London (107 page)

Martha had been approached in the past by agents of the Virginia Company, asking if she and her family would like to settle there. But that was nothing: so had half London. And she had gently pointed out to the men who approached her that there was little point in crossing the Atlantic only to find King James’s Church when she got to the other side. But this was different. When she had heard about the little Puritan group who planned to found their own community, not in Virginia, but in the wilderness of America’s northern seaboard, she had been fascinated. And try as she might to overcome it, she could not help it: she had felt the pain of envy in her heart. She even mentioned her longing to Dogget. But he had only laughed.

Until help had come from an unexpected quarter. The eldest boy, arriving home from a fishing trip, calmly announced: “Father, there’s a new venture going far north of Virginia, to the Massachusetts colony. It’s organized by the Merchant Adventurers. We could do well there. Barnikel the Fishmonger thinks so too.” And when his father asked him why, he replied with a single word: “Cod.”

This, of course, made the whole venture possible. King James, enquiring how the settlers meant to live, and being told they meant to fish, had wryly remarked; “Like the Apostles,” but he too knew that the settlement lay near some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. “It’s a risk of course,” the boy conceded. “But you build boats and I fish.” But even so, Dogget had not been enthusiastic.

The mysterious offer came the following day. Though Dogget suspected otherwise, Martha had done nothing to invite it. She was as much in the dark as he, though it was clear that the offer must come from a person, or persons in the Puritan community. Martha even wondered if it might come from Barnikel himself. A message arrived stating that if they wished to join the expedition, a well-wisher was prepared to pay Dogget a handsome sum for the boatyard – far more than it was worth – and to purchase shares in the company for them as well. As his son said to Dogget, in front of the other children: “Where else, father, could you get money for the family like that?” And that was the trouble. He couldn’t. A week later, he had reluctantly given in.

The voyage of the
Mayflower
is well recorded. Making her way down the wide Thames Estuary, the little ship proceeded eastward, the long coast of Kent on her right. Then she turned south, rounding the tip of Kent and passing through the Straits of Dover into the English Channel. At Southampton, halfway along England’s southern coast, the
Mayflower
was to rendezvous with a sister pilgrim ship the
Speedwell
. The
Mayflower
reached Southampton just before the end of the month.

The
Speedwell
was a very small ship, only sixty tons. As she came up Southampton Water, she seemed to be low in the water and to move in a curious, ungainly manner. Dogget, staring at her, muttered: “She’s overmasted.” And as she drew close, an embarrassed silence descended upon the watchers, broken at last by the eldest boy. “That vessel’s not seaworthy.”

She wasn’t. Within an hour they heard: “She needs a refit before she can sail on.” Nor was this all. Dogget and his son went aboard her at once only to return, shaking their heads. “They’ve hardly any supplies.”

It was well into August before they finally left Southampton. The weather was fine, however, and the mood was lighter. They passed the sandy coast below the New Forest, then the long cliffs and coves of Dorset. By dawn the next day they were off the coast of Devon when Martha heard a shout.

“They’re pulling in.” The
Speedwell
had sprung a leak.

At last the
Speedwell
was declared seaworthy again and the two ships set sail. For five days, in a moderate swell, they ploughed slowly westwards. On the sixth day, a hundred leagues out, gazing back at the
Speedwell
, Martha noticed that it seemed lower in the water, and that it was falling behind. An hour later, the two ships turned back.

“The
Speedwell
can’t go on. She’s rotten,” Captain Jones told the assembled passengers, when they had returned to the westerly port of Plymouth. “The
Mayflower
can only take about a hundred of you. So twenty must stay behind.”

In the silence that followed, having held his peace for over six weeks, John Dogget spoke.

“We’ll stay,” he said. His children nodded, even the eldest boy. “We’ve had enough of you,” Dogget said. And Martha could not blame them. Others too now admitted that they would sooner not proceed. “They’re not going to make it,” the eldest boy confided to her.

And so it was, in the month of September, in the year of Our Lord 1620, that the pilgrim fathers finally set sail in the the
Mayflower
from the port of Plymouth, but without the family of Dogget, who returned to London.

On a bright morning in early October, Sir Jacob Ducket was just returning to his house when he encountered Julius. Seeing his younger son give him a slightly uncertain look, he enquired what was on his mind. After a moment’s hesitation, Julius told him.

“You remember those people, father, with the funny hands.” Sir Jacob frowned. “Well,” the boy went on, “I’ve just seen them again, with Carpenter. I think they’ve come to live with him.”

This came as a great blow to Sir Jacob: because earlier that year, anonymously and through a third party, he had paid them a handsome sum of money to leave. That evening, after sitting alone for some hours with a flagon of wine – a thing he never normally did – Sir Jacob Ducket suffered a stroke. Two days later, it became clear that his two sons, Henry and Julius, must take over his affairs.

It was a familiar sight in those years. Every evening, a little before sundown, she stood there on the low ridge called Wheeler’s Hill, gazing eastwards.

What was she looking at? The broad fields below; the winding river? On a clear day you could see the Atlantic, but was she looking for the sea? No one asked. The Widow Wheeler kept her thoughts to herself.

The Wheeler spread was typical of Virginia then – a few hundred acres, a yeoman’s farm. Wheeler himself had never made much of it, but his widow had. She ran everything herself, with sweated labour. There were two slaves; but the day of the slave was only just beginning in Virginia. Most of the labourers were indentured English men – some poor, some in debt, a few petty criminals who had ten years of labour to earn their freedom. She had a name for being fair but ruthless. But the real reason for the farm’s profit was her choice of crop: for, like many others in Virginia, every yard was given to a single crop whose acres of huge green leaves flapped in the breeze like so many floppy pieces of parchment.

