On the drive south to Jamestown on Wednesday morning, Quinn and I tried to parse Noah Seely’s theory about why someone had murdered Prescott: because of what he was searching for or because someone didn’t want him to find it.
“Noah said he had no idea what it was,” I said. “So how did he know Prescott had angered someone enough to make him—or her—commit murder?”
“Prescott must have told Noah he pissed someone off,” Quinn said.
“You’d think Noah would want to know why. Or what. And especially who.”
“Not necessarily. First of all, Noah doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would ask,” Quinn said. “You’re the one who told me he worked in intelligence before he retired. He kept secrets for a living. Second, Prescott might not have made a big deal about it.”
I thought about it. Quinn could be right. Prescott could have just come out with some off-the-cuff remark. Taking risks was part of the thrill of the hunt. Maybe even a prerequisite.
“I guess so,” I said. “Noah is the kind of guy who believes in ‘need-to-know,’ and perhaps he thought this wasn’t one of those times. Maybe Prescott mentioned it in passing because—as Noah said—it’s not the first time he’s alienated someone when he’s been on the trail of whatever it is he wants. Noah probably didn’t think anything of it, either—until Prescott turned up dead.”
“Plus you’ve got Bobby who believes someone murdered Prescott because of money and the fact that he was threatening to sell a big chunk of Avery Communications. Specifically the Washington Tribune,” Quinn said. “Do you think he’s wrong?”
“Who? Bobby or Noah?”
“Take your pick.”
“I don’t know. I wonder who else knew about the lost treasure Prescott was looking for.”
“You do.”
A shiver ran down my spine. I didn’t want to end up like Prescott.
“I have an idea what it might be. Only because Prescott asked me to sell him Ian’s Madeira and then suggested the clue to where I might find it was in Leland’s ‘secret’ safe-deposit box. Without Hobson Banks’s letter and those newspaper photos of Jock and Prescott at Bruton Parish when the graveyard was being excavated, I would have had no idea about any of this,” I said.
“I still think someone else might be looking for the same thing, darling.” Quinn gave me a look that didn’t do anything to quiet my uneasiness.
“Look, the official reason we’re driving down to Jamestown and Williamsburg today is to meet with Josie Wilde. Talk to her about getting her to help us at the vineyard. No one has a clue we’re also going to talk to her about Bruton Vault and whether it exists or not.”
“Fair enough. But depending on what we find out today,” Quinn said, “I think it would be a good idea to talk to Bobby when we get back to Atoka.”
“Are you kidding? I already told him when he questioned me the other day about Prescott telling me he was on the verge of solving a puzzle that’s baffled people for centuries.” I twirled my finger next to my temple. “Bobby thinks that’s nuts. He thinks I’m nuts. Don’t forget, Clay’s trying to make a case that Prescott wasn’t mentally competent when he died. That he wasn’t capable of making sound financial decisions because he was living in his own imaginary little world.”
Quinn groaned. “What a mess.” He reached for his to-go coffee mug and took a sip. “This has gone cold. Want to stop for another coffee?”
“Not just now,” I said, an edge of excitement creeping into my voice. I pointed to the exit sign next to the highway. “This is where we turn off to take the back road to Jamestown. We’re almost there.”
IT HAD BEEN A dozen years since I visited Jamestown—both sites—the living history exhibition where visitors could explore a replica of the colonial fort, see a Powhatan Indian village, and tour replicas of the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery—the three ships the settlers had sailed on in 1607—and the actual site of the original fort where archaeologists were still making new discoveries.
In the 1950s a scenic twenty-three-mile road known as Colonial Parkway had been completed that connected the Jamestown Settlement, the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, and Colonial Williamsburg in what was known as the Historic Triangle.
America started here.
The site of the Jamestown fort, known as Historic Jamestowne to distinguish it from the Jamestown Settlement, was located off a spur of Colonial Parkway. We drove across a bridge that led to what had once been a peninsula but, thanks to rising water levels and changes in the topography of the James River, was now Jamestown Island.
“I didn’t expect it to be so remote,” Quinn said as we drove along a desolate stretch of road surrounded by nothing but forests of pine trees and bare deciduous trees. We hadn’t seen a car for a couple of miles.
