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.