Seeking Eden Read online

  He smiled. “We will employ builders,” he said.

  “Will there be a school? A meeting house? Shops?” The girls were full of questions.

  “There will certainly be a place to meet,” said my mother, “probably in someone’s house.”

  And my father added, “We will be free to worship without fear of persecution. And in a few years we’ll have a better life, a new country…”

  I looked at the map, and saw how the land granted to William Penn stretched far, far to the north and west of Philadelphia, with almost nothing marked but rivers and a skein of mountains running north to south.

  I ran my hand across it. “What is here?”

  “Wilderness,” my father said. “Forests, rivers, wild animals. ‘A red man’s wilderness’, George Fox called it.”

  And William Penn was the owner of this vast tract of land, having dreamed for years of setting up such a colony. He was given this territory, the size of southern England, by Charles Stuart, the king, in settlement of a debt the king had owed his father, Admiral Penn; and now he would use it for his holy experiment, and we would be part of that great cause.

  My father turned to me. “Well, Jos? How dost thou feel about all this?”

  I shrugged. Enthralled as I was by the maps and pictures and by William Penn’s vision, I was unwilling to admit any of this to my father. “I’ll come,” I said.

  My mother spoke sharply: “Of course thou’ll come! I won’t go without thee!”

  “Judith says there is plenty of work there,” my father said. “We must find thee something to thy liking.”

  I looked at my hands, at the bruised knuckles, the broken nails, the blood of the shambles still in the creases of my skin. “I suppose they’ll have butchers there,” I said, “and butchers’ll need swabbers and sweepers.”

  “Thou’rt determined to provoke me, Josiah. Thou could do better than sweeping; thou know it. Thou should endeavour to learn a trade.”

  “I’ll get work there,” I said, “but I’ll find my own master.”

  I imagined an explorer, or a trading voyage up one of those great rivers that flowed out from the wilderness; saw myself as ship’s boy.

  “Good.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “But think about thy natural talents. Thou can cast accounts, and read well, and write a fair hand.”

  “A clerk!” I said, and sighed.

  “Why art thou so hurtful to Dad?” Betty said later. She had joined me, uninvited, on the bed in my attic room.

  This room was one I had chosen for myself years ago, and kept – against all common sense, since these days I could stand upright only in the very centre. But I liked the feeling it gave me of being apart from the rest of the family. I had a few books there – Friends’ writings, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and also books with maps and drawings. My own drawings – for I loved to draw – were tucked away in a folder, not displayed. Friends do not approve of drawing and painting unless for some useful purpose, such as a herbal or a map. My parents knew of my interest, for I used scrap paper from the shop; they tolerated it, but my mother urged restraint: “Thou must not make likenesses of people, Jos, or any other work that leads to vanity.” I did not make portraits, but I drew the view from my attic window, the rooftops and spires, the gulls that perched on the windowsill and glanced about with fierce eyes, their feathers lifting in the breeze. From that window I had a glimpse of the docks, the network of masts and spars, a sense of ships coming and going, all the life of the great river.

  And up here I was away from my father’s eye.

  “He bullies me,” I said in response to Betty.

  “He tries to help! And he’s right: thou should be a clerk – keep tallies and ledgers—”

  “Huh! Like I did for Thomas Green? He didn’t think much of my skills.”

  “Thou didn’t try.”

  “I didn’t like him.”

  But it was true I’d been unwilling – lazy, even. And Thomas Green’s business was up north, in a dull part of London, far from the docks and the vigour of the City. I hadn’t wanted to stay. I’d been on a month’s trial, and had failed. I was glad to come home, but it had angered my father, who had put effort into arranging the bond.

  Betty said, “I shall work with Dad in the print shop when we go to America. He says I can. I’ll be fourteen by the time we sail – no need for any more schooling.”

  I looked at her in surprise. I’d thought of her as a child, but it was true, she’d be old enough to work.