“The fort is located on the banks of the James River,” I said. “Not so far inland that the settlers couldn’t easily sail back out to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Plus, the land belonged to the Powhatan Indians. The English were encroaching on their territory, so they stayed near the water on purpose.”
Quinn pulled into a parking lot where fewer than half a dozen cars were parked. A red-and-white Mini Cooper that reminded me of a car I used to own had a Virginia license plate from the Jamestown quadricentennial—a picture of the Susan Constant, along with 1607—JAMESTOWN—2007 written across the bottom. The tag read VAYNDOC.
“Vain doctor? A medical narcissist? Vein doctor? What do they call those people—phlebotomists?” Quinn started guessing as we parked next to the Mini and got out of the Jeep.
“Phlebotomists are the people who draw your blood for lab tests,” I said. “Phlebologists are vein doctors. Personally, I think it stands for V-A Wine Doc. Virginia wine doctor. As in Dr. Josephine Wilde. I bet that’s her car.”
He laughed. “Good call. I bet you’re right.”
The Visitor Center was a long, low gray-blue building with a row of windows and reminded me of a large shed. It sat on the edge of the parking lot and looked as if it were meant to blend unobtrusively with the scenery. A sign out front announced we had arrived at America’s birthplace.
I recognized Josephine Wilde the moment we walked inside the building. For one thing, her photo appeared regularly in all the major wine industry and vineyard management journals. For another she was also frequently featured in glossy magazines like Wine Spectator, Saveur, and Food and Wine. Last but not least, she was drop-dead gorgeous.
She had been speaking with a woman behind the ticket sales counter, but she turned around and smiled when Quinn and I entered the large, airy atrium. It was deserted except for the three of us and the ticket sales person; the place seemed to echo.
“You must be Lucie and Quinn.” Josie Wilde came over and put out her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Josie.”
She had the flaming red curls of a Botticelli angel, wide violet eyes, and a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Dressed in a bright red down jacket, a navy turtleneck sweater, jeans, and work boots, Josie Wilde looked like the person you wanted with you if you were ever lost in a forest in the middle of nowhere or stranded on a desert island. She had the calm, unflappable demeanor of someone who would know how to start a fire without matches, build a shelter using a Swiss Army knife, and find food using her wits.
Quinn and I shook hands with her as she sized us both up. Her eyes lingered on Quinn, who I hoped would be on his best behavior. He wasn’t still totally sold that we needed her. I was.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said.
“Absolutely,” Quinn said. “A pleasure.”
He wasn’t sold on her. The look in her eyes said she knew it, too.
“Come on,” she said, “let’s walk down to the fort. It’s so cold and raw today I think we’re going to have the place practically to ourselves.”
“Thanks for doing this,” I said. “We appreciate it.”
Josie led us to a door at the back of the Visitor Center and we followed her outside. It was even more hauntingly desolate than the drive along Colonial Parkway had been. Dead trees poked up out of a marshy swamp covered with dry, straw-colored weeds. We walked across a pedestrian footbridge that looked as if it led nowhere.
“You’re looking at the Pitch and Tar Swamp.” Josie gestured to the bleak landscape on either side of us.
“Seems like an appropriate name,” Quinn said.
“Look,” I said. “The fort.”
A crude, uneven fence built with spindly-looking logs rose in the distance. Beyond it, a British Union Jack flew atop a flagpole. It looked both defiant and somehow inadequate in the lonely surroundings.
“Where’s the river?” Quinn asked.
“On the other side of the palisade fence,” Josie said. “Archeologists found stains in the clay soil from the original fence, so the one you’re looking at is located exactly where the settlers built it, although part of it’s now under water in the James. It’s triangle-shaped so it completely surrounded the fort.”
The James River came into view just then, wide and gleaming, the color of dull pewter. The shoreline on the other side was a long, low, dark smudge. Proper grass had been planted in this area and gravel paths with benches lining them crisscrossed each other leading to the fort and down to the river. A map under glass showed the full fort, the Visitor Center, a picnic area, a cafe, and a building called the Archaearium.
