A Tale of Two Queens

“Peepholes--that’s what tapestries were good for. You hung them with the broken threads just on top of certain holes in the oak panelling of the wall underneath. Within the wall itself, there was a space just wide enough for a watcher to walk through.” John Mowbray, a “spider” (as spies were known in the Court of England’s Elizabeth I) gives us this bit of tradecraft as he snoops among his employers at Hampton Court Palace early on in Roanoke, Margaret Lawrence’s astonishingly good new historical novel about the fate of the New World’s 16th-century Roanoke Colony.

Soon after that, we’re allowed to listen from behind similar hangings at El Escorial, Philip II’s magnificent palace northwest of Madrid, as that Spanish monarch grumbles to one of his ministers about his digestion and plots to thwart any British attempts to plunder gold and jewels from Virginia. The eventual translator of the secret record of their conversation is the same John Mowbray--obviously a spider with valuable skills.

But Mowbray is not this book’s most important character; he’s just the cleverly distanced narrator of Roanoke, who quickly lets his remarkable colleague Gabriel North take and hold center stage. We first meet North (a “tall, slender fellow of middle age, more unshaven than bearded, his sandy hair frizzled by the river damp ... Within the ratty costume of fabric and flesh, he waited out his private apocalypse”) as he saves Queen Elizabeth’s life in 1585, fighting off the 24th assassination attempt against her since her ex-communication by Rome in 1570. For his heroic efforts, North is ordered to set meager sail for the New World in a foolhardy convoy promoted by Sir Walter Raleigh, the Virgin Queen’s favorite. “He was the son and grandson of farmers and sailors, and he made the capital error of being proud of it,” Mowbray says about Raleigh. Underfinanced and commanded by inexperienced and unworthy officers, the Roanoke Colony produced one of history’s most baffling mysteries, its occupants disappearing into the shadows of time.

Lawrence’s first wonderful conceit concerning this tale was finding in the original Roanoke passenger lists a “single woman named Margaret Lawrence who made it more or less inevitable that I would write this book.” The second is her creation of a Native American queen to rival Queen Elizabeth. No, not Pocahantas (who was prominent in Virginia’s Jamestown Settlement during the early 1600s), but the widowed Na’ia. The intrepid North is dispatched to Virginia to seduce this fictional lovely. “Na’iya--so the Secota tribesmen spoke her name, with a slight stop of the throat, as though she took their breath away ... She was small in stature, slender of face but strong-muscled, with an elegant economy of movement that seemed to be bred in her ...,” writes Lawrence.

“Na’ia was quite alone when we caught our first glimpse of her. She might almost have been waiting for us, perfected, opaque as a shell,” Mowbray tells us. She and Gabriel North begin a tangled relationship, he first winning the hearts of the young widow’s two young children and then earning their mother’s love and loyalty. But when North is suddenly summoned back to England by Elizabeth (“He would never be a spider again,” explains Mowbray. “His gaze was already fixed on that dangerous spot in the inner distance, the one that means you’ve caught sight of something ...”), Na’ia appears to go on with her life as before. Only a brief, heartbreaking final scene on a Breton beach lets us know the more complicated truth.