  She was clever, my eldest sister, and eager to learn. She and Sarah went to Hester Lawrence’s school for the daughters of Friends, at Mile End. There they learned to read, write and cast accounts; also to sew, and darn hosiery, and knit, and launder and prepare herbal remedies – all those womanly tasks that I was spared. And of course they were guided gently but firmly towards the light. Silence and Bible-reading took up much of their day at school, as it had at mine. Betty was proficient in everything. Sarah, who had always been a frail child, was often ill and absent from school; she was slower to learn; and our mother, who feared for her, kept her close at home. She was Mam’s baby, the youngest since Henry had died.

  So there we were: the protected Sarah; Betty, who spent all her spare time in the print shop or among the books – Betty, who was our father’s pride, his “clever girl”; and me, his only surviving son, and a disappointment to him.

  “I’ll miss my friends at school,” said Betty. “Ruth, and Damaris. And I’ll miss Tabby.” She gave me a teasing look. “Thou will, too. Thou’rt blushing, Jos!”

  “Tab’s spoken for,” I growled. “Anyway, she’s too old for me.”

  “Too old! Thou make her sound ancient!”

  I changed the subject. “Dost thou think Mam wants to go? I know what she said, but…”

  I knew Mam had been less certain than our father, who was such an admirer of William Penn, and had been inspired by his writings from the start. My mother thought more of those people we would leave behind and probably never see again: her Shropshire family – our grandmother Elizabeth Thorn, for whom Betty was named, Uncle Isaac and Aunt Deb – and the Lacons, our neighbours and work partners for so many years. For months my parents had sought spiritual guidance and waited on the inward light. Some Friends regarded emigration as a moral failure, a reluctance to stand up and face persecution. I knew my parents had wrestled with this.

  “I think Dad is more certain,” said Betty. “But when thou think how we have suffered, all of us – Dad has never really recovered from that time in New Prison, has he? – surely she must want to go?”

  “Dost thou want to?”

  Usually Betty likes to appear detached and worldly-wise. But not now. “Oh, yes!” Her eyes shone. “And thee?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  The adventure drew me, and the vision of a society based on the gospel. But there was another reason: in Philadelphia the majority of people would be Friends. We would not be living constantly among people who despised or mocked us; I would not need to pretend indifference to Friends’ ideals, as I did when out with my butcher companions. Above all, we would not suffer for our faith. We need not fear arrest, imprisonment or fines.

  I shall change when I am there, I thought. I’ll show my father what I can do, and he’ll be proud of me.

  A new world, a new beginning. How could I not want to go?

  Tokpa

  A sound wakes me. A night bird? A footfall?

  At first I don’t think of danger.

  The hut is dark, but I know in my body that dawn is not far off. My father and brother breathe steadily in sleep close by.

  I stretch. My limbs ache from yesterday’s dancing. Such dancing we had! Such drumming! All day clouds were building in purple masses above the hills. Soon they will burst and bring the rains. We young men painted our bodies, laughing as we turned about to decorate one another’s backs and shoulders with patterns in coloured clay. Everyone came out to dance: mothers with babies,
old men, old women, children who could scarcely walk, girls, bright-eyed and giggling. The spirit dancers appeared wearing masks. They were neighbours, men I knew, and yet the masks changed them. When they danced, an ancestor’s eyes looked out through the empty eye slits; the dried grass hair shook with the spirit’s power.

  As I lie here, remembering the masks and the drumming, it comes again, that sound: a footstep; then muffled voices.

  I leap up, heart pounding.

  A scream pierces the night like a spear. I hear yells, wails, running feet. Smoke! The crackle of flames.

  Outside, huts are ablaze; burning thatch lights up the night. My mother’s hut is on fire. She bursts from the doorway, my young brother and sister clinging to her, screaming. People run and cry, trapped: my friend Manhtee, my aunt, my neighbours, running like ants when the nest is kicked open.

  There are men here, strangers, not of our tribe; men with clubs who beat and seize us. My mother shrieks as they drag her away. Behind me I hear my father shout, then the sounds of a club and a groan.