We stopped in front of a tall gray obelisk.
“What’s this?” Quinn asked.
“It was erected for the tercentennial in 1907,” Josie said, giving him a puzzled look. “A monument to Jamestown when it was a shrine to old Virginia. To what we wanted our history to be.”
“What you wanted your history to be?”
“You’ll have to excuse him,” I said. “He’s from California.”
Josie’s face cleared and she grinned.
“It’s a rather large state on the West Coast,” Quinn said. “Of America. Although we’re big enough to be our own country.”
Josie laughed. “Obviously this is your first time here?”
He nodded and she turned to me, “You’ve been here, Lucie, of course?”
I said, chagrined, “Yes, but it’s been a while. The last time was for the quadricentennial, in 2007.”
“Honey,” she said, giving me a severe look, “that’s a lifetime. You’re not going to recognize the place. They’ve been making discoveries that put Jamestown on the list of top ten archeological finds in the world. Twice. That means what they found here was significant enough to be on a par with ancient sites like Athens and Cairo.”
She caught my look of surprise. “You didn’t know that?” she asked.
“No,” I said in a faint voice.
“So why is this monument a shrine to old Virginia?” Quinn asked.
Josie turned back to him. “That,” she said, “is the million-dollar question. And the answer is that until archeologists started finding remains of the old fort and of colonial life here, Jamestown was a place to commemorate Virginia’s British heritage, to celebrate our accomplishments and achievements in establishing the first permanent English colony in the New World. Also it was the first place a representative government existed in America.” She waved a hand like she was shooing a fly. “We sort of glossed over that pesky old conflict with the Indians and the fact that slavery also began here. The first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619. Sort of by accident, but still, it happened. All of that makes for a very different narrative.”
“The fort wasn’t discovered until the mid 1990s,” I said to Quinn. “Before then, everyone assumed it had disappeared into the river because of shifting tides and erosion.” I gave Josie a sidelong glance. “I do remember some history.”
She grinned again and Quinn said, “Wait. Do you mean until about twentysomething years ago no one knew where the Jamestown fort really was? You thought it was in the river somewhere? For almost four hundred years?”
Josie and I looked at each other. “More like three hundred,” she said.
“That’s still a long time to lose a valuable piece of American history, Virginia people,” Quinn said.
“Point taken, Mr. California,” I said. “Except it wasn’t lost. It was more like a miscalculation about where it was.”
“A miscalculation? Really?”
“However, we are making up for lost time.” Josie said in a bright voice. She pointed to a roped-off rectangular area that was about twenty by thirty feet. Inside a tarp covered what was clearly a pit; sandbags placed around the perimeter of the tarp kept it secure. “As you can see by all the tarps and fenced-off areas around here, this is still an active archeological site. For obvious reasons everything is covered up now to protect it from the weather. But if you come back in the spring you get a chance to watch the archeologists doing their work.”
“You said a lot of new things have been discovered since the quadricentennial,” I said.
Josie looked around as if she were trying to conjure a list. “That’s right. Since then they’ve uncovered the foundations of a couple of buildings that were inside the fort … the original church, the kitchen, the well. They also found structures in what was known as New Town.” She gestured behind us. “Plus they uncovered a couple of dump sites.”
“What’s a dump site?” Quinn asked.
We were heading toward a fretwork structure of slender logs located inside the perimeter of the triangle fort. It looked like the skeleton of a large building.
“Just what you think it is,” Josie told him, “Dump sites or trash pits, if you prefer, are an archeologist’s treasure trove. One of the things archeologists learned from them is that the Virginia Company in London bought provisions for the settlers on the cheap. The dump sites are full of the junk people threw out. The stuff that didn’t work. They even found helmets, breastplates … armor. Not a good sign.”
She watched us absorb that information. What must it have been like for the colonists to realize halfway around the world that they had been suckered into a deal made by a company motivated by profit rather than their well-being? That the owners wouldn’t be there to watch this colony fail? Their lives wouldn’t literally depend on it, so tough luck.
