grasp it. “What kind of woman wouldn’t be happy about a babe?”

I twist a woody vine around a stalk and it breaks off in my hand and leaves a wet stain in my palm. I glance at Henry but he doesn’t notice.

“I don’t think she will get better,” he says. “I think she is simply mad now.”

“Master Collins,” I say, and take a breath because I am nervous.

“Henry,” he corrects me. His gaze, his attention, his pretty face and intense eyes, they take my breath away.

“Henry, I was wondering.” I hesitate again.

“Ellis?” he says. “You were wondering what?”

“I was wondering about if you’ve heard of a man called Christopher Folk.”

He looks at me, his eyes hard and sharp. “Who is Christopher Folk?”

It’s mine, the answer. I don’t want to give it.

“Ellis.”

“Papa,” I say to the vines curling around my fingers.

He doesn’t answer for a long time.

He didn’t know. I didn’t tell him.

“Is he here?” Henry says.

“He came.”

“When?”

“Before,” I say. “Before Mama died.”

“Is that why you came?” he asks.

I know it, deep like an ache in my belly: It’s not what he wants me to say. He wants me to be here for him. Not for anybody else. Not even Papa.

I won’t say it, I decide. Though yet the truth is obvious.

“Have you heard of him?” I press.

“No.”

“What about…”

“What about what?”

“My indenture.”

“What do you want to know?” he says.

“I was wondering if I could see it?”

“Why do you want to see it?”

There’s no way to answer without making him angry.

“You couldn’t read it,” he says.

“I was wondering what it says.”

He looks out over the grass. The sun is bright on his skin. He closes his eyes to the light and then opens them again and looks at me. “It says you belong to me.”

*   *   *

I wish I hadn’t spoken. I was wicked. I know I was. I follow him, watching my feet, until we’re back in our dark little house. I peek at him. His back is rigid. He is angry. I’ll be good, I tell him in my head. I’ll be good.

“Ellis,” he says.

I blank out my face. My eyes are empty.

“I brought you here. I gave you this opportunity. I feed you, clothe you, house you. You will be grateful to me. You will be obedient.”

“Yes sir,” I say.

But it’s not done. I will receive his anger. I will be his good girl.

“Get the switch.”

*   *   *

He gives me leave to go and I hurry away, blinking back tears.

Sometimes I like feeling owned by Henry. I want to be owned. I want to belong to somebody, the way I used to belong to Papa and Mama.

But it hurts, this ownership, this feeling of not being my own.

I walk by Jane’s house. Her windows are covered. I want Jane.

I come upon Rowan herding the hens. One in particular is giving him trouble. She runs, zigzagging this way and that to avoid his arms. He chases after her and she leaps, fluttering, looking too fat to fly, and lands on the roof of a small house.

The door to the house opens and Rebecca North comes out, all clean and prim. I glance down at my hands. My fingernails are lined with dirt.

“Got away from you, did she?” Rebecca laughs like she thinks she’s being charming. She stands too close to Rowan, their shoulders touching. He flushes and moves away.

“Come down here,” Rowan says. The chicken bobs her head and takes a few dainty steps. He sweetens his voice. “Come down Peasblossom,” he coos.

Rebecca laughs. “Such a romantic name,” she says.

Rowan ignores her. He croons to the chicken as she saunters along the roof. Finally Peasblossom flutters down and he catches her and hurries away.

“Goodbye!” Rebecca calls. She sounds indignant.

I follow him. “Why don’t you like Rebecca?” I ask.

Rowan shrugs. He rubs his cheek into Peasblossom’s downy feathers. She coos at him, pleased. Such a princess.

“Rebecca seems nice enough. And she likes you.” I keep the teasing out of my voice. I know he wouldn’t like it.

“I’m too young for girls,” he says.

He’s not though. Geordie and Thomas Savage and Henry Spelman, they all like girls, bringing them small gifts and flowers and leading them on walks along the water. Rowan doesn’t.

He glances up at me like he knows what I’m thinking. “You don’t like boys,” he snaps, accusing me.

But I only nod. “That’s true.”

“It’s not that I don’t like girls. I like Jane and I like you. I just don’t fancy girls. I don’t fancy anybody. I wonder if I will when I get older,” he says. He seems nervous. Like he’s wondering if there’s something wrong with him. His arms tighten around Peasblossom.

When we reach the chicken enclosure he sets her down inside. The hens cluster close to the fence, murmuring and clucking at him.

“Are they hungry?” I ask.

Rowan shakes his head, reaching down to pet them. “They’re just saying hello.”

*   *   *

I long for Papa. I long for Mama. I long for my home. Franny didn’t want me anymore. She had her position with the merchant family. The mama and the papa and the three girls. She slept in the attic with the other housemaids. She wanted the footman to marry her. She wanted to save some of her wages for a room to rent someday when she might have a baby of her own. She didn’t want me. She couldn’t afford me.

I understood that she wanted her own little place, her own little family.

I want that too.

I remember Mama’s feet, dodging around corners of tables while I sat on the floor and played. Papa made little wooden animals, two of each. Funny little rabbits and cats and cows. There was only one fox because Franny lost its mate. I called my little fox Mistress because she was the lady of the house. Because she had the charge of the other animals.

Mama would crouch next to me and make a rabbit talk in a jolly voice and a cat in a sly voice and a cow in a simple voice and they would argue with the fox and I would laugh, and I remember how she would hug me when I laughed. I think I made her happy. I think she loved me.

It’s things like the color of the scuffed floor. The lines in the wood. It’s the way I felt Papa’s footsteps in the floor underneath my skin. The way I felt his steps coming up through the floor into my palms. How small I felt when he sat behind me and pulled me into his lap and wrapped his arms around me. How small and how safe.

It’s those things that I want back. That feeling.

*   *   *

Can I find Papa? Nobody knows. Nobody will help me. I don’t trust anybody with it. Nobody but Jane.

But Jane doesn’t speak to me anymore. She doesn’t even look at me.

Henry gave me leave to collect tuckahoe and oysters outside the fort. I’m afraid to go alone but I am trying to be good. So I walk with my two baskets banging against my hips. I am sweating because of the heat of the afternoon sun, but I am afraid to walk in the shade of trees because of what I can’t see in the woods, behind this tree or around that bend.

This morning Henry asked Mistress Collins to go with him to call on Master Percy and he bade me to dress her in her velvet robe and purple silk veil and when I did she pouted like a sullen child. She was red and sweating and then she went white and vomited all down her fine clothes. Henry yelled so loud I covered my ears and then he left, slamming the door behind him.

Mistress Collins will moan and weep and she tries to stifle it by pressing her hands to her mouth but I can still hear her. I hate it so much I want to cover my ears and burrow into the ground, under the rushes like a mouse. And too, I want to fly at her in a rage and cover her face with a blanket to shut her mouth and stop her moaning and weeping.

So I washed her fouled robe and when Henry came back I begged leave to go collect tuckahoe and oysters and Henry smiled on me and praised my dutifulness.

At the shore, out of sight of the fort, I peel off my kirtle and smock and hose. Oh the water is cold on my naked skin. I remember when it was warm. When Jane and me swam together.

I scrub my smock with rocks and sand and lay it to dry on the hot grass. It is cold in the mornings now, but hot again in the afternoons. This morning there was a frost. Rowan says the country people say the winters are colder than they used to be. Frigid cold. Horrible cold.

It scares me to go deep in the water to find the oysters. Perhaps my feet will slip and I will lose my foothold. Perhaps the water will push me, pull me, out to where I can’t reach the air. Perhaps I will drown and die here.

I lie back on the sand in the shallows of the river. I let the water wash over me. It covers my face. My hair fans out behind me. Floats like seaweed. It is dark and quiet down here. Behind my eyelids I see golden spots floating in the black. But now I see Jane. It’s Jane who comes to me in the darkness. It’s Jane who I see behind my eyes.

She’s not here. I only dream of her.

I use a stick to pry the shells from off the rocks. They clink with a hollow sound as I toss them in the basket. Jane says sometimes the oysters are huge. But only where nobody has fished them for a long time so they have many years to grow so big. They are grandfather oysters, she says. The banks by the fort are stripped clean of oysters. The grandfather oysters are all eaten up and there is nothing but babies left if there are any at all. I wonder how the Powhatan manage to harvest only just enough oysters to keep themselves fed, but to also let some, at least, grow big.

My smock is dry and stiff from the sun. It smells like salt as I pull it over my head. There is a moment when I can’t see but for the holes between the weave and all the light is shifting and white and I feel a throb of fear deep in my belly. And then my eyes are uncovered and I see nothing and nobody. I am alone here.

The baskets are heavy, full of oysters and tuckahoe. The sun is starting to fall and the light is silver and blue. I can see the walls now and I wish I didn’t have to go inside them.

I step in the muck by mistake. There is rope, too. It’s green and frayed and sunk in the water. The fishing nets. For a long time I stare at the ropes. The nets are rotted. I stare because I cannot believe it. The fishing nets are rotted.

Rowan says before we came they made the fishing nets. He says it took some number of men working together for some number of days to make them. He says the fish they caught could feed many men. Rowan told me and Jane about the nets weeks ago and I forgot all about them until now, staring down at their rotted corpses that won’t bring us any fish at all.

*   *   *

“Who were you with?” Henry says as I come in.

I clutch my basket of oysters. “Nobody,” I say. I am a good girl.

Sometimes Henry’s eyes are so dark blue they look black. He comes close to me. “Tell me, Ellis.”

“I was alone,” I say again.

“I ask you because I already know the truth. Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not,” I say.

He turns away. My heart is light and fast, it doesn’t land, it’s disconnected from my chest. I go to set my basket down but Henry whips around and knocks the basket from my hand. The oysters scatter. Absurdly I worry for them, those creatures inside their shells. The coverlet hangs in the corner, still and silent. She leaves me to him.

“You were with Jane Eddowes,” he snarls.

“I wasn’t,” I whine.

“Stop lying to me!” He grabs my shoulders, shoves me against the unstable wall. It shudders behind me.

“I’m not,” I say. I feel tears in my throat.

He pulls away and my heart lifts. Will he relent? Does he believe me? But I see the disgust on his face.

“Why can you not behave, Ellis? Are you wicked, like Jane?”

“No,” I weep. I’ve been good. But my weeping only infuriates him.

“Get the switch,” he spits.

This time it’s different. Before it felt controlled, like he was training me to be good. This time, he’s angry, he’s disgusted, like he hates me, and he sears that hate into my skin with the switch, again again again.

I’m clutching the table. Every part of me is shaking. My skin feels cold. I might be bleeding. I feel him swaying behind me, as though he is as exhausted as I am.

He drops my skirts over my tattered skin and it stings. I try to keep my sounds inside but I can’t. He looks away from me with blank, uninterested eyes. Like I’m not real to him anymore.

When he leaves, Mistress Collins comes creeping out. She soothes me with a gentle hand on my back, guides me to her bed, dresses my lashings with balm and linen. I cry into her pillow. Angry and ashamed, aching and stinging. “He will forgive you,” she says.

*   *   *

And then Mama died. Mama died just before we lost our room. The landlord came knocking every day. Mama was sick but I couldn’t tell Master Burton that. He would have forced us out because of it.

Mama lay down with a headache like she sometimes did. But then she got a fever. Hot and then cold, so cold she shivered and shook and couldn’t speak because her teeth were clenched together. That night she started vomiting. Over and over. So much until it was nothing but bile and blood. The next night, after I got Lizzie down and after Master Burton came calling and I sent him away again, Mama got strange swellings in her neck and on her groin and under her arms. She screamed until her eyes were red and her voice was gone.

When Lizzie started complaining that her head was hurting, that’s when the black pustules appeared on Mama’s skin.

She turned black. Her fingers. Her feet. Like the plague rotted her while she was still alive. She died soon after that. And so did Lizzie.

I don’t know why I didn’t die. I don’t know why it spared me. When they died it felt like it was because of me. Because I was wicked. Because I did wicked things.

Jane wasn’t the first. First there was Meg, who would walk to church with me and Lizzie when Mama wasn’t well. She had red hair and freckles. We kissed in the alley behind the church. I remember the hurried, desperate way we pressed against each other, the way my heart pounded, the way I was so afraid we would be caught.

I was wicked and then Mama and Lizzie died.

And the only one left was Franny, who didn’t want me.

But I remembered Papa. Mama said he wasn’t dead. So where was he? He came here. He came for land and to build a house and bring us here to live. The land of plenty, he called it then, before he left.

But now that I’m here, I know he was wrong. There were already people living here. And they don’t want us here. They don’t want to give up their land for us to live on. Rowan says they don’t think of land like that, with owners. They think the land belongs to everybody and it’s strange for us to come here and build our houses and our walls and tell them to stay off our land, as if somehow we can say we own it just because we decide to.

When Papa got here, what did he think? What did he feel? Did he feel like me here? Lost? A stranger? Like he made a mistake in coming? But still I could find him and we could be together. He could protect me. Care for me.

Where is he?

Six

I can’t cry all day. I have work to do. I have my duty. It hurts to move, but it hurts worse to sit.

I have a scab on the crown of my head, where my hair parts. It’s an old bite that I scratched until it bled. I work my fingers beneath my hair to my scalp and touch the scab. The skin around it itches. I find a piece of hair growing from the skin around the scab. I tug it. It pulls out at the root. I look at it, a thin strand that disappears in the sun. I open my fingers and let it fall to the ground. I find another strand and pull it out.

Does Henry believe I lied to him because really I am wicked? I do want Jane. Maybe he sees inside me. Maybe he knows what is in my heart. Because I do. I want to kiss her all over her body. I want to bury my fingers in her hair. I want to press my naked skin to hers.

I lean back against the outside wall of a house. I’m breathing hard. The space between my legs throbs, just thinking of all the things I want to do to Jane, what I want her to do to me. Is it wicked?

Spider comes slinking between the houses. “Come here,” I whisper, tapping my knee. Spider pushes her cold nose into my hand and I scratch behind her ear. She leans heavy against my leg.

I tried so hard to be good but Henry saw my wickedness anyway. Maybe it doesn’t matter that I tried.

Spider trots off and I follow her. Henry is gone; he won’t know. I follow Spider through the darkening night.

Jane is sitting in a patch of starlight, of moonlight, of something bright and brilliant like her. Or perhaps that’s just how I see her. Glowing.

It bubbles up inside of me. The wickedness spills out of me like boiling water into a fire, sizzling and spitting hot.

I don’t know how I must look to her. Desperate? Her expression is carved into her face, hard like bone. I squat in front of her. My hands are shaking. I press them into my knees.

Please please please.

“Jane,” I start, because I don’t know what else to say. It’s as though her name is a prayer. Please Jane. Please be my Jane again, though yet I shunned you and sent you away. Please come back to me.

She watches me, waiting for something I don’t know how to say, create, give. She is brilliant and I am dull. The words won’t come.

I try anyway. “I want—” I say. “I wish—” I pick at a piece of skin on my lip. Rip it off. I taste blood.

She wipes the blood off my bottom lip with the tip of her finger. “You wish what?” she asks.

“I wish I was different.”

“Ellis,” she says, soft.

“I wish I was like you.”

“How?”

“Brave.”

She sighs at me. She doesn’t protest. She knows what I say is true. She’s brave and I’m not.

“I made this for you,” I say. I hand it to her, a small square of lace. All around the edges are flowers, sweetbriars and pansies, and in one corner a tiny flock of swallows, bursting into the sky.

She touches the edges. The flowers, the birds. She tilts my chin up. It gives me courage, feeling her gaze on my skin. “I want to be with you,” I say.

My heart starts to race as she leans forward. I close my eyes to the moonlight and stars and I taste her lips, like sage and honey and salt. She nips my bottom lip between her teeth and I pull her in close, my hands on her silken hair, on her back, warm through her thin smock. I feel her breasts pressed into mine. I feel our hearts pounding between us, together.

*   *   *

I slip into the house carrying a bucket of water. Henry is poking the fire with a long ashy stick. I skirt the wall, my fingers brushing the wattle, the sticks, daubed with clay. I feel the dust of it crumble beneath my touch and sift down to the rushes. I am pressed against the wall by his mood, his frown.

Does he know that I was with Jane? Does he know of my wickedness, my rebelliousness, my want?

Henry owns me. But I belong to Jane, like she belongs to me. We are each other’s.

“We had word,” he says without looking at me. “We had word that some of the men left their settlement at Nansemond to come back here.”

I don’t know if I should be still and pay attention. Or if perhaps I should start making his supper because it is late. I don’t know what to do to make him less angry or at least not make him more angry. So I don’t move.

“Where are they?” he says.

I don’t dare answer. But I wonder, where are who?

“They never arrived. Where are the men?” Henry looks at me and then leans back in his chair, his legs spread wide, taking up the whole room. “I am hungry, Ellis. Where is my supper? Where were you, if you were not here making my supper?”

“I was getting water, sir.” My feet are bare and grubby. My lips are kissed and my cheeks are burning. Can he see it? It feels secret. Mine. I don’t want to share it.

There is a knock at the door and Henry nods at me to answer it. It is Big Mary come to call. She has a basket with her.

Henry stands up behind me and blocks the doorway. “Hello!” he says, bright.

“I’ve come to visit with Mistress Collins,” Big Mary says. “I brought her some cordial.”

“How kind!” Henry says. “I’ll give it to her.”

There’s a pause.

Henry speaks again. “She is unwell today, poor thing.”

When Big Mary goes away, he sets the little brown bottle of cordial on the shelf, out of reach. He doesn’t look at Mistress Collins. Her eyes are open, blank, staring at the underside of the roof.

Next morning, it’s gone.

*   *   *

This time when I water the wheat, I ask Jane and Rowan to come. I am still afraid to go alone. To walk through the tall grass where I can’t see, where there might be something crouching. There are teeth in the grass, Mark said.

After we water, we run. With them, I am free. It is easy out here to pretend Henry isn’t real. To pretend he doesn’t exist.

Spider chases us, splashing through the Back River, and we run from her. Jane shrieks and Rowan yells and I giggle into my hands, trying to keep up. Spider gets weary of biting our heels and bursts on ahead, darting through the talking trees, the dancing drifting insects, the spilling sunlight. We chase her now, her glee, her freedom. Spider attacks a hill, climbing it, paws furrowing into the thick carpet of pine needles, digging her way up. Breathless, we climb too. I collapse, lying face up. Sky sky sky. Here, I am free.

Jane lies next to me. Rowan spins around, batting at Spider, still excited, still playing. I lace my fingers through Jane’s.

“I want it,” I say.

“Want what?” Jane says.

“This. I want this.”

She turns onto her side. Rowan is out of sight but I can still hear him and Spider. “All this?” Jane says. She smiles. She knows. All this beauty. All this light. All this freedom.

“I want to be free.” I say it and it makes me cry. I don’t know why. Perhaps because I want it so much though yet it is wicked. Tears spill down my cheeks.

“Ellis,” Jane says, low and so sweet it makes me ache. She leans close, presses her forehead into mine. I feel a hot tear between our cheeks. My heart is breaking with her sweetness, her beauty.

Spider jumps between me and Jane, frantically licking my tearstained face. I laugh and hold her wriggling strong body, so tight. I hide my face in her neck until I recover myself.

Rowan and Jane say they can own land someday. Henry says I belong to him. I will always belong to him. I should trust Henry. Let him guide me. Believe the things he says. Be his good girl and obey.

It feels wicked to think about being free, owning land. It is wicked to want it. But I do.

*   *   *

We are back from watering. The wheat is growing and growing now that Henry and me water day and night. But I long to go farther into the woods. I want to run back up that hill. I want to climb the trees again. I want to kiss Jane again. I want to find a little plot of land for me, my very own.

I stand at the walls, looking outside the fort, at patches of shadow and green between the timbers.

“What are you looking at?”

It is Mark, watching me.

“The woods. Or just—” I wave my hand around. “Just out there. Out of here.”

I wonder if he ever gets to visit his family, his people, like how sometimes Thomas Savage can come back and visit us. “Why do you want to go out there?” he asks. “It’s not safe for you.”

“We never see anybody,” I say.

“That doesn’t mean they don’t see you,” Mark says.

“But I want to be free. Jane says she will get some land someday. So will Rowan. I want some, so I can be free of this.”

Mark isn’t looking at me with kind eyes anymore. There is nothing in his expression, just nothing. I take a step back. I don’t understand this change. “Mark?” I say.

“Shhhh, I’ll tell you a story,” he says. He sits in the dirt up against the wall, his legs long and stretched out in the sun. I sit next to him. He says, “Once there were hungry people. That is the most important thing about them. Their humanity sunk and settled into their hunger until they were nothing but hungry mouths gobbling up whatever they could, slavering hungry yellow stinking teeth that ate ate ate everything everything everything.

“Now I’ll tell you a secret. It’s their fault they were hungry. They decided to be adventurers. They decided to sail to a faraway land in search of jewels and gold and furs and honey. They decided that it didn’t matter that there were already people living in this faraway land. They decided it didn’t matter if they didn’t know how exactly to live in this faraway land. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know what food was safe to eat, which berries, which leaves, which animals to hunt and when. It didn’t matter that the deepest water to anchor their ships also turned black and poisonous in the hottest summer months when they needed to drink it the most. It didn’t matter that from the black water rose hordes of biting pests that stole their blood and delivered sickness in its place. None of it mattered because they were adventurers and they wanted treasure.

“So they begged, borrowed, and stole the food they needed to live. The land. They fought with the people who were already living there and they fought with each other. And they died. They died and they kept dying and they kept welcoming new adventurers with lies.

“And then one day the adventurers went to steal food again. They were so hungry all they wanted was food. They didn’t care about anything other than their hungry starving mouths. They didn’t care that they didn’t belong and nobody wanted them. All they cared about was food. So they stuck their hands out and they opened their mouths and they said feed me feed me feed me while I steal your land and kill you.

“But the people who were already living there lifted up their weapons and killed the adventurers. They stuffed their dead mouths full of bread and said there’s your food.”

Mark stops talking. His face, his eyes, they’re still expressionless. He stands up and walks away from me.

*   *   *

“I want the cordial,” Mistress Collins says.

But I don’t want Henry to be angry. I pinch my skin.

“Now,” she says, sitting up.

“Yes mistress,” I say. But it’s not on the shelf. I dig through Mistress Collins’s chest. I take everything out, piece by piece, kerchers, smocks, hose, veils, her fine velvet robe, tiny purses, leather, cotton, linen, trinkets, a prayer book covered in knotted green silk. There is no small brown bottle.

She watches me. “Look in Master Collins’s chest.”

I hesitate. I shouldn’t without his permission.

“Now,” she says again.

But the bottle isn’t there either. I place everything back in the chest, careful, so careful to do it right, the way it was before.

There’s nowhere else to look. Mistress Collins stares at me and then her gaze shifts. She stops looking at me or at anything. Her eyes go blank, inward. She lies down again, hands on her belly, eyes at the ceiling.

*   *   *

I wish to know more about what goes on here and with the country people. Henry tells me things sometimes but not enough. Mistress Collins never goes anywhere and never talks to anybody. Big Mary came to call again and Henry told her to leave. So did Mistress Eddowes, Jane’s mother, and Henry sent her away as well.

It has been some number of days and Mistress Collins hasn’t said anything since she demanded the cordial. Not a single word.

Henry won’t tell me much of anything. He just tells me to do my work, be good, obey, don’t ask questions. I’m forced to trust him. To trust the leaders of the colony. I’m forced to trust them with my body, with my life.

But there isn’t enough food for everybody, not since the Sea Venture was lost. And the country people won’t trade with us anymore because the council has been cheating them and threatening them and being violent. Master Percy speaks of harsh and cruel dealings when he sends men to trade with the country people. But Henry says we will be safe; we will negotiate with the country people.

He’s off adventuring today and so I take my time collecting our grain. I grind it in the quern and sift the salt and knead it and set it to rise outside our house hoping for Jane to come by. But she doesn’t, so I decide I need more water from the well to make Mistress Collins’s beer.

The wellhouse is really just a lean-to on the storehouse. Jane is loitering in the square like always. She waves at me and I smile and nod at my buckets and continue on my way. It’s dark and cool inside and a relief from the sun. Jane follows me in with Rowan. “Ellis, Rowan was just telling me—” Jane says, hopping with excitement.

“Let me, you troll!” Rowan says, shoving Jane and laughing.

I pinch my arm.

Rowan goes on, “Martin’s men. Downriver in Nansemond territory. Instead of farming and hunting like they were supposed to, they went right on begging for their food. And Martin, that cowardly bastard, came back. He said it was to help Percy with the business of the fort but the Nansemond have been most fierce in their attacks. I think he’s just a coward. He left Sicklemore in charge of the settlement. Well, we just had word.”

Jane sinks in a puff of skirts to the hard-packed dirt and pulls me along with her, clutching my hand in hers. She has stopped smiling.

Rowan’s not smiling anymore either. “Sicklemore and his men left their settlement. Perhaps they went begging for food or perhaps they were trying to come back here. But the settlers found them, Sicklemore and all his mean, dead with bread stuffed in their mouths.”

Like the story Mark told. He must have known.

Jane clutches my hand so tight my bones grind together. Then she laughs with all the bravado she can muster and Rowan laughs too. I wish I could but I can’t. “They are stupid men,” Jane says. “They should know by now the country people won’t help us or give us food. They don’t want us here.”

“Smith thought we might resume trade,” Rowan says.