  I am caught. I struggle, but they bind my wrists, fix a collar around my neck, fasten me to a line of others. Yoked together, we stumble out into the dark forest, our homes blazing behind us.

  I think of the masks, flames licking, devouring, shooting through the eye slits.

  The forest is full of spirits. I cry out to them to help us.

  Three

  We left for Gravesend on the sixteenth day of sixth-month, the month the world calls August. This was the first stage of our journey. At Gravesend we would embark on the Promise, and sail to Deal, on the Kent coast, where we would take on stores and more passengers. Only when wind and tide were right would we begin our voyage to America.

  The boat that conveyed us to Gravesend left Wapping soon after dawn. I stood on deck with my family, among a crowd of other passengers, mostly Friends, each of us alone with our thoughts as we gazed back at the London skyline. For me, it was the city where I had been born, the only home I had known. In the distance, gathering form and solidity as the light grew, I could see the scaffolding and half-built walls of the new steeple-house of Paul’s – the old building having been destroyed in the Great Fire.

  It was seventeen years since the fire that had blazed for four days and nights and left London in ruins. My parents had been caught up in that catastrophe, and as a child I’d loved to hear my mother tell how they escaped, with me in her belly, into the fields of Islington.

  “We thought the fire would cleanse the city of its wickedness,” she said once, “but it did not. The Truth is still unheard in the great Babylon.”

  The great Babylon: a place of luxury and corruption. How different would Philadelphia be? I wondered. My father, who had been brought up an Anglican and had learned Greek and Latin at school, had told me that the name Philadelphia meant “City of Brotherly Love”. It could surely not yet be a city at all, for it was only last year that William Penn had sailed there with a hundred other Friends to found it.

  When I remembered the alarms of my childhood – the meetings violently broken up by soldiers, my parents sentenced to prison, the bailiffs ransacking our house – I’d thought how good it would be to live in such a place as William Penn envisaged. And yet now I wondered if I might also miss some of the wickedness of the great Babylon.

  The City receded from view, and in its place we passed through smaller docks and clusters of mean houses and brothels. The land was marshy and flat, and the river looped across it, slowly widening towards the estuary until we came in sight of Gravesend.

  And there, at last, we saw the Promise. She was an old, round-bowed, weathered ship, her brown sails dirty and patched. My sisters and I were disappointed. We had imagined something more impressive – a vessel worthy of such a momentous voyage.

  My father was watching anxiously for our chests and boxes, which were being removed from the boat by porters and transferred, along with everyone else’s luggage, to the hold of the Promise. In addition to all our household goods, he’d brought a crate full of books for sale in Philadelphia, and cases of fonts, ink, paper, quills, notebooks and ledgers of all kinds. The bookshop and stationer’s could be set up almost immediately on arrival, but the print works would take longer, for a press would need to be built and men hired. Once the decision was made to go he had spent weeks working out the packing and finances. The cost of our passage, he’d told me, was the smallest part.

  “Look to the women, Jos,” he chivvied me now. “And help find our cabin space.”

  A somewhat unseemly rush to claim the best spaces was in progress on the lower deck. We installed ourselves in a spot near the stern. When she saw the sleeping quarters we had been allocated, Betty was appalled. The so-called cabin the five of us would share for the next eight, twelve or perhaps even fourteen weeks, was an airless space, partitioned off from neighbours on either side by thin walls, and with just enough room for us all to lie down. A curtain screened it from the gangway.

  “I won’t be able to bear this!” she complained. “Mam! There’s no privacy! We are all together – it’s not decent. And where is the privy?”

  My mother had no patience for her. “A little overcrowding is nothing to what Friends have suffered in their time,” she said (at which Betty, turning away, rolled her eyes). “Dost thou imagine we had privacy in Newgate? We’ll hang up a sheet if thou must pretend to such maidenly modesty…”

  “It’s not pretence!” protested Betty, but to no avail.

  Our mother was more concerned about Sarah, whether the damp, malodorous air would harm her. Sarah was already coughing, but she was happy enough, helping Mam to unpack the few possessions we would use on the voyage.

