“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.

Nineteen

The weather had changed for the worse as we arrived in Williamsburg and it looked and felt as if snow was on the way. Josie parked in a commercial lot near the Wren Building at the edge of the William & Mary campus. Quinn pulled in next to the Mini.