Chesapeake (25 page)

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the tired little thief thought, and carefully he edged his sloop along the rim of the marsh, not knowing how to penetrate it for the protection he needed. Then, at the eastern extremity, he located a commodious creek, not broad enough to invite inspection from searchers but wide enough to provide safe passage for someone wanting to hide. Lowering his mast to aid concealment, he paddled his boat softly into this passageway between the marsh on the south and solid ground on the north.

When he was far inland and secure from danger, he dropped anchor and stowed his paddle in the bow. He then fell asleep as the fading stars winked their careless approval. Toward noon he awoke with a curious sensation: he felt as if someone were staring at him. Rubbing his grimy eyes, he looked up, and there on the bank to which he had moored stood four Indian braves.

‘Run … no … more,’ he muttered. Rising on his knees, he grinned at the warriors and extended his open palms. ‘See,’ he said hopefully, ‘no … gun.’

FOR TIMOTHY TURLOCK TO FLEE ALONE INTO THE
Choptank marshes was an act of madness. In England he had not been a countryman, and in Virginia he had been so busy fighting the Janneys that he had not mastered the skills of rural life. Only one thing enabled him to survive: he had developed a passionate love of land and rivers, and intuitively sensed the steps he must take in order to live with them.

Accordingly, when the wandering braves found him at the edge of the marsh, he knew that he must throw himself into their hands, be as docile as possible and learn from them the tricks he would need. There was no Indian village of Patamoke on which he could rely; that site was a mournful echo populated by no one. The braves who had discovered Turlock had been on a casual hunting foray; for some days they remained with the runty Englishman, rather pleased that he was no larger than they.

From them he learned how to weave marsh grass into the walls of his hut and how to catch the few remaining crabs of autumn. Geese had not yet arrived from the north, so he could not trap them, but he did learn the rudiments of tracking deer.

They could not converse with him, of course, but his habit of talking in single words accompanied by grimaces and gestures prepared him admirably for speaking with Indians, who often did the same, so that by the close of the second day he had accumulated a vocabulary of a few words with which he would conduct most of his later intercourse with the Choptanks:
kawshek
for
oyster; tahquah
for
crab; attque
for
deer; nataque
for
beaver;
and the word which was going to prove most terrifying,
poopponu
for
winter.

By the time the four braves had departed, they had provided him with
an intensive course in survival which sufficed during the clement weather of September and October. Indeed, when the great geese did arrive, assuring him of food, he felt such confidence that he began preparing small fields for gardens, even though he had no seed or any comprehension of what to do if any fell into his hands.

But in late November, when the first really cold weather blew across the Choptank, he was appalled at its severity, and then began his dreadful testing, as cruel in its way as the starving time which had tested the first Virginians. He had no blankets, but there were pine boughs, and when these were properly interlaced he could creep under them and at least escape the gale. He also deduced that goose feathers, if they could be compressed into some kind of container, might provide warmth, and after many infuriating failures he discovered a way to make a small blanket from one of the shirts he had stolen from Janney. When tied ingeniously and stuffed with feathers, it was comforting. After a week he reasoned that he must throw out the big feathers with tough quills and use only the down; this conserved heat, so that on some nights he actually perspired.

Then came the snow. The Choptank was far enough north for the river to freeze once or twice each winter, and so situated that snow was frequent. He would fall asleep at dusk, his shirt-blanket about him, and during the night would become aware of an overwhelming silence: no sound of any kind, no birds, no boughs bending, no fall of any foot. And then he would hear that softest of all noises, the almost imperceptible touch of falling snow, striking pine needles and drifting slowly to earth, where it would cover his untilled gardens and smother his hut.

In the morning he would peer from his doorway and see only white, even the river’s ice would be covered, and he would know that on this day he would be hungry and cold and bitterly alone.

The winter of 1638–1639 was unusually severe, and Turlock suffered through five snowfalls that depleted his pemmican and made it impossible for him to catch either fish or geese. When the sixth storm swept across the Choptank he was near dead, and when the river thawed he surrendered. He would sail down to Devon Island and give himself up to whatever charges the authorities in Virginia might want to bring against him.

