For two weeks, she crept about the woods at morning and at night, through the winter cold and wind, to Mr. Waters a-hiding in the cave. The darkness so thick and the man no more than a shadow, she did not find him first but rather he found her, sneaking up and grabbing her, clamping a hand over her mouth. “And who be this?” he snarled at her and lifted his fingers so she might answer.
“Long John Long. I’ve come to bring your supper.”
“Set it down, boy, and sit where you are. Move not.” Waters fell upon the food, and in the pitch black of the cave, his slurping and chewing sounded like a rough beast or monster. “Tell me,” he said between bites, “what news. Am I to be stretched?”
“They look for you, Mr. Waters, but cannot find you. You are hid as in a dog’s belly, and the good men of the crew will not let Gates hunt and hang you.”
“Zounds, child, and why should I be? For it was no crime but an accident.”
“That’s what they all say. Mr. Chard and the other mariners. They say Samuell provok’d the blow.”
“Edward Chard is a good man and a stalwart judge. Would that he, not Gates, were king of this island.”
So Long Jane played the go-between, a secret kept within her bigger secret of girl disguised as boy, bringing food and news to Mr. Waters. He often kept her long in the cave, anxious for some conversation, desperate for reprieve, and within two weeks, the governour relented, and Waters was freed. “I shall not forget your kindness, John,” he told him. “There will come a day when you are repaid.”
And while Gates later granted Waters and the other mutineers clemency, not all escaped his government. A man named Paine was later hanged for some offense, justice meted swiftly, and Mr. Waters felt the phantom rope for weeks afterward. Six in all remained forever on—or should it be in—the island: besides Mr. Paine and Mr. Samuell, there were Jeffery Briars, Richard Lewis, William Hitchman, and the baby girl born to the Rolfes, who had been christened Bermuda, buried there nearby Sir Somers’s garden.
They were nearly a year in making two smaller ships, which Gates, he named Deliverance and Somers, he named the other the Patience, both hewn from the native cedar and the oaken remnants of the Venture. Jane labored as a boy alongside those shipbuilders, taking care at all times to disguise herself and keep her womanhood hid, never to wash, to hack at her hair when it grew long, to sweat, to swear, to feign to drink, and seem as black and rough as any mariner. When the cahows, or the devil birds, so called for the hellish noise of their nightcalls, a clamor of unholy voices that would set fright to any Christian, when they built their nests and laid their eggs, she joined the hunting parties, tho to call it a hunt makes more sporting the outright killing of these birds. They were so tame, so plentiful, and so curious, complete in fearlessness, that the men could wander among the nests with clubs and smite the cocks and hens, taking in a single night a hundred or more, which when cooked in water or roasted were as good as any English goose. The bird hunters would return to St. Catherine’s Beach laden with their fare, and Jane among them, burdened under the weight of a score or more.
As water is in water or a palm tree in a winter fog, she vanished as a true person, hidden but still there, plain to see. No one knew her as anything but a boy without a master, for Ravens had flown away, and she had no true friend but Mr. Chard, who sought her out once again as April gave way to May and the new ships were judged ready for the sea. He approached her at evensong, took her arm and led her away from the others to a private spot beyond the thatched cabin that constituted Mr. Bucke’s church.
“I have a mind to stay,” he told her. “Why trust yourself to the mercy of these wondrous false crafted boats, these paper sailors? Think on Ravens, the best navigator among us, and he and the men and the boat at the bottom of the cold, dark sea.”
She shuddered at the picture in her mind, remembering the houricane and a world made of water. Why had she left The Moon and Seven Stars, her mother, and her four baby sisters?
“And what is in Virginia that can better what we have here? I have heard tell that savages haunt the woods near James’s Town, red men who go about naked and not a word of English. The people there live in fear of their very lives and suffer want of food and shelter. The winters worse than the highlands of the Scots, and the summers hotter than Hades. Why leave this Eden for that purgatory?” Chard threw his arm around John’s shoulders and drew the boy to him. “Stay with us, I entreat you, and spare the risk. If they live, they will surely send ships from England, much better beamed and planked. Mr. Carter will remain and Mr. Waters and myself.”