The island was a paradise in every other regard, and for their feast and respite, fresh water and food were soon found. Fish abounded in the waters off the shore, and could be had by means of gigging a sharp stick, or later, a net was sewn from scraps of rigging, and when dipped into the water, it would return a bounty of mullet and rockfish and pilchard. Lobsters could be had by hand, tho quick hands were needed, so as not to be bit by their claws. In time, sea turkles arrived to lay their eggs upon the sand, and they could be plucked and eaten raw, and the turkles themselves, when stewed, produced a toothsome meat neither fish nor fowl tho never foule, and one large creature could feed them all for three meals in turn. Wild hogs, abandoned no doubt by earlier visitors to these isles, the Spanish or Portuguese or Irishmen perhaps, were rounded up in a most ingenious way. Mr. Chard had discovered a herd of swine rooting through the forest and that night, he lay down with them, next to the boar, and when the hog began to snuggle close, he grabbed its leg, held fast, and tied him with a rope, leading sire and sows and piglets back to our encampment as if Chard were the king of all hogs. Crab, the dog, kept his watch over the pen we built, and the hogs were bred and slaughtered in turn when the survivors tired of lobster or fish. Admiral Somers ordered a garden to be tilled with English seed, and within ten days, the first sproutlings shewed their green necks, tho the muskmelon and peas and onions never bore fruit, for the plants themselves were eaten by the multitudes of birds and creeping insects. But berries flourished on low bushes, and the fruit of the palm, when boiled, reminded many of English cabbage. Mr. Chard discovered that the palm leaves, when crushed and fermented, made a drink not unlike port wine.
“Have a taste, boy,” he said one evening near the end of their first marooned month. Seated on the corpse of a felled cedar, they were enjoying a moment’s peace at the end of ten hours’ labor. Just at the waterline, they watched the rising of the moon, the appearance of the constellations one by one. Chard, like so many of the men, had failed to don his blouse, and his suntanned chest, brown as a beetle, glistened in the failing light. His whiskers and beard had grown so that when he spoke, he looked like a bear or some other fabulous beast. She took the cup from him and drank deep till the liquor spread across her belly and crept into her limbs.
“That’s the stuff, lad, that will rid all cares and make you forget all about old England. Precious stone set in a silver sea, my arse.”
The palm wine roared to her head.
“I, for one, am glad we are here,” Chard said. “Glad of the storm. Glad to be off that ill-met ship. I don’t care if we ever leave here. I am sore sick of the sea, cooped like a rat belowdecks, never your own master but bound to serve men of no sense, men who sail into the cheeks of the wind at full sail. Half-wits and knaves who like to drown you in their vainglory. There’s them who pull the yoke.” He poured another cup of wine for John. “Fish aplenty, the sun on your back, no crowds jostling and bustling. If only I was my own master, then I would show them as fools they be. For want of coins in England, but here, lad, here there is no king, and all can be had by a man’s own labor. Here a Chard can be a lord, and a lord no better than a Chard. Here now, drink up, John, and be glad you are a free man. This mash will put a beard on you yet.”
John nodded at the good sense of the argument, tho the wine toyed with her mind until all reason, indeed all feeling, escaped. The stars lost their places in the night sky and the white sheets atop each wave rolled in and then pulled away so fiercely that she feared the blankets would reach and drag her into the sea.
Like a great bellows, Chard yawned and drew a deep breath. “No more talk of kings and knaves tonight, for such fancies sit heavily upon the soul, and hope is more tiresome than a day’s labor. I take my leave with my bottle and bid you good night till the morrow.”
A crab emerged from a hole in the sand and began to fan the air with its great claw, its eyes twisting on their stalks, first one and then the other, and fascinated by its display, John laid her head upon the sand to watch more clearly. The little crab was the color of the sand itself and difficult to see in the moonlight, but she strained to catch every motion, and in so doing, fell asleep, rocked in wine-soaked slumber by the sound of the endless sea. How long she slept, she could not say, and when she woke ’twas as from a dream, or more than a dream, for the first thing she saw was the master, Mr. Ravens, seated beside her as the sun peeped over the edge of the Atlantic. And the first thing that she realized was that she had been stripped of her blouse and her bindings unwound, and then her shirts hastily thrown over her again. Bare-breasted, she knew, despite the thrumming in her head, she had been found out.
In all modesty, without so much as a sideways glance, Ravens spoke as soon as she stirred. “I am sorry. When you did not come to our home last night, I worried for your safety and set about the woods looking for you. And finding you here on the beach in such disarray, I shook and shook to wake you from your stupor, thinking you ill at first, rather than in your cups. You lay here in a pool of water, as if washed in by the waves, soaked in your own drops from the drink and hot night. I thought it best to cool you when you would not wake, for some fever or ague was surely upon you, and when I saw.… Who are you really, girl, and why have you hidden your true nature?”
Jane struggled to sit but every motion made her giddy and unwell. In time she managed to turn her back and dress herself. “Master Ravens, I have served you well these past months. I pray you not uncover me to all. Keep my secret. There was no other way to come to Virginia than in some employ, for my mother is but a serving maid in a house named The Moon and the Seven Stars, and my own dear father left this world when I was but nine.”