“The other thing they learned,” Josie went on, “is that the men who risked their lives to come to Jamestown weren’t lazy good-for-nothings who refused to work as some people had thought. Instead they discovered that this place was a hellhole and the men who came here weren’t prepared for what they found. It’s practically a miracle anyone survived.”
“Why was it a hellhole?” Quinn asked.
“A lot of reasons.” Josie started ticking them off on her fingers. “The worst drought in the last six hundred years coincided with the first six years of Jamestown. A lot of people starved to death. Then you’ve got the James, a salty tidal river that becomes even saltier in summer. That meant no digging deep wells. Anyone who didn’t starve probably died of dysentery or typhoid. Last but not least, two-thirds of the colonists who came here had never done manual labor before in their lives. The sailors from the three ships that brought them to America stayed on for six weeks and built their fort before they returned to England.”
“I didn’t know about the sailors building the fort,” I said.
“The Virginia Company of London didn’t send the cream of the crop,” she said. “The men who came were hustlers. Scrappers. Children. Servants. Second sons who had no hope of inheriting anything in England.”
“This building must be where they lived,” I said, indicating the open wooden structure surrounding us.
“The barracks. You wouldn’t have seen it in 2007,” Josie said. “When John Smith became governor he made the men build it so they weren’t sleeping outside in trenches as they had been doing. He also made the rule that anyone who didn’t work didn’t eat. It was pretty effective.”
A frigid gust of wind blew in off the river as she spoke. I pulled up the hood of my jacket and jammed my hands into my pockets. Quinn tugged on his knitted cap so it covered more of his ears and Josie zipped up her down jacket. No one else had joined the three of us the entire time we’d been here. The fort, which already seemed a grim, desolate place, looked increasingly bleak as dark clouds across the river scudded toward us.
“How did they survive in weather like this?” I said. “It must have been brutal.”
“It was,” Josie said. “The summer wasn’t much better.”
We left the delicate-looking barracks and walked over to an area that had been marked off by unfinished walls that appeared to be made of packed earth and came up to about the height of my waist. Wooden benches faced an area separated by a railing. Four crosses commemorating graves stood inside what must have been where the minister preached his sermons and led his congregation in prayer. This had to be the original church.
Fifty feet away—outside the walls of the fort—was a brick church that had been here on my last visit. In fact it had been here for more than a century and I knew it had been built on the site of several churches, including one that Nathaniel Bacon the Rebel burned down when he torched Jamestown in 1676. The only part of that church to survive the fire was the bell tower, the remains of which I was looking at right now.
According to what I’d read over the last few days, Nathaniel Bacon the Elder, a distant cousin of his rebel namesake and kin to Sir Francis Bacon, had buried the documents he brought over from England under that very bell tower. Later they had been moved to a vault at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg. The answer to Prescott Avery’s search for a lost treasure could have had its origins a few feet from where I stood.
“… you’re standing on the site of the earliest church erected in Jamestown,” Josie was saying to Quinn. “This was the church where Pocahontas married John Rolfe.”
“Are you serious? Pocahontas?” Quinn sounded awed.
Josie nodded. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of the cartoon version of a willowy girl with doe eyes and a feather in her long, dark hair. The real Pocahontas moved to England where her name was changed to Rebecca Rolfe. She died there and was buried there. In Kent, actually.”
Quinn gave her a guilty smile and she said in exasperation, “I should have guessed, Mr. California. The land of Mickey Mouse. Of course you’re imagining a Disney character.”
He laughed and I said, “As long as we’re on the subject of fantasy, what about Nathaniel Bacon the Elder burying documents he brought over from England under that bell tower over there?” I pointed to the church. “Supposedly they were moved to Williamsburg during the fire set by the other Nathaniel Bacon when he burned Jamestown. Or maybe even earlier.”
Josie raised an eyebrow and turned to look at the bell tower. “I’ve heard all those stories. No one really knows precisely when the documents were moved to Williamsburg. Or, to be honest, if there were any documents to move.” She held up the index and middle fingers of both hands to put quotation marks around “documents.”
“You don’t believe there was anything to the story?” Quinn asked.
“In all this time, no one has found proof that there was anything to it. Just a lot of theories. Some of them crazier than others. I’m a scientist. I deal in facts.” She looked over and gave me a wry smile. “I can see you’re disappointed, Lucie.”