“Master Collins said that at Non-such the men desecrated the country people’s churches and burned their homes,” I say.

Jane nods. “You see? Why would they want us here? Stupid men and their great gilded dreams.”

I think of how I told Mark that I wanted land here and how he looked at me with dead eyes. Not like he was dead but like I was dead to him.

“Here Ellis.” Rowan lifts my buckets. He says, “I’ll carry them back for you,” and teeters out of the lean-to. I start after him but Jane holds me back. She presses into me. I can feel her body through our clothes. She shudders in my arms. “It’s terrible,” she whispers.

“Jane! Ellis!” Rowan calls from outside.

Jane kisses me, deep and salty. I am left gasping and following her into the bright blinding sun.

*   *   *

I am sitting outside grinding tuckahoe when Rowan runs by in a flash of brown hair and light clothes, with Spider trotting after him.

I go back to grinding. The tuckahoe must dry before I boil it, and only then can I grind it. If I don’t do all that, then it will make our stomachs hurt when we eat it.

Jane careens around a corner. “Ellis, there’s people coming!” She grabs the quern from me and thumps it down and drags me along with her.

“Wait,” I say as we get close. “I can’t let Master Collins see me.” We watch, peering from behind a shed.

They come in, dirty, ragged, skinny, injured, scared.

“It’s the settlers from Nansemond,” Jane says.

“They’re safe,” I say. But Master Percy’s face is white. He’s not welcoming the men back.

I see Henry walking toward our house and I dash to beat him there. I have just started turning the quern stone again when he arrives. I hope he cannot see the sweat on my brow.

He slams his hand into the door frame. The whole house shudders and dried mud showers down. I don’t move, like a rabbit caught in the shadow of a hawk.

“I am angry, Ellis, do you know why?”

I shake my head, looking down. Did he see me with Jane?

“Those cowards from Nansemond. If only they had the will, the strength, they could have stayed and lived there. But they’re weak. More mouths to feed,” he says. And then he stalks away.

When I go inside, Mistress Collins is sitting up on the bed, her legs pale and spindly. “Dress me,” she says.

Her smock, her gown, her hose. I am braiding her hair when Henry comes back.

“Blythe?” he says.

“I’d like to call on Mistress Eddowes, Henry,” she says.

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Mistress Collins’s jaw twitches. She smooths her face again.

“No, Blythe,” Henry says. “You are unwell.”

“But I feel fine today,” she says.

“I said no.”

I stand frozen between them, my eyes down.

“You are unwell and you will stay inside. To protect yourself from the miasma,” he adds like an afterthought.

Seven

When I collect our grain this morning, there is a line already. I watch my breath; it billows like woodsmoke on a cold night. Master Tucker, the cape merchant, is inside, measuring out the grain. I wait and shuffle forward and wait and shuffle forward and wait. Mistress Eddowes brushes against me on her way out. Her face is drawn and she’s muttering under her breath. Next, it’s the young woman who lost her baby not long ago. She climbs up the steps and quickly comes out again with sunken eyes.

Then it’s Rowan. He bounds up the stairs and there is a pause and then he is shouting. But not jolly, teasing, playing rough. Terrible shouting. He thunders down the steps and then he’s gone and I don’t know what upset him so.

The others don’t shout but every one of them comes out silent and stooped. I wait, pinching my arm. It’s me now and I am afraid.

Master Tucker is in the shadows of the storehouse.

“Master Tucker?” I say, because he’s staring at me with his sunken skull eyes.

“Is your mistress still with you?” he asks. He means is she still alive.

“She is,” I answer. I pinch my arm. He reaches his hand out for my basket and I give it to him. One full measure. One half.

“Master Tucker?” I say again because this is not enough food.

He brings his knobby yellow fingers up to his face and doesn’t look at me again. “No more,” he says.

I stand in disbelief. It cannot be so.

“Go,” Master Tucker says, rigid.

I go.

*   *   *

They keep saying it will be enough but it won’t. It won’t.

I am already hungry all the time. I am used to being hungry. I have always been hungry. But they said we would have enough.

We can’t live on half a can of grain a day, even going beyond the walls and digging tuckahoe and oysters and collecting whatever acorns or berries I can find. Even including the maize and wheat and beans and squash, it is not enough.

I’ll just have to find more. I grab a hair and pull it out at the root. I’ll just have to be braver and try harder and do a better job gathering. I pull another hair. But we’re not supposed to leave the fort. Mark said it’s not safe for me out there and then those men were found killed with bread stuffed in their mouths. All the other settlers have come back to the fort. West’s men have come back now, too. But I must go forage, still. I must. I can search with Rowan and Jane. I pull a hair and look at it, hold it up to the light, and drop it.

I must get Mistress Collins her bread and beer. Inside the little house she is retching behind the coverlet. I go to her, holding my breath. She’s sitting up in the dark corner vomiting onto the blankets. I will have to launder them and she’s vomited onto the heaviest wool.

She subsides and covers her face with her shaking hands. I haul the blanket off the bed, keeping the bile wrapped up. Her eyes are closed as I wipe her hands and face with a wet rag and comb back her lank hair.

I start her a decoction brewing, adding fresh stinging nettle. We ran out of cloves weeks ago and I know she will want something strong to rid her mouth of the taste of bile. I stare at the bubbling water in the cauldron. I know she will not want to eat. I know Henry will be angry if she doesn’t eat. Not just at Mistress Collins. He’ll be angry at me as well.

We have no butter for the bread. I pull a hair out. We have no jams or jellies. I pull a hair out. We don’t even have lard or honey. I spiced the bread with rosemary, the last of it from home.

Mistress Collins is still sitting up, waiting for her decoction. She swishes it around in her mouth and spits it on the floor. I watch as it settles past the reeds into the packed dirt beneath. I leave her with the cup.

*   *   *

Henry is gone when Mistress Eddowes comes to call. I let her in though yet I’m sure Henry wouldn’t like it.

“Hello Ellis,” she says, smiling. She looks at me gentle, like I am a skittish calf. She has a basket over her arm again, like last time. I wonder if there are any biscuits in it.

“I’m so glad you came,” Mistress Collins says.

“I tried before but Master Collins said you were unwell.”

Mistress Eddowes puts her basket on the table and I unpack it. A small jar of clover honey. Dried rosemary. Biscuits. A pat of butter. I hope I will be allowed to have a biscuit.

“He won’t let me go out. He believes the miasma will make me worse,” Mistress Collins says. Her voice sounds thick. “He won’t let me call on you or Mary.” She stops talking. When she recovers herself she says brightly, “All this food! You are so kind. Though we do not go hungry, of course.”

But it’s not true, we do go hungry.

“No no, we have plenty to share. But this talk,” Mistress Eddowes says, and I go still so that they won’t notice and banish me. So that I might listen. “Master Eddowes doesn’t say so, but I think he’s worried.”

I’m so quiet that I’m the quietest thing in the house, but suddenly Mistress Collins snaps her head up to me. “Ellis, go find something to do,” she says.

Mistress Eddowes smiles at me. “Jane is at home, see if she will share her biscuits with you,” she says.

*   *   *

It is twilight now and time to water the wheat. The maize is tall and the green leaves are starting to break away from the corn on the inside. I touch the hair bursting out of it. Soft like silk. White, the color of Jane’s hair. I remember the warm sweetness of the biscuit Jane gave me earlier. We were alone in her house. Her mouth tasted like honey when we kissed.

“Soon we will harvest it,” Master Collins says. Proud like a father.

“Will it be enough?” I venture. I make my voice soft and sweet. I hope he isn’t angry that I ask.

He curls a whisp of my hair around his finger and considers it. It’s the color of dust. The color of the muck at the bottom of the marsh. But he holds it up and it gleams in the fading light. He tucks it behind my ear and smiles down at me. “Yes, Ellis, it will be enough. I will keep you fed, I promise.”

*   *   *

The next afternoon is barely warm but it is lovely. The pine needles are soft under my bare feet and they crunch as we walk. Jane is undressing me little by little. “Take off your cap,” she urged. Now she says, “It is so lovely to walk on the cool earth with no shoes or hose.” She makes me wicked. I want to be good. But too, I crave this wicked feeling. It bursts out of me, like birds from a tree, loud, shrieking, clamoring for more.

Rowan says, “Jane, you troll! I have a needle stuck in my toe!” She bullied Rowan into going barefoot too. He sits down on the ground and pulls a pine needle out of his big toe and scowls at Jane while she laughs and Spider licks his face.

We are going swimming. There’s no other reason we’re out here. It’s the last warm day, Rowan says. It shouldn’t be this warm this late but it is. And the water, cold and clean and fresh, washing off the sweat and grime, oh it will feel so nice.

Jane helps Rowan up again and we keep going. I stop and say, “Oh.” I almost stepped on a snake.

Rowan squats and pokes at it.

“Don’t!” Jane yells.

The snake doesn’t move though, not really. Perhaps a little, a ripple of muscle under its smooth skin. It’s tiny and dark green with a yellow stripe along its body. I’ve never seen a snake before. Spider snuffs at it, nudges it with her nose. The snake doesn’t move.

“They don’t bite. And anyway their bite can’t hurt us,” Rowan says.

“I didn’t know they were so…so tame,” I say, trying to find the right words.

“They’re not usually. They’re shy of people and hide,” Rowan says. “It might be too cold. Mostly they’ve burrowed and are sleeping by now.”

Jane says, “What can we do?”

Rowan shrugs, looking sad. “I don’t think we can do anything. We don’t know where its burrow is so we can’t put it back. Hopefully it will find its home.”

I reach out my finger but hesitate close to the snake. Then I stroke it along its stripe. It’s smooth and firm and dry and it feels cool. It ripples under my touch.

“Come on, Ellis,” Jane says, reaching her hand to me. I let her pull me up. “Are you sad?” she says.

I shrug. Rowan runs ahead of us, Spider at his heels.

“It might find its home again,” Jane says.

“Or perhaps not.”

“Animals die,” she says, like it doesn’t really matter.

*   *   *

They are going to teach me to swim.

Rowan and Jane sit on a fallen log over the slow marsh waters in a patch of yellow sun. They dangle their feet. Jane kicks, splashing Rowan. He yells, surprised, and Jane shrieks with laughter, scaring a turtle off a rock. I hesitate on the bank, unsure. Scared of water that is murky and might be deep.

Jane extends her hand to me, slipping off the log into the water. It comes up to her chest. I wade in.

“Stretch out your body,” Rowan says, shivering.

I try but I can’t. “I’m afraid,” I say. Of losing my feet. Of losing the ground. Of drowning, of dying, of going away and never coming back.

“Your body will float. You just have to have faith,” Rowan says. He flops back hard, splashing the water all around him. He stretches his arms out, his legs out. I can see the shadows of waves, little gimlets of water, dark lines on his pale skin.

I want to float like that, a bird on the wind.

Jane comes up behind me. “Lie back, Ellis,” she says. She holds out her arms. “I’ll hold you. You weigh almost nothing in the water.”

And so, I do. I lie back in the water. The sunlight bursts in my eyes, sparkling in the waterdrops in my lashes.

“Try this now,” Jane says, and she backs slowly slowly away from me. Leaving me suspended in the water, just above drowning above death above dying.

I am flying.

*   *   *

After what little supper we have, when Mistress Collins gives me leave to go, I wind through the twilight. It isn’t my place but I tap at Jane’s door and her mother appears. She smiles at me and says over her shoulder, “Jane, Ellis is here.”

Jane appears and we hurry away together.

“I keep thinking about that little snake,” I say.

She threads her fingers through mine.

“I keep thinking it might still be alive.”

“Ellis, do you want to go look?” Jane says, watching me.

“Do you think we could?”

“It will be an adventure,” she says.

We’re ignoring the danger. The danger Mark says is out here. The danger Henry says is out here. But it doesn’t feel real. The dry pine needles crunch under our feet and the leaves rattle in the wind and Jane squeezes my hand hard like a pulse, like a heartbeat, and we run.

“I think this is where we found the snake,” Jane says. She bends double, hands on her knees, squinting at the ground. Everything is shades of brown and gray.

“Here,” I say, kneeling. The snake hasn’t moved since this afternoon. It’s cold and stiff. I can feel Jane looking at me but I don’t meet her eyes.

I slide off my heels and sit on the ground. There’s a sound far away between the trees. Jane rests her head in the crook of my neck. “Ellis,” she croons, like a lullaby.

I can’t manage to say anything. I sit and look at the dead snake that I perhaps could have saved somehow.

“Poor little snake,” Jane says after a while, like she’s saying it for me.

Eight

Master Tucker had to beat back some men who came to take more grain than they were allowed. I watched them storm by and I followed. They came ready to fight, fists balled and faces flushed with anger and indignation.

Master Tucker was outside the storehouse, standing with his arms crossed in front of his chest. He looked yellow and sick, all his bones knobbing through his skin. “I can’t let you in,” he said.

The men crowded up close to Master Tucker, in his face, threatening. They would push through him to get their food. The food they thought was theirs. And as I watched I thought, But what about my food? What about Jane’s? If they take it all, what will I eat? They think it’s theirs but it’s not, only. Or perhaps they don’t care that if they take it all, there won’t be enough left for me or Jane or Rowan or anybody else.

But behind Master Tucker came Master Percy and Master Webb and they had guns. Master Percy fired his straight up into the sky. The men gave up, slinking away with angry over-the-shoulder looks.

That was two days ago.

The line for grain is silent now. No laughing, no gossiping, no whispering. I say the Lord’s Prayer to myself, pinching my arm.

There is a noise at the back gate and people turn and whisper to each other. I stand on my tiptoes to see over the bobbing heads. There is one young Englishman. He is tall and deeply tanned and his hair is light brown. He is with four country men who are wearing buckskin leggings and buckskin mantles and have their hair tied up on one side. One of them has feathers in his knot. They carry with them a large buck, its long slender neck beautiful and sad. I don’t know what tribe they’re visiting from.

The settler among them, I think it’s Thomas Savage.

The men carry baskets of maize, squash, beans. They are smiling, and I remember the settlers who were found dead with bread stuffed in their mouths. But that was, I suppose, perhaps a different tribe who killed those men. There are many tribes, I hear, and they don’t all follow the law of Powhatan.

The Patawomeck defy Powhatan to treat with the men here, sometimes, Rowan has told me. Too, I don’t understand why men do the things they do. Any men. All men.

Thomas Savage leads the way to Master Percy’s house. People wander off, talking, wondering, like me, who will get to eat the deer. I feel as though I am always wondering things that I never find out about. I pull a hair.

I should be working. I pull a hair. I should be laundering. I pull a hair. I should be grinding the grain and baking the tuckahoe and setting the bread to rise.

There is a bald patch where my hair parts that keeps getting bigger, the hair around it flat and greasy. I hide it under my cap.

Later, on my way to the well, I wonder again. I wonder more. What happened to the deer? Who will eat that meat and the rest of the food?

Rebecca North is there, drawing water from the well.

“Did you see Thomas Savage was here?” I ask.

She scoffs. “Of course I knew he was here. He came to bring a message to Master Percy from the king of the salvages, asking to trade.”

“I thought they were weary of giving us food. I thought they were angry about us asking.”

She grunts as she hauls her bucket up from the well, sloshing water over the sides. “They’re already saying Master Ratcliffe will take the men and go to Werowocomoco to do the trading.”

“Master Collins says Master Ratcliffe is fickle.”

Rebecca leans back against the wall and doesn’t answer Henry’s allegation.

I go on, “He says that Master Ratcliffe built himself a ridiculous palace. Well, he didn’t build it himself, Master Collins says. He made the men build it for him.”

Rebecca laughs. “I’ve seen that stupid palace. It was never finished.”

“But it was wrong of Master Ratcliffe to waste the men’s labor like that, on his own indulgences.”

Rebecca sighs like I’m boring her. “Well, perhaps the salvages will kill him.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

She shrugs and lifts her buckets to leave. “I didn’t get to see Thomas. I wish I had. Jane says he is looking well, all brown like the salvages.”

I flush and turn my face to the water. Why was Jane looking at Thomas Savage like that?

“Goodbye Ellis!” Rebecca calls, triumphant because she flustered me.

*   *   *

They left late the next day. After the sun came up. After the fog rolled in from the water. The men left to go to Werowocomoco, quite a number of them, bringing their guns and swords. They wore their finery, their starched collars and velvet upperstocks and gowns. Master Ratcliffe wore hose and upperstock that were yellow and violet and an obscene codpiece and his collar was bigger than anybody else’s. He looked proud and puffed, marching at the head of them all.

Henry says he wouldn’t have gone even if they asked him to. He says there are more important things to do here, like watering his plants. He says trading with Powhatan will probably be unsuccessful anyway because Master Ratcliffe is just a fop and a fraud who doesn’t deserve his station in life and that Powhatan is shrewd and sneaky and that he is probably trying to trick us all into giving him more copper beads and perhaps finally getting some of our guns for himself.

I am sitting outside, languishing in the air that smells like brine and pine sap and the sun that is barely warmer than the wind. My hands are working but not as fast as they should be. My mind isn’t working at all. Mistress Collins is quiet inside. I think I should go in and uncover the window so she can have some clean air and perhaps feel a bit of this sun on her face.

She never says anything anymore. I don’t know the last time she spoke. Perhaps it was when Mistress Eddowes visited with the biscuits. Mistress Eddowes came to visit again after church but Henry told her to leave.

“Mistress,” I call. There is no sound from behind the coverlet. I untack the window cloth and the air sweeps in and catches the ash in a whirl on the hearth. There is a sound now. Below the wind. In here, not outside.

It’s not whispering. It’s scrabbling. It’s…

A child runs by outside, screeching, laughing. I jump. Clutch my chest.

I listen just on the other side of the coverlet. It’s a sound I don’t understand, like a rat scratching at the other side of a wall, or a low whispered mutter.

I pull the coverlet aside and Mistress Collins is sitting up scratching scratching scratching the stretched skin across her belly through her smock, rocking back and forth, back and forth, saying something. Whispering, again and again, the same thing with the same cadence, but I can’t make it out because I see now the welts rising up under the linen of her smock, the spots of blood staining it, and her fingers still scratching, still scratching. I lurch forward and grab her hands and she screams right in my face, her eyes wide and horrified and quite mad.

I cover her mouth with my hand, out of instinct, out of fear. She closes her eyes and starts to weep, her tears pooling onto my hand. I wipe her tears on the blankets and look over my shoulder at the door. Checking for him. But he’s not here.

Then back to Mistress Collins. I pull her to standing, as though she is a child’s rag baby, limbs flopping and heavy. I yank off her smock and throw it in the basket to launder and use a cloth to blot at her scratches. Her round belly is molted with them.

He will be so angry.

I tie a wide strip of linen around her belly to catch the blood and put a fresh smock on her and lay her back down. She is docile, like she has gone away inside her head.

I watch for him. My fingers find my scalp. I find a strand. It feels greasy, curly, bumpy. I find the root. It slides out easy. I drop the hair. Find another. Pull it out.

*   *   *

And so Master Ratcliffe was killed. The Powhatan believe a real person should die in silence and dignity. So they tortured him to make him scream and he did scream. They used sharpened shells to scrape off his skin while he was alive and could see what they were doing. It was women who did it, they say. Henry says Master Ratcliffe was a greedy, selfish man.

That is how he died. And then they attacked his ship.

They don’t want us here. We don’t belong here. We can’t live here. Why, why, why did we come here?

*   *   *

Jane begs me to go outside the walls with her. She does whatever she wants. She lies to the guards and tells them: “We’re just going down over there to launder our clothes.” Nobody stops her or tells her what to do. It is not the same for me. But Henry has been invited to confer with the council and will be with them all day.

“I’m afraid, Jane,” I say. “Didn’t you hear about what happened to Master Ratcliffe?”

Jane scoffs. “He was stupid, Ellis. He didn’t exchange hostages like he was supposed to. And he accused Powhatan of cheating.”

“But what about when they attacked the ship?”

“They won’t attack children,” Jane says. “Remember?”

“But we are not children,” I whisper.

She doesn’t answer that. “Let’s run!” she says.

We run fast fast fast. Jane’s cheeks are pink and lovely. It’s too cold to swim. The sun is all blue and gold through the fog.

First we huddle together, cold skin on cold skin, our fingers touching, and we kiss in between our bubbling laughter here and there that we can’t help. Just a brief press of her lips to mine.

But the sun gets warmer and gradually our limbs unfurl. Our kisses become deeper. We lie down on the damp dead leaves that are soft and thick, and I stretch my legs and curl my toes and press my body into Jane’s.

“Why are you always so serious?” she asks me. Her arm is under my neck. “Why are you so sad, Ellis?”

It’s as though I’ve been waiting for her to ask. “They died,” I say.

“Who?”

It seems almost strange that she doesn’t know. It’s so big. I think about it all the time.

“Mama and Lizzie.”

“Who’s Lizzie?”

“My baby sister.” I remember how when she was born her eyes were bright and big, as though she were waiting to come into the world and see everything. And how when her hair came in, it was so fair, so light it was almost translucent.

“They died and it was like it was because of me. Because I was wicked. And then I had nobody, only my sister Franny, who didn’t want to lose her position. I came here to find—” But I stop.

“Find what?”

“Papa,” I whisper.

“Your father is here?” Jane breathes, surprised.

“He came, but we never heard from him. And now I’m here, but I can’t find him.”

“I’ll help you,” Jane says.

I am so tired. My eyes keep falling shut while we talk and our silences get longer and the sun gets warmer. My head is on her shoulder. Her hair covers me. I am finally warm even in my chest and stomach where I always feel cold. We are falling into sleep together and I am glad of it. To sleep in her arms. To share her dreams.

I wake with my eyelids heavy. The fog has burned away and the sun is on my face. Jane is still sleeping, her limbs heavy and her cheeks pink. I feel a happiness blooming in my chest. I imagine living every day like this with just her, just us, somewhere alone and fed and without being afraid all the time. Some little house on some little plot of land. Free, alone.

Her eyelids flutter and she wakes up. My body is slow and languorous and Jane stretches and relaxes into me and our lips come together in a kiss as if there’s nothing else we could possibly do. Deep and deep and deeper.

*   *   *

They say there isn’t enough grain to feed the chickens anymore. They stopped laying weeks ago because they haven’t had enough to eat. Rowan wants to release them to forage in the woods but the council says we must have them for food.

I help Rowan bring them, one by one, to the butcher. Tears stream down his face. His snub nose runs and he wipes it with the back of his hand. At last it is only Peasblossom left, his little contrary princess.

He stops for a moment, holding Peasblossom to his chest. But he must. He has no choice. “It’s silly anyway,” he says.

I watch him in sympathy. He doesn’t want to bring her. Of all of them, he loves her the best. “Come along, mistress,” he says. He walks to the butcher, slow, then slower still. He’s crying too hard to continue. I hover by his shoulder, unsure of what to do.

He looks up. Nobody is around but some children playing at the back of a row house. Rowan runs to the back gate. The children all burst into laughter and cheers, leaning over their game of little stone balls. He slips through, into the tall grass, running for the tree line with the hen in his arms. She thrashes and squawks, loud and frantic.

A man in the bulwark shouts at Rowan but Rowan keeps running. I watch, alarmed, wondering if he’s going to come back or just keep running, forever, away into the woods with his hen. Spider races after him, barking at his heels.

Rowan tosses Peasblossom into the woods. She flutters around in circles, agitated. He shoos her away, but she just paces and pecks. She won’t go.

Master Tucker brushes past me, the butcher behind him. They march out to Rowan. The butcher grabs the hen and Master Tucker grabs Rowan by the collar, yanking him back to the fort. Rowan gives me an agonized look as they pass.

*   *   *

They put Rowan in the stocks for the night. They say he should be put to death for stealing food, but because the attempt was unsuccessful he will only get the pillory.

I must make Henry his dinner.

“What did Mistress Collins eat?” Henry asks me. He slurps his soup. It dripples into his beard and he wipes it with his handkerchief. It’s one of the good ones. Silk with a lace edge of forget-me-nots and grass. I remember the way my eyes and back ached, leaning over it. I remember the way I kept stabbing my thumb with the pins and losing track of the bobbins in the dim rushlight. I remember the feel of the cloth so smooth and fine against my rough skin. I remember cleaning my hands before I touched the silk so I wouldn’t leave smudges. He wipes his face on the cloth and leaves a dun-colored streak of soup with a little chunk of something. Gristle or maize or old bread.

“Well?” he says.

“She ate a little bread.” A very little. The rest of the bread that she didn’t eat, it thickened his soup.

“Is that all?” He frowns at me.

“She ate this morning, pottage with some honey the Eddoweses shared with us.” I falter on their name.

But he doesn’t notice. “And did you get her out of bed?”

“Yes. I scrubbed her skin and changed her smock for a clean one.”

“And what about to invigorate her? To move her limbs?”

I hesitate. I can feel her listening. “She said she felt too weak and that she needed rest.”

He finishes his soup. I stand in shame, fingers on the wall behind me, finding the upright line that remembers for me how to stand. Please don’t be angry with me.

He leaves in silence. The soiled handkerchief is on the table waiting for me to clean it.

I don’t bring Mistress Collins her beer. It’s her fault. I go outside to get rid of the waste. She can get it herself.

I bring Rowan water, late when the fort is dark but the houses are lit with warm light and families are all together. Jane’s, Rebecca’s, Big Mary and Small Mary. All but me and Rowan. Here we are across the sea and far away. So far away we might as well be in another world.

