When Joan Peirce sailed for Virginia in 1609, she little knew the adventure and hardship that awaited her. In this finale of the Jamestown Sky series, Joan faces her hardest year since the Starving Time. The colony first endures massacre, followed by famine and epidemic contagion, and Virginia teeters on the edge of collapse once more. Through love and losses and setbacks, Joan again discovers that while life on the Virginia frontier is filled with heartache, it is also never without hope.

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      Jane and Isabella were already watching the ship as I arrived.
     “Corn, we hope!” Isabella said brightly. “We’ve seen no one disembark yet.”
     I scowled. “I hear the ship has no corn.”
     “What?” Isabella turned to me.
     “Pray Esther, my near-deaf  servant, hath misunderstood,”  I added. I didn’t have heart enough to mention the illness.
     Yet as passengers soon filed off ship, it was easy to see something was wrong.
     “They … they are staggering,” said Isabella, watching them alight.
     “Well, the sea does cause something like that,” I murmured,  trying to make sense of it. No, it cannot be.
     “Not like that.” Jane, too, was staring at the newcomers.
     “The beer, it was bad,” muttered a mariner to a man nearby unlading the ship. “I wouldn’t drink of it if I were thee.”
     “Bad?” The servant paused.
     We leaned in, too. Then I decided to make bold. Learn from those who know, Maggie had taught me.
     “What do you mean, the beer was bad?” I asked as I approached the mariner.
     The sailor turned to gape at me. “What I said. The beer was a-stinking from the time we got ourselves aboard. If we could smell of it, I do reckon that the greedy Duppa what brewed it could smell of it, too! And then folks began dyin’. Dyin’, and dyin’ and dyin’ and illness spreading on to the next. We lost husbands and wives and children and crew. I nearly died myself. Now do that look right to you?”
     He gestured to those who seemed disoriented. His sunken eyes and ghostly skin told me as much as his words that the journey had been a hard one.