“Is it possible you were digging at the wrong place at Bruton Parish?” I asked. “What if the documents had already been moved?”
“You mean moved from Bruton Vault?”
I nodded.
“For one thing, we didn’t find a vault,” she said. “Even an empty one.”
I shivered and she said, “Come on, let’s walk over to the Archaearium. We’ll be warmer inside. There’s an exhibition on the Sea Venture I know you wanted to see. It wasn’t there in 2007, either. You can have a look and then we should head over to Williamsburg. I’m afraid I’ve got a two o’clock appointment at William & Mary that just came up this morning.”
“We appreciate you giving us this time here,” I said. “And we haven’t even spoken about the problems at the vineyard.”
“I looked both of you up,” she said. “And your vineyard. Now that I’ve met the two of you, I might be willing to take you on. It’s a close working relationship so I’ve got to like my clients or it doesn’t go well. My only condition, as I’ve told you, is that you have to be willing to go along with what I advise if I’m going to put in the kind of work I intend to do for you. I want you to make good wine. Actually, I want you to make great wine. Wine that wins national prizes, maybe even international prizes. That’s the plan.”
She hadn’t said anything about us liking her. I wondered if the jury was still out with Quinn.
He started to say, “We’d—”
I elbowed him before he could finish. I wanted her to work with us. She was the best and she knew what she was doing.
“Love to,” I said. “That would be terrific, Josie. Thank you so much.”
“Lucie took the words right out of my mouth,” Quinn said and I caught him protecting his ribs from another dig.
“You both need to be one hundred percent on board,” she said with a knowing look at Quinn. “And you need to come to my lab in Charlottesville to see what I can do for you. Then I want to see your vineyard. On my own. Without either of you with me.”
“It’s a deal,” I said and Quinn nodded.
“All right,” she said. “After you visit me and I visit you, let’s see where we are. Okay?”
“That sounds fair,” Quinn said. “What do you think, Lucie?”
“I think I’d really like Josie to work with us,” I said. “So I hope the next two meetings are smooth sailing.”
“You have an interesting vineyard and a long family history of owning your land so I know how personally important this is to you, Lucie.” Josie hooked a thumb in Quinn’s direction. “However Mr. California here is not completely sold on the idea. That’s why I’d like you to come to the lab. We need to talk some more.”
This time she did see me elbow Quinn. “Mr. California,” I said, “will see the light by the next time we meet. You have no worries.”
We had been walking past rows of metal crosses with no adornment and no names—a large graveyard on the edge of the James River. Next to it was a larger-than-life weathered bronze statue of John Smith, his back to us, proud and defiant, as he looked out over the James River. I already knew that the inscription on the front of the statue read GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA, 1608 along with his coat of arms: VINCERE EST VIVERE. TO CONQUER IS TO LIVE. He’d returned to England under arrest, just as he’d arrived in Jamestown. Eventually he died there without ever returning to Virginia, though he’d written books about his adventures in the New World.
Who were the men buried in the graveyard next to his statue? Had he known many of them and led them as governor? Years ago when I visited the American cemetery in Normandy with my French grandfather, he told me that all the graves of the American soldiers buried there faced west, toward the Atlantic Ocean. Toward home. I wondered if any of the dead buried here at Jamestown had wanted to face England, their home—or did they not want to go back, whatever the consequences?
A small sign indicated the site of Confederate earthworks as Quinn, Josie, and I continued walking toward a long, low building made almost entirely of glass and set up off the ground on short, stubby blocks: the Archaearium.
“Jamestown was a Civil War fort, too?” Quinn pointed to the sign, changing the subject smooth as silk, so we weren’t talking about us working with Josie anymore.
She nodded. “The Jamestown settlers picked the perfect strategic location for their fort. Not only were they worried about the Powhatan Indians, they were also afraid the Spanish—who believed Florida extended all the way to Virginia—might sail up the river and attack them. The fort was so well situated the Confederate Army used it as a base to prevent the Union Army from reaching Richmond. Even now the U.S. military still brings troops here to study its strategic importance.”
