Dangerous Dreams: A Novel (6 page)

“Oh, just thinking.” He smiled. “It
is
beautiful. No smoke in the sky, no grit in the teeth.” George stood five-nine, had a ruddy complexion, a round face with high cheekbones, brown eyes, and long, sandy hair which he tied in a bundle in the back, just above his shoulders. He had a man’s body, which made people think he was older than he was, at least until he spoke, for he’d not yet found his man voice. He seldom smiled and always looked like he was brooding about something.

“George, what troubles you? I’ll listen . . . better yet, tell me why you and your father are here.”

He thought for a moment. “ Everything comes back to my mother . . . her death.”

“Why do I always bring up painful things?”

“No, Emily. I must accept her loss and deal with it. So when she died, Father and I were lost and depressed for a time. By the way, she, too, died of the Bloody Flux. It took Father a full two years to recover from her death. He stopped working the foundry, stopped eating, just sat and stared all day. I wasn’t much better, but I did the best I could to keep the foundry going. I only had two years’ experience as his apprentice, so I wasn’t very good at it, but good enough to get us by. When we heard about Governor White’s colony, we started thinking that perhaps we could start a new life. A colony would need all the things we knew how to make: nails, shovels, axes, shot, pikes, tools, even swords, and we heard they’d found iron here on one of the two earlier expeditions. So it all sounded quite enticing. Then it occurred to us that we might also be able to trade with the Savages,
if
they were friendly, and that we could also farm or sell our five hundred acres to someone else. So here we are. That’s the story . . . and Howe and Son are ready to start work at once.” He smiled, gave her a quick nod.

“George, I think you and your father are exactly what we need here: good, sincere, honest, hard-working folk.” She held his hand. “I’m glad you’re with us, and I’m most glad you’re my friend.”

George felt like warm water was trickling slowly over his head and shoulders. “Em, I . . . tell me about you and your father.”

His shyness brought an understanding smile to her face. “Well, Father has dirt under his fingernails. He grew up a farmer’s son, but his father didn’t own anything. He was only a tenant to a wealthy lord and had to give most of his crop to the lord in payment. He wanted Father to have a better life; and in exchange for more crops, he made an arrangement with the lord to obtain an education for Father so he could teach school. So Father became a schoolmaster, and that’s why I know how to read and write, which, as you know, most common women don’t. I’m very grateful to him though as a child I fought it constantly . . . hated being indoors and studying all the time. He also made me—
made
me, mind you—learn French, Italian, Spanish, and a bit of Dutch; so I could teach and tutor wealthy people and
their children. Well, it turned out that I rather enjoy languages, and they come quite easily to me, to the point that when I’m learning one, I eventually start having dreams in it without translating anything. That’s what tells me I’ve become fluent . . . same with the Savages’ hand signs Manteo taught me on the ship. I actually started seeing myself communicating with them and understanding them in my dreams.”

“What are the hand signs for?”

“They’re the signs all the different tribes of Savages use to communicate with one another when they don’t know each other’s language. Manteo says every Savage in the New World knows them, though some have a few unique signs of their own.”

“You know everything, Emily Colman. Show me some.”

“As you wish.” Emily’s hands and fingers moved: twists, turns, rolls, flips, flings; sometimes in conjunction with her head, arms, eyes, and mouth.

“Impressive! So did you truly say something, or were you just trying to impress me?”

“Of course, I said something. But because you doubt me, you sha’n’t know what it was.”

George shook his head. He never tired of hearing her voice; what she said was immaterial. “Very well, I apologize. Now will you tell me?”

“Perhaps.”

“Come on, Em.”

“Are you truly sorry, or just being mercenary?”

“Yes. I’m
very truly
sorry, Mistress Colman. Now please tell me!”

“I said,
I like you and your father very much, and I want to be your close friend. I’m very happy being with you and talking to you right now. And I should finish telling you why Father and I are here
.”

George blushed, felt his head muddle with warmth. “Did you really say that?”

“I did.”

“Emily”—he took a deep, calming breath—“ finish your story.”

She smiled at him, grasped his fingers, then squeezed them for a moment. “Well, Father, though he’s a fine schoolmaster, never stopped wanting
to farm, always felt like he’d been denied the opportunity; so when he heard about the colony, he saw his chance—a 500-acre chance—decided he could school the colony’s children and farm at the same time. So here
we
are . . . strange that with all the time on the ship, we never talked about any of this. What
did
we talk about?”

“I was too sick to talk.”

“Me too, now that you mention it.” She recalled hours of retching over the side of the ship and other times scurrying up the steps, trying to reach her favorite spot before the big heave. She smiled as she remembered calculating exactly how long it took to make the trip and thereafter knowing in advance whether or not she’d make it in time. She also remembered the times she’d lost the race because someone was in the way and slowed her pace; she’d then had to swab the deck or the floor, which nearly made her retch again. It was particularly bad manners to retch in the hold because the smell nauseated the other passengers, with predictable results. The ship had been a terrible place, she thought: people crammed together with animals, no space to breathe, no privacy, constant rolling and pitching, horrible food, tainted water. No surprise people didn’t get to know each other and were always sick, angry, embarrassed, or scared. She was glad it was over, glad to be on solid ground.

“So what about your mother and brother? Why didn’t they come?”