  There were several families on board whom we knew from Ratcliff and Stepney meetings, and the women soon began to help one another and to find ways of making their situation more comfortable. My mother brought out some sheeting and got us to help her make divisions in our space. “Catch hold of that end, Betty. Jos, can you reach up and fix it?”

  I soon became tired of these domestic tasks and wanted to go ashore, but my mother forbade it; I think she was afraid I’d get into trouble again. Instead, I escaped by going up on deck. I breathed the salty, tarry air of the docks, and watched sailors and porters working on the quay, and seagulls swooping and crying. I had never seen the Thames estuary before, let alone the ocean. Later, lying on a thin mattress below decks at night, it was strange to feel the tide tugging the ship at its moorings. The cabin space was full of small sounds: a baby cried and was shushed; Sarah coughed and sighed; and my parents murmured together in low voices for a long time.

  The next day we had to wait for a suitable tide and did not leave Gravesend till late afternoon; and then in Deal we were delayed for five days by contrary winds. Most people went ashore from time to time. A few, who could afford to pay for an extra passage, hired servants in the town, which was a rough sort of place, full of cheap lodgings and alehouses. We Friends kept together, and I caught the curious, sometimes unfriendly eyes of the inhabitants on us.

  Our father gave each of us a small book in which to keep a journal. I knew he meant it for a spiritual journal – this being, for Friends, a voyage of the soul as much as of the body. He knew that Betty would write about everything she heard and saw; that Sarah would struggle with her letters, and lapse; and he knew that I would draw more than I wrote. But he left it to the spirit to guide us. Betty began writing that very day, with great enthusiasm. I tried dutifully to write about my hopes for our life in Philadelphia, but found myself daydreaming of forests and wilderness – vague imaginings that could not be put into words. Instead, I turned to drawing. I drew the harbour buildings, the quayside and the ship, paying careful attention to every detail of the rigging.

  The night before we sailed, when all were aboard, we held a meeting for worship on deck: more than eighty people standing silent together. Even the crew fell quiet. The only sounds were the creak of the ship’s timbers, the slap o
f waves on her sides, the cries of gulls. This meeting affected me more powerfully than any I had experienced before; and it was the silence itself that held me, for whenever a Friend spoke the wind carried away his words and I could not hear. It seemed to me, in the silence, that we felt and breathed as one, that we were all held in this great endeavour, this holy experiment.

  Before mid-morning the tide began to turn. The master shouted orders, the seamen ran to their stations, and I watched the sails hauled up, bellying out as the wind caught and tugged them. Nearly everyone was on deck now, my family among them. My mother stood quietly, elbows on the rail, head lowered. She was praying. My father laid his arm about her shoulders. Betty and Sarah stood, intent and absorbed, as did I; I believe we all felt the seriousness of the moment.

  The anchor was raised. And the Promise was under way.

  Tokpa

  Many days we walk through the forest, far from home, far from our ancestors. If there are spirits here, I don’t know them. The rains have come. A roar of water fills the air, battering the leaves, drumming on the earth. Streams become torrents. We slip and slide in the mud.

  My wrists are chafed and bleeding, my neck rubbed raw from the collar. The pace is fast. Our captors swear and beat us. My friend Manhtee is sick. When he falls and can’t get up, they unfasten him and throw him to the side of the track. He lies still, the rain pounding his body.

  “Manhtee!” I cry out. I want to help him, but they drive us on, on. Manhtee will die there, alone in the forest. Tears and rain run down my face and I can’t brush them away.

  Day after day we walk. We sleep at night in villages, still shackled. The rain lessens as we come out of the forest into a dry country. At last we arrive at a river. This river is so huge I can’t see the other side. Boats like great birds with upraised wings float upon it. Our captors are gone. Demons surround us: pale-faced, thin-lipped, with noses like beaks and hair hanging down. They jabber together in a strange language. Many other captives are here, other tribes, other languages. I can’t talk to them.