Sweet Savage Eden by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

lay, even when he was home. “I don’t know myself, Robert. But there is a draw. I feel it always. It is a passion that grows in my blood, in my heart. I love the land and the river and the endless forests. There are places of such beauty and quiet!”
    “I’ve seen the sketches brought back of the Indian attacks, and of the ‘starving time’ in 1609, my friend. The Indians are savage barbarians. It is a savage land, so they say. Bitterly cold, then humid and hot.”
    “The Indians are of a different culture,” Jamie mused. “But they are men and women, just as we.”
    Robert laughed out loud. Jamie cast him a quick glance and shrugged. He’d had the pleasure of meeting the colonizer John Rolfe and his wife, the Indian princess Pocahontas, both in Virginia, and at King James’s royal court. It was said that she had saved the life of John Smith when her father would have taken his head, and the lady did not deny the story. Jamie had been saddened to hear that she had died in England. And recently, her father, the great Powhatan, the big chief of many tribes, had died too. It was as if an era were already over, when so much had just begun.
    When the London Company had first sent its men sailing across the sea, and when they had first established their settlement at Jamestown on the James River in Virginia, the days had been dreary indeed. They hadleft England in 1606. King James had sat upon the throne then, but it was just three years after the death of Elizabeth, and three years after a tempestuous age. The age of explorers, of Sir Francis Drake, of Sir Walter Raleigh, of the Spanish Armada. Entering into Virginia, they were aware that there was a constant threat of invasion from the Spaniards, of attacks by the Indians. Many things had hindered the growth of the colony. Supplies hadn’t always arrived, as planned, from England. Men had looked for profits, and they had planted too much tobacco and not enough food. They had starved, they had clashed with the Indians, the Pamunkies, the Chickahominies, the Chesapeakes.
    But much had improved since then. Though Pocahontas and Powhatan were dead, the peace formed at the time of her marriage to John Rolfe seemed to have lasted. There had been few women in the colony; now married men brought their wives, and the Company had made arrangements for young ladies of good character to cross the ocean, and the colony and the various “hundreds” surrounding it were beginning to flourish and prosper. From the Old English hundred, established before the Norman Conquests. A great swath of land where a hundred families could live.
    On his last trip to Virginia, Jamie had staked out his own land. He and his father were heavy investors in the London Company, but Carlyle Hundred, as he was calling his land, came to him directly from the king in recognition of the services he had rendered there.
    His land was directly upon the James River, in a far more fortuitous spot than Jamestown, so he thought, for his land was higher and not so dank and infested as the Jamestown acreage. It was beautiful, high land, with a small natural harbor. The pines and grass grew richly, so profuse that the area seemed a blue-green. By the water there was a meadow, and as Jamie had stood there, alone with the sound of the sea and the very quiet of the earth, he had felt anew his passion for the land. It would be great. The country stretched forever. It was where he would dig his roots, and it was where hischildren would be born, where they would grow, where they would flourish. The Carlyle Hundred. “It seems to be a land of endless opportunity,” he said aloud.
    “I’d enjoy any of your opportunity,” Robert replied with a sigh. He had gambled away much of his own inheritance and, indeed, traveled with Jamie now in the hopes of meeting a lady of fortune who would appreciate his fine lineage and ignore his lack of a purse.
    “If you choose to come with me, I will deed you a thousand acres of your