Dolefully he stepped his mast, unfurled his stolen sail and left his sanctuary. Once in the Choptank with the island visible, he felt a sense of resignation; at least on Devon he would find food and warmth, and it might be months before the Steeds could deliver him to Jamestown. His spirits did not brighten, but did focus on the fact that during a postponement covering some months a clever fellow like himself might be able to think of something.

It was remarkable that Turlock had been hiding in the marshes for
nearly half a year without those on Devon learning of his existence; after all, the two locations were only ten miles apart, but it must be remembered that the Indians had left Steed’s employ, and the servants who had taken their places were not allowed to penetrate the back country. Therefore, when one of them noticed a strange boat putting into Devon Creek, considerable furor swept the settlement.

‘Master Steed!’ one cried as he ran toward the house. ‘Boat! Boat!’

The master was absent in one of the fields, but from the trim door of the house a tall woman with a black shawl about her shoulders appeared, studied the snowy fields, then saw the boat. She was in her forties, with whitening hair and a skin still pallid. She moved as if the island belonged to her, as it did, and after satisfying herself that only one passenger occupied the boat, she sent messengers scurrying about the plantation.

As the sloop tied up to the wharf she saw an emaciated white man climb ashore. Walking unsteadily, he followed the footpath to the house, but had come only a short distance when he collapsed.

‘Help him,’ she told the servant at her side, and Turlock was dragged into the house, where Mrs. Steed could almost see the warmth penetrate his near-frozen bones.

‘Who are you?’ she asked when he had sipped some pork broth.

‘Turlock.’

‘Oh! You’re the one who worked here with Simon Janney?’

‘Same.’

Delicately she avoided disclosing that she also knew he was the one who had bashed Janney’s head with a spade and stolen his boat.

‘Janney … live?’ Turlock asked.

‘He did,’ she said evenly, ‘no thanks to you.’

‘He … was … bad.’

She did not believe this. Both Janney and his wife had testified that neither had ever struck their fractious servant and that both had seen to it that he ate as well as they. Turlock had been presented to the court as an ingrate who—

‘Master Steed is coming!’ one of the men cried, and Turlock rose, expecting to meet Edmund Steed, with whom he had worked. Instead, a fine-looking young man of twenty-two entered, his cheeks red from frost, his hair tousled.

‘This is my son Henry,’ Mrs. Steed said. ‘He interrupted his law studies in London when my husband died.’

Turlock knew he ought to say something about the death, but graciousness was not his specialty. ‘Bad,’ he grunted.

‘You worked with my father when I was away?’ young Steed asked.

‘Uh-huh.’

There was an awkward pause, during which Turlock stared insolently at the glass window, the first he had seen in the New World. It ended
when Mrs. Steed explained, ‘We’ve discussed his attack on Janney.’

‘A wonder you didn’t kill him,’ Steed said accusingly.

‘No … good.’

‘He was your legal master.’

‘Liked … slaves … better.’

It was remarkable how quickly one became accustomed to Turlock’s truncated conversation; when he provided brief verbal clues the educated mind leaped to fill the interstices, as if he were primal and restricted to the barest essential thoughts. The Steeds understood him readily.

Henry was about to lecture him when Mrs. Steed interceded; she said gently that what this repugnant little fellow needed was not moralizing but warm food, and she took him into the kitchen where pots were simmering and fed him. Then she led him to an empty bed, and he fell asleep under real covers.

When she returned to her remonstrating son she silenced him with an instruction she had received from her grandmother in High Wycombe: ‘Look after the other man’s belly and your own conscience.’ She said, ‘If a man comes to your door plainly starving, Henry, don’t preach, feed him.’

‘We’ve got to turn him over to the authorities.’

‘Do we?’

The suggestion was so startling to young Henry, trained in law, that he began to expostulate, but his mother, thinking of the sleeping man, cautioned, ‘Keep your voice down, son.’