Rowan won’t look at me or speak, but he drains the cup as I hold it to his mouth. I fill it again and he drinks it all.

He shifts from side to side, squirming.

“What’s the matter?” I say, but I think I know.

He looks up at me, shamefaced. “I don’t want to, on myself,” he whispers.

I look but nobody is around. The guards in the bulwarks face out. It’s strange but it doesn’t feel embarrassing. It’s as though Rowan is my brother. I help him with his hose and lift his shirt so he doesn’t make a mess of it. He pushes his hips out and a stream of urine arcs away, steaming in the night. He really had to go.

“I should leave before Master Collins comes back,” I say.

I come again early next morning. Rowan relieves himself and drinks more water. He’ll be released soon. It’s just getting light as I leave him.

But as I’m walking back to the little house there is yelling. It’s Henry. He’s yelling at Master Percy and Master Percy is yelling back at Henry. He walks forward, advancing on Henry, and Henry backs up and I feel a flush of embarrassment for him. A flush of fear. Henry will be angry. Angry that he was cowed by a man who he believes is lesser than him. He turns back toward our little house and I run. Fast as I can. To get there before him.

I check on Mistress Collins. She is sitting up in bed, her fingers on her Book of Hours. She meets my eyes and then she sets her book on the ground. She curls on her side like a wounded animal and squeezes her eyes shut. Then suddenly she looks as if she’s sound asleep.

I sit down by the quern. I blank my face. I am grinding when Henry slams in with the wind. He sits down and doesn’t acknowledge me but sighs and runs his hands through his hair and sighs again and mutters to himself. He looks up at me now and I quick look down.

“Francis West has forsaken us.”

“Sir?” When he’s angry sometimes he’ll rant and tell me things and I learn what’s happening in the fort.

“Percy sent him to trade.” He stops talking like he’s bitten his tongue, sudden and sharp. I jump when he slams his fist into the rickety little table and it shakes under him, but I recover myself and hope Henry didn’t notice. I want to know more, want him to continue.

“Percy sent West to trade with the Patawomeck. He thought that, because they were so far removed, Powhatan might not influence their willingness to trade with us. But they refused, so West tortured the salvages until they complied.” He waves his hand, dismissing this point, this pain and suffering, as though it doesn’t really matter.

“And he was successful! The salvages traded with him then. They were eager to!” He laughs. I shiver at his laugh and try to hide it. “They gave him all they had and for nothing much at all. But West didn’t come back here, did he?”

“Sir?” I say again.

“No, Ellis, he didn’t come back here with the food. He left. He has begun his journey home and he will be sustained with the very food meant for us. Captain Davis brought us word that West has sailed down the Potomac River and for the open ocean.”

All that food.

Henry says he will keep me fed. But it feels strange to think it as my stomach aches with hunger.

*   *   *

There’s nothing I should be doing right now. I pull a hair. There is no grain to grind and Henry has not let me gather tuckahoe.

I pull a hair. I feel tired, weak. The laundry is done. I pull a hair. The fire is banked for the night. Henry will be gone, he said. He didn’t tell me not to leave. He didn’t say anything about what I am supposed to do.

I set a jug of water next to Mistress Collins. She is sleeping, her brow smooth for the first time in weeks.

I slip into the night. The cold makes the bad smells go away, the rot, the filth, the dead and decaying. There are warm squares of light glowing in the small houses, hot smells of fire, even a strain of music, a sweet low voice weaving with the jingle-jangle strum and pluck of a lute.

“Ellis!” It comes from around the corner, just out of sight. A whisper with laughter hidden beneath the hush. They’re like wraiths, white smudges in the night, Rowan and Jane. They’re already running when I catch up and we run fast, hands linked and yanking, swinging between us. We go to the sea gate because the back gate is shut tight and the sand is fresh and cold and clean. Rowan flops down and Jane does too. I lie careful of my kirtle, smoothing it to my ankles, not like Jane, whose hose are showing all the way up to her garters.

There are tilting thin crosses edging into view. We only bury the dead at night now, so the country people don’t find out how we suffer. How many of us are dying.

I thread my fingers through Jane’s. “Will you read for me?” I whisper. I tug her toward the graves. Is this where he is? I imagine kneeling in front of his grave, my spine bowed with grief. I imagine having nobody here, or anywhere at all.

“All of them?” she asks.

“Just one.”

She understands now. “Of course. What is his name?”

“Christopher Folk.”

“Oh, Ellis,” Jane murmurs. We weave through the graves and Jane studies the names. “He’s not here,” she finally says, relieved.

But death still lies on my shoulders like a heavy blanket. If he’s not here, where is he? Was he lost at sea? Was he killed in a battle with the country people? Was he taken? Did he simply leave? Walk through the marsh, into the woods and hills and never look back or wonder what became of his family?

We lie down with Rowan, sprawled on the sea grass. “When I die,” Rowan says, putting his arms behind his head and staring up at the sky, “I want the wolves to drag my bones across the woods.”

“How gruesome,” Jane says.

“I don’t want to rot in the ground,” he says.

“You want to rot above the ground,” Jane says, laughing.

“I don’t want any part of me to linger. I want wolves to crack open my bones and suck the marrow and I want my bones to turn to dust. I hate the idea of worms crawling through my eyes,” Rowan says.

I shiver and wrap my arms around myself, clutching my elbows and wishing I were warmer. The cold air is thick on the ground.

“I read that the ancient Northmen would send their dead out to float on a fiord in a burning ship. And the ship would have treasures and gold and a feast and sometimes living servants yet, to go with their masters to the land of the dead,” Jane says.

“I’d rather burn than rot,” Rowan says.

“The Egyptians would suck the brains and guts out of their dead and wrap them in the finest silk and linen and entomb them in their pyramids.” Jane waves her fingers in the air like a witch casting spells, sketching pictures, summoning ghosts.

“What about you, Ellis?” Rowan says.

“The Bible says that we are only saved by His grace. Only God knows what will become of us.”

“But what do you want,” Jane says. “What do you imagine?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never thought.” I feel them look at me but my eyes are on the sky. On the velvet darkness between the stars. It’s infinite. It’s unfathomable. But so much is unfathomable to me. I don’t understand anything. Nothing of this life or the next.

“Perhaps nothing,” I say. “Perhaps like the clouds melt into the sun, that’s how we die. Perhaps like how silt and mud dissolve in the current, that’s how we die.”

I imagine the wolves, cracking my bones, sucking my marrow.

I imagine burning on a ship of gold.

I imagine lying for years and years at the bottom of a heavy tomb of stone and dust, lying still and quiet.

I imagine melting, dissolving, fading into sunlight.

It is late, past time to go home. After we say good night to Rowan, Jane whispers to me, “He might be alive.” About Papa.

I nod, barely, feeling a strange kind of shame. Why is this so hard? I am so afraid of being a burden. Of being unwanted.

Jane slips her arm around my waist, pulls me into the shadows. She curls my head to her breast, cradles me.

Nine

Another day of the air getting colder, reminding me that winter is near. Another day of waiting in line for our quarter shares of grain, not enough, not enough. Rebecca North is in front of me, pretending she doesn’t know me. But then there is a noise, past the walls. I look up to the watchmen on the bulwark facing the river. They are waving their arms.

“What are they doing?” I ask.

Rebecca squints against the sun glare. “I don’t know,” she says.

The men start shouting down, calling for Master Percy.

“They’re untying the boat! The salvages are untying the boat!”

There’s a sudden crush of people, milling and anxious, and knots of men elbowing their way through the crowd.

A young man yells, “The shallop! They’re releasing it!”

The boat, they’re letting it go. So it’s lost to us. So we can’t use it against them. So we can’t leave.

Henry bounds up a ladder with his musket on his back. He sights and fires, and I clap my hands over my ears. The ladders and bulwarks are full of men firing over the walls. It is so loud my skull is vibrating and I feel each explosion in the deepest part of my ear. Each one is a sharp pain.

A volley of arrows flies over the walls. Screams erupt around me. Rebecca turns and runs, her kirtle and smock swirling around her, and I follow, ducking down, covering my head with my arms.

Jane is crouching beside a house. I squat next to her. “Geordie is shot,” she whispers, pointing. Geordie, one of the boys who came with Rowan, is sitting against the side of a house like a toy baby, legs splayed, head hanging.

“With an arrow. In the shoulder,” Rowan says, crouching around the corner.

Three men jog up and haul Geordie by his arms and legs, his head lolling to the side.

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. My fingertips are tingling. Jane’s lips are pale, almost white. The noise from the walls goes on. It doesn’t dull. The gunshots still hurt, even from this far away.

There’s a woman lying on the dirt. An arrow sticks straight up into the air from her face. It wavers in the wind. Nobody goes to her.

What happens now?

The wash still needs to be done. The bread still needs to rise. I haven’t gotten the grain yet. Such a small amount of grain and yet we have such need of it.

“What are you saying?” Jane whispers to me.

I didn’t realize I was reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

The men at some point stop firing their guns. I don’t know how many of the settlers are hit. I don’t know how many country people, on the other side of the walls, have been hit. How many we hurt. How many we killed. There are some number of bodies lined up on the inside of the walls now. We will bury them in the dark.

After a while I remember Mistress Collins. I’m the only one who ever thinks of her now. Nobody else remembers her. Even Mistress Eddowes has stopped visiting. She is moaning as I approach and I shiver and pinch my arm. I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to.

The sky is filled with white clouds. Sky to sky end to end all over white clouds thick like there’s nothing else there, like there was nothing ever there, just unbroken unrelenting white. I sway, staring up. My head is filled with a sound like flies over carrion. Like my head is filled with eaters of the dead.

She’s curled around herself, moaning, weeping, in pain or misery or madness, I don’t know.

“Mistress Collins?” I say.

She ignores me. I pinch my arm. I just want to leave. But Henry would be angry. I am here to help her. That’s why they brought me. “Mistress Collins?” I say again. “What’s wrong? How can I help?” How can I make her shut her mouth.

She keeps moaning. I sit next to her on the floor. “Do you need water? Are you hungry? Do you need to vomit? Do you need the chamber pot?”

She shakes her head against my litany and I resist the urge to clap my hands over my ears to make her moaning, her crying go away. Just stop!

I bring her water. She ignores it. She keeps crying.

I pinch my arm until it’s red and swollen. I pull out hair after hair until my scalp burns.

Finally, finally after hours of insanity she says, “Why did we come here?”

I stare back at her red eyes. “I don’t know.”

*   *   *

“What did she eat?” Henry asks.

“She ate a little bit of bread. But not much.”

“How much?”

I show him with my hands. It’s not enough for a mother with child.

He glares at the coverlet hiding her.

I tried. I told her Henry would be angry.

He goes behind the coverlet. I try not to listen.

I find a strand. I pull it out. I look at it. I drop it in the hearth. I find another one. I pull it out.

He comes back around later, after. I blank my face. He’s sweating, breathing hard. He’s angry. He’s angry at me. I will do better. Please don’t be angry at me, Henry. Don’t be. I’m sorry. I’ll do better.

“Get the switch,” he says.

*   *   *

I want to run. I want to burst. I want to explode out of my chest and take off flying. I want out. I want out.

I talk to myself as I walk fast away from there. My skirts chafe against my raw and stinging backside. My arm aches where I pinch it. I talk to myself like I am Henry and like I am arguing with him. I talk to myself like I am Mistress Collins and I am telling her to eat. To do what Henry wants. To take care of her body, of her babe. I say all the things to myself that I can’t say to them.

I need out. I need Jane.

The sun isn’t hot enough but still I ask her when I find her, “Will you come swim with me?”

She laughs. “It’s cold, Ellis!”

I pinch my arm. I don’t say anything.

She takes my hand, pulls it from my swollen red skin. “It’s too cold. Ellis, I don’t think we should.”

I pull away from her and start walking. Faster and faster I go, through the gate, through the woods, to the river deep and cold. I shed my clothes, piece by piece, until I am naked, until I am free and I am thrilled with the feeling of the cold on my bare skin.

I start to run.

“Ellis!” Jane yells, laughing behind me.

I’m gasping for breath.

I splash into the water, deeper and farther than I should. It’s up to my shoulders now, the current tugging at me. It’s up to my neck now.

“Ellis!” Jane screams.

Cold, cold, shocking cold. Bubbles swirl around me harsh and then gentle on my skin, gentle as I sink.

Everything is soft down here.

Jane grabs me. Her hands are strange on my numb skin. She yanks me back toward the bank, swimming, and slowly, almost like I am surrendering instead of surviving, I start to kick.

We break the surface of the water. Jane is gasping. “Ellis, Ellis!” Her hands are tight on my shoulders.

I wrap my limbs around her, pressing my lips, my body into hers. Her mouth is hot, wet, I can’t breathe, I need her. We fall back down below the surface of the water, entwined.

*   *   *

“I don’t want it,” Mistress Collins says.

It takes me a moment to realize she’s speaking words to me. She hasn’t said anything since that morning when the country people released the shallop. For longer and longer now she will lapse into silence, like she is hiding away within herself.

“What?” I say to her.

She is lying on her back, her hands on her pregnant belly. It keeps getting bigger. Though yet she never seems to eat. I don’t know how, but the babe keeps growing.

She’s staring up at the ceiling but I don’t think she’s looking. It’s like she’s staring at the dust swirling in the air. Or perhaps her eyes are seeing nothing.

She has her hands on her belly but she snatches them away and presses them to the bed on either side of her. As though she can’t stand to touch the skin containing the babe.

“I don’t want it,” she says in the same low expressionless voice.

I set the quern down on the table. “The babe?”

“Yes, I don’t want this babe.” Her eyes are wide and horrified, as if she is giving herself permission to feel something at last. Terror of her situation. “I don’t want the babe. I don’t want to bring a babe into my life. Into this life. I don’t even want this life.” She is whispering, her fingers now scratching on the skin of her belly, like she’s trying to crack her womb open and claw the baby out.

“Do you know how to slip a babe?” she asks me. “You can’t tell him,” she says.

Henry.

“You can’t tell him. He would…” But words seem to fail her.

He would be so sad. He would be so angry. He loves this baby already, I can tell. The way he watches Mistress Collins. The way he instructs me to tell him when and how much she eats and tells me to watch her and watch her and watch her. To never leave her. This babe is his. I find a hair and pull it out and then I remember Mistress Collins is watching and I stop.

She sighs like she is giving up. She looks away from me, her eyes glazing, withdrawing. As though she is letting go of any hope that I will help her. But then her eyes snap back to me. “I know,” she says. “I know about Jane.”

What does she know? “Mistress?” I say. What does she know about Jane? I pull another hair out and stop myself again.

“Jane Eddowes is not a good friend to you, that’s what he says.” The words are coming out of her fast like she’s already angry at me for refusing to help her though yet I haven’t done so. “He says she’s not a good friend to you but I know you spend time with her still. Mistress Eddowes used to come to call sometimes. She said you leave the fort with Jane. I could tell him. I could. He would be angry with you.” It’s strange how I never noticed that her voice is low and throaty when it’s not a whisper.

She doesn’t know everything. Only that we spend time together. Only that Jane is my friend. She doesn’t know more. She doesn’t know everything. But still, Henry can’t know. He would be so angry with me. So disappointed. I touch my scalp. I’m just touching it. I’m not pulling.

I sit down on the stool. Back home when Franny got with a babe, she did slip it. We went to the witch who lived down the way. But she didn’t look like a witch. She was young and pretty.

The witch said Franny was early enough in her pregnancy, because it was before the quickening, that it would work but it would be dangerous. It would bring on the bleeding and she might die of it. She might bleed everything out, not just the babe but her life, too.

The witch gave Franny a bundle of plants to make a decoction. I held it in my hands, I remember. I wanted to know everything about them, what they were, their uses, how they grew. The witch smiled and pointed them out, one by one.

Franny lay in the bed we shared when she lived at home, her eyes closed and her face pale, as I boiled the water. I was sweating from the steam. I put the herbs into the cup as the witch had told me to do and poured the water over it. She said to let it steep for a long time, until the water was cold. The smell, it was like a wet dog. Hellebore. And pennyroyal, fresh and sharp like mint.

“I do know at least one, perhaps two herbs, but I don’t know if they grow here,” I say.

“What are they?”

“Hellebore and pennyroyal. I know they grow at home but I’ve never seen them here.”

She closes her eyes tight. Tears flow anyway, flooding down her cheeks. “There has to be some way.”

“Perhaps Jane would know.”

Her eyes flicker at the mention of Jane but she doesn’t say anything. She better not. Not if she wants her way. “Or perhaps the country people,” she says. “They must have women who want to get rid of babies too.”

I nod. Everywhere, every place, there are women who can’t keep their babes. But I have never spoken to one of the country people that live outside our gates. Only Mark, and I haven’t dared speak to him since he told me that story. I don’t know how to reach them. Rowan knows a few words of their language. He went to stay once with Thomas Savage before we came here. They are friends, Jane says.

“I might be able to,” I say.

*   *   *

Everything is brown and gold, the trees, the grasses, the dead plants. The wind billows and gusts in the bare treetops, the stark branches, the bones of the trees black against the white sky.

Rowan runs ahead of me. We are pretending our youth will keep us safe though yet it might not and we both know it. But now that we’re pretending, we pretend all the way and we are pretend safe, deep in the golden silky forest. Spider darts into clumps of bushes and birds explode out of them.

They won’t let us into their town but a young apprentice will meet us, Rowan says after I sent my request through him. Well, Mistress Collins’s request. I have her opal broach wrapped in a kercher as payment.

Thomas Savage is waiting for us. There are two young men and a young woman with him. They are laughing and talking and one of the boys is stomping his bare feet like he’s cold but I think he’s joking, playacting a part in some story.

Thomas waves when he sees us. They all stop laughing and then the two boys go back to talking to each other, ignoring Rowan and me. Thomas says, “This is Winsakeekyahgo. She is apprenticed to the healer in our town.”

Winsakeekyahgo. I say her name in my head. She looks at me, serious, her brows drawn together with concern. Her eyes are the deepest, richest brown, like peat, brown and green and gray all at once. She says something to Thomas. He shakes his head and turns to me. “I trust this medicine isn’t for you? She says you’re too young and it could make it so you’d never have a babe even if you wanted to.”

“No,” I say. “It’s for my mistress.”

She opens the bundle and pulls out something brown that looks like a tangled knot of hair. She speaks over it, earnest, eyes on me.

“Poughkone,” Thomas says. “It can make you vomit, lose consciousness. Make sure to use only a little every time. Too much is very dangerous.”

She gives me the little bundle. Her hands are warm and her fingers calloused as they brush against my skin. She is lovely, I realize, and I feel my cheeks get hot. She is smiling at me because she knows what I am feeling, I think. A hot flush, a shiver, a breathlessness. There is that moment of recognition. If we had a little time; if things were different. Her fingers are still on mine. But then I take my hands back and look down at the bundle and Jane’s face floats up behind my eyes.

She is saying things to Thomas and he gives me instructions and warnings, to give in turn to Mistress Collins. It’s dangerous, she says. Mistress Collins will be sick, vomit, every time she drinks it. She could be injured inside and never be able to have babies again.

“I’ll tell her,” I say.

There’s a pause. I withdraw the broach and hand it to Winsakeekyahgo. She smiles in pleasure at the beautiful piece of jewelry. The opal glimmers in the sunlight. She holds it up to her hair and admires the gold and glimmer against the mahogany sheen.

“Beautiful,” I say, and can’t help the smile that rises to my lips. She smiles back and I feel the eyes of the young men on us, suddenly paying attention.

Spider comes bounding out of the woods behind us. We all jump and then laugh and one of the boys crouches and dances a little in front of Spider, playing with her, batting at her haunches. She pounces at him, yipping. He says a word to her in a stern voice and she sits, wagging her tail, until he hands her a strip of dried meat.

He says something to Thomas and Thomas translates. “Mko wonders if you might trade for the dog?”

Rowan blanches, looking from Thomas to Mko. He hesitates and I watch, worrying. And then he shakes his head and smiles sympathetically. “She is wonderful, isn’t she? But no, I love her too much. I could never give her up.”

Mko nods, understanding. He gives Spider another piece of meat and we all say goodbye, Rowan and me going one way, Thomas and Mko and Winsakeekyahgo and the other young man going the other way.

*   *   *

We steal through the sea gate and Jane sees us. She looks from me to Rowan, uncertain. Is she jealous? Does she wonder why we would sneak away together? We go to an inside corner of the fort with Jane. There is little privacy to be found inside the fort but it is getting more and more dangerous to leave.

“It’s Mistress Collins. She wants to slip the babe,” I say to Jane. Rowan nods. I clutch the bundle of witch plants tight in my hand. Jane sits back against the wall and I sit next to her.

“I wouldn’t want to bring a babe into this place either,” Jane says. “I don’t even want to be here myself.”

“I don’t either, anymore,” Rowan says. “Before, there was adventure and there was food and there was hope, but now it’s all bleak and sad and I’m always hungry and I wish I wasn’t here anymore. But even if there was a ship to take us, we couldn’t pay. We’re trapped here.”

It’s the same for me, of course. I couldn’t go back. Henry wouldn’t let me. Even if I left my position with him and broke my indenture, I couldn’t pay. And if I broke my indenture I could be arrested. And even if there were a boat to take me, what would I go back to? There is nothing for me there just like there is nothing for me here. But there is Jane here, and there is the beauty of here. It wasn’t beautiful at home. And somewhere, though yet I forget to think about him more and more, somewhere I might find Papa.

“But I feel strange about it,” I say, though yet it’s not my place to question my mistress. “The Bible says, ‘If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished,’ ” I quote. “I’m afraid of doing wrong, of doing something wicked.”

“It’s not even alive yet,” Jane says. “The babe hasn’t moved yet, right?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Anyway, everybody is dying,” Rowan says.

Mistress Wainwright died and one of her twin babies. The other one was adopted out to the other Smiths. The bodies are so many now, they’re burying one on top of the other.

“We’ll die too,” I say.

“Someday,” Jane says. “Or do you mean soon?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“What if we die too?” Rowan says. “Just like everybody else? Who will know? My name wasn’t on any manifest. How will my father and brothers know? Nobody will write to tell them. There will be nobody to mourn us except the country people and they won’t mourn us, they’ll be glad of it. They want us gone.”

“If you die and nobody mourns you, did your life even matter?” Jane says.

“If nobody knows you’re dead, were you even alive?” Rowan says.

“God knows,” I say.

“I don’t know if God is here, Ellis,” Jane says.

*   *   *

I brew the decoction and let it steep for so long it is cold when I give it to Mistress Collins. She sits up to drink it, gulping it down, a little water dribbling out of the side of her mouth. She lies down again, clutching her hands to her belly, as though she expects the cramping to start right away. Winsakeekyahgo said it would take more than one cup of the decoction to bring on the bleeding. Soon, Mistress Collins vomits. I am ready and so is she. She vomits into the pot and I bear it away as quick and quiet as I can.

*   *   *

“What did she eat?”

Nothing. “She ate some bread and I found some dried apple for her.”

“Did you get her out of bed?”

No. “Yes, sir.”

“What did she drink?”

The decoction to kill the baby. “Water and some beer.”

“Make sure she eats greens. My mother always said greens will make for cool and moist humors.”

There are no greens anymore. “Yes, sir.”

*   *   *

Three days of the decoction and vomiting and she starts bleeding a little. I am sitting and staring out the door because there is nothing else to do.

Lately, I think about food all the time, every minute. I thought I was used to being hungry. I thought I was used to not eating much. But not like this. It is as though I must think and plan and work every minute if only to have some small amount of food that doesn’t add up to enough. No matter how hard I work, it’s not enough.

The forest that surrounds us is bare now. There are no more acorns and so the turkeys and deer don’t come anymore either, now that there is only death for them here. I would strangle a turkey if I could find one but I don’t think that I will. And it’s not safe to leave the fort, that’s what everybody says. The cold is getting worse. It isn’t fresh anymore. It doesn’t feel good anymore. It hurts now.

“Ellis,” Mistress Collins says. Her face is paler than usual. She is holding up her hand to me. There is blood on her fingertips. There is blood smeared on her legs and a few spots of dark, deep blood the color of garnets on her bed linens.

We use her body cloths to clean her legs, and wool and herbs wrapped in linen to stanch the flow of blood, and I put the bed linens away to wash. I lay her back down in the bed. Her face is creased with pain. Sunlight falls on her, deep and gold, and her eyes startle me with their brightness.

“Master Collins will have to know about the bleeding,” she whispers. “When it…when it is the lifeblood of the babe. He’ll have to know.”

I nod.

She clutches at my hand. “But not about the herbs.”

I nod again and let her see the fear in my face at the thought of it. Of Henry finding out about the herbs.

But I don’t need to change her wool that night when Mistress Collins gets ready for bed. We check it and there is not much blood.

I keep making the decoction. She keeps drinking it. She bleeds a little more and a little more still. But nothing more than blood. Just blood. And just blood is not enough.

*   *   *

Jane approaches me while I wait in line for our daily grain. She leans close to me, whispers in my ear, “What if we ask Thomas Savage?”

“Ask him what?” I say.

“About your papa. There were other settlements, though yet not many have survived, I hear. What if he’s at one of them? Or what if he’s with one of the tribes?”

A strange feeling wells up in me, like tears about to overflow. It takes me a moment to name the feeling. Hope. “Do you think so?”