Tobacco. Since John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, had introduced it, the burgeoning of the Virginia tobacco crop had been astounding. A few years ago, twenty thousand pounds weight had been shipped; this year – who knew? – maybe half a million.

From its shaky start, the Virginia colony was growing swiftly. There were several thousand settlers now, taking more land every year. Some of the larger farmers were doing so well they had started importing a few luxury goods from England. But the Widow Wheeler bought almost nothing. Perhaps she was puritanical; perhaps just mean. It was hard to guess for, it had to be confessed, few of her neighbours really knew very much about her.

They would certainly have been surprised to learn that for fifteen years, the respectable Widow Wheeler had lived with Black Barnikel the pirate.

Not, in truth, that this really described their strange, wandering, relationship. Jane herself, during those years, would have put it far more simply: “I’m his woman.”

She had been his woman on that first voyage. She had had no choice. She had been his woman when, already pregnant, he had left her to have the child in an African port to which, months later, he had returned, delighted to find he had a son, and showered her with gifts. Five voyages, a dozen ports, three more children. Her years had passed in strange, exotic places, from the Caribbean to the Levant.

And how had she felt? It had been strange at first to be in his power, to know he could probably kill her. She had studied him carefully therefore. Yet she had found him surprisingly tender. Whether she wished it or no, he knew how to bring her to physical ecstasy. Did she not think of escape? He was too cunning to give her the chance. He never went near London. What should she do – abandon her children? She found she could not. Take them home with her to London? What would they, with their strange, dark skins, be there? It was when she thought of this that she guessed at Orlando Barnikel’s secret rage, and it was at such times, far more even than those of physical passion, that she recognized that, in a way, she loved him.

The end had come suddenly. After the third child, a boy, she had lost two more babies. Orlando had been much away. She had not conceived for some years. But it was just after the younger boy, aged twelve, had made his first voyage with his father, that Orlando had announced: “I’m sailing to America. Come with me.” When they reached Virginia, escorting her off the ship at Jamestown he had put a bag of money in her hand and announced: “It is time for you to leave me now.”

She had been almost thirty. Young enough to marry and have a family in a colony like that, where settlers were often in need of wives. He had been right.

Six months later she had found Wheeler, and married. The only catch had been that he had fallen sick and there had been no children. As for Orlando, she had never seen, nor heard of him again. Recently, however, as she stood on Wheeler’s Hill and gazed over the plantation, she had sometimes found her eyes wandering, on clear days, towards the blue glint of the ocean.

It was some news she gleaned from one of her own indentured labourers that had caused this change. The fellow had come from Southwark where he knew the Globe well. Having no idea who she was, he had told her that her parents had both recently died and her brother gone away to the West Country. The news had left her with a curious sense of freedom. It made no difference to anyone, she realized, what she did now. She would face no awkward questions.

All the Virginia growers knew that the tobacco plant exhausted the soil. Most plantations at this time were exhausted after seven years. It was not a huge problem, for the whole continent of America lay before the settlers. They just set up a new plantation further inland. In three years, Jane knew, Wheeler’s farm would be exhausted and she would have to move. But by then, also, she would have saved a comfortable sum of money. Enough, perhaps, to do something else, she thought, as she gazed towards the sea.

Some people might find Henry proud, but Julius could only admire him for the courageous way he had assumed the leadership of the family. Sir Jacob had never recovered from his stroke: his right side was paralysed and he could not speak. He was a sad sight and some children might have wanted to hide him. But not Henry. On his orders, once a week, immaculately dressed and followed by his two sons, Sir Jacob was carried in a litter to the Royal Exchange so that people could pay their respects to him. “And to our family too,” Henry told Julius. “No matter what happens, hold your head high.” Henry had style.

His father’s incapacity caused a change in Julius’s life too. He had been expecting to go to Oxford himself that year, but within a month Henry had informed him: “Young brother, I need you. I can’t do all this alone.”

Henry soon left the everyday accounting and shipping arrangements to Julius. “You’ve a head for figures,” he said. But Henry made one very shrewd move. “I am buying a parcel of land, just along the ridge from Bocton,” he announced one day.

“Whatever for?” Julius demanded.

“To grow hops,” came the cheerful reply. “For hopped beer. Everybody’s doing it.” And he turned out to be right. The English brewers, having developed a strange darker brew of beer using imported hops, were now finding it cheaper to buy locally if only farmers would produce. A good contract was soon signed with the Bull brewery of Southwark; and in the years that followed, even when trade was poor, the Bocton hop-gardens provided a steady flow of income.

But Henry’s true genius, Julius soon discovered, was in making powerful friends. It was amazing how he did it. Within weeks of his return he seemed to know everyone, not only in the city but at court as well. While Julius checked the accounts, often as not Henry would be out hunting, or dining with a great lord, or attending a court entertainment at Whitehall. At first, Julius had assumed that this was only to raise the family’s social position. But then one afternoon, striding by in his hunting clothes, Henry had nonchalantly dropped a document on the table: it was a contract, for a huge consignment of silk, signed by no less a person than Buckingham, the most powerful favourite at the royal court. “Friends in the right places,” Henry had murmured. “That’s all you need.”

Monopolies were the thing. Strictly, of course, the great trading companies were monopolies: their charters, giving them exclusive trading rights in distant regions, were probably necessary to make such great investments possible. But the ones Henry spoke of were little, pettifogging affairs. “You want to open an ale-house? You need a licence: apply to a favourite. You need gold thread? A friend of mine has the monopoly. A tiny monopoly, Julius, is still worth a fortune. And all courts do it.” The court of the Stuarts, he might have added, more than most.