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colonists walked cautiously down the pathway to the shore to retrieve the baggage. Four soldiers with ready weapons escorted them, continuously scanned the forest in all directions. Emily studied the narrow strip of sky above the pathway, thought how the clouds looked like mounds of cotton floating on an inverted sea. All around her, thin rays of sunlight sliced through the tall canopy of trees, sparkled like gem stones on the dew that clung to every leaf. Not even the queen has so many diamonds, she thought. Would that
I
had a few. She stretched her arms out to the side, executed a slow, graceful pirouette, then another, and another. “George, it’s magnificent, so fresh, so free . . . so hot. Nothing like England.” She stopped. “George, you look as if you’re on your way to the gallows. What troubles you?”
    “Oh, just thinking.” He smiled. “It
is
beautiful. No smoke in the sky, no grit in the teeth.” George stood five-nine, had a ruddy complexion, a round face with high cheekbones, brown eyes, and long, sandy hair which he tied in a bundle in the back, just above his shoulders. He had a man’s body, which made people think he was older than he was, at least until he spoke, for he’d not yet found his man voice. He seldom smiled and always looked like he was brooding about something.
    “George, what troubles you? I’ll listen . . . better yet, tell me why you and your father are here.”
    He thought for a moment. “ Everything comes back to my mother . . . her death.”
    “Why do I always bring up painful things?”
    “No, Emily. I must accept her loss and deal with it. So when she died, Father and I were lost and depressed for a time. By the way, she, too, died of the Bloody Flux. It took Father a full two years to recover from her death. He stopped working the foundry, stopped eating, just sat and stared all day. I wasn’t much better, but I did the best I could to keep the foundry going. I only had two years’ experience as his apprentice, so I wasn’t very good at it, but good enough to get us by. When we heard about Governor White’s colony, we started thinking that perhaps we could start a new life. A colony would need all the things we knew how to make: nails, shovels, axes, shot, pikes, tools, even swords, and we heard they’d found iron here on one of the two earlier expeditions. So it all sounded quite enticing. Then it occurred to us that we might also be able to trade with the Savages,
if
they were friendly, and that we could also farm or sell our five hundred acres to someone else. So here we are. That’s the story . . . and Howe and Son are ready to start work at once.” He smiled, gave her a quick nod.
    “George, I think you and your father are exactly what we need here: good, sincere, honest, hard-working folk.” She held his hand. “I’m glad you’re with us, and I’m most glad you’re my friend.”
    George felt like warm water was trickling slowly over his head and shoulders. “Em, I . . . tell me about you and your father.”
    His shyness brought an understanding smile to her face. “Well, Father has dirt under his fingernails. He grew up a farmer’s son, but his father didn’t own anything. He was only a tenant to a wealthy lord and had to give most of his crop to the lord in payment. He wanted Father to have a better life; and in exchange for more crops, he made an arrangement with the lord to obtain an education for Father so he could teach school. So Father became a schoolmaster, and that’s why I know how to read and write, which, as you know, most common women don’t. I’m very grateful to him though as a child I fought it constantly . . . hated being indoors and studying all the time. He also made me—
made
me, mind you—learn French, Italian, Spanish, and a bit of Dutch; so I could teach and tutor wealthy people andtheir children. Well, it turned out that I rather enjoy languages, and they come quite easily to me, to the point that when I’m learning