Revenger (48 page)

She spoke then of the long journey there, when she was already with child, and how she had become increasingly wary. The voyage had been full of sickness. Two and a half months long, from early May through the summer, “in weather so hot the ship’s bilges threw up a stink, like the bowels of hell.” The mariners did not like them and gave them the worst of the food—salt pork with maggots, biscuit that had turned blue-gray with mold. But Eleanor, at least, found some kindness. Perhaps it was her prettiness or the fact that her belly was swelling with each passing day, but one of the crewmen had looked out for her, bringing her the best of the meats and butter, cheese and ale. He made certain that she was as comfortable as could be, despite the sour looks of Ananias, who did not like the attentions the man paid his wife. “I am sorry if Ananias was unhappy, but in truth I doubt I would have seen my baby to term without that man’s help.”

Eleanor shivered and folded her arms about her chest. She paused, summoning up the memories so long suppressed. The first winter had been terrible, she said. They had been told it would be warm and mild all year round, being so far south, but that was not how it was. Winter there was more bitter than any they had encountered in England. The wind cut in from the sea like a knife forged from ice and steel.

Ananias, her husband, was killed on Christmas morning. He had gone out from the palisade alone to check on the traps and bring in some firewood. When he did not return by noon, some of the men went out after him, but all knew there was no hope. They found him stretched out on the ground, tied by his ankles and wrists to four stakes. A fifth stake had been driven through his belly and he had been left there to die. He must have screamed in pain, but they did not hear him. Or if they did, they
took it for the howling of the wind. The men went out to avenge him, but that brought no comfort.

The rift was so deep then that none of the tribes would trade with them, not even those that had held back from open hostility. When the settlers approached their villages, the Indians fled for the woods.

“Thomas Topan was next to die, then Mark Bennett. Horribly murdered and mutilated, both of them. There was sickness, too, and by spring a half dozen were gone with the bloody flux, including Margery Harvey’s baby, who had been born soon after my Virginia. Our only hope then was that my father would return with supplies. But the summer came and went and there was no sign of him.”

The words Eleanor spoke and the lashing of the rain were the only sounds in that shepherd’s cottage next to the ruins of Jervaulx. Suddenly, Shakespeare put up a hand to hush her. “Listen,” he whispered. For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, imagining voices in the wind or footsteps among the raindrops. Was that how it had been night after night in the New World? “Nothing,” Shakespeare said at last, though he was less than certain. “Nothing … I’m sorry. Carry on, Mistress Dare.”

The second winter came, she said. Their crops had failed. They had so little food they ate seaweed from the shore and bark from the trees. “Every little animal trapped, even a mouse, was like a gift from God to our shrunken stomachs.” Their livestock died one by one. John Borden and Joan Warren were taken by the flux.

Yet still the colony survived and spring came again. The spring of 1589, then summer. And then, at last, in early July of that year, ships came. With English ensigns bravely flying, the men waved to the settlers as they rowed ashore in their ship’s boats. “Never before or since have I seen a sight to so gladden the heart,” Eleanor said with a bitter laugh.

There were four ships, two of them fighting galleons and two barks. Eleanor’s voice became slower as she recalled that fateful
day. “Thirty or more men came ashore with shouts of welcome, and we did instantly recognize two of them from the voyage to Roanoke: there was Davy Bramer and Mr. Slyguff. There was also the man that I now know to be Charles McGunn, smiling broadly and booming a loud greeting.”

Unarmed, the men, women, and children all ran toward them. But Eleanor held back. “I could not tell you why, except that I have these feelings. When others do seem keen, I begin to have doubts.” And so she slunk back toward the palisade and waited there in silence in one of the storehouses, holding Virginia, who was nearly two by then.

Eleanor knew something was wrong as soon as she heard shouting and orders. “Soon I did not hear the voices of my fellows anymore, only those of the mariners that had come for us. Nor were they all English voices, but Spanish, too. The reason I am alive today is that Davy Bramer looked for me and found me before anyone else.”

It had been Davy Bramer who brought her food on the voyage out. Now, in the coolness of the storehouse, where their paltry provisions were kept in sacks of jute, he put a finger to his lips, then gestured for her to follow him out from the palisade into the woods. No one saw them go. At times, she said, she wished they had, so that she might never have had to live through what was to follow.

As if divining what Eleanor was about to say, Catherine squeezed her hands. “You don’t need to go on …”

Eleanor shook her head. “I must tell you this. Oh, the horror is with me still. I cannot look upon a child but I do think of that day. He took Virginia from my arms and bade me kiss her. She was shaking; even at her tender years, she was in fear. Gently, he lay her down upon the ground, her head upon a flat rock. I watched, though I knew what he would do and why, and I did nothing to save her, because I could not. Davy brought up a boulder of half a hundredweight by my reckoning, and, with all
his force, drove it into her head, killing her without a sound, except for the crack of stone on bone, like a hammer.

“I cannot tell you what happened next. I was gasping for air. My smock and kirtle were covered in my baby’s blood. I know that we did bury her beneath some leaves and I know that somehow Davy did get me aboard the galleon, but I do not know how he did it.” Her body was moving, she said, but her mind was dead. Davy put her in a jute sack and told her to be still, as still as death. Somehow he carried her aboard as though she were a bag of carrots or some other produce. All she could recall was that she was manhandled, that she heard voices and smelled the sea and the tar and the bilges.

At one time she was dropped heavily onto a deck, but even then she did not cry out, nor move. “Somehow he did get me aboard that rotten ship of death, and he did conceal me in the nethermost region, among the ballast and bilge water and cable rolls and barrels of tar, where few men tarried except they needed to collect stores. It was dark there and smelt like the Devil’s jakes, but there were nooks for me to hide in when a mariner came down in the long weeks that followed.”