Jane smiles at me. “I think it’s possible,” she says. She squeezes my hand and turns to leave. “I’ll ask Rowan,” she says.

*   *   *

People are dying more now. There were always sick people but now there are more. They turned a rowhouse into a sick house. Some of the mothers tend to the sick. Mistress Eddowes is one of them. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t visit Mistress Collins anymore. Maybe she is too busy. Or maybe she thinks Mistress Collins is mad now, like Henry is always telling everybody.

But I don’t know what they can do for the sick, really. Perhaps it’s enough to bring them comfort. We have no chirurgeons here. There was one, Jane says, but he died before we came.

I don’t know anything. My mind feels so dull as I try to think about things. Like if Rowan reached Thomas Savage and if Thomas Savage might look for Papa.

And like how to care for Mistress Collins. How to answer Henry’s questions. How to find food to feed Mistress Collins so I have something to answer his questions with. But there isn’t any food. Only a little grain I can make bread or thicken watery soup with.

It’s getting hard to think. Hard to make thoughts come and when they do, they’re slow and sluggish, like wading through mud. My head aches all the time.

I try to plan. I try to think. I try to do better. To be good. But I just can’t and I hate myself for it. I hate how simple and witless I am.

Ten

I find a persimmon.

I am out wandering, though yet it’s almost winter and there are no more things to forage this close to the fort. Everything is long since dead and rotten. All the birds are gone but the carrion eaters that gripe at me as I walk by. But I need to find food. I need to eat. I need to find something to feed Mistress Collins so I can tell Henry the truth again.

I find it on the ground by a tree, short and twisting, like an apple tree. There are orange fruits underneath, rotten, crawling with ants, half-eaten or mostly eaten. They are all, none of them, whole. I kneel and pick one up that looks less eaten than the others.

It smells so sweet.

There is a sound and I stand, but I am slow, too slow. I am caught, I know. I shouldn’t be out there. It’s not safe.

It’s Winsakeekyahgo. I smile. I can’t help it. She smiles too and comes closer, a basket dangling from her arm. Full of the bright round fruits, not eaten. Full, round, ripe, fresh.

Winsakeekyahgo holds one out to me. I take it and bring it to my mouth. She nods and I take a bite. It bursts in my mouth and the juice is like honey. I close my eyes to taste the beautiful sweetness.

When I open my eyes she is still smiling at me. She gives me a few fruits. “Persimmon,” she says. She draws it out, and I watch her mouth.

“Persimmon,” I repeat. She nods and smiles and nods again and then she leaves. I collect all the half-eaten half-rotten ones as well. I’ll boil them down into a spread. I don’t care if the pests and squirrels have been eating them.

*   *   *

Henry comes bursting in the house. The door slams into the wall and it rattles everything. The daub flakes and falls. The thatch shudders. He doesn’t notice. He’s holding something. A bundle in his arms.

“Ellis!” he says, his eyes bright. He holds the bundle out to me. It is a mantle of fawn-colored fur. I touch it with the tips of my fingers. It is smooth, silky. I am gentle because it is precious and not for me.

“For the mistress?” I say.

He laughs, joyful, beautiful, captivating. “No, Ellis, for you!”

I touch the fur again, disbelieving. “Is it…?”

“Sable,” he says. “It was Mistress Wainwright’s but, well…”

She died. I look up at him. I can’t wear sable.

He shakes his head. “We’re so far from home, it won’t matter.”

It’s not quite illegal for me to wear silk, fur, the color purple, but almost. The ban on clothes above my station has been lifted, but still I would be judged. But Henry says I can. And it is cold and getting colder. This fur will keep me warm.

But I cut my eyes to the coverlet hiding Mistress Collins. Won’t she want it? Won’t she be jealous? Is his offering it improper?

His eyes narrow. “Take it, Ellis. It is for you.”

I cradle it, I can’t stop myself, and bring it up to my cheek, closing my eyes at the feel of it.

When I open my eyes again Henry is watching me. His eyes are warm. He takes the mantle and brings it around, over my shoulders. When he fastens it, his fingers brush against my neck, where my collarbone dips. I flush but he turns away next moment, not looking at me anymore. I press my cold hands to my hot cheeks, an unpleasant twist in my gut.

*   *   *

Sometimes the hunger makes me feel mad. I think about food and my mouth waters. I imagine the sweet juice of the persimmon and my head aches. When I eat, I don’t feel full. I feel mad with hunger. It is as though what I eat reminds my body that food exists. That food is possible.

I remember the maize and the wheat. The beans and squash in the garden. I can’t believe I forgot about it. Henry hasn’t asked me to water with him for some number of days. It must be the hunger, eating away at my brain.

I ask him about it now. “Should we water the wheat?” I say.

He shakes his head, eating bread and persimmon jam. It’s on his lips. A yellow smear. I am glad to see him enjoying it. “The wheat is gone,” he says.

“Gone?” I repeat stupidly.

“Yes. Gone. Enough questions, Ellis. I am trying to eat.”

I lower my head and back up to the wall, my fingers on the cold daub. Gone? Gone where? Gone how? What happened to it? Did somebody take it? Did some pest eat it? All that food. My chest aches. I never knew how my chest could ache with hunger, as well as my stomach. My stomach, my chest, my head, even my legs ache. I am so hungry.

*   *   *

Rowan and Jane and I have left the fort. We need to, we must find food. We’re looking for persimmons though yet they are perhaps all gone.

Jane runs ahead, her lithe white form darting in and out of the blurred brown landscape. It is like she is just a bit of fog, a bit of mist, a cloud floating.

The air is so still today, so clear. I can see all the way to the other side of the river. The leaves are gone, blown away on the wind. The trees are bare. The grasses are dead and here and there are patches of dry hard earth, frozen in the cold. I wear my mantle that Henry gave to me. Jane balked when she saw it, used to my lewd dress. Used to the laws of our home. I flushed and said, “Master Collins said it is to keep me warm.” As though I were apologizing. She shrugged and didn’t say anything else. Should I be ashamed? I only want to be warm.

Spider dashes away. Rowan is alive with excitement. His cheeks and snub nose are flushed pink and his eyes are sparkling clear. “Spider!” he calls. She explodes out of the shrubs and Rowan throws a stick. Spider hurls herself after it and comes dashing back with a different stick, this one so big it’s more like the limb of a tree. Rowan roars with laughter.

“Isn’t it wonderful to be out of the fort?” Jane says, taking my hand. Rowan takes my other hand and we generate a little warmth among the three of us.

I feel safer between Jane and Rowan. The anger of the Powhatan weighs heavily on my shoulders, as it should, as we are guilty, as we should be gone, as we never should have come at all. But it is good to be out of the fort. Out from under the stress and wailing grief and madness of Mistress Collins. Henry says he will be gone all day but he doesn’t say where.

“What if we find no persimmons?” I say.

“Then we are adventuring!” Jane says.

“Perhaps we’ll find the river to the other ocean,” Rowan says. “I would like to discover something so important.” Rowan says that Master Smith and his men searched for a river passage to the other coast, the other ocean. A trade route, navigable by boat. But they couldn’t find a way. They kept getting stopped where the rivers got too narrow or shallow, or where there was a waterfall.

The persimmon jam is gone. Mistress Collins ate a little in her pottage and Henry ate the rest on his bread. Big spoonfuls of it. I was happy to see him like it so much. I wish I could make more. I ate my bread this morning with no jam and that will be all I eat today. Unless we find some food while we’re out. I imagine Jane biting into a persimmon. I imagine her face as she tastes the sweet juice. I imagine kissing the sweetness off her lips. Her cheeks are pink and lovely. Her skin is so pale. She is like roses and cream and ice.

The hunger sharpens everything. Everything has hard edges and everything glitters and everything aches with cold, except my hand in Jane’s as she yanks me along, her energy, her bouncing, her rushing and running.

Rowan discovers a little cove in the river and we dig some oysters with cold hands and sticks. Rowan swallows them raw and whole and breaks some open for Spider. We have nothing to build a fire with, so I eat them raw as well. They taste like salt and water and nothing else. Jane laughs at me, at the face I make because they are so soft and slimy. But then she makes the same face when she eats hers.

Spider darts away downriver and Rowan runs after her and then Jane and I do as well. I’m panting and Jane is laughing and the brush whips at my legs. I stumble to a stop. Rowan is crouching by a small canoe made of a burned-out tree.

It belongs to the country people, of course. It’s pulled up on the bank. It looks new and well cared for. It’s most certainly not just abandoned. I look to the bank behind us and in front of us and off into the forest stretching out between us and the fort. They must be near and we must leave.

Except Jane yelps and rushes to the canoe and runs her fingers along its sides. Her excitement is feverish, infectious, and I catch it though yet I try not to. I try to remember my fear. My fear is more sensible.

“Let’s take it, just for now,” she says. “We’ll bring it back. I’ve never been on the other side of the river!”

Rowan looks over his shoulder, around, side to side, and he starts to smile.

Of course it’s wrong. Of course we shouldn’t. But we do.

It’s despicable, I think. To steal this craft that we know somebody spent hours and hours to make. Finding the tree, cutting the tree down, scraping the wood, burning the wood, however they make it, it takes hours and hours of effort, I know it must. It’s wrong. But we’ll bring it back.

We are despicable. How could we? This is everything we are, the strangers here. We come and steal things that aren’t ours, that don’t belong to us, with no thought to who we hurt, to what damage we do. We take and take and take.

But Jane is so beautiful when she smiles.

And…but…we’ll bring it back.

Nobody yells at us. Nobody shrieks with indignation. Nobody attacks us, no arrows fly by our heads or thunk into the wood as we push it into the water. And oh the wind is cold like a rebuke, but also it is fresh and clean and beautiful across the water as we paddle to the other side. But we are so exposed. My neck tingles.

We bump against the bank on the other side. I notice suddenly there are no birds. A wave of dread crashes over me.

We walk along the bank. Now that we’ve done this, taken the canoe, our exhilaration is gone. Spider lifts her nose up to the cold air. Her nostrils flare, again, again. She bolts away, disappearing into the brush. Rowan yelps and follows her. Jane grabs my hand and we run, breathless.

And then. Blood so thick and dark. Blood and gaping bulging intestines. I can’t make sense of it and it isn’t until Rowan grabs my arm, yanking me behind a shrub, that I understand. It is a hog, butchered. Steam rises from the insides of its body, hot in the cold air.

A country man is butchering another hog. There are many hogs. A massacre. A slaughter. The man sees Spider, wrestling with a leg, absurd and thin, straight up in the air. She yanks it backward, trying to drag the whole hog away. He yells at her but she ignores him. He yells again.

“Spider!” Rowan whispers. He slaps his thigh, calling her, but she won’t come.

The man stands up, holding his dripping knife by his side.

“Spider,” Rowan hisses, urgent. My legs hurt from crouching. Jane whimpers in fear and I clasp my hand over her mouth.

The man throws a stick at Spider. It hits her hard in the ear. She yelps and darts away. Behind the shrubs, where the man can’t see, Rowan grabs Spider, clutching her to his side, his hand clamped around her snout.

The man watches for a moment, then turns back to his work. I become aware of myself again. Of us. Of our hungry bodies, hiding here watching him. We stole their canoe and have no way to get back without it. And Rowan is looking back at me as though he has remembered as well.

I tug on Jane’s hand. Her face is blank. I tug again. I’m scared to even whisper. Suddenly, the smell of blood covers everything, even the cold air. I feel ill and I feel hungry. Jane nods at me and we crouch and crawl away. The sound of my kirtle dragging on dead leaves and grass is loud over the wind and the silence of the birds and the nothing else.

On our way back we find some number more of hogs. Some of them cold in the cold air. Some steaming hot. Fresh blood. Red. Each body terrifies me more than the last, like a warning: Get out. Stay away.

How we are not killed, how we escape, how the country people, for there must be more of them somewhere close to kill so many hogs, how they don’t hear us or see us or notice us, I don’t know. Every step I feel as though I am suffocating. I feel as though I am about to faint. My ears are filled with a rushing swooping sound like I am falling. My head aches and my nose runs and my cheeks sting.

The canoe is still there. We are exposed again on the river and I don’t know, again, how we are not killed.

“The hogs,” Rowan says.

Jane starts to cry. I watch her press her hands to her face and I feel confused. Is she grieving the hogs? Maybe the wreckage of so many bodies was shocking to her.

Rowan says, “They were ours.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“The hogs were ours. They belong to the fort. We could have eaten them. They could have sustained us.”

The loss hits me like a blow to the gut. And suddenly I am so filled with rage it is as though I bit my cheek and my mouth has filled with the iron taste of blood. How could they? How could the leaders of our fort be so careless? We need that food! How could they neglect to butcher the hogs? We should have been eating them all this time. How could they? How could they?

I’ll keep you fed, Henry said. All the reassurances of the men who lead us, and they left the hogs to be butchered by the country people.

And the country people. They ruin our chances of survival. They kill the hogs we might have eaten. That is how much they want us dead. Or perhaps they did what we neglected to do. Make use of food, readily available. Now they have the hogs, the meat, the skins, the everything.

So much food. My mouth fills with saliva, my stomach fills with churning hunger, my head is sharp with pain.

And we get out and leave the canoe again. Probably not in the same place we found it. But we’re gone from it.

And then it descends on me again. The callous behavior of our leaders. The hogs. The waste of them. The lack of them. They’re all dead and taken.

The hunger the hunger the hunger.

*   *   *

Leviticus says we should not eat horses, yet they are butchering the horses today. There are only eight of them, all privately owned by gentlemen here. The horses will be killed and distributed among the families for us to eat.

The men leading the horses are grim. One of them, a man I don’t know, is weeping. He looks angry, as though he’s been ordered to do this, which he probably has. The horse is brown and plain and it walks placidly alongside the man. It trusts him.

I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to see these animals killed. But Henry is behind me and he expects me to watch. He doesn’t have a horse to contribute.

The man watches with tears still streaming as his horse is stunned with a poleaxe and then its throat slit as it lies on the ground. Its blood pulses out of its body fast like a flowing river. The other horses scream and rear and paw at the air. They were calm and now because of the blood they’re not. Men hang on to their reins. The man just stands there weeping with his dead horse at his feet, as one by one the other horses are slaughtered.

I am frozen. Trapped by my own stress. Trapped by Henry. I pinch my arm hard, again, again.

There is so much blood. It stains the ground around the horses, all dead now, their throats gaping open, red and glistening.

Later I line up with the others and they hand me a cut of meat, like a beefsteak but more red. Master Collins will eat it and comment on the flavor I manage to bring out in it.

*   *   *

Rowan is serving, he told us. The council and the gentlemen, they’re having a feast of horse meat and what else I don’t know, but they must have something to offer. I wonder if they have hoarded food they won’t share with us. Some of the men here believe they do. They grumble about the rationing of grain. Their grumbles turn angry, of late. The kind of anger that comes with hunger.

Jane is pale in the blue dark. We hurry around the side of the house, our kirtles and smocks rustling. The window glows yellow. Warm air billows out at us and it smells like sweat and food.

“There’s Rowan,” Jane whispers to me. He is standing against the wall across the room, his hair tied neatly back, holding a pitcher and looking bored. I find Henry, nodding and smiling among a group of men. One of them waves his hands around in the air, looking as though he thinks he’s very important, and Henry says something in response. I can hear his voice but not his words. I smile watching Henry and then I feel Jane’s eyes on me. I look at her and she turns back to watch Henry with her eyes narrowed.

They are all dressed in their finest upperstocks and gowns and hose and collars. But there is a wilt to them. Their clothes are spotted with stains and grime and wrinkles and they sag. The men are wasted now like they weren’t before. Wasted and thin and sickly and pale. But they smile and laugh and act important anyway.

They sit down to eat. There is a long table with real pewter plates mixed in among the ceramics, and cutlery and linen napkins and a red haunch of horse meat, and real bread still steaming, and puddings. Food and food and food and food. So much. My stomach churns. How have they managed this? Perhaps it is not as much as it seems. Perhaps my eyes are as hungry as the rest of me.

Henry hovers near a chair next to where Master Fettiplace, Master Percy’s second in command, is sitting. He touches the back of the chair. Another man takes the chair and sits down in it, nodding to Henry, and then says something to Master Fettiplace, turning away from Henry. Henry’s face goes blank, eyes staring straight ahead. Then he moves farther down the table and sits down.

Jane snickers.

“What are you laughing about?” I say to her.

“Master Collins. He wanted to sit next to someone of importance, though yet he’s not important really.”

I turn back to the window but Jane is still looking at me. “Ellis, are you angry?”

Henry is talking to the man across the table from him. They are both laughing. “He is important,” I say.

Jane shakes her head and says, “No, he just wants to be. See the way he keeps looking up at the head of the table? He thinks he should be there with the leaders of the colony. But my father says his father was only a merchant and that he was only granted his coat of arms a few years ago because he bribed the College of Arms. He’s not a real gentleman.”

I shove myself away from the window. Jane follows me but I ignore her. “Ellis,” she says, too loud. Somebody will hear us.

I walk faster, away from Master Percy’s house. She catches up to me and grabs my arm. She is almost laughing, as though she can’t believe it. “Why are you so angry at me?” she says.

“I’m not,” I say. But I am.

“I only told the truth. Are you really angry?”

“No.”

She tightens her hand around my arm. “You are!”

I don’t say anything.

“Is it him? Your master?” she says. She touches the fur mantle he gave me, that I wear all the time now though yet people look and disapprove. I yank away from her. Does she disapprove too? Does she believe I think too much of myself?

Jane looks at my face and I keep it blank. I don’t want her to know what I’m feeling. I don’t want her to see my anger and confusion. My admiration of him, his beauty, the way he makes me feel flustered, flattered, and uncomfortable all at the same time. The way I long for a home with him, to feel safe with him, but also I long to escape him.

I think she does see it. I think she always knows what I’m feeling. She doesn’t check to make sure we’re alone. She puts her hands on either side of my face and kisses me. I resist for a moment and then sink into it, a thrill sharp and deep in my belly. Then I push her away, frustrated for giving in and frustrated for wanting more.

I leave her standing there.

Eleven

Mistress Collins is shivering. I rub her skin with her body cloths, in brisk rough circles. Her hip bones push the straps of her girdle out so it gapes and there are purple shadows on her skin.

She stands there with her eyes closed and I ignore the tears that leak out. I go to change her wool and she stops me with a hand. “Don’t.”

Then I see that there is no blood showing.

“The bleeding stopped,” she says.

*   *   *

It’s different this time. Rowan won’t go with me. He says it’s too dangerous. He sends a message to Thomas and tells me where to meet Winsakeekyahgo. It’s farther from the fort this time, as though she is not willing to come as close to us as last time.

The woods are quiet, flat, and gray. I imagine men coming up, over low hills, dragging me to the ground, beating me, killing me, silent angry faces. Crows follow me as I walk. They flutter from tree to tree. They are chasing my death. If anybody catches me, I could. I really could die. Does Mistress Collins know what she is asking of me?

A noise in the distance. My heart races. It is only Winsakeekyahgo. Her face is tense like I think mine is. Her eyes dart from side to side, as though she expects to get caught. As though she is not supposed to be here either.

She nods at me to hurry. I pull the bundle out of my pocket. It is everything that was in Mistress Collins’s little velvet purse. Everything special to her. As though she doesn’t care anymore. As though nothing is special anymore.

There is a string of gray pearls, knobby and irregular. I let it slide through my fingers into Winsakeekyahgo’s pooled hands. A ring, an insignia stamped into gold. Another broach, this time crystal, glinting a rainbow onto Winsakeekyahgo.

It’s a small treasure trove. Every precious thing. Mistress Collins is giving it all away, that is how desperate she is.

Winsakeekyahgo looks at me with wide eyes. She wasn’t expecting all this. I shrug at her. I don’t have the words to explain.

She takes the treasures and gives me a bundle of herbs. It, too, is bigger this time. More than we need. More than I imagined she would give us. I know why. It’s because she doesn’t want to have to meet me again. It’s not safe. Not safe for me and I think, because of the way she checks over her shoulder, it’s not safe for her either.

I put the bundle in my purse and I nod at her. Then a thought occurs to me. Though yet Rowan sent a message to Thomas Savage, we have not heard anything about Papa. “Christopher Folk?” I say.

She tilts her head. She doesn’t understand.

I hold my hand up over my head. He’s tall, it says. I give myself a beard and long hair, twisting my finger to show the curls. “Christopher Folk,” I say again.

I press my hand to my heart without meaning to. “Papa,” I say.

She nods. She says, “Christopher Folk,” but in a strange, new way.

I smile. “Thank you,” I say, though yet I know she doesn’t understand my words. Perhaps she’ll understand my smile. Perhaps she’ll understand the look in my eyes.

She reaches out and I give her my hands. She speaks to me like I spoke to her. As though she knows it’s useless because I won’t understand but she wants to say the words anyway.

But I don’t know what it is she’s telling me. And then she turns and hurries away.

*   *   *

There is a guard of several men at the storehouse. It must be difficult for them to resist eating the food, I think. How could it not be? It does seem like an abundance, sacks of grain.

It’s not loud when the other men, the fathers and husbands and oldest sons, come marching up to the storehouse with their hoes and scythes and hammers, and one of them has a gun. A long musket that gleams and glows in the sunlight. The sky soars above us, up and away and like the deepest blue sea, such a perfect deep blue that I can’t see past it.

I don’t know why they didn’t come at night. Perhaps some of the men guarding it would have been asleep or gone. I don’t know why they’re doing it at all. It won’t work. Only perhaps if we all ganged together and attacked the storehouse at once. And then what? We would take all the food and eat it too quickly and then it would be gone, and then what?

They walk and then they run. They charge like they’re on a battlefield like Papa used to tell, late by the hearth with the warm fire making it a story, glorious and not real. But this is real. They brandish their husbandry tools and their carpentry tools and charge the storehouse.

The guards stand up. One of them, an older man, he swallows and swallows again like he’s scared, but he lifts his gun.

They know one another. The men guarding and the men attacking. They have worked together, eaten together. That man over there, he is aiming his musket at a man whose house he helped build. They sat on their rooves together, laughing, thatching, talking under this faraway sky. Now they point guns at each other.

One by one the guards fire.

One of the attackers falls. Then another. There are only a handful of them. Not very many. They keep running. They are swiftly put down. Clubbed with the butts of the guns, shot, pinned down.

And then it’s over.

These men who all came here with the same wrong dreams. They put us all here, where we fight and starve and die. Where we are the strangers. And now they kill each other.

*   *   *

Master Percy makes us watch. This is the first time I’ve seen all the settlers together, other than church. Not since we arrived have we all gathered like this. We’re shrunken and gray-skinned and dirty-faced and slump-shouldered.

We’re less of us. I pull a hair out. I don’t know how many have died, but standing here we are so much less than we used to be. I stand with Henry. Mistress Collins stayed in bed because she is unwell. She was given leave by Master Percy himself. I pull another hair out. It gets tangled in my fingers.

Jane is standing with her mother and father. When Henry is not looking I steal her image again and again. Her cap is on properly. Her veil is tied neatly around her neck. Her kirtle and smock are clean and her shoes are on. Her eyes are forward and her face is tense with perhaps dread or perhaps excitement. Rowan fidgets beside her but she ignores him.

The men who attacked the storehouse, the ones who weren’t killed by the guards, are standing on ladders, ropes around their necks. Their hands are tied in front of them. They have their nightcaps on. The minister reads from his prayer book, pacing back and forth. And then he pulls the caps down over their eyes.

There is no noise. The wind catches the hair in my fingers and I pull another. Another. Another. Until my scalp burns and itches.

Master Percy is pale and thin and I remember how young he is. He is younger even than Henry. I think he is trying to be strong but his hands shake as he reads to us their crimes and why they must die for them.

I’ve never seen an execution. I’ve never seen a person killed like this before. Calm and deliberate. I feel breathless as the executioners take the ladders out from under the men. I let my eyes blur. I focus on the nothing between here and there.

There is a crack, a snap, a neck breaking as a man falls. But only one. Now there are ragged sounds, choking sounds, as the other men strangle. It takes a long time. It is cold but still I smell it when they lose their bowels.

The crows squawk and land and flutter and hop, curious about the dead but scared of the living.

*   *   *

We wake up together. All three of us.

Henry is languishing. His anger and frustration eat at him, eat at me. He is jiggling his knee, frowning at the wall. I am small in the corner. There is again no food to prepare. Nothing but the quarter shares of grain we are now allowed. And still, I am so hungry. Still, Mistress Collins wastes away. Still, Henry worries. I wonder how he looks so well. He doesn’t look wasted like everybody else. His skin is flushed with life and his eyes are bright.

*   *   *

I wait in line to collect our daily grain under the winter sun. It is so cold and dry my skin itches. I scratch until my skin is red and angry, white and numb.

The effects of the rebellion and the execution are oppressive. The fear of violence. The anger of not enough to eat. I watch my feet. One step forward. Feet together. One step forward. My neck hurts. My head feels heavy.

“Ellis.” It’s Rowan. His color has faded and his freckles stand out against his pale skin.

“Rowan?” I say. He is excited about something.

“I found a chinquapin tree,” he whispers, his breath on my cheek. His face is alive with anticipation.

“Have you told Jane?”

He nods. “Meet us at the sea gate.”

*   *   *

We’ve gotten away with it so many times. We keep leaving and nothing has happened. We leave and nobody knows. We sneak out and nobody catches us.