And then she examined with him the ancient theory of sanctuary, whereby a man running from justice might run so adeptly that ultimately he entered into the place of refuge from which he could not be extracted. ‘Men didn’t devise that concept for nothing,’ she said.

‘There’s no escape from justice,’ Henry said.

‘There is … if you reach sanctuary.’

This idea was repulsive and he began to argue forcefully, but his mother made two points: ‘Henry, your father and I were often the objects of the law’s persecution, but thank God, we found refuge.’ And more telling, ‘Just because you studied law, don’t set yourself up as a little tyrant.’

Her son was prepared to accept this rebuke because of the extraordinary moral power his mother had demonstrated in the last months of her husband’s life. While he was absent fighting for freedom in the Assembly, she had minded the plantation and kept the slaves productive. Her sons were unable to help, for they were in Europe and were still there when Edmund died.

Then she had faced real trouble: Simon Janney showed up with shadowy claims to all fields north of the island, said he could prove that he had worked them and had shipped their tobacco to Bristol under his
name. She knew the history of the fields and knew his claim was fraudulent, but it required great and solitary effort for her to repel him. When the boys returned from Europe they were able to reoccupy the plantation only because their mother had been resolute.

‘Simon Janney is a mean-hearted man,’ she told her son.

‘Do you think he whipped—What name did he give?’

‘Turlock? I doubt it. Janney was never interested in revenge, only money.’

‘Shall I surrender Turlock to Jamestown?’

‘I think not,’ she said, but in deference to her son’s position as inheritor of the island she added, ‘What do you think we should do?’

For five days Mrs. Steed and her son discussed the moral problems represented by Timothy Turlock’s presence in their home, and that sly fellow knew what subject kept the pair engaged. Consequently, when the weather cleared and it looked as if spring would soon reach the river, he slipped away, after first ransacking Mrs. Steed’s room to find some spools of thread which he needed. He also took her pins, some nails, a small hammer and a blanket, stowing them securely under the bench of his stolen sloop.

He was well down the creek before the servants noticed his departure, and the hue they raised surprised neither of the Steeds, ‘Let him go,’ Martha said. ‘He carries with him his own punishment.’

‘But he inflicts it on others,’ her son said, ‘never upon himself.’

Turlock spent that splendid autumn of 1639 in fortifying himself against whatever the winters of the future might bring. Using all the bits of cloth he could assemble, he made a facing for his stolen blanket; when the resulting pouch was carefully stuffed with goose down he would have a comforter as good as any in Maryland. He raised his bed, filling the space beneath with heavy goose feathers, and built a double wall inside the house, cramming empty spaces with more feathers. He added a new roof, thick with pine branches, and dug pits in which to store food, and drains to lead water and melting ice away from his hut. At the creek he built a wharf, following the pattern he had learned when doing this job for the Janneys, and even though he had no helper to drive the cedar pilings home, he so worried them and pounded them with a club that the points sank well into the mud.

But most of all this little man, barely a hundred pounds and sadly unfitted for outdoor life, mastered the forest, noting all things that occurred therein. He built trails and along them constructed traps of such ingenuity that he always had food; he cleared an area beneath the towering pines and moved his hut so that they might provide coolness in summer and protection against the snows of winter.

In these early days he saw the marsh merely as a surface thing, a mysterious hiding place in which water and land competed. Within it he found isolated islands firm enough to be tilled, and beside them swamps which would engulf the careless walker. At times he would perch on some hummock to watch the blue heron fishing, and he was delighted when the tall bird snatched a fish and sent it struggling down its gullet. He often saw foxes creeping through the grass, slyly watching for quail or rabbit, and at times large eagles would swoop down to grasp some prey he could not identify.

But the secret of the marsh, the aspect which captivated his imagination, was the fact that he could sail his sloop into it, unstep the mast and hide it so effectively that none could detect it from the river. Or he himself could dart along his camouflaged paths and lose himself just as effectively. Once when Indians came to barter he proved this. Running adroitly among the rushes, he called, ‘Find me!’ and they could not. When he emerged, grinning with his black teeth, they wanted to see how he had escaped, and when they saw, they marveled.