“There must be ghosts that haunt this place,” I said. “Spirits of people who died at Jamestown under such horrible conditions.”
Josie gave me a startled look. “There are,” she said. “I feel them as I walk around these grounds. It’s as if the sadness and tragedy never left. It’s still here—in some places more than others—but it’s real.”
“All right, you two,” Quinn said, holding the door to the Archaearium for us. “Can we talk about something else besides Jamestown being haunted?”
After the cold, sharp wind that had buffeted us outside, it felt good to be somewhere warm.
“Sure,” Josie said. “Welcome to the Archaearium. The museum of Historic Jamestowne.”
“I’ve been here before,” I said.
She nodded. “Right after it opened. Now it holds more than four thousand artifacts. It’s expanded a lot in the last decade. One of the things I especially like is the fact that because the museum is located right here at the settlement, whatever has been discovered in the field is integrated into the exhibits almost immediately. It’s rare to have a museum that’s so current and up to date.”
A sinewy map of the James River was painted on the floor in the lobby where we stood; a mural in shades of brown and tan depicting London in the early 1600s as a hurly-burly city with the Thames flowing behind it proclaimed THE VIRGINIA COMPANY in bold white letters with a description of how a group of investors decided to take a chance on establishing a colony in Virginia.
England. Where it all began.
“There are eight galleries laid out chronologically,” Josie said. “We’ll follow them clockwise through the museum.”
“Are we the only people here?” I asked.
“We might be,” she said. “Though there will be at least one person from the museum staff in the gift shop. It’s the last stop.”
Though the floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the building let in plenty of natural light as we walked through the exhibits, on this gloomy, overcast day the somber exhibitions looked especially stark and sobering. Our footsteps seemed to echo; I was certain we were alone.
The Jamestown Settlement’s Archaearium—the repository of artifacts from a fraught, violent, and tragic past—reminded me of a warehouse with its muted browns and grays and twinkling spotlights shining on Plexiglas display cases. It also seemed to be a place where you whispered or spoke quietly so as not to disturb what was preserved here.
“The Sea Venture exhibit is nearly at the end,” Josie murmured, confirming my suspicion of library silence.
We had gone more than halfway around the museum when Quinn stopped so abruptly that I ran into him.
We were at an exhibit called Survival. Quinn leaned forward to read the explanation inside the Plexiglas cabinet. “What the … oh, Jesus Christ.”
In front of us, the lifelike bust of a beautiful young girl with unblemished skin, full lips, and wavy golden hair partially covered by an embroidered cream-colored cap stared sightlessly into the distance.
“This,” Josie said, “is one of the more recent developments that the archeologists working here have managed to confirm along with the help of the Smithsonian. It’s … unfortunately … proof of cannibalism. Survival cannibalism.”
“Survival cannibalism,” Quinn repeated. “You mean they ate each other because they had to?”
“That’s right.”
“They ate … her?” I asked. “This girl?”
“You didn’t know about this?” Josie asked. “They call her Jane.”
I wished Josie hadn’t given her a name. “No,” I said in a faint voice, placing my hands over my stomach. “Somehow I missed it. Though I don’t know how.”
“The winter of 1609 and 1610 was called the Starving Time,” Josie said. “By the time the Sea Venture landed in Jamestown a year and a half after it was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda—in the spring of 1610—the men who arrived found only fifty people out of the entire population of Jamestown. They looked like walking skeletons.”
“How did they—the researchers—find out about the cannibalism?” Quinn asked.
“Another trash pit,” Josie said in a matter-of-fact voice. “They discovered her remains. Bone fragments. Part of her skull. She’d been hacked to death with a cleaver and then eaten. I’ll spare you the details—it’s more gruesome than you want to know; there were a lot of blows and failed attempts to crack her skull—but scientists from the Smithsonian and Jamestown archeologists were able to reconstruct her face using CT scanning and computer graphics. They were also able to determine where she came from in England and that she was approximately fourteen years old.”
“Good God,” Quinn said.
I remained mute.
“Are you sure about the cannibalism?” Quinn asked.