And it is so warm today. And Rowan found a chinquapin tree. He says it’s half-dead, the tree, and it’s near what looks like a big animal’s burrow. Rowan points out the piled-up dirt and leaves and the dark hole. Too big for a fox or a badger. Big enough for something frightening and dangerous. But animals sleep in the winter, don’t they? And I’m so hungry.

It’s near the old palace. But the settlers don’t go there anymore. And Rowan thinks the Powhatan are afraid of it because there was a battle between them and the settlers and many of them died there.

My fingers are warm in Rowan’s and Jane’s hands as they yank me along. Jane sings a little song from back home:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

Remember me to one who lives there,

For once she was a true love of mine.

Rowan tells a nonsense poem that he makes up on the spot:

My name is Bertha Von Splat.

I’m a witch with quite a big hat.

Inside it are frogs,

Herrings and hogs,

And perhaps a mischievous rat!

I don’t have anything clever to say or sing. But I love it—Rowan and Jane and the things they say.

Jane is singing still, and she turns in circles and bows to a tree and then she shouts the last few words of the song to the sky. Rowan grabs her and says, “Hush, you troll!” But we are laughing and we can’t stop. Jane covers her mouth with her hands and laughs behind her fingers.

In the yellow sun the ruins of the old palace look beautiful and haunted. There is a fallen branch through the roof. The grass is dead all around it and the trees are bare like bones.

It is so big. I wonder how Master Ratcliffe could think to build it here when the rest of us huddle in our tiny houses made of mud and sticks. How many men worked on this palace instead of growing maize?

These men who came here, who brought us here, them and their great gilded dreams. Master Ratcliffe is dead now. His skin scraped from his bones, dripping over a fire.

“Come on, this way,” Rowan says, tugging us around the side.

It’s just a small tree, so small it’s hidden behind the palace. There aren’t many nuts on the ground beneath it but I gather the ones I can find, even the ones that have been gnawed on by squirrels and who-knows-what. Jane climbs up the spindly limbs and shakes the branches hard so all the loose chinquapins fall and scatter on the ground.

“Jane!” I yelp when one hits me on the back as I chase them.

We gather them quickly, filling our baskets. There are so many, I think Rowan is right when he says the Powhatan don’t come here.

We linger in the sun. We break open the nuts and eat them and for once my stomach feels full. Jane pets my hair, pulling the knots out and running her fingers through it. She touches my bald patch, where I pull the hair out, and then she wraps her arms around me and holds me tight against her. The weight of her arms feels good on my chest.

We try to pretend that we are children, free and playful, but it becomes impossible. There is so much to be afraid of, so much to grieve.

“When my sister Annie was little she would tell these lies about her dreams. And they would go on and go on. How the trees were walking and came and whispered secrets to her and how the crows were actually witches and, I don’t know, these stories that made no sense and never seemed to end.” Jane smiles and the corners of her lips tremble. Annie died early in August. She died of the flux, like so many others when we first came.

“I don’t miss my father,” Rowan says. “I miss my brothers. I miss Oliver. And Miles, but mostly Oliver. It’s different for me. They’re still alive. But far away and I may never see them again.”

“What do you miss about them?” Jane asks.

Rowan leans back, his arms behind his head. “We used to play a game. I was the outlaw and they were the villagers. But I was never bad enough and Oliver and Miles would be angry with me. Once, I was supposed to steal Mother’s lamb and hide it away somewhere nobody could ever find it. But when I ran away with the lamb, it was so sweet and soft and Miles and Oliver found me lying in the field feeding it wood sorrel and petting it. They were so angry.” He laughs, remembering.

I think of Mama and Lizzie. Of Franny, who is still alive but doesn’t want me anymore. I think of Papa, who might be somewhere out there but I don’t know where. But I don’t talk about them. It hurts too much.

*   *   *

We’re almost back. We’re close to the fort with our baskets over our arms, heavy with chinquapins. I hear it first. Jane and Rowan are ahead of me. There’s a noise in the woods. I stop. My neck tingles. I can’t see anything but trees and trees and trees, flat and long and far away in the melted honey sunlight.

“Ellis,” Rowan calls. Jane waves for me to hurry. We’re almost there.

Rowan’s face changes. He was looking at me and now he’s not. Then I hear it. The whistle. I hear it after it passes me. The wind rushes by my cheek. In a straight hot line it burns along my skin. Rowan’s eyes, they are so wide, so open, I can see the whites all around his brown. And then I hear the soft wet thud thud thud, and there, down beneath his chin, there they are. There are some number of arrows I don’t know I can’t count them I don’t know I never learned numbers but there are so many too many too many there are too many arrows and they are buried in his chest in his neck there are too many.

He falls away from Jane. She stares at him and then she is screaming, screaming, screaming so loud and I am running to her. The arrows are whistling by my head and my cheek is hot burning pain and it feels wet. And Rowan is staring glassy at the sky and there is a forest of arrows in him. There is an arrow sticking out of his neck and I’ve never seen one so close before and I think Rowan is dead Rowan is dead Rowan is dead Rowan is dead.

I grab Jane and she grabs Rowan’s basket of nuts and I am glad, and ashamed that I am glad, that she thought of it while we’re running and Rowan is dead and Rowan is dead and we can’t leave him but we must leave him and we’re already leaving him behind.

We run and the arrows fall away behind us.

We pound on the sea gate and they let us in and there are words being spoken to me but I can’t understand them. Jane is gasping and I don’t know what my face is doing. I don’t know anything. Rowan is dead.

*   *   *

Rebecca’s father, Master North, tried to leave the fort and he barely made it back alive. His fellow didn’t. He was shot, like Rowan. He died and I don’t know his name. His body is still out there. Just like Rowan’s.

Rowan’s father and his brothers, Oliver and what was the other one’s name? I can’t remember. I can’t remember and now I’ll never know. They don’t know that he died. How will they know? He came alone. He came without anybody. I can’t write them; I don’t know how. I can’t write and tell them that he died and anyway, how would the letter get back to them? There are no ships, we have no way to leave here to get back home and bring a letter.

When Master Percy learned that Master North was fired upon leaving the fort, he tried to send out scouts and they were fired upon as well, and another few of them died. I don’t know how many.

“They are laying siege to our fort,” Jane says. We huddle by a wall. On the other side the country people wait for us to leave so they can kill us. And so we don’t leave. We have no place to escape to.

I remember the way Jane’s skin, in that cold water with the warm current hidden beneath, the way her skin was covered in tiny bubbles like a fine silver net.

She touches my cheek, where the arrow caught my skin and sliced it open, such a fine cut it’s just a thin red line, but it still burns. Everything burns.

I hold her hand to my cheek. We crouch together. My stomach churns with the loss of Rowan. I don’t say anything. I just weep. My tears are trapped beneath Jane’s hand, searing into my cut. She leans her head against mine and shakes with her own tears. Rowan is dead.

*   *   *

Henry knows I left the fort. He knows because I was with Rowan when he died. He knows I was with Jane.

“Why do you spend time with Jane Eddowes?”

I don’t know how to answer. I don’t even try. I stare at the floor with my dull, dead eyes.

“Ellis, I told you I don’t want you spending time with Jane Eddowes. Did I not?”

“You did, sir.”

“You must speak up. I cannot hear you, Ellis.”

“You did.”

“I did?”

“Yes sir.”

“If I told you not to spend time with Jane Eddowes, then I am at a loss to understand why you would spend time with her.”

I have nothing to say to this.

“I don’t understand why you would defy me, Ellis. Jane Eddowes is not a good friend to you. I said that exactly. You spent time with her anyway, in defiance of me, and look what happened. A good man was killed. Rowan was killed by the salvages because you chose to defy me and spend time with Jane Eddowes outside the fort. Why, Ellis? Why would you do that?”

I whisper to my feet.

“I cannot hear you, Ellis.”

“I don’t know, sir.” What else can I say?

“Why would you do something that carries so much risk if you don’t have a good reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know why,” he says. As though he is speaking to my darkest most afraid self. “It is because you are bad. I’ve tried to help you be good, but you are only ever bad.”

He waits.

I nod. I am bad. I am not good. I am wicked.

He walks close to me so all I can see are his cold eyes full of hatred for me and my terrible choices. He uses the switch on me again, of course. As he should because I’ve been wicked. He says when he is done, “Will you defy me again, Ellis?”

My heart, it hurts like a fist is squeezing it, squeezing squeezing squeezing. “No.”

“No?” His breath is cold and smells like beer.

“No sir.”

He leaves. My head throbs. I press my fingers to my temples. Mistress Collins is silent.

Twelve

Henry took the chinquapins. I don’t know where he put them. After I wait for the grain, in the silent shifting line, I grind what little we have. I have no more tuckahoe to add to the bread. The bread that we have nothing to put on, no butter or lard or honey or jam, and the bread that is crunchy with weevils because I can’t pick them all out. Perhaps it is better. Perhaps the weevils are good to eat. I think about eating pests sometimes. I’ve been hungry for so long. When I eat my little share of bread, after Mistress Collins and Henry eat theirs, it makes my stomach thrash and boil. Angry, it seems.

I have no thoughts. I have no feelings. The whole of me, my whole self, is wasting away.

*   *   *

I wonder where the chinquapins are. I pull a hair out. I wonder where he put them. I don’t think they’re in our little house. I don’t think there’s anywhere he could hide them in here. Where else could they be? If I found them I could eat a few. Just a few. I pull another hair.

*   *   *

I think about Mark and how this is his place and his land and he knows it here. I think about the chinquapins and how they were all just lying there. How Rowan knew about them. Perhaps Mark would know where there is food nearby. He might know where I can find some more persimmons or chinquapins or tuckahoe or anything. Anything to eat.

When I find him there is something quick about him. He has a bundle of something in his arms.

“Mark,” I say.

“Not right now,” he says.

“But I have a question, please. I was just wondering if I could ask you a favor, as a friend.”

He looks away and then he looks again at me. I take a step back before I realize why. He looks at me like he hates me. Like I disgust him. “You’re not my friend,” he says. “We are not friends.”

But I thought—I thought we were. He was kind to me and I was kind to him and we understood each other in our suffering here.

“You think you’re different from the rest of them but you’re not. You want land too, don’t you? You want your little house and garden and you want to own it and be free and alone.”

“But what’s wrong with that? I want to be free of them, just like you, Mark, I don’t—” But then I stop talking because he interrupts me.

“My name is not Mark. And you can’t own land that doesn’t belong to you. None of this is yours.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. Did you think we would just all go away? That we would just give you our home? Feed you, care for you, sustain you, give you everything?” He’s talking so fast, he spits a little. It hits me on the cheek and I wipe it away. He gives me a last look of scorn before striding away.

Somebody steps out from the corner of a house. It’s Rachel, her arms around her wide pregnant belly. Her belly is bigger than Mistress Collins’s. She looks so much healthier than Mistress Collins. But she looks scared too, like Mistress Collins. Rachel looks at me and then back at Mark, which is not his name but I don’t know his real name. Rachel is not her name either. They hurry away together. I follow them to Rachel’s house, where Mark gives her the bundle. She smiles up at him, grateful, I think. Maybe it’s food. Maybe it’s food that he got from the country people to feed Rachel, who’s carrying a baby and needs it, so much that it’s worth the risk of leaving, even for Mark, who is compelled to be here.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins is moaning. She is hungry. She wouldn’t eat before, when there was more than this bread, this mush. It is cold. There is no fire and the air is bitter, seeping through the walls. No, not seeping; stabbing. It is a vicious cold. A violent cold. There is no fire because there is no wood and we can’t leave the fort to collect more.

The dough is thick and crumbly beneath my fingers. I add a little more water. I add a little salt. I set it to rise but I wonder if it will because it is so cold and there is no fire. We could burn the table, I suppose, and the stool. But Henry isn’t here and I couldn’t do it without asking.

Mistress Collins is moaning still. Quieter now, just a whimper. Now it’s just her breathing. I lean back against the wall and listen to the in and out and I pretend it’s waves, the waves of the ocean against the hull of the boat. I pretend I’m returning home though yet there is nothing for me there.

I don’t think I sleep. I just drift.

*   *   *

I am brushing her hair away from her head, looking for nits like always though yet she has nobody to catch them from. She never sees anybody and I wonder if it is too cold for the nits anyway. I just do it because I always do it and I’m too tired to think of doing anything else. I’m brushing her hair and she leans her head to the side and her neck is pale and exposed.

There on her neck. Deep purple black. Green on the edges. Yellow. Stains on her skin. Bruises that are small circles like marks from his angry fingers. A thumb mark, pulsing like a heartbeat on the side of her throat. Her skin pimples when I touch the thumbmark bruise.

“He found the blood,” she says.

“He knows you tried to slip the babe?” I feel a prickle of fear.

“No, he didn’t find the herbs. He found the blood. He knows I was bleeding. He was angry I might lose the babe.”

“He beat you because you were bleeding?” I say. It’s not my place. It’s not my place. I shouldn’t have said it.

“He didn’t beat me. He choked me. He wouldn’t beat me. He wouldn’t hurt the babe.”

*   *   *

I wonder what happened to the horse meat. Is it all gone? I wonder what happened to the chinquapins. I wonder where Master Collins hid them. I wonder if he ate them all. I wonder what happened to that deer, the one Thomas Savage brought. Perhaps they smoked some of the meat. Perhaps there is still some left. I wonder what happened to Thomas Savage. I wonder if he is still with Powhatan at Werowocomoco. I wonder what he is eating there.

I wonder if Thomas Savage ever got the message about my papa. Now I will never know because Rowan is gone.

*   *   *

Where is Henry? He was here for so long, bored, restless, angry, pacing. Now we haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. Where is he? He couldn’t leave the fort. Where has he gone?

I am glad he is gone. I don’t want to be glad. I am angry at myself for being glad. Henry would be hurt to know that I am glad. But I am.

When he is here, it is hard to breathe.

*   *   *

I’m scrubbing Mistress Collins clean when she gasps and touches her belly. Not in the injured way she usually does. She does it now like it is something strange to her body, something new. She touches it lightly, just her fingertips. Then she pushes her hands deep, feeling all the way to her womb.

Her eyes are lost in the air, vague. Then she gasps again and I see it. A ripple. A roll. Something pushing back against her hands. The babe. It’s moving.

The edges of her mouth tremble up into a naked, vulnerable smile. Her eyes shimmer, wide, brimming full of tears.

And then she changes. It’s so fast I jump and stumble back. She throws her cup against the wall and overturns the table and the chair and she is screaming at me, spit flying. “No!” she screams again and again.

I crouch in the corner with my hands over my head until the noise stops and she is standing still in the middle of the little house. “No,” she says one more time. And she cradles her belly, the weight of the baby in the crook of her elbows.

I should move. I should clean. I should fix this mess. Solve it before anybody sees, before anybody knows, although somebody, some number of people, must have heard her.

But I can’t. I just cower.

She turns and climbs into her bed and presses her face into the linen.

The small bit of order in this house has been torn apart and I must fix it because Henry will come back and I don’t know when. And he can’t find it like this. I right the table and the chair and the basket. The grain is spread across the floor. I pick up the kernels but so many of them are lost between the rushes. My fingers tremble as I pick them up and put them in the basket. I bury the broken pieces of cup in the hearth.

She is still naked. She doesn’t cover herself with a blanket. I pinch my arm. I collect her clothes. I pinch my arm again. She is like a dead body. Pale and clammy and limp. I stuff her limbs into her clothes as quickly as I can and cover her with blankets and hang up the coverlet and turn away from her.

I go outside though yet it is too cold. Spider is barking and I go toward the sound.

I find the dog barking at the back gate. Is she looking for Rowan? I press my face to the timbers and I squeeze my eyes shut and I am weeping, silent, my shoulders shaking. Rowan. Rowan.

*   *   *

Henry stays away for so long I become afraid. Not of him never coming back but of when he does come back. The waiting, the waiting. The hunger and the waiting and the emptiness of everything.

I don’t want to be glad that he’s gone, but when he’s here I’m aware of everything he does. I imagine him watching everything I do. I tell myself I’m just being vain, but then I look up and he is watching me.

But he always comes back eventually.

*   *   *

I don’t know how many days it’s been. I haven’t seen Jane. Not since Rowan died. I miss her skin. Her corn-silk hair. The way she touched me. Her grin. But Rowan died because we left the fort. I am wicked when I am with Jane. I was wicked and Rowan died.

The dogs have stopped barking. And the cats are starting to disappear, one by one. I know because the rats are bolder now. One ran over my foot this morning. Though yet I didn’t scream. I suppose I’m too tired to be surprised. It won’t be long now, before the rats start disappearing too.

We are all starving.

We can’t leave to gather, to hunt, to forage. At church Master Percy did the reading and then I heard him say to Master Fettiplace: “Indians kill as fast without the fort as famine and pestilence do within.” He looked at me then, sharp and angry because I should not have listened. I hurried away.

It’s night now and so cold I don’t know if I can sleep except I am so tired. Henry and Mistress Collins are quiet behind the coverlet and I think they are asleep. He still comes back most nights.

I close my eyes. It is Jane I see. Her rosebud lips. Her navy eyes. It’s not just her face I see here in the dark and quiet. It’s the whole of her. It’s the way she moves her lips, the way she wrinkles her nose, the way she closes her eyes when she laughs.

I wonder what she is doing right now, right this moment in time. Is she lying in bed too? Is she thinking of me? Is she thinking of those moments we had in the woods, together, alone, our skin touching, our minds touching, our hearts touching? Is she thinking of those sweet sad lonely beautiful moments?

Is she thinking of Rowan? He is gone. Not here anymore. One moment he was here and the next he didn’t exist. I don’t understand it. He is out in the woods still. He wanted to die in the woods, to be dead in the woods, and now he is. He wanted the wolves to eat his flesh, crack his bones. He wanted to disappear, disintegrate into the ground, turn into flowers and sweet spring grass. Oh Rowan.

I open my eyes and stare into the dark. The pale light that glimmers around the edges of the window. The empty fireplace. Then there is a noise, a whisper, a rustle. Behind the coverlet. It’s Henry, murmuring. Mistress Collins is whimpering. I turn away and close my eyes and Jane is with me again.

*   *   *

I slip into the house. Henry told me to. He said the ones that lived here in this house, they’re all dead. It’s so cold there is no smell. It just smells cold.

They’re in the bed. Some number of them. All of them. Whoever they were.

I didn’t know everybody who came here. There were so many this last summer. Families. Young men and women longing for work, for freedom from the overcrowding, the poverty, the pestilence of home. Second sons with no money of their own. The faces all blurred together, hopeful, anxious.

Now they’re all covered in blankets or covered in dirt. Or something else. Something else that is happening to the bodies. They’re disappearing.

I run my hands along the wall. The rushes crack under my feet. I take the stools. There is a table too but I can’t carry that; it’s too heavy and I’m too weak.

I hope nobody sees me as I run home with the stools. Stealing from the dead. But now we have something to burn.

*   *   *

When I close my eyes I see her face. The shape of her eyes. The way the little wisps of her corn-silk hair curl around her temples.

*   *   *

There are less people in line now. I stand here in this cold. I can’t seem to get warm. It doesn’t matter what I wear. Even the sable that Henry gave me, wrapped around my shoulders and neck and clenched tightly in my fists, even that doesn’t keep out the cold.

When I get inside the storehouse Master Tucker isn’t here. It’s somebody else, a man whose name I don’t know. Master Fettiplace stands with the new cape merchant, guarding the spoiled grain with his musket. It’s less than a quarter measure per each now. I am too tired to protest, to feel surprised.

On my way back I pass by Big Mary sitting outside her house. She’s sitting on the frozen ground. She has no kercher to wrap around her shoulders. Her face is pale and I can see the bones of her face through her skin. Her eyes are red and staring. It is strange to see her like this. She is grown, she is a mother, she should be busy with tasks all day. But somehow I’m not surprised. Everything is strange.

“Mistress Chenoweth?” I say.

Her eyes flicker and she drags her gaze up to me as though her mind is moving through a bog.

“Mary?” I say.

She clasps her hand to her mouth. Like the name is a shock to her. “Mary!” she wails, keens. “Mary is dead!”

Small Mary. She’s only seven. She’s been weak since the sickness took her this summer. “Small Mary is dead?” I say.

She presses her fingers to her face and she doesn’t respond. I peer behind her. There is a shape on the bed. A body. Small Mary. Small Mary Chenoweth, who was only seven when she died. She’s on the bed and her mother is outside the little house and what can she do with the body? It’s amazing and terrible how easily I can think of Small Mary as a body. Just a body now.

The dead bodies, we don’t bury them on their own anymore. We can’t. They go into a pit, quick and quiet, outside the walls.

I look down at Mary. Just Mary now, I suppose, because there’s nobody to get her confused with. No Big Mary and Small Mary. Just Mary.

“Mistress Chenoweth,” I start. “You should…Will I ask somebody to come help you?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Mistress, should I ask one of boys to come take Mary?”

She rears back, away from me and my words. “No! You can’t take her! She can’t go in there…in that hole…with the other bodies. I won’t let you put her in there.”

*   *   *

When somebody dies, if they have a person there with them, then somebody knows. But sometimes a person dies and nobody knows. They’re just dead in their house. When Big Mary dies, nobody knows.

One day Big Mary isn’t in line waiting for her meal. I must wait. I have no choice. Would I skip it if it weren’t for Master Collins? I don’t know the answer to that question. It might be nice, to stop. To lie down and stay lying down. It makes my head pound to stand here.

I pass Mary’s house now. There are crows in the sky. It hurts my eyes to watch them. So I look back at her little house. At the covered door and the covered windows and no smoke and no sound and no movement.

“Mary?” I say. There is nothing.

The door is latched on the inside. I push against it. There is a crumbling and the latch pulls away from the mud wall. The dust and mud fall to the rushes below and the house is dark and cold and silent.

Inside, I can tell. There is no breathing. No warmth. There’s nothing here. Somehow I can tell the lack of it. Of life.

“Mary?” I say anyway, though yet I know.

She’s on the bed with Small Mary. Their eyes are closed, their hair is brushed, their faces clean. She holds Small Mary’s hands, above the coverlet. She must have lay down with her daughter, her daughter who died here in this place and left her alone. She must have lay down with her and waited to die with her, to die too, to leave this place in her daughter’s footsteps. They are dead and there is nobody here to mourn them.

It’s like Rowan. Nobody knows they’re dead.

It is dark and cold in here but the house is clean and they are lovely lying together like that and I don’t know what to do, I can’t think what to do, so I just leave. I leave them there and close the door behind me.

*   *   *

I walk by their door on the way to the well. I walk by their door again on the way back.

I walk by their door on the way to the storehouse for our grain. I walk by again.

Again. Again.

It is different this time. The door is open. A dark slit between the door and the wall. I have no thoughts. I have no ideas of what, why. But I go in to see.

The bed is empty. They are gone. The bodies are gone.

*   *   *

I never found where Master Collins hid the chinquapins. Perhaps he ate them all. I can only make a tiny loaf with the quarter shares of grain we get. So there is nothing now to eat and it’s only midday. Master Collins sits and stares and taps his foot and finally he leaves, off to do who-knows-what. I don’t know and I can’t guess. Perhaps he goes to talk to Master Percy and try to solve this strange never-ending problem of what to eat when there is almost nothing left and we can’t leave here to get anything.

We missed Christmastide. Master Collins didn’t honor the feasts but yesterday Mistress Collins, who tracks the days with her Book of Hours, gave me a small gift, apologizing for its tardiness. It was a length of green velvet ribbon wrapped around a coin. I have nowhere to spend the coin, of course, but Mistress Collins braided the ribbon into my hair and said how pretty I looked.

When Master Collins is here, I pick at my lips. They’re dry and they peel and I pick at the skin. I pick it off until it bleeds and my lips feel swollen and then Master Collins knows I was picking. Sometimes he is gentle. He touches my knuckles, my fingers bent over my lips, my nails dirty and pulling skin, pulling hair, pinching. He touches my hand and breathes, “Stop, Ellis.” As though he is saving me from myself.

Sometimes he smacks my hand so hard it turns white and then red and it aches and he snarls at me to stop, like I am a disgusting creature who should live beneath a rock.

When I stand up a wave of gray and black and white and yellow overcomes my eyes so, for a moment, I can’t see anything and my head feels as if it is underwater, and I put my hands on the table and sway and then it clears.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins is moaning. “My head hurts,” she whispers.

“I’ll get water. It will fill our bellies at least,” I say, though yet I shouldn’t go out now. It’s too cold and too dark.

Outside there is a noise and I am scared. It’s a furtive noise, like somebody is trying to keep quiet. There is a pale form that moves in the darkness. A smudge of gray against the black. I don’t know who it is; I can’t tell. Whoever it is, they are dragging somebody. They crouch over the limp form, hands under the armpits, shuffling backward. The person they’re dragging I think is dead. The head lolls, the legs bump over the frozen ground. It’s just a body.

The person dragging the body looks suddenly toward me like they can sense my watching eyes. I feel a sharp thrill of fear and my spine tingles and I duck behind the wellhouse. My back is pressed to the wood. I don’t think they saw me. What would they do if they had? And what are they doing with the body?

Thirteen

I wait in line again. There are even fewer of us now, in this line that has taken over my life. This and nothing else. This and nothing. Just this.

I see Jane from far away. She passes by and I can’t stop myself from staring at her, lapping her up with my eyes, looking looking looking, at her form, her colors, her soul inside her body, the way she moves, just quick, slip by and slip away and then she’s gone. She never looked at me.

