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  He was lucky. The sound of the shot was like a cannon blast going off in that innocent land and the flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees in a flurry of whirling wings. But John’s target bird could not fly up, it spiralled downward, one wing broken, bleeding from the breast. John dropped his musket and taper and ran across the cleared ground, crossing it in five giant strides. The bird was scrabbling to get away, one wing trailing. John snatched it up and wrung its neck quickly and mercifully. He felt the little heart pound and then stop. He went back to the doorstep, put the bird inside, near the fireplace with the unfinished fish trap, and reloaded the gun.

  The light was going fast and it was getting cold and dark. The pigeons, recovering from their fright, circled the little clearing and landed in the trees again. John took aim and fired and the birds dashed skyward again, but this time nothing fell to earth.

  ‘Just the one,’ John said. ‘Well, that will do for my supper at least.’

  He plucked the bird carefully, saving the feathers in a fold of linen. ‘That’ll make me a pillow some day,’ he said with assumed cheerfulness to the shadowy room. He gutted and beheaded the bird, tossing the entrails into the water in his cooking pot which he set on the fire for soup. Then he split the pigeon into four, and skewered the pieces carefully on a sharp green stick and set it before the fire with the pot beneath it to catch the dripping juices.

  It was a long while for a hungry man to wait but John did not allow himself to hurry, nor to be distracted from the task of turning and turning the fowl while its stubbly skin grew golden, and then brown, and then finally crisp and black. ‘Pray God it’s cooked through,’ John said fervently, his stomach rumbling with hunger.

  He took the skewer, and with his knife pushed the pieces off the charred wood on to his trencher. The meat was speckled with burned wood. John flicked the splinters away and then took up a little leg joint. It was wonderful: hot, tasty, and strong. John burned his lips against the hot skin but nothing could have stopped him biting into the flesh. He ate every scrap of meat and then dropped the bare bones reverently into his cooking pot. For the first time in his little house he looked around with something like confidence.

  ‘That was good,’ he said quietly. He gave a quiet, satisfied belch. ‘That was excellent. I shall hunt again tomorrow. And I shall have the soup for my breakfast. A man cannot work on the land with only porridge in his belly.’

  He picked a scrap of meat from his teeth. ‘By God, that was good.’

  He kicked off his boots and drew his satchel and spare jacket towards him, folded them under his head for a pillow, and then pulled his travelling cloak and a rug over him. He opened one eye to see that the fire was banked in, and his fish trap was safe, and then he was asleep in moments.

  May 1643

  Next day John set to work on the fish trap for an hour and set it in the cold, swift-flowing water. The meat from last night’s supper stayed in his stomach more comfortingly than porridge, he felt stronger and more competent all day; but the following morning he felt hungrier, as if his body were expecting meat again. He had the soup from the pigeon bones for breakfast and then had it again, thinned down and less satisfying, for his dinner at midday.

  In the afternoon he went to look at his fish trap and found a small trout in the keep-net.

  ‘Praise God!’ John said devoutly, inwardly praising himself. He lifted the trap from the river, carefully supporting his trophy, and smacked the squirming little fish on the head. He cleaned it and gutted it. There was not much left of it after he had cut its head and tail off but he set it in the pot with a little water and dried maize flour to make a stock and simmered it for a few moments, and then left it to cool until supper.

  These foods became his staple diet. The monotonous blandness of the cornflour – as porridge, as vegetable, as sauce, and the occasional treat of fish or meat. Slowly, John adapted, and only ate well and with relish in poignant dreams of Lambeth feasts: great dinners at Twelfth Night, rich tables at Easter.

  Every day he chopped wood, and went out into the forest to see if he could recognise any berries or nuts which Suckahanna had gathered, but the branches were showing nothing more than fresh green leaves and the nuts had all blown down in the winter gales or been eaten by squirrels and mice. The woods were not as friendly to John as they had been to her. Everywhere that she had looked there had been food or tools or medicines or herbs. Everything that John saw was strange.

  After weeks and weeks of this he thought that he had had his fill of strangeness. His father had loved the rare and the unusual and John had inherited that love. Their whole lives were based on the joy of difference: different plants, flowers, artefacts. But now John was in a different world, where everything was strange to him and he felt that perhaps he liked strangeness only against the background of the familiar. He liked the exotic flower when it grew in his English garden at Lambeth. It was harder to admire when it was growing against an exotic tree, under a foreign sky.

  ‘I’m heartstruck,’ John said in sudden amazement in the middle of the second month, and a great longing for Lambeth and the children and even for Hester rushed over him so powerfully that he staggered, as if from physical sickness, and had to steady himself with a hand on a tree trunk. ‘God! I am longing for my home. It has been weeks, no, months since I came to live here and I have spoken to no man and seen no woman since the Hoberts left. I miss my home. And, my God, I am lonely.’

  He turned to look back at the little clearing and, plumb in the centre of it, the house as small and as rough as a wooden box made by a thick-handed apprentice. A sense of the minute scale of the house and the enormity of the forest rushed upon John, leaving him breathless and fearful. ‘But I’m making my home here,’ he said stubbornly.

  The wind, the massive wind, stirred the tops of the high, strong trees as if the very woods themselves were laughing at the false pride of a man who thought he could make a home among such wildness. John could labour here all his life and never manage to do more than survive. He could never build a house like the one at Lambeth, never make a garden like Oatlands. Those were achievements which took years of labour in a society rich in labour. Take away those riches, the work of many hands and many brains, and a man was like an animal in a wood – less than an animal, because every animal in the wood had its place in the scheme of things, food that was suited to it, a home which was right for it, whereas John had to fight to get enough food in this land of plenty, and had to struggle to keep his fire burning to keep his house warm.

  A sense of despair as real as darkness swept over him. ‘I could die out here,’ John thought, but he no longer spoke aloud. The very silence of the woods seemed too great to challenge, it silenced his little voice. ‘I will die out here.’ Every thought seemed to open a greater gulf beneath his feet. ‘I am making my home here, far from my children, from my wife, from my friends. I am making a place where I am all alone. And sooner or later, by accident or illness or old age, I will die here. I will die alone. In fact, if I fail for just one day, just one day, to get up and fetch water, chop wood, hunt or fish I will die here. I could starve to death before anyone came.’

  John pushed away from the tree but found that his legs could hardly support him. His sense of loneliness and fear had weakened him. He staggered back towards his house and thanked God there was at least a curl of smoke coming from the chimney, and suppawn in the cooking pot. John felt his throat close at the thought of eating cold porridge again. He fell to his hands and knees and retched. ‘God, my God,’ he said.

  A little saliva dribbled from his mouth. He wiped it on his sleeve. The strong brown homespun of the sleeve was stinking. He noticed it when he brought it to his face. ‘My clothes smell,’ he said in quiet surprise. ‘I must smell.’

  He touched his hand to his face. His beard had grown and was matted and dirty, the moustache was long around his mouth. ‘My breath must smell, I am filthy,’ he said softly. ‘I am so foul that I cannot even smell myself.�€