She lived there like a rat, scuttling at the slightest footfall, crouching behind a cask or reclining silently along the bilge-keel, listening to her heart and hoping it would not be heard. Davy brought her scraps of food and ale. But he could never stay long. It was weeks before she asked him what had become of the others. At first he seemed reluctant to tell her and she could scarcely bear to know, for she knew there was horror. She knew the reason he had killed Virginia was that they were all destined for death and because he could never have brought her to safety. “I knew he had done it to save me and to save her from a worse fate, and that he had much courage, for he was hazarding his own life. But I often wished he had killed me with her.”

He told her the others had been taken aboard ship at the point of gun and sword. The Irishmen took great delight in carving the
letters
CRO
on a tree, and the word
Croatoan
on a gate of our palisade. They also dismantled the houses and carried them away so that nothing should be left.

The truth, of course, was that the ships were Spanish, bearing false flags. The crew was more than half Spanish, along with many Irish and a few Netherlanders, including Davy. Mostly, they were military men, sailors or kerns. Davy told her it was Slyguff who had somehow got copies of the rutters from Fernandez on the earlier voyage aboard the Lion—and that was how they had navigated their way to the island. As Davy understood it, the mission was funded by Philip of Spain, but it was McGunn who lay behind it.

“What did they do to the colonists?” Shakespeare asked.

“Davy told me it happened in the first hours out from Roanoke, within four or five leagues of shore. McGunn killed the colonists himself. Each and every one. He killed all the women by hanging and the men with swords. Each woman was hanged from the yards, and the men forced to watch. Then he did for the men. One slash to the neck, one in the belly. As each died, McGunn kicked him into the Western Sea. And as one sword blunted, so he took another and another, until all the men were dead and the decks were thick with gore. His own clothes were drenched in the blood of a hundred poor innocent souls.”

The Spanish and the others had looked on in silence. As far as they were concerned, it was done for King Philip, to avenge the Armada, but Eleanor never believed that and nor did Davy. It was all done for McGunn, who seemed to carry a dark hatred in his heart.

“I am the only one left, and now McGunn knows I am alive, he will pursue me until I am hanged like the other women. I must be hanged, I know that much, though I know not why. He will kill me no other way.”

T
HERE WAS A SOUND
outside the cottage somewhere. Shakespeare put a finger to his lips and peered out. For a moment, he thought he saw a light among the trees, but then it was gone. A gap in the clouds, a trick of the moon, perhaps. He picked up Boltfoot’s caliver; it was primed with powder and loaded with ball-shot. He held it close to his body, aimed at the door. They waited a minute, two minutes, in silence.

“It could be a deer. Perhaps a wild dog,” Catherine said at last, though she did not believe it.

“I must finish my story.”

Shakespeare nodded his assent. “Whisper it.”

After six weeks, she said, the vessel moored at the port of Angra on the south side of the island of Terceira, to take on supplies. The island was Portuguese, though ruled by Spain, and there were peoples of many different hues and languages there. It was among those islands called the Azores, and was a place where the treasure fleets from the New World put in. It was a busy port, with many ships jostling at anchor in the harbor.

With Davy’s help, it was a simple thing for her to get off the ship at night, when all the crew were ashore drinking and wenching. He had found a lodging among the narrow streets, a small room on the second story of an old Portuguese white-painted house that looked out over the harbor. The landlord was an honest and holy man, a Papist Fleming, who took a fair rent and fed them well.

They did not leave that room until they saw that McGunn’s ships had sailed from the harbor. Even then, they waited a week before venturing out, for fear that it was a ruse and that they would return to find Davy.

“Those were strange days. We came to know each other, Davy and me. He had risked his life for me, and I grew to love him, though never forgive him. He told me that when he had embarked with McGunn, he did not know what was planned. It was only when he was told that they must get all the colonists aboard
without alarming them that he became worried. He could think of no other reason for their deception than that they meant to kill us. He thought they probably planned to kill him, too, before the voyage ended.”

They spent the autumn and winter on Angra. “I found much kindness there. The quayside was full of the smell of good fresh fish cooking over red-hot coals.” But they knew they could not stay on the island. One of the Spaniards or Irishmen might return at any time and spot them. Shipping came in and out every week, so it would never be safe. Two years ago, in the spring of 1590, Davy heard of a merchantman from the Spanish Lowlands, and made inquiries of the master. He agreed to take them to Antwerp, where he was headed, for twenty gold ducats.

“Davy always had coin, so he paid our fare. The voyage was uneventful at first, with fair weather and brisk winds.” But they were set upon by English privateers as they neared the western approaches of the Channel, and their ship’s master surrendered without a fight.

Eleanor and Davy were taken into Plymouth and set at liberty. Davy had told Eleanor they must never reveal the truth of who they were, so they told the customs officials that she was the widow of an English merchant venturer in Lisbon, returning home by way of Antwerp, and that Davy was her manservant.

Davy understood that his life would be forfeit if ever it was known he had been involved in the capture and slaughter of the colonists. They knew, too, that Eleanor would be condemned as a traitor and a harlot for surviving as she did. “But most of all, we knew that the devil McGunn, wherever he was in the world, would pursue me to his last dying breath if he knew I was alive.”

Davy changed his name from Bramer to Kerk and they hoped to live quietly. They had no idea that McGunn would come to England. They thought him wedded to the Spanish and Catholic cause, like so many Irishmen, and so they made their way to London, where they believed they might go undiscovered. And so it
turned out for a year or more. She came with child twice, but lost them both times, which she took to be God’s judgment for the death of Virginia.