I hardly notice the days passing. There was a reading for Epiphany and when we gathered together, I noticed the other settlers noticing Henry. His cheeks are rosy. His hair still shines. They looked at him, at us, with narrow, suspicious eyes. We had a reading again for Candlemas but only a small number of us had candles. Jane had one. Her skin, her hair was golden in the light, I remember. I watched her from the dark, from my shadowed corner.

I look to the front of the line. I pull a hair. I pull another. A woman comes away from the door weeping. The new cape merchant, the one who replaced Master Tucker, is shutting the door behind him and he looks guilty and angry. He looks like he is full of despair. “There’s no more,” he shouts to the line. “It’s gone. The grain is gone.” Next to him is Master Fettiplace, the one with a musket. He will shoot us if we rage at him, if we riot.

I drop my hand, spread my fingers, and let the clinging tangle of hair be carried away by the cold wind.

And so the people leave. There is nothing else we can do. We just leave. We leave and go back to our little homes our little holes to do nothing to eat nothing.

*   *   *

Master Collins is here now. I don’t know where he goes when he isn’t here. He looks so much more alive than I would expect. His eyes are bright. He doesn’t look withered like the rest of us do.

When he’s here it’s quiet and strange. Mistress Collins never talks. She lies in bed and stares at the wall. When he speaks to her she whispers in return and I can’t hear the words she’s saying. He talks to me. He asks me questions. He tells me things.

He says, “They should have let me lead the colony.”

He says, “Wasted time, those men, trying to find the passage.”

He says, “There is no passage to the other side.”

He says, “The salvages have the food. They have all of it. We should take it from them.”

He says, “Percy is weak.”

He says, “Don’t you agree, Ellis? Percy is weak to not take the food.”

Then he says, “They’ll all die. But I won’t.”

He seems not quite sane. But I don’t want to think that. Just be normal, Henry. Please, just be normal.

He stares at me in a way I don’t understand. I pinch my arm and pull out my hair until he tells me to stop. I pretend I have work to do. I make myself busy because I feel his eyes on me. It’s not like he wants to see the shape of my body beneath my clothes. It’s not like he covets and lusts. It’s something different.

Something seeps from him. Something almost like an odor. I feel his eyes on me and I pretend not to. I look the other way. He stares at Mistress Collins too. He pulls the curtain down when he’s here and he sits and stares. She curls away. Sleeps, or pretends to.

When he talks to her, he’s loud. She pretends to sleep and he pretends to be happy and nice, but then he settles back into his staring silence.

*   *   *

No food. No food. No food.

There is nothing.

Nothing.

*   *   *

I listen. I hear a scurry and I crawl toward the sound. It’s gone now but it came from this corner. I dig past the rushes. The dry blades of sea grass cut my fingers. I dig into the dirt. Looking. Looking. There is a hole here, I found it! The hole is a tunnel, I think. I pause and listen. There is no noise now. I wait and still there is nothing. I lean back against the wall.

Mistress Collins is watching. Her face is hopeful. “Is there anything?” she says.

“Not yet.”

She lies back down.

I wait and listen and I drift and wake and drift.

“Ellis!” Mistress Collins says. She points. The noise is back. A scurry. There, a rat. A big brown one. Sniffing. I don’t know what it smells; there is no food here. I don’t move. It noses out a little, a little more, its black eyes beading, whiskers twitching.

I don’t move I don’t move I don’t move at all until now I slam my hands down on its lithe brown body. The rat shrieks, a noise like I’ve never heard before, and it bites me and bites me and scratches at me and I squeeze it and squeeze it. I don’t know how to kill it I don’t know how to do anything other than not let it go, and I slam it into the wall but it doesn’t die it’s still biting and scratching at me. I squeeze it so hard now I feel a crack as something inside the rat snaps and its breath leaves its body and then it’s still. It’s dead.

I slump back against the wall until my breathing slows and I am still holding the dead rat tight in my bleeding hands. Mistress Collins is watching me, and she isn’t horrified by what I did. She’s glad.

My stomach churns as I skin it and gut it and cook the meat. It’s hardly anything but still we eat it slowly. It’s so rich I have to rest. The oil that drips from the meat soothes my raw fingers. Mistress Collins moans a little as she eats. Her eyes are closed.

It is so good. I hope Master Collins doesn’t come back before we finish and hide the bones. Do rats have marrow?

I snap the bones and we suck the marrow down.

I bury the cracked bones in the hearth. I let the air come in cold through the door and window to blow away the smell of roasting meat. I wash my face and hands and clean my teeth and hide all the evidence of our illicit meal.

Mistress Collins doesn’t look guilty; she looks defiant.

I don’t know where Master Collins is. Would he be angry? Because it’s dirty, filthy, to eat a rat? Would he think we’re filthy for eating it?

*   *   *

Master Collins comes back to spend the night. I press my face into the blankets and listen to him and Mistress Collins, rustling, moaning, whimpering. I listen to his breathing after he falls asleep. I am so cold. It is too cold to sleep. I feel mad.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins is bleeding again. She asks me to help her with her wadded wool and linen and we both know Master Collins must not find out. She groans a little with pain. Pain like a cramp she says.

*   *   *

The Townsends are dead. I don’t know how Master Collins knows. He bids me to hurry and get dressed for heavy work and we step out into the aching cold. There are no clouds today, just the high soaring sky and the distant disinterested sun.

The Townsends had a little house. Bigger than ours but still little. I wonder where the others are as I follow Henry. The others who want to scavenge the leavings like crows. But there is no one.

The house is empty. The bodies are gone. I don’t know where to. In the dark there is a shaft of light. It cuts across the space. In it there is swirling dust and it is so beautiful. The motes dancing and glittering. For a moment everything is crisp and beautiful. The way the light falls on a bowl on the table, an empty bowl that glows. And then Henry steps through the light and the dust motes crash away from him and their movement isn’t beautiful anymore, it’s just disturbed.

We carry away the blankets first. Blankets and linen and a thick brown pelt that smells like sweat but oh it is soft and warm. We take their bowls and their utensils and we take their Bible and we take their dresses and gowns and caps and kerchers and garters and robes and hose, though yet Mistress Collins is too thin for Mistress Townsend’s clothing and Henry is too tall and we have nothing to do with their sons’ clothes. We still take them. They can be ripped apart and resewn.

Master Collins stops working and he touches my chin with two fingers. “You’re a good girl, Ellis,” he says.

Henry thinks I’m a good girl. I thought he didn’t anymore but he does. A tightness in my chest, it eases as we step into the cold air and Henry walks close, warm, here, with me.

We come back to their house and break apart the furniture with an axe and carry it stack by stack and pile it inside our house so nobody steals it. We need it all, Henry says.

When we start taking the boards from the walls, Master Percy appears and orders us to stop. He puts his hands on his knees and stoops, breathing hard and wheezing. “Leave the house, Collins,” he says.

Henry continues prying the boards and handing them to me. “For some other man to take?” he says without looking at Master Percy.

“For another family when the resupply comes.”

As we leave, Henry gives Master Percy a look of such malice that a shiver ripples across my skin. He walks so fast ahead of me I run to keep up. “Build up the fire,” he orders when we are back in our house. He takes the cauldron and brings it back full of well water and instructs me to keep a low boil and then he leaves again.

He comes back smiling. Not like he is happy; like he is satisfied, like he is vindicated. He is carrying shoes. Four pairs. The Townsends’.

“Boil just the leather until it is soft,” he says. “Soft enough to eat.”

*   *   *

There is a whining outside. It comes to me through the darkness. The stars are all hidden behind the clouds. The sky is dull gray like ash. There is no light. Not even the warmth of a fire behind a glowing square of oiled cloth.

The whining. I follow it. It’s high and strange and I can’t tell if it’s human. My heart thuds with fatigue and fright.

It’s louder now. The whining. And there is struggling too. And whispering. It’s all coming from a dark ruin of a house. The family there, they died. The door has been taken, for firewood probably, though yet Master Percy says to leave the house be. It’s just a gaping hole. A darkness I can’t see past to what’s inside.

I am closer now. There is a smudge against the dark, deep inside. A shape that isn’t as black as the night around it. Rolling against the darkness. The whining is louder now.

I want to turn and cover my ears and ignore the whining, but then there is a yelp and it’s Spider. “Spider!” I say, and I go into the house and the shape takes form.

It’s Spider, oh poor Spider. I forgot about her after Rowan died. It’s Spider and she’s struggling against Rebecca.

“Rebecca!” I say. “What are you doing? Let her go!”

Rebecca’s hair has come undone, her cap is hanging from one pin low in her hair. She has scratches on her face, and a bite is bleeding on her arm. Her hands are gripped in Spider’s fur.

Rebecca darts her eyes to the side and says, “She’s trying to get away, I’m just trying to keep her.” She licks the corner of her lip where a scratch is bleeding.

“Let her go. I’ll get her. She trusts me,” I say, reaching for Spider.

“She’s mine!” Rebecca says. Her fingers clench and the dog yelps and struggles, her little claws frantic.

“Rebecca,” I almost weep, “let her go, you must let her go.” A horror is growing in my gut. A horror of what Rebecca wants with Spider, of what I know people here have been doing to their animals, of what people will do to live.

“Rebecca, give her to me.” I can’t let her. Not Spider.

“No!” she snarls, and grips Spider by the neck with one hand and then with both, and Spider’s whines are cut short. Rebecca leans into Spider, pushing the little dog into the ground. She is strangling the dog in earnest.

I think I grunt as I hurl myself at her, as I shove her off Spider, as she lands on her back and I hit her, in the face in the chest on the head on the arms again and again. I think I make some inhuman growling noise until I feel Spider’s cold nose on my ankle through my hose and I stop, breathing hard, my cheeks hot, my hands cold, my heart cold. And yet Rebecca isn’t scared. The second I let go of her she grabs for me, her face fierce and feral and I know she doesn’t care she just wants Spider because she wants to live because she’s hungry.

I shove her once more as hard as I can and turn, swatting Spider on the rump and saying, “Come! Come Spider,” and she’s at my ankles as I run.

We are at the back gate in seconds and there are no watch men, they are all dead or dying in their homes. I pry my fingers into the wood and drag the gate back toward me. I hear Rebecca running hard. I push Spider’s little body out into the night. Out to the Powhatan, who hate us and want us to die, but they hate us for a reason, and what reason is there to hate such a good little dog? Perhaps they will let Spider live. She runs and disappears and I shove the gate shut again just as I hear the thunk of an arrow on the other side of the wall, just as Rebecca reaches me.

She grabs my neck from behind and shakes me hard, slamming my head into the wood. A deep, sharp, yellow pain flashes and for a moment I can’t see anything. But she stops. She doesn’t hit me again.

She sinks to the ground. Her hands cover her head and she presses her mouth, her lips and teeth, to her knees, wailing and choking and sobbing into her kirtle.

I was wrong. I shouldn’t have let Spider go. Spider could have sustained Rebecca and now she might starve just like I might starve just like we all might starve. I might have just killed Rebecca and she knows it and so do I.

But I can’t bear to regret it.

I lean back against the wall. I don’t hear anything. I know they’re out there. But I don’t hear the sounds of a frightened dog. Perhaps Spider will live.

*   *   *

Henry has a secret place. I don’t mean to follow him. I am only out looking for wood to burn and perhaps for food. But it is useless because there is no food. His eyes are darting around. But he doesn’t see me. I think I am too dull to be seen sometimes. I am not a glimmer in the darkness; I am just a smudge. I float along behind him. The houses are dark. He slips behind Master Percy’s house. I follow him.

Then, close to the sea gate where I can hear the waves, he lets himself into a house, bigger than ours, but not as grand as Master Percy’s. A light glows around the window covering. A golden square.

I come closer, my feet wrapped in rags because we boiled my shoe leather and ate it. There is a smell seeping out into the cold. A smell like meat roasting. Like dripping fat, sizzling in the coals. My mouth waters. I wipe my chin. I look behind me but nobody comes. How do they not smell it? Perhaps there is nobody near.

What could he possibly be eating? Has he found a way past the country people? Why isn’t he sharing with me? With Mistress Collins? Why is he hoarding the meat for himself? Perhaps it is only a little. Perhaps it isn’t enough to share.

I press my eye to a slim crack between the window covering and the frame. I can see him. Before him on a table there is a bag. Split open, spilling onto the tabletop. Something round, small, so many of them. The chinquapins! The ones we found before. The ones Rowan died for.

And there, leaning against the wall, are two big baskets of something glinting white and yellow and gold. The maize. It’s the maize. The maize Master Collins said was lost. It’s here. He has it.

He lets us starve. He lets us starve while he hoards this food.

*   *   *

He finishes his meal and wipes his face and hands and stands up. He puts on his robe and starts toward the door. I run.

Quick, quick, I dart behind a house, weaving between edges and white corners, blurry in the dark.

He’s coming.

I must get back before him.

I can’t hear his footsteps. I run.

I hear him now.

The door is just ahead.

I push it open. Push it closed. Throw myself on my little bed. Mistress Collins watches me. Closes her eyes. I close mine. I hear my heartbeat in my ears.

Stop breathing so hard. He’ll know. Stop. Stop. I press down my chest with my hands. Cover myself with my blanket.

I hear him at the door.

He comes in. Passes by me on the way to his bed. I feel his shadow between me and the light. The light goes out. It’s dark now. The bed creaks.

I keep my eyes closed.

Time passes and my heart slows.

I pull one hair. I pull another. Another. Another. Another. Another. Another.

And I realize. I am afraid of Henry.

Fourteen

What is starvation like? I think mostly it’s time passing. Yet how does it pass when something so terrible is happening? How can life go on?

It feels like boredom. It feels like a constant headache. My body aches all over. My ears are filled with a rushing sound. I sleep almost all the time. Master Collins is gone almost all the time. He comes back with flushed cheeks and shiny hair and flashing eyes.

He is eating the dead, I know it.

*   *   *

Rebecca is happy to tell me. “They’re dead,” she says. She is bitter and she hates me and she is glad she’s not the only one grieving. Her face is skeletal. There is hair growing on her face, a light blond fur. She leans against the wellhouse wall, panting. My fingers find my own face, looking for fur, but it isn’t there. Not yet.

“Who?”

“The Eddoweses.” She smirks, happy at my grief.

“Jane is dead?” I sound like a child. Like a little girl.

Rebecca shrugs. She tries to lift her buckets of water but she can’t. She sits down on her ankles and presses her hands to her forehead. I just watch. I should help her but I can’t or perhaps I won’t.

Jane. Jane. Her name is echoing in my head.

Rebecca recovers herself and dumps a little water out onto the ground. Her spindly arms. Her fingers like bones. Her strange new fur. Her red eyes. She tries again to lift the buckets and again she can’t. She glares up at me. Hating me still, hating me more. For witnessing her failure, her weakness. Or for not helping her. I don’t know.

She gives one bucket up, dumps it out, snarling at the bucket, at me. Her other bucket is only half-full and she lugs it with both arms. It’s startling how changed she is. How she was once this strong, brash, lovely girl. Now she is reduced to something not even human.

Jane. Jane. My head is filled with buzzing flies.

*   *   *

But she isn’t dead. She’s there, huddled against the wall. Her father and mother lie on the bed. There is no warmth in here at all. The hearth is a smudge in the dim light. Ashes blow across the floor.

“Jane?” I say, but she doesn’t answer. I touch her cheek. It’s cold.

She opens her eyes. “They’re dead,” she says.

Her mother and father. Their hands are clutched over their blankets, still. So still. I drift to them. I touch their hands. Their skin like the thinnest slice of birch bark.

“They died in their sleep,” she says. She presses her face into her knees and starts to shake so hard I think her bones must grate and chip.

“Jane, Jane, Jane,” I croon, my arms around her, my mouth against the back of her neck. I have no warmth to give her. I have no strength to lift her. “Jane, you must get up, you must come with me. You are too cold.”

She moans into her knees.

“Please, Jane, please.” I weep against her, my tears falling on her skin. “Please Jane, come with me. You have to get up.” Somehow.

My hands are fisted together beneath her breast and I try to lift her. I can’t but I try so hard that I must move something within her and she puts her feet underneath her and tries as well. Together we get her to standing. Her arm around my neck and my arm around her waist, we leave her terrible house, her shroud house, her empty aching house.

We walk into the wind so cold it bites at my skin. Our heads down against it. One foot. And then the next. That’s it. That’s all. One foot. And the next. Until we’re in my house. Mistress Collins sits up, her eyes huge in her face, like her skull is naked of skin.

The walk here has weakened Jane. She sinks to the floor. I pinch my arm and look to Mistress Collins. “Please let her stay, mistress,” I beg, fear already curdling in my stomach. I am so desperate for Jane.

Mistress Collins’s eyes flick to the door and I know she is afraid of Master Collins. That he will be angry. That he will not want Jane Eddowes here.

“Please mistress,” I say again. “Her mother and father are dead.”

Mistress Collins touches her bottom lip. She nods once.

“Jane, Jane,” I say, but she does not respond. “Come lie down.” She stays there on the floor. “Jane, you’ll be warmer.”

Mistress Collins kneels next to me, her hands gentle on Jane. “Up up you get,” she says to Jane. Together we tug and disturb Jane enough that she allows us to move her to my bed. Mistress Collins is breathing hard. She collapses back on her bed.

I cover Jane with the thick brown fur we took from the Townsends’ house. Her hair looks so thin and I remember when it shone white in the summer sun and the way it smelled when we kissed, our bodies overlapping in the river water.

She shivers. I lift up the fur and slide in behind her, and I wrap my arms around her and press my body to hers and my face to the back of her neck and clasp my hands over hers. We lie like that and after some time she stops shivering.

I am afraid.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins stares at the underside of the roof. Jane goes away somewhere in her mind. Where does she go? Does she remember the day by the river, when it was just the two of us, like I do?

I hear my blood pulse in my ears.

Where is Master Collins?

There is nothing to eat. The last time we ate was three days ago when Master Collins took food from the other Smiths’ house after they died. It was a round loaf of bread, furry with mold. We all ate it, even the mold. If it weren’t so cold it would have had more mold. If it hadn’t been still in the pot, rats or mice would have spoiled it. If I had a rat, I would eat it.

My mouth fills with spit. I swallow it. My stomach churns and knots.

There is a noise at the door. Master Collins is here.

“What is this?” he says. He looks at Jane and she squeezes her eyes shut like a little girl who doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to see it.

“Please sir, her mother and father are dead.”

I feel tired under his gaze. It’s hard yet to hold up my head. I know he wants me to meet his eyes.

“You are asking me to take in another mouth to feed?” he says. He paces and turns in the tight space. “You have no right to ask anything of me, Ellis. You are fortunate to even be here. I brought you here. And now you ask this of me?”

He swipes the bowl off the table. “Jane Eddowes?” he bellows.

He is getting angrier and angrier. How dare I? How dare I?

“We have nothing to eat, even for ourselves! We are starving here,” he says.

He knocks another dish off the table, harder this time, like the first time was permission to keep doing it.

“My wife and babe are starving and you’re asking me to bring in another mouth to feed, one that is undeserving? Jane Eddowes is no friend to you!” he bellows, and I clap my hands over my ears. It’s so loud. He’s so loud.

Mistress Collins comes up off the bed, her bare feet quiet on the reeds. He whips his head around and starts toward her and she flinches and closes her eyes and then opens them again. She pads over to him, puts her hands on his shoulders and he grips her arms and shakes her hard, angry angry angry. But she whispers into his ear and her eyes are big and though yet she is starved thin and pale she looks suddenly beautiful in the light. Henry stops and looks at her and she kisses his mouth. He yanks his face away from hers and storms out of the little house, slamming shut the door behind him so that dust crumbles from the wall.

I’ve betrayed him.

Mistress Collins presses her fingers to her forehead and then reaches behind her. She finds the bed with her hand and sits on it with her eyes closed. “She may stay,” she says to me. “Miss Eddowes may stay.”

*   *   *

I don’t think Jane cares anymore. I don’t think being alive matters to her anymore. I let the fire die because Henry is gone and I don’t know when he will be back.

*   *   *

I can’t stop staring. Learning Jane’s face. Her skin. The lines of her mouth and nose and eyes. Her eyebrows, strong and broad, beautiful like an oil painting. I touch them gently, scared of waking her. Her hair that is almost white. It has lost its luster. I can see patches of her pink scalp through her thinning hair. I touch her scalp and she moves her hands over her head, covering her hair.

“Ellis,” she whispers. “I just want to sleep.” Her voice is thin and weak and hardly there.

“I know. I’m sorry, Jane.” She sighs against me and I press my face into the back of her neck, holding her close. Memorizing the feel of her body against mine. Oh Jane. She’s so diminished. Just like Rebecca. Just like me.

*   *   *

“She needs to eat something. Just, anything,” I whisper when Master Collins returns. “Please sir. Just anything little. Even if there are some of the chinquapins left. Remember how I found them? Are there any left?”

He has them. I saw them in his secret house. I pull a hair. Please, please, she’s not wicked, she’s not, she’s just hungry. Please.

He is like a wall, like a statue, frozen, unmovable. But now he looks at me and his eyes are cold. He is angry at me for even asking.

*   *   *

“Just drink a little water, Jane. Just a little.”

She won’t open her eyes or move her head.

“Please Jane,” I say. I touch her chin. I try to lift it up. She keeps her mouth closed. I sit back on my heels and try to decide if I should force her. She must drink water. She must! If she doesn’t, I can’t bear to think.

“Jane,” I say again. She’s ignoring me. I clasp her chin and dig my fingers into her cheeks where I can feel her jaw. She whimpers and her mouth falls open and I pour water in. It trickles down her cheeks, down her neck, pooling in the dip of her collarbone, and she coughs, choking.

“Please just stop, Ellis.”

My tears come then, running down my cheeks. Helpless tears. She doesn’t open her eyes. I don’t make any noise. I don’t move or touch her again or say anything else. I just sit and look at her. This silent, wasted form. Her chest rises and falls in quick shallow breaths.

She’s giving up.

This beautiful human, this soul, this bright spark of vitality and wit, she’s not anymore. She’s lost that. She had it taken from her and now she doesn’t want to live. She’s giving up.

*   *   *

“Please sir. Isn’t there anything we can give her?” Please. Anything. Just anything. But he won’t answer me.

*   *   *

I feel it. I feel it in the night with my arms wrapped around her. Only the skin between us is warm, my stomach, her back. I feel it when it happens.

I’m drifting. I’m remembering home. When Mama and Papa held me as I slept between them before they moved me to Franny’s bed. I remember my smallness. I remember their bigness.

I remember the way Jane and I slept, that day, under the milky sky. How when I woke up and looked at her, Jane’s cheeks were flushed pink like roses and how she woke up and saw me watching and smiled at me and how then we…Then we…I remember.

I feel it when it happens. When something changes and I don’t, at first, know what. She is still warm. But. There. It’s different. She’s different. She’s smaller now. She’s still.

She’s not breathing.

“Jane,” I say. “Jane!” I sit up and shake her. She’s yellow. Her skin. She’s sunken. Her cheeks. Her chest. I shake her and her head flops. Her eyes roll open.

“Jane,” I gasp, I sob. I know, of course, I know. I knew she was going to. I knew she was going to die.

Mistress Collins puts her hands on my arms. She is sitting behind me. She holds me while I cry. I push my forehead into Jane’s chest, her still silent chest, her not-moving breast, her empty lungs, her empty self. I gasp again and again.

She isn’t there. She isn’t there.

*   *   *

I am still sitting next to her when he comes in. It has occurred to me. Of course it has. I know what he’s been doing. I know what the ones who are still alive have resorted to. I don’t feel very alive. I don’t think I will continue to be alive…if I don’t.

I think most of the people here have done it. Eaten the dead. Her parents’ bodies are gone. The bodies are disappearing quickly now.

Mistress Collins has lain back down on the bed. It’s so cold in here, there is nothing to do but lie in bed covered in furs and blankets, but still I sit on the ground and freeze next to Jane. I am so cold I can’t move. I can’t move myself away from her. From Jane’s non-self.

Mistress Collins hasn’t said anything about it. Though yet I’m sure she has thought of it as well. What we could do with Jane, now that she’s gone from her body. What we could do with her body.

But it’s Jane. It’s my Jane. She is Jane. She isn’t just a body, is she? Her body is sacred. It is all that’s left of her. It’s the only thing that exists anymore to show that Jane ever existed. That Jane ever was. If her body is gone, what is there to prove she ever was? Ever was a beautiful soul with quick eyes and a strong body and a deep pure heart that beat with love and excitement and…and…

But I am so hungry. It’s deeper than hunger. It’s emptiness. It’s utter lack. It’s hunger that’s been hunger for so long it’s something else now. It’s the way my head aches all the time. The way my whole body aches. It’s the way I can hardly lift my limbs. It’s the way my skin is growing fur like Rebecca’s. It’s the way I want to sleep, always, all the time. It’s the way I can’t ever get truly warm. It’s the way people keep dying. It’s the way I think I will die too.

Unless.

Of course it has occurred to me. It’s been occurring to me.

Have we been cursed? Are we being punished? Leviticus says, I know it, I learned it by rote, it says: “I will punish you seven times for your sins. You will become so hungry that you will eat the bodies of your sons and daughters. You will be disgusting to me.”