“My brother’s slightly over a year old, so my parents decided he was too young and that he and Mother would stay in England for at least another year before joining us. George, I miss them a lot and hope they come next summer, no matter what.” Her face suddenly blossomed with excitement, as she reached into her apron pocket, removed her locket, which had a small hole drilled in the edge for a neck string. “Here, look at this; I’ve never shown it to you.” She handed the locket to George. “My parents exchanged identical lockets before we sailed. Mother’s holds a lock of Father’s hair and this one has a lock of Mother’s.” Sudden tears filled her eyes, ran down her cheeks. “Look at me, crying like a baby.” She held her smile, dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. “Holding it always makes me sad and teary, but it’s a
happy
sad because touching it makes Mother feel closer.”

“I understand very well. I feel the same way when I hold
my
mother’s things.”

Both smiled a knowing, wordless, lingering smile that reflected a tight, inseverable bond of shared experience. But soon Emily assumed a pensive look. “You know, George, talking about why the Howes and the Colmans are here makes me wonder why all these other people came . . . why they gave up whatever they gave up to come here.”

George thought for a moment. “I suppose ’twas no different than for us. Everyone has reasons for what they do . . . but this is such a challenging and dangerous venture . . . I think their reasons, like ours, would have to be quite serious and important or else they’d not take the risk.”

“That certainly makes sense; for according to Father, we have a goldsmith, a sheriff, a lawyer, a Cambridge professor, and, oh yes, two former convicts. We can guess why they’re here. But then there’s Governor White—a successful artist—and gentry such as Master Tayler, and a mason . . .”

“He likes you doesn’t he?”

“Who?”

“Master Tayler. I’ve seen him look at you. He’s always looking at you.”

“Looking isn’t a sin, George. Actually, I don’t know him very well at all. Never even had a real conversation with him, but he seems like a nice man, what you’d expect for a gentleman, I suppose. Father certainly likes what he’s seen of him.” Emily had also liked what she’d seen, wondered when she’d have a chance to talk to him without her father or someone else around. “So, George, why would those people abandon such secure, prosperous lives for
this
?” She extended her arms out to her sides. “What could justify the risks they’re taking, with so much more to leave behind than we?” She smiled. “I’ve often wondered if rather than running
to
something, many aren’t actually running
from
something, something in the present or past they disliked or feared, some unpleasant reality, something in the mind that torments them. And yes, I think most of us probably
are
following a dream, perhaps without even knowing what it is but sensing that it will better us or improve our lot in life.” They’d fallen behind the line of colonists, and Emily saw one of the soldiers look back to
check on them. She bumped George’s shoulder, pointed ahead, quickened her pace.

“Emily, you’re a deeper thinker than I. I could never conjure such thoughts on my own.” He stopped, gently took her hands, looked into her eyes, searched them. “Haunting they are . . . haunting and beautiful . . . and irresistible . . . and . . . Emily, I know there are two years between us, and that you’re a woman not a girl . . . but I can’t help . . .”

A crimson glow spread up Emily’s neck to her cheeks. “George, the soldiers are waiting for us . . . come, I’ll race you to the shore. I get a head start.” She giggled, shoved him backward, then lifted her skirt to her knees and sprinted for the shore. She was halfway to the water before George took his first step.

A crew of thirty men, over half of them soldiers, felled trees around the perimeter. Cutting close to the village served two purposes: it gave the Savages less cover to sneak up on the village, and it gave the men who transported the logs a shorter distance to the palisades. However, since the last expedition had taken most of the close, properly sized trees for the old palisades, now seventy percent destroyed, the cutters were beginning to cut into virgin forest outside the perimeter.

An ideal palisade post was about fifteen feet tall and eight to twelve inches thick, so another challenge the cutters faced was that a tree long enough to make two posts would usually exceed the desired thickness and be too heavy for one man to maneuver and carry by hand. As a result, they would have to crosscut larger trees and split them lengthwise to obtain the required number of posts. Lieutenant Waters, who directed the project, calculated the task would require around five hundred oak and walnut trees, each split into two or three posts and a few cross braces, for a total of about twelve hundred posts. Without problems a thirty-man crew
might
complete the task in a little over two weeks, a length of time that troubled his maturing military mind because it meant a dangerously long period of vulnerability for the colony.

Initially, two men chopped on each tree until it was about to fall, then one man delivered the final blows after the second man removed himself from the fall line to avoid being crushed. The cutters controlled the direction of fall by making their cuts at different heights, on opposite sides of the tree. The lower cut, on the fall side of the tree, notched into the trunk about a third of the way to the tree’s center and was overly wide to make space for the tree to collapse into; while the upper cut, on the opposite side, went almost to the center. The undercut notch gave the tree space to collapse in the desired direction, avoiding hang-ups with other trees and providing easier access for the sawyers and splitters. The sawyers then cut the felled trees to length, and the splitters used wedges and mauls to split them into the desired thickness. The posts were then dragged or carried to the palisades, where another crew worked on digging a continuous, four-foot-deep set trench all the way around the village perimeter, on lines laid out by Lieutenant Waters. After enough adjacent posts were stood up in the trench and buried to ground level, horizontal cross braces, ten to fifteen feet long and six to eight inches thick, were mounted across the top and bottom on the inside of the wall to bind the logs together and provide strength. The braces were joined to the logs by long, hand-hewn wooden pegs about three inches thick, driven from the inside of the wall by large hammers into hand-bored holes that went completely through the braces and four to six inches into each post. The top brace was mounted a foot or two below the top of the wall, and the bottom brace, about two feet above the ground. While no step in the process was easy, the most exhausting was that of boring the gun-barrel-sized peg holes, which required countless, forceful twists of the crossbar handle on the end of the eighteen-inch metal auger bit.