Josie nodded. “Absolutely sure. Believe me, everyone did a lot of research and double-checking before putting out something like this to the public. Come,” she said, “let’s go find the Sea Venture. To this day it’s called ‘the shipwreck that saved America.’ At least that story has a happy ending. There are a lot of what-if theories that if the Sea Venture hadn’t been shipwrecked and had arrived with the other supply ships instead of a year and a half later, the British might have given up any idea of establishing a colony in the New World. Everyone at Jamestown almost certainly would have died—or disappeared like the lost colony of Roanoke.”
No one spoke as Quinn and I followed Josie until we reached the display depicting the wreck of the Sea Venture on the island of Bermuda. Knowing what we knew now about the cannibalism that had preceded the arrival of the two smaller boats built out of the salvaged remnants of the Sea Venture, it seemed even more astonishing that the passengers had found anyone still alive in Jamestown that spring. Had the Jamestown survivors hidden what they’d done from the unsuspecting colonists who arrived with fresh supplies and an improbable story of their own survival on an island that everyone had believed was enchanted?
“There’s a quicker way back to the Visitor Center than walking through the fort and across the bridge,” Josie said. “It’s used by staff and the researchers, but it’s so cold and windy we’ll take it, since it’s more protected.”
We were still subdued as she led us to a path that took us into the forest behind the museum and the fort.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“The staff buildings are back here,” she said as the path widened into a dirt-and-gravel road.
The fort, the river, and the Archaearium had disappeared. We came to a fork in the road where two moss-covered stone pillars looked as if they’d once marked the entrance to the settlement. A wrought-iron gate with ivy curling through it was propped against one of the pillars.
Quinn and I exchanged glances. The woods surrounding us were completely silent. No birdsong or the scrabbling noises of squirrels or other animals anywhere.
“Come on,” Josie said, as we left the road, “this path will take us back to the parking lot.”
“It’s even spooky here,” I said.
“I know what you mean,” Josie said. “You don’t want to be walking through these woods alone at night … are you all right, Quinn?”
“Just thinking,” he said, “about the Donner Party. They ate their dead when they got stranded in the Sierra Nevadas on their way to California back in the Gold Rush days.”
“The Donner Party,” I said. “I forgot about that. My God, how bad does it have to get when people do something like that?”
“Pretty bad,” Josie said. “What happened at Jamestown didn’t happen to any of the other early American colonies—Plymouth, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Dutch in New York. At Jamestown they were so desperate they ended up killing each other for food after they’d eaten everything else—including their shoes—that they could find to eat.”
The view opened up in front of us and suddenly we were back in the parking lot.
“Sorry to end on such a gruesome topic,” she added.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Thank you for the tour. It was unforgettable.”
Her face cracked into a small smile. Then she added in a sober voice, “The tercentennial was a celebration of the first English settlement in North America. By the time the quadricentennial came around and we knew what really happened here it was more of a commemoration. Everyone should visit this place. It’s important.”
She hit a button on her key fob. Two quick beeps sounded as the parking lights flashed on the Mini. “Why don’t you follow me to Williamsburg?” she said.
On the fifteen-minute drive along Colonial Parkway, I kept thinking about The Tempest, which I’d just finished reading, and how it had a happy ending as everyone prepared to leave the island: Ferdinand and Miranda about to get married and Prospero giving up his library of magical books and asking the audience’s forgiveness for causing the shipwreck and controlling the characters in the play so that they would do as he wished.
The story at Jamestown—starvation, death, a fire set by one of their own consuming the settlement like a funeral pyre—had been so different I wondered how much Shakespeare had known about what awaited the survivors of the Sea Venture after they reached Virginia.
I’d learned more than I bargained for at Jamestown and Josie had said there was nothing to find at Bruton Parish. Yet Jock and Prescott Avery both seemed to think, to the contrary, there was something to Bruton Vault—that it had existed. Prescott hinted before he died that he might even know where the contents were now located.
I would have nothing new to bring with me to the Folger Library tomorrow proving that Shakespeare might not have written Shakespeare. And now that I knew about the cannibalism that had taken place at Jamestown, the memory of the young girl named Jane would haunt me for a long time.