I am thinking these things and then he comes in. He glances at Jane. He sees that she is dead. His face is cold and hard and flat. He doesn’t want to see my grief. He looks away from me.

*   *   *

“She can be of some use to us now,” he says. Mistress Collins rolls onto her side away from us. She leaves me alone with him. Just him and me. I stare at his face, beautiful even now. His pretty mouth and straight dark brows and thick shining curling hair. I can’t believe he can be so beautiful when something so ugly can exist in his mouth.

Yet I thought of it before he said it.

But still I hate him for it! I hate him! I hate him! I hate his mouth, his staring insistent eyes, his pores, his skin. I hate his teeth that eat the dead.

He killed Jane. He deprived her of food until she died and he deprives us of food and we will die too, here in this waste of broken bones and frozen ground.

I hate him. I hate him. It burns into me as I stand here, into my veins, my bones.

He hands me a butcher knife. Square and broad and gleaming in the white winter light.

*   *   *

She is lying on the table. She is smaller. Small. Smaller.

She is smaller.

I stare at her.

On the table.

Mistress Collins hides behind the coverlet.

Master Collins is gone again.

He left after he told me.

Told me what to do.

To butcher the body.

I don’t know how.

He knows I don’t know how.

When he left, my anger, my hatred left too, and now I am empty and shaking. And hungry.

I am so hungry.

We can…

We can.

He gave me the knife, thick and square. Even the face, he said. There is meat even in the cheeks.

Her skin is like a cold melted candle.

My whole body is shaking. I am aware of my breathing, short and shivery.

How can I do this? How can I cut her skin? Butcher her?

It is Jane. My Jane.

No matter how long I stare at her it won’t go away. What Master Collins told me to do. My hunger. That won’t go away either.

I hold the knife over her face. Her eyes are not blue anymore. Not the same blue.

I am shaking so hard I don’t think I can do it. But I do. I press the tip of the knife into her cheek. Even the cheek meat, Master Collins said. I try, and try again. I just can’t. I make little shallow cuts in her face and they don’t bleed and her eyes stare at me. But they don’t even. They don’t stare at me they are lifeless and they stare at nothing because she is dead my Jane is dead.

Her face is shredded but it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t look like a face.

My hand is shaking so hard the knife falls with a soft thud to the rushes.

I step back and crouch on the ground. Wrap my arms around my knees and press my face into my elbows and I shake and shiver and my eyes are overcome with spots and my mouth fills with bile and my stomach churns and my head aches because I am so hungry.

I am so hungry.

I stand up. I sway and clench the knife and plant my feet farther apart and step closer to the table and stare. She is still dead. Her poor beautiful face is gaping open from my cuts to her cheeks.

I set the knife back down on the floor and with both my hands on both her shoulders I roll her over. Each lift and heft and shift is agony. Her body is stiff and heavy and I am awkward and sweating and desperate and then she is face down on the table.

I lift my arm up, knife in my fist, and bring it down on the back of the skull. There is a thunk, and it’s open. I can see the brain. I bring it down again. There it is. The brain.

*   *   *

There is nothing to say about it. The horror of it. The way I felt sick but also wanted more.

*   *   *

We fall asleep. I am so tired I nod off while I’m sitting against the wall tending to Mistress Collins. She pats my hand as I brush her hair and she lies on her side and her deep breathing lulls me until I sleep as well. Master Collins guides me to bed, covers me with the fur and blankets. When I wake, he is gone. So is Jane.

I am empty. I am abandoned here by God, I know. We all are. I have sinned so grievously, become so wicked there is nothing left for me here or home or anywhere. I am empty of soul, of grace, of love. I am nothing but a body.

*   *   *

Mistress Collins is standing up. Does she need the pot? She shakes her head. She prods her belly. Her eyes hold with mine. Then she lies back down, staring at the ceiling.

“What is it?” I say.

“The babe stopped moving.” For a moment she doesn’t say anything else. Then she says, “I just realized it. I haven’t felt the babe move. Not in a while.”

*   *   *

I need water. At least there is water. Outside, the air is bright and white and the sun swoops away behind a cold blue sky. I have learned that it is always colder when there are no clouds to keep the warmth below them. I see Mark’s legs round the corner before I see him. He looks so much the same it is a shock to me, to see him looking like he did before. Before I became a revenant in my own body. Before Jane. He is alive and I am a ghost and I am haunting him.

“I thought you left,” I said. “With Rachel.”

“Her name isn’t Rachel.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. But I thought you left with her. Is she your—your wife?”

He looks up at me, his face devoid of emotion. “Sister,” he says. “I leave to bring her food. She will not leave her husband. She loves him.” He says it like it is tragic. Like she will die and her babe with her, all because she loves her husband.

“Some time ago,” he says, “the Werowance heard a prophecy from his quiakros. That a nation would rise up from the Chesapeake Bay and destroy his empire. Our empire. So the Werowance destroyed the Chesapeake. They are no more. They are gone. But now you have come.”

It is strange hearing this. It sounds like he is saying that me and my people here in the fort, we are the powerful ones. We will destroy his empire. The Powhatan. “But we’re all dying,” I say, and my voice is so weak I’m not sure he can hear it.

He just looks at me. I fade away from him, back toward the wellhouse.

“Wait,” he says. “I have a message for you. From Winsakeekyahgo.”

My heart leaps, though yet it does not feel strong enough for that.

“She says she knows of Christopher Folk.”

I sit, heavy and hard, on the frozen ground. “Please,” I say. Tell me more. But I don’t have the breath.

“Did you know there is another settlement?”

I shake my head. I don’t know anything.

“Your people established a settlement on the bay, near a town called Kikotan. They, your people, call it Fort Algernon.”

I nod. I have heard of this fort.

“There they live now, well fed on hogs and crabs and oysters. Everything you do not have here. Winsakeekyahgo says to tell you there is a man there called Christopher Folk.”

He’s alive. He’s fed and well. “Papa.” I weep. But I can never get to him. It’s too far. I don’t know how to find the settlement. I cry into my hands.

He might as well be dead. The thought drifts to the surface. But it’s not true. It’s not Papa who might as well be dead. It’s me.

But still, “Thank you, thank you,” I say to Mark. He doesn’t look angry anymore; he looks sad. Sad for me, perhaps, because he knows I will die. I wonder what will happen to him. What his life will come to. Will he live long and happy and free?

His name is not Mark, he said. “What is your name?” I ask him.

His gaze softens. “Little Bear,” he says. “In your language.”

I reach out my hand to him. He takes it. “Thank you,” I say again.

He nods and leaves without looking back.

Fifteen

She is lying in a shaft of pale sunlight. In it she has less color. I crouch before her. She is alone. I remember, her family died weeks ago, first her father and then her mother and then her brothers. She was alone and I forgot about her again, after I freed Spider from her. After I deprived her of the food that might have saved her.

“Rebecca,” I gasp. I press my hands to her chest. I touch her cheek. I stare into her open eyes. She isn’t here anymore. “Rebecca!”

I shake her. I know she’s dead. But I shake her anyway.

It’s my fault it’s my fault it’s my fault.

“Rebecca!” I scream through the tears. They surprise me, streaming down my face. They taste like salt and they sting the cracks in my skin.

I am overcome. I press my forehead to her chest, shuddering, sobbing.

It’s my fault.

It’s everything. It’s so much death. It’s everybody. Everybody is dead. Jane. Oh Jane.

My head pounds with the sobbing. The taste of grief is thick in my mouth.

*   *   *

Master Collins is gone at night most of the time. He doesn’t come back to sleep anymore. I let Mistress Collins hold me. We lie together in her bed. The baby doesn’t move. I feel the hard lump of it, pressed into my back. Mistress Collins is still awake and I can feel her blinking against my neck. At least we are warm together here.

“I think it died,” she says. “I think the babe is dead.”

I turn to face her. She doesn’t look sad. She doesn’t look like anything.

She says, “I think it’s dead now. I think it worked. Or something worked. Perhaps it starved.” She looks as if she feels nothing. She says, “I should be glad.”

Her face crumples and she shakes and keeps her weeping quiet. She is quiet like she is afraid to make noise. I wrap my arms around her and she pushes her face into my neck and she gets my smock wet with her tears.

“I would have wanted it,” she says. I feel her voice vibrating on my skin. “I would have. If things were different. If I were home. If it wasn’t him.”

Him. I feel the back of my neck prickle. Afraid that he will come home now. But he doesn’t.

“I would have wanted the babe if I could have given it a different life. I should be glad,” she says, and then she stops talking and she cries hard for a while and then it settles down into just tears and then she is quiet and still and eventually she breathes deep like she’s asleep.

I don’t want to sleep. I want to wait and listen and know if he comes in. But I am too tired and so I sleep as well.

*   *   *

She starts to bleed. I help her clean her body. We only have a little water. It becomes red and bloody and I still use the same water because it is all we have and it hurts too much to go back for more. Blood, dark and thick, runs down her legs. I wipe it, rinse the rag, wipe again. She leans on my back, my shoulders. It’s not enough to wad linen and wool in between her legs. It doesn’t catch all the blood.

I see it in her face. She is afraid. She is afraid because we can’t hide it.

He’ll have to know the babe died. He won’t know we did it on purpose; he’ll think the babe starved. We are quiet. Quiet so that we can hear him as he approaches. So she can quick do whatever she can to please him, to ease his anger, to settle him before he rages, before he hurts her or me or both of us.

*   *   *

He reacts strangely. Strange, he is strange. He is a stranger here, just like we all are. But somehow he thrives here, while the rest of us starve and fight and die. He reacts strangely to Mistress Collins and her dead baby. He swaggers in, sees her bleeding, her pale face, her tired eyes. He says, “Birdie?” as though he is a child and he wants her to reassure him that it’s not what it looks like.

“I’m sorry Henry,” she says, and she sounds sorry, so sorry. Sorry that she couldn’t manage to bring his babe into the world. Sorry that she was not a good enough vessel for his offspring, for his heir, for his legacy. Sorry that she failed him.

It’s her fault, that’s what he thinks. Though yet women lose their babes all the time, especially their first. And he doesn’t know we did it on purpose because of him, because of everything.

She touches her lip with the tip of her finger.

He reacts strangely to the lifeblood of his coveted firstborn child flowing down his wife’s legs.

First, it is normal. He is shocked. And then, predictably, he rages. The details are the same as always. I am afraid and exhausted and bored, all at once. I’m bored with him while he paces and rants and slams his hands on things, but he is still frightening.

He hits her then. Again, again, again, with no restraint, no fear now of hurting his coveted child. He strikes her across the face until her head is flopping on her neck like a toy baby and blood is coursing from her nose and mouth and I realize I am screaming only because my throat sears raw and hot.

He steps away from her, releases her. She falls back on the bed. I’m not sure if she has fainted. And he strikes me now across my face. But only once.

“Hush, Ellis!” he says.

He leaves.

Did anybody hear me screaming? Is there anybody out there anymore?

*   *   *

“Mistress Collins,” I say. Her legs are hanging off the bed, bare and bloody. “Mistress Collins,” I say again. My throat is rough and it hurts. Her arm is over her face. I swing her legs up onto the bed. There is a smear of dried blood on her calf. It flakes off as I tug her, pull her, rearrange her.

I move her arm away from her face. Swollen and split and bloody. I can’t help it, I gasp. “Mistress Collins,” I weep. She opens one of her eyes. The other won’t open. It’s too swollen.

She tries to say something but I think it’s painful for her to talk. I shush her. Tears leak from the corners of her swollen eyes. I wash off her blood with snow warmed by the fire. I wrap cold fresh snow in her linen body cloth and press it to her mouth, her eyes, her cheeks.

She tries to speak, but I can’t understand. We lie together in the dark and cold. When will he come back?

*   *   *

He wanted to colonize her body. She should have received it. Accepted his ownership of her body, of her capacity to create, of her life, of her everything. He wanted to plant his seed in her and watch it grow and watch her create his child and then he wanted to have it, the child, the result of his seed, his legacy that she created and sustained. He wanted it and she should have given it to him. Given it all to him no matter what it cost her. There’s nothing she could have done to prevent the violence of his ownership, once he decided that she was his.

*   *   *

He comes back too soon. He wakes me up when he comes back. My eyes are sore and I think that means I haven’t been asleep for long. Mistress Collins doesn’t move. I don’t think she slept. Too frightened or in too much pain. I slip out of his bed and crawl to my own.

He faces out the open door. He didn’t shut it. He’s letting in all the cold wind. It’s already cold under the blankets but now it will be colder yet. His back is angry. The lines of his arms and back are angry. More than angry, indignant. How dare she.

Does he know? Did he find the herbs? Does he know she did it on purpose? Or, how dare she lose the baby? Not get rid of the baby, lose the baby?

He shuts the door. The room is black now. So black I can’t see anything.

“Ellis, it’s terrible cold. Why is there no fire?”

I don’t answer. I just build the fire up again. The ashes covered some embers, so it lights quickly. In the dim glow I crawl back to my bed, staying low, staying out of the fray.

He climbs into bed with her. Tugs at her. Yanks at her. Talks to her. She doesn’t respond. What is he saying? I can’t understand most. Or perhaps I don’t want to. I just want it to stop.

He rants at her. He makes her sit up and listen.

I cover my head with the blankets.

He won’t let her sleep.

“Please, I’m so tired,” she says.

“Listen to me,” he says.

“Please, just let me sleep,” she says.

“I want to choke the life out of you,” he says.

He shakes her. She’s empty of anything. I watch through a tunnel of blankets, breathing my own sour breath. Her face is empty because she knows any emotion could bring on his anger. It’s a trap, that he’s trying to elicit feelings. But her lack of emotion enrages him too. His hands are on her shoulders, shaking her, his tight fingers bruising, I can tell. He shakes her hard once again and then tosses her to the side. She falls to the bed and closes her eyes and I watch his face as he stares down at her.

First empty. Then something starts to build. It’s not anger like before. It’s something else. Something flat and hard.

Contempt.

*   *   *

The fear is oppressive. Fear. Fear. Fear of what? What am I afraid of? What will he do? Something more than hit us. She is afraid too.

*   *   *

He stares at her. She curls around her dead womb. She feels labor pain, I think. She’ll have to bring the dead baby into the world soon. She might die of it. Master Collins keeps staring at her. Strangely. Covetously. I don’t understand it. The way he looks at her makes me feel sick. He looks at her in a way that looks like lust, but it’s not, I think it’s not.

Why won’t he leave? He stays and stays here. He sits and stares here. He used to leave all the time. He left so often we were alone and I knew Mistress Collins like I didn’t know her before. Now he’s here and it’s hot with the big greedy fire he bids me to build. It is like the summer with all its heat and sweat and sickness and no relief.

*   *   *

She is afraid, while he sits and whittles. She is afraid, while he sits and stares. We make ourselves small in the room. I wish there were some task so I had something to do with my hands, something to do with my eyes, somewhere to put them. But there is nothing.

*   *   *

His eyes are on me now. I feel them. I am afraid to meet his eyes. I don’t know why I am afraid but I feel it, here in my chest, here in my shrunken gut. It is so that I feel I can’t move at all, not even a bit here or there. It is so that I feel as though he will notice if I breathe and be angry and then what? What will he do if he gets angry with me? What will he do?

*   *   *

“Let’s have something to eat,” Master Collins says.

“Let’s have something to eat.” I listen to his echoing words as my eyes are caught by his. Have something to eat? There is nothing. There has been nothing.

Not since…

Nothing since…

He took Jane away.

“Sir,” I start, but I have nothing to finish with. Nothing to answer with.

“Ellis?” he says.

Mistress Collins is small on the bed. Lying on her side. Facing the wall. Curled around her dead womb. She won’t help me now. She can’t. She is too afraid.

“There is nothing,” I say. There is nothing.

It is almost as though that is what he wanted me to say. He knew that’s the only response I could give to his demand. He smiles, just a little, just a gleam of his shining white teeth. “Well, then, go find something. In all these empty houses, there must be something.”

Now Mistress Collins moves. I can see the pain she feels as she sits up. She looks at me as though from the bottom of her grave.

As though she is receding, far away, echoes only, echoes of her from far away.

*   *   *

I look though yet I know already there will be nothing. Every movement is hard. My heart has started skipping beats. I can feel when it stops for a moment and I think I will die. And then it starts again and I am still alive and I don’t know if I wish I weren’t or not.

I lean against the outside wall of a house. The snow drifts down around me. Cold. So cold. I stop again and again. Clutch my chest. Breathe. My head throbs with every step.

I can’t find any food though yet there are more empty houses now than ever. The doors hang open, off their hinges or just gone. The houses have no furniture anymore. Taken for firewood.

I wonder what he would do if I went to his secret house, brought back his hoarded food. For one mad moment, I consider it. But he would be so angry. I’m afraid of what he would do.

I come back with nothing. The house. It’s echoing at me. It’s tilting strangely. I feel as though I am about to faint. The dread. It’s overwhelming.

He’s not here. It’s silent. But for a dripping. A steady dripping.

Like a tap. A little tap. More like a tip. Tip. Tip. Tip.

On the rushes. A dark red. A puddle of red that sinks into the rushes. A gleam of red, a drip of red onto a gleam of red, and then it sinks into the rushes and then there’s another drip and a gleam and then it sinks.

I follow the dripping from the ground up to its source.

*   *   *

It is such a little thing. But it looks like a real baby. Like a strange, elfin baby with clear perfect ears and eyes still sealed closed. Not breathing. Dead.

A changeling. A bloody little changeling.

Now there is a keening. High and queer. It burrows into my ears, my brain. My arms are covered in blood. The baby is rocking as though in a cradle. My arms are around the baby. It is me. I am rocking the baby. It is me that is keening.

There is so much blood. Blood on the table the floor the coverlet, there is a lump under the coverlet, there is a sopping wet sunken pool of blood in the center of the coverlet over the lump that is under the coverlet.

I hold the baby the dead baby in one arm and go to the coverlet. I stand over it. The lump under the coverlet, it looks like it’s crawling. The coverlet is crawling in toward itself. But it’s not really. It’s not moving.

I reach a bloody hand out. It shakes as I touch the coverlet. I pull it back.

Eyes blood red skin spatters. Teeth broken. Mouth, jaw, hanging open strangely.

She echoes in my eyes, again again again.

She is dead she is dead.

I cover her face.

Mistress Collins. She was afraid.

She was from a little town it was by the sea that smelled sometimes sweet like hay and like salt.

She was afraid.

There is no sound anywhere. My heart roars in my ears as I step outside, cradling my bloody little bundle. Where is he? Where is Master Collins?

There is a light growing in the sky. Everything is quiet and gray. Every beat of my heart is hard, a thud that is painful, too much, too hard. I don’t think my body can keep doing it.

Mistress Collins was afraid.

Where is Master Collins? Where did he go?

I shake as I walk. The baby is cold and hard in my arms. My heart keeps racing forward as though it will never stop. After a while it comes to me how cold it is. How perhaps I’m shaking from cold as well as fear and shock. It seeps past my skin into my bones my muscles my blood. I rattle as I walk and I bite my tongue again and again until my jaw aches with it.

The river is black now. It rushes by. I don’t want to but I will. I am covered in her blood. In her death.

I walk into the water. The cold is so shocking it hurts, it stabs at me, and I can’t breathe, until I gasp and breathe deep, gulping air, cold so cold.

I lower myself until I’m covered with the black water up to my shoulders. There is nothing on the bank. Nothing but dead empty houses and broken wood.

Where is he?

The baby is still in my arms. I must let go. I must get out of the water. I feel as though I could die in this cold water in this cold night.

My arms are locked. I don’t know if I can do it.

But I do. And then she is gone. Swept away in the current. A little baby girl.

Sixteen

I am slow. My limbs ache deep. My chest feels bruised. I crawl through the gray dawn. Past Master Percy’s house where I hear a thump and a rustle. I thought he was dead. But I suppose perhaps not. Past Jane’s empty house. Past Rebecca’s house empty but for her body. Her body is in there. Or perhaps she has been eaten by the people still alive.

There is my house. There is a glow around the edge of the oiled cloth. I stand outside the glow. I am shaking so hard I feel my bones vibrating. I must go in. There is the fire inside. And dry clothes. I must get warm or I think I might die.

She is under the coverlet. I don’t look.

How am I still here existing? How have I not died of this horror yet? How does a person live through death and more death and horrible and gruesome things and not die of it?

I build up the fire. I change into my dry smock. I put on my hose and tie it with my garter and my kirtle. I wrap the sable, the poisoned gift, around my shoulders. I must go. I must leave before Master Collins comes back. Where will I go that he can’t find me?

My hand hovers over the fur on the bed. There it is next to the coverlet. There are spatters of red, of blood. But it is so warm. Perhaps I won’t need a fire because a fire would give away my presence to Master Collins.

I don’t hear him coming.

“Ellis,” he says. He is standing in the door. His face is clean and his hands are clean and there is no blood anywhere on him. “What is that?” He looks past me to the coverlet. He tries to fool me. Horror and surprise. As he goes to her, as he lifts the coverlet off her face, he wails. His wail is so…so…so false. And then he looks at me and I can’t move my face. I can’t make myself pretend to believe him. I am too slow. I have nothing to conjure.

We stare at each other.

“We can share her, Ellis.”

He doesn’t cover her face with the coverlet again.

“I’ve brought salt to powder her.”

I wonder if he will notice that the babe is gone.

“We will say she died like everybody else.”

I am so hungry. Horrified at myself. I want it. I want to eat. The blood smells rich and salty. I know I am not hiding my hunger.

But I can’t. He killed her, bloody and brutal.

I know I should think of some lie some story to tell some way to pretend but I am too dull. I can’t think of anything at all but hunger and fear and cold.

He sees me back away and he changes. His face twists into a snarl and a hunger and I stumble back and fall and he is on top of me his hands on my throat and face and I am trapped.

My heart, it can’t handle this. This racing thumping crashing. It’s too much it aches it aches as I thrash underneath him. Just stop, I tell myself. But I can’t. I fight.

He is so strong. He’s been eating the dead. His hands are on my throat. I am so weak there is nothing in the everything I am giving. It’s not enough. My eyes are going dark around the edges.

I shove my fingers into his snarling face, all that false kindness that solicitousness gone. He is just a vicious snarl and he bites my finger and his spit drips on my face and I shove my thumb into his eye as hard as I can I push I push I feel it, his eyeball, I feel it resist my thumb I feel its roundness beneath my thumb I feel it’s firmness I push I push and then he rears up off me and I scramble for the door.

He grabs my kirtle, yanks me back again. I hit my head on the stool. I feel my nose erupt with blood and there is no pain. I can’t feel the pain; it’s not there.

He is on top of me again and I am trapped again and I don’t know if I can get away if I can ever get away and my head sears with pain now and everything is a white-hot panic as he shoves my face into the rushes and I can’t breathe with my face in the rushes I can’t breathe I can’t breathe!

I will die here. I know I will.

Spots are dancing they are yellow against the black and there are white sparks and they pop in my eye they explode and then they disappear and then they come back and then and then and…

*   *   *

I’m not dead. I become aware. Of blackness. Of sound.

Of feeling. Of my skin. I feel my skin. My finger, it throbs and each throb is a pulse of pain. I’m aware of my head, my nose. Of how much pain I feel. I am in so much pain.

I become aware of how my chest aches with each beat of my heart.

But my heart, it does beat.

My breath is shallow. But it does come. Slowly, painfully, but my body hasn’t given up yet.

I am still alive.

Each breath insists on it. Each beat chants it. Alive alive alive.

Alive enough, anyway.

I don’t know how. I don’t know why he didn’t kill me.

He hums to himself as though he is going about a normal day.

I feel a thrill of something. Dread. Fear. He is mad. He is mad. There will be no reason here. No way to leave. He won’t let me.

I don’t know what to do. If I should open my eyes and be alive or if I should pretend to be dead? Will he butcher my body and eat me?

I don’t know how long I lie here not moving just listening.

I wait. I don’t know what to do.

It is warm in here. The fire crackles. I smell the smoke.

He is eating something. He is chewing something to a bloody pulp between his teeth and I sit up and vomit now. I can’t help it. I gag into the rushes, my stomach clenching and my throat burning and it’s nothing but bile and everything hurts so badly as I vomit. I close my eyes again when I’m done. I’m panting. My head throbs.

He says, “Poor Ellis.”

He says, “If only you had just eaten with me, Ellis. I wanted to share a meal with you. I was trying to be generous.”

He says, “And anyway, there is nowhere for you to go. But I’ll let you stay. I’ll share my food with you.”

My eyes are on the rushes. They are wet from my bile. The smell is sour and pungent.

I can see him, his blurry form, moving closer to me. His hand comes into focus, holding something. A cup.

I take it without looking at him. I swish the water around in my mouth and spit it out. It washes the bile down between the rushes.

He is kneeling next to me. His eyes are jolly and crinkled at the sides and he is still handsome. He looks so well it’s shocking. He should be a wretch, a wasted revenant like we all, the rest of us, are.

He is speaking words to me and I don’t know how to speak words back to him. I don’t know how to open my mouth and say things. If I were Jane or Rebecca or Rowan I would. I would be charming and quick and witty and I would know what to do. But I don’t. I’m not. And Jane is dead. They are all dead. And I’m still here.

But slowly, like wading through a bog, I discover that I do know. I know that I need to pretend. To make my face blank and my eyes open and to keep my lips closed.

“I’ve powdered the meat,” he says. He says he says he says.

I nod. There. I did it. I agreed. I consented. I approved.

The meat. On the table behind him. Mistress Collins.

*   *   *

Does he know about the herbs? Does he know that I helped her? When will he notice that her little box of treasures is gone?

He left so often before, but now he won’t leave. He whittles, sitting on his stool by the fire. He chews on his lip, gnawing on a piece of loose skin. His fingernails are dirty, crusted with blood. He works the chisel into the wood, gouging it with his bloody fingers.

I look down away from him and scrub the blankets, scrub the blood away. It swirls and dissipates and dissolves until it is all gray, all the blood and water is gray now.

I wonder if he knows about the herbs.

I wait for him to sleep. I pull my hair. It comes out in fistfuls now. I pull it. Pull it. Burn it in the fire.

When he does sleep, it is late and I let the fire die down until it is glowing embers. Henry rolls onto his back and his mouth falls open and he starts to snore.

The ground is hot under the hearth stones. I use my nails to pry the flat stone out of the hardpacked dirt. There is the leather purse. The herbs are dry and crumbly. I don’t think they’ve been disturbed. There are still quite a lot. I cringe at their dry rustle. But he is still snoring.

I touch something rough. It’s the cloth wrapped around the ground-up poughkone, wrapped separate from the other herbs because it is the most precious, the most dangerous. I ground it down from the root and wrapped it in a bit of linen, before, when I made the decoction for Mistress Collins every day.

Master Collins snores loud and then coughs and his eyelids flutter open. I shove the herbs and the poughkone back under their rock and busy myself over the fire, building it back up.

He watches me. His eyes are slits, gleaming in the firelight.

I am behaving as I should. I am a good girl.

He is listening to me. I lie on my furs and I listen to him back until his breathing deepens. Until I’m sure he sleeps again.

The poughkone.

It makes you insensible. It makes you sleep.

*   *   *

I remember how the stars looked over this little house before we thatched it. I remember how they looked like the sugar on the cake Mama made when Franny got her first position. Finally, finally, there was a little extra. Enough to buy the good white sugar and the good fine flour for a cake. The sugar was like the stars here some nights. I can’t understand their beauty. I don’t have the energy or wit. But here I lie, remembering.

Now the roof is dark and mottled with black and green mold from the rain and melted snow that dripped through again and again. There are no stars to consider. I lie here empty. I don’t feel hungry anymore. I just feel tired.

*   *   *

I pass into sleep at some point. I think I could sleep forever now. I think I could die now like blood dissolving into water. Like sunlight dissolving into clouds.

“Birdie,” he says.

It is light, bright light, daylight.

“Birdie.” His face is blurred in front of me. Blue and beautiful.

“Birdie,” he says again, laughing. “You slept the morning away.”

He pulls me up to sitting, my blankets crumpled between our bodies and my smock hanging off my shoulders. I push my hair out of my face. He is smiling at me, his dimple showing, his teeth gleaming.

“I have a surprise for you, Birdie,” he says. He holds up a sack of flour, mostly empty. In his other hand is a small clay pot. He pulls off the lid and holds it up to me. I lean close and smell it. It’s honey. My mouth fills with spit.

“We can have bread and honey, Birdie!” he says. He is so happy.

Why why why is he calling me Birdie? His Birdie is dead. He killed her. She is dead and I am here.

*   *   *

He watches while I measure the salt and flour. The flour is coarse and brown. Good, it won’t show. He watches while I mix the water and knead the dough. He watches while I build the fire and set the dough to rise.

“It is wonderful to have the smell of fresh bread in here again, Birdie,” he says, leaning over his whittling. It is starting to take shape beneath his fingers. A figure. A woman.

The fire crackles. I pry the rock. He looks up at me and I look down at the dough, peeking at it under its cloth. It smells warm and wet. He looks back at his hands, at the wood and chisel, digging out a face. I push my fingers down, in between rock and dirt. My knuckles scrape against the rock. I find the purse. I hunch over my hands in the ground.

“Birdie,” he says.

I look up.

“Don’t check the dough too much. I don’t want it to be tough.”

I nod, eyes wide.

He smiles and leans over his wood again.

I find the poughkone with my fingers.

He hums to himself. To his little wooden woman.

I scrape my fingers again as I pull the pouch from under the rock. Quick quick I untie it. Quick quick I dump the powder in the dough. Quick quick I work it in, concealing the red color in the rich nut brown of the dough.

But now my fingers are stained red. I pour water over them, crouching over my hands to hide them from Henry. I scrub but it won’t come off. I feel faint. I push my fingers past the rushes to the dirt floor beyond. I rub my fingers in the dirt. Staining them brown on top of red.

Now the dough must rise again. I lie back on my little bed.

“Birdie,” Henry says.

My eyes are already closed. I closed my eyes without realizing it.

“Birdie,” Henry says again. His voice fades in my ears. There is a deep roar, a dull pain in my ears.

“Birdie,” he sings to me.

There is a rushing a pounding in my head.

Fingers press into my shoulders, front and back, pull and tug me up and I am up. I see a swarm of yellow bees flying in my eyes.

He won’t let me rest.

*   *   *

The house fills with the smell of the baking bread. I drool down my chin as I wait. I must not eat the bread. I must not eat the bread.

I imagine the honey on my lips, on my tongue. I can eat the honey. I can’t eat the bread but I can eat the honey.

When it is ready I cut it with the same knife I cut Jane with. The same knife he cut Mistress Collins with. I pour honey over each slice of bread. I cover the bitterness of the poughkone with the sweetness of honey. I lick my fingers. I lick the honey off. He watches me.

He eats the bread. He eats my smile. Slice and slice and slice dripped and doused with honey like sweet medicine I give him.

*   *   *

I don’t know how long it takes. I can’t keep the time in my head as it passes. It feels like it takes days but I know it doesn’t. The light only changes once. It turns gray as Henry starts to drift. He nods over his little wooden woman, and his eyes close and close and close again, more asleep than awake.

“Master Collins,” I say. “Henry, you are tired. You should lie down.” I guide him to his bed that he used to share with Mistress Collins. He swoons back as though his head is too heavy to hold up.

“Birdie,” he says to his blankets. Or he says to Mistress Collins, who is dead because he killed her. Or he says to me because I am Birdie now. He moans. He clutches his stomach. “Birdie,” he says again, and retches, closes his eyes and then opens them again and vomits. His beautiful eyes find me, find my face, which I imagine is full of expectation because I am too witless to hide it now.

He vomits again and again, until he just heaves and retches and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and he looks at me again with bloodshot dripping eyes and says again, “Birdie?” but this time as though he can’t imagine what is happening to him. What I’ve done to him.

He squeezes his eyes shut and his breathing deepens. His eyes stay shut.

He didn’t think I would. He thought I was his good girl. He didn’t believe I had anything to use against him. But I did.

*   *   *

There is a strange pallor to what I see now. A veil between the world and me.

And I don’t know how long he will be asleep. How long the poughkone will keep him. But I walk slowly. I can’t lift my head, it is so heavy on my neck. My feet drag, wrapped in rags. They point in and I point them forward but my toes, they list in, again, again. The world is gray and frozen and it deepens to black as I walk. There are no glowing windows, no flickering fires behind oiled cloth.

Master Percy’s house is dark. I wonder if he’s there. I wonder if he’s dead. He wasn’t well before the starving time. I rest my forehead against the door and I knock.

I look behind me. It’s all dark corners and shadows. If anybody is there, I can’t see them. If Henry is creeping through the shadows, coming for me, I wouldn’t know.

I knock again. Still, nobody answers.

I am overcome by weariness. I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do this. I can’t stand here in the cold and fear and exist here in my body in this place anymore. I can’t. I’m too weak. I sit on the ground with my back against the door and the frigid cold seeps through my worn kirtle and smock and into my skin, and my heart is pounding just sitting here and my head is aching and my nose is running.

But I must. I must because of Jane. And Mistress Collins. And the little changeling baby. I must.

I thump the back of my head against the door. Again. Again. A steady, irritating thump. Again, again.

“Go away!” comes through the door, muffled by blankets and weakness, just like my own.

But I don’t stop.

The door wrenches open behind me, scraping on the wooden floor, and I catch myself before I fall. Master Percy has blankets around his shoulders and he is hunched over and his skin is yellow and his hair is in his face. He holds a cloth to his mouth, coughing.

I turn over onto my knees. He coughs above me. I need to stand up. Master Percy nudges me with his foot. “Move,” he says. “You’re blocking the door.”

I can’t stand up. I crawl inside his house, away from the door and turn so I’m against a wall and sit on the floor. Master Percy closes the door, coughing and shuddering. He sits and forces himself to breathe, in through his nose, out through his mouth, in through his nose, out through his mouth. “What do you want?” he says after a moment.

“I have to tell you of a crime.”

He leans his head back against the chair. “I don’t care.”

“It was a terrible thing, sir.”

“I’m sure. Desecration of a corpse? Somebody ate a dead body?”

“He killed her, though. He didn’t just eat her; he killed her first. He killed Mistress Collins.”

“Who?” he looks at me again, interested now.

“Mistress Collins, she’s dead. Henry Collins’s wife, remember her? She was ill. She was carrying a babe.”

He coughs. “Wasn’t she mad anyway?”

“He killed her. Master Collins. He killed Mistress Collins. He ripped her babe out of her body. He killed her and ate her.”

*   *   *

They hang him by his thumbs until he confesses. And he does confess. Then they burn him alive. I watch from behind the crowds. I say crowds but there aren’t. Just some small number of huddled forms, covered in layers of blankets like wraiths, like phantoms, like the ghosts left over. Cold and dark and shadowed. The center space of the fort used to be filled with people and now only a small part of bare ground is covered by shifting forms. I stand behind them all. I wear layers of blankets like everybody else. My hair is covered. But still his eyes find me. Still, he sees me.

*   *   *

Everybody who loved me is dead. When have I been loved? When have I ever felt loved? Once or twice or never, but I hardly know how to name it.

I felt loved, between Mama and Papa. When I was small and they were big and their arms were my safety and my security and my playthings and my everything. I felt loved then. For a little while.

I felt loved when Jane drew me on her slate. When she captured my image.

I thought I felt loved by Henry but I think what I felt was possession. Like I was his.

I think that’s it. It is a strange and bristly thing to exist without love softening me and keeping me open. I feel prickly and spined. I feel unlovable. How unloved becomes unlovable, I don’t know.

But really, this is all pretend. These words don’t make sense. I don’t understand the concept of love and being loved. It’s not a thing I have time for.

*   *   *

Step and step and step and step. He’s dead. He’s dead.

My feet are bare. I only wear rags. Where are my shoes?

We ate the leather. I have no shoes.

Step and step. I lift my head for a moment. Then back down to my feet.

My heart thuds with each step. Each breath rips with cold. My chest aches and my heart flutters strangely here and there like a dance. It steps forward and back, jumps and stops.

Step and step and step and step.

I leave him behind me. Him and the bloody gaping hole that is Mistress Collins and the dead space that is Jane my Jane, the dead empty space that she used to live in, in my heart, and now I can’t think of her without shame.

Jane.

Rowan.

Everybody is dead.

The gate is open, hanging off its hinges. I slip through, my eyes on my feet still.

Nothing comes. No arrows.

No sounds of them following me, the strangers there in this place, my people.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I’m going.

But as I walk, it comes to me. Papa. Papa is somewhere out here. Papa is safe and fed and alive.

And maybe I can find him.

But probably I can’t.

The ground changes from dirt and ice to dead grass. I pass through dim sunshine to the shade of the forest.

I fade.

The sounds whirl away and sweep back and then away again. Birds and wind.

My eyes are dark and I can’t see through them but then I can.

My heart stutters.

But I keep walking.

I want to be away from there.

I just want to go.

I can’t walk anymore and I sink to my knees and then to my side. I curl and then I close my eyes and then

then I   pass

*   *   *

Jane. Her face like sunlight behind the clouds, her hair like water. She comes to me through the veil and we are drawn together. Like we were before, we are now. Always.

It’s like sleeping. Like when we slept together in the light. And when I woke up from my dream and she was there. And I loved her. And that love was as simple and beautiful as the line of golden light along the horizon when the sun melts into the night.

In this place with Jane, I know love.

*   *   *

Then there is a warmth on my face of sunlight and I open my eyes and the sun dazzles me and it is so warm and lovely here right now the leaves beneath me are soft and smell like chestnuts when we used to

and Mama sometimes would

when she did I loved it when Papa  then I came here

 after they

and now

I am

here not here

I pass to this

*   *   *

There is a warmth beside me. I wake to it. A warm solid little body. A wet cold nose. A soft tongue on my cheek and ear. My eyes are closed still. I cannot open them. I sigh and turn toward the warmth that smells like fur and dust, and there is a soft little whine a yip and it’s

and now

I am

not here

Author’s Note

Dear friend,

Regarding the word savages. It is true that settlers of the era called indigenous people this epithet. There is debate about whether to include historically accurate but nevertheless abhorrent, racist language in historical fiction. Some believe that it softens the violence of white people in history to pretend they didn’t call people these racist names. Some argue that it is traumatic and unnecessary to include these slurs in fiction.

I have opted for an antiquated spelling that will hopefully take the sting off.

Now, a note about Jane and Ellis’s relationship. There are many times that Ellis worries she was wicked for loving Jane. She was not. Love outside of boundaries of respectability and normativity has always existed. Ellis’s fear of being wicked had more to do with the knowledge that she was defying her abusive employer. As a typical young , white English woman of her time, she believed that dutifulness and submission were good, and anything else was wicked. Also at the time, same sex relationships could be severely punished because they were viewed, however wrongly, as unnatural. Ellis would have felt some guilt about participating in what was viewed as sexual deviancy, even though for her it was natural and beautiful.

*   *   *

To the Bone is based on fact. During the winter of 1609–1610 an estimated 75 percent of the colonists at James Fort starved. There are many accounts of survival cannibalism during that winter, called The Starving Time.

The Starving Time was absolutely preventable. A major reason was failure of leadership, both of the Virginia Company and of the colony. The three hundred settlers who arrived in the summer of 1609, Jane and her family included, were unexpected by the leaders of the colony. The supply ship, the Sea Venture, that was supposed to come with their fleet was shipwrecked in Bermuda; the food meant to sustain these new recruits was lost with the ship. Many of the men who came were gentlemen, which meant they were unused to hard labor and wanted their food to come from resupplies from England or trading with/stealing from the local indigenous tribes. In fact, it was always the plan to get most of their food from the natives, as was the practice for European colonizers.

Powhatan, whose real name was Wahunsenacawh, as the leader of the Powhatan Confederacy, had become frustrated with the invaders. The winter of 1609 created a confluence of events that made James Fort vulnerable.

Powhatan and John Smith, as president of the colony, had many times been able to negotiate. But when Smith attempted to disperse the settlers, sending one group of about sixty to settle in Nansemond territory, led by John Martin, and another group of about 140 settlers upriver to settle near a town called Powhatan, led by Francis West, tensions started to come to a head. The settlers had an estimated ten weeks’ rations, and Smith believed with plentiful game, fish, and foraging available, the settlers would make it comfortably through the winter. However, shortly after the settlers arrived in Nansemond territory, Martin led an assault on the local indigenous people. This destroyed the truce that existed between the Nansemond people and the settlers. A similar situation played out at West’s settlement.

It was then that Smith was injured and sent back to England. Powhatan saw the removal of Smith back to England as an opportunity. The tribes stopped cooperating with the settlers. They laid siege to the fort and killed or captured those who left to find food. They also killed the settlers’ livestock. Their intention, it is believed, was to starve the settlers until they gave up the land and went home.

In To the Bone, when the Powhatan kill the hogs of Hog Island, Ellis, Jane, and Rowan witness it. This was not possible. Hog Island was six miles downriver from James Fort, much too far for three children to travel in a stolen canoe. (It is also extremely unlikely that they would have been able to steal and use a canoe, just the three of them.) Not only that, the Powhatan had also effectively laid siege to the fort at this point. There is very little chance they would have been able to leave the fort and travel so far without being discovered. However, for narrative purposes, I chose to overlook that.

History looks back on John Smith with opinions divided, but it is clear he was an effective leader. He forced the gentlemen of James Fort to work. He famously said, “He that will not work, shall not eat.” He was successful in negotiating with the local tribes and trading for food. When he was injured, he left the colony without effective leadership. Would The Starving Time have happened if John Smith were still in Virginia? Perhaps no matter who the leader was, the Powhatan would have still been fed up with the invaders.

It may be tempting to vilify the Powhatan, but that would be a mistake. They realized around this time that the settlers were there to stay. They were stealing land. They were continuously harassing, attacking, and coercing the local tribes into giving them food.

What came next for the Powhatan, and indeed, for all the indigenous tribes of the United States, was four hundred years of genocide and brutal oppression.

Though this is true, it is also true that what happened to the settlers during The Starving Time was incredibly sad.

Jane was a real person. Her remains were found in the Jamestown Rediscovery dig in 2012 and a team of experts concluded that her body had been cannibalized. Not only that, but based on forensic analysis, they were able to determine that Jane’s body was processed by someone who was hesitant to do so. They can tell that the person first attempted to access the cheek meat. However, they gave up that attempt and were only able to begin processing the body after it was turned over—in other words, when they no longer had to look at her face.

Jane was a healthy, well cared for, probably beloved young woman. There is some evidence that she was a servant in a wealthy family’s household. She had a diet rich with meat, which was usually the case for a person in a well-to-do household, but there was no lead in her teeth, which indicates she was not eating off pewter plates, as would have been the case for a member of the family. They estimate her age to have been around fourteen years old. For the purposes of our story, Jane was a beloved member of a middle-class family. The Jamestown Rediscovery Project reconstructed her remains and you can view her image at https://historicjamestowne.org/archaeology/jane/history/. The illustration of the skull on the cover is based on the actual reconstruction of Jane’s remains.

Mr. Collins was also a real person. The real Henry Collins arrived in James Fort in the second supply in 1608. There are multiple accounts of the crime I ascribe to Collins, including a diary entry by Master Percy, the president of James Fort during The Starving Time. John Smith also published an account, although he wasn’t present in James Fort when the murder occurred. The account is exactly as I’ve written it. Mr. Collins was accused of murdering his pregnant wife. He was hanged by his thumbs until he confessed. During his confession he claimed he did not eat the fetus but washed the dead body of the fetus down the James River. After he confessed, he was burned alive. We don’t know for sure that the criminal was Henry Collins, and there is no physical evidence of his crimes.

Once word got out about Mr. Collins’s crimes, the Virginia Company published reports claiming that he had a full larder, meaning he had plenty of food and didn’t need to kill his wife and eat her dead body to survive. There is some question if this was propaganda by the Virginia Company to make the situation in James Fort appear less dire and protect the financial interests of the colony.

And finally, Ellis was not based on a real person. There were, however, many young women who traveled to James Fort and later Jamestown as maids and indentured servants. Ellis was a very typical young English woman for her time. She was uneducated, she was poor, she was naive in many ways, she was religious because that’s how she was raised. During this story Ellis only begins to question her upbringing and the world around her.

Ellis is also typical in that she didn’t have much, if any, power. She needed to survive, she needed to eat, and so therefore she needed a position, a job. After her father left and her mother died of bubonic plague, she didn’t have many options. Once she was in James Fort, she craved freedom and land. While I empathize with Ellis’s desires, she was wrong.

Colonialism is wrong. The settlers of Jamestown were wrong. You might ask how can I, as an American, feel this way? I live here because of colonialism. I don’t have an answer. I am a settler. I live on stolen land. At the same time, I have no homeland to return to. My ancestors have been here since before the Revolutionary War. All of these things are true, and all I can do is recognize that I am a settler on stolen land and never stop working to repair past harms.

We can do this by returning land. The Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative states: “The Land Back movement advocates for a transfer of decision-making power over land to Indigenous communities. The movement does not ask current residents to vacate their homes, but maintains that Indigenous governance is possible, sustainable, and preferred for public lands.”

Land Back (landback.org) is a decentralized movement that exists “to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands.”

The Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF.org) “is a national, community-based organization serving American Indian nations and people in the recovery and control of their rightful homelands.”

The indigenous people who lived and continue to live in Tsenacomoco had their land taken from them. Since 2018, the Chickahominy Tribe has acquired almost 1000 acres of land that was originally stolen in the late 1600s. In 2022, 460 acres of their ancestral land was given back to the Rappahannock Tribe. Also in 2022, 504 acres of land was returned to the Nansemond Indian Nation.

I hope this story demonstrates the violence and tragedy of colonization. It is just one tiny piece of a much bigger picture.

End Note

I used three quotes from historical sources almost verbatim in this novel. The first is from William Fettiplace, in regard to John Smith leaving Jamestown:

“What shall I say? But thus we lost him, that in all his proceedings, made justice his first guide, and experience his second; ever hating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignities, more then any dangers; that never allowed more for himself, than his souldiers with him; that upon no danger would send them where he would not lead them himselfe; that would never see us want what either he had, or could by any meanes get us…whose adventures were our lives, and whose losse our deathes.”

And the second is attributed to Mr. Collins but is really a quote from Mr. Percy: “They beat the savages out of the island, burned their houses, ransacked their temples, took down the corpses of their dead kings from off their tombs, and carried away their pearls, copper, and bracelets wherewith they do decorate their kings’ funerals.”

Mr. Percy says the third to Mr. Fettiplace: “Indians killed as fast without [the fort] as famine and pestilence did within.” In reality, he wrote it after The Starving Time.

Select Bibliography

Thank you to the following resources from which I gained a wealth of information:

Brown, K. M. (1996). Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs: Gender, race, and power in Colonial Virginia. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press.

Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative. (n.d.). Land Back Movement. Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative. https://www.cbglcollab.org/what-does-land-restitution-mean#

Custalow, L., and A. L. Daniel (2016). The true story of Pocahontas: The other side of history. Fulcrum Publishing.

Goodman, R. (2017). How to be a Tudor a dawn-to-dusk guide to Tudor Life. Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company.

Grant, J. E. (2019, January). Trichotillomania (hair pulling disorder). Indian journal of psychiatry. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6343418/

Historic Jamestowne. (n.d.). https://historicjamestowne.org/

Kelso, W. M. (2018). Jamestown the truth revealed. University of Virginia Press.

Kupperman, K. O. (2021). Pocahontas and the English boys: Caught between cultures in early Virginia. New York University Press.

Potter, J. (2020). The Jamestown brides: The untold story of England’s “Maids for Virginia.” W.F. Howes.

Price, D. A. (2005). Love and hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the start of a new nation. Vintage Books.

Rountree, H. C. (2006). Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough three Indian lives changed by Jamestown. Univ. of Virginia Press.

Smith, J. (2010). True relation of Virginia.

Stromberg, J. (2013, April 30). Starving settlers in Jamestown colony resorted to cannibalism. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/starving-settlers-in-jamestown-colony-resorted-to-cannibalism-46000815/

Waugaman, S. F., and D. Moretti-Langholtz. (2006). We’re still here: Contemporary Virginia Indians tell their stories. Palari Publishing.

Wilson, T. (Host) (2013, May 13). Stuff you missed in history class cannibalism at Jamestown [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.iheart.com/podcast/stuff-you-missed-in-history-cl-21124503/episode/cannibalism-at-jamestown-30208109/

Winny, A. (2022, November 2). A brief history of abortion in the U.S. Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine. https://magazine.jhsph.edu/2022/brief-history-abortion-us

Acknowledgments

A book is like a baby; it takes a village. Thank you to my original readers, Lily, Zack, Conner, Cade, Elnora. I love my Sugar Plum crew! Thank you to my writing besties, Arnée, Kelsy, Allison, Jackie, you guys keep me from despair. Long live the Depraved Writers Club! Thank you to my incredible community of love and support here in li’l ol’ Lincoln, Nebraska. I never thought I would love living in the only triple landlocked state in the country, but life is funny and weird, and here I am.

Thank you to my incredible agent, Susan, and the whole team at Upstart Crow. I would be lost without you! You suggested I follow through with this weird, grim idea about cannibal colonizers and look! We did it! Thank you to my tremendous editor, Lauri, you actually bought this crazy book and through your help I think we have made something really special. Thank you to the team at Penguin, so many of you work in the background and your work is incredible and of paramount importance. Thank you to Kristie for your incredible cover design and for coming up with the title To the Bone when I was struggling. Thank you to Adam for your gorgeous cover art. Thank you to Amy for your incredible work in correcting my missteps. With your partnership, To the Bone is as historically accurate as possible! Thank you to the whole crew at the Jamestown Rediscover project and dig. Your work is inspiring and necessary.

Thank you to my family: my mom, my sister, Suzanna, Noah, Eva, Cat, Everett, Sebastian, Jude, and Rowan. Rowan, sorry I killed you off in this one. I promise to do it again, as soon as the opportunity arises. Zack, you are my partner in the most profound sense of the word. I couldn’t do any of this without you and I love you forever.

And lastly, I must honor and acknowledge the real people who lived this story. Sometimes history is so far away and so long ago that it doesn’t seem real. But it was. They lived and died and their descendants still live in the United States today, whether they are settlers or Virginia Indians. Even if they died without their names being recorded by history, their lives mattered.

About the Author

Alena Bruzas grew up in Seattle and currently lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with her family. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Ever Since, and she hopes her writing will find the people who need it most. When she’s not writing, Alena serves on the board for Ten Thousand Villages, Lincoln. She also occasionally cooks dinner, worries about commas, and wanders the prairie.

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