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  He waited. The child, he could not even tell if it were a boy or a girl, wearing an apron of buckskin but otherwise naked, squatted in the doorway of the hut and regarded him with solemn dark eyes. John tried to smile. The child’s face was grave. John leaned back against the wall of the hut and waited.

  He could see the shadows lengthen in the little square of the doorway, and then he heard the sound of singing from far away. From the child’s silent alertness he guessed that it had heard them some minutes ago. John looked at the child and raised his eyebrows as if to ask what might be happening. The child was solemn as a warrior, and like a powerful warrior merely shook its head.

  John leaned back again and waited.

  The chorus of singing came nearer. John listened more intently. He was sure, he was certain, he could hear Suckahanna’s voice. Reason told him that it was not possible, that he had heard her speak only once or twice, that he surely could not hear her voice among many; but still he felt his heart pound and still he leaned forwards, his ears aching with the effort to hear more clearly.

  ‘Suckahanna?’ he whispered.

  The child, recognising the name, nodded, and then made a simple, graceful gesture to the door, and she was there, framed by the golden evening light, taller than he remembered, her face a little graver, her hair grown on both sides of her head but still braided away from her face on the right-hand side, wearing buckskin leggings and a little buckskin dress, and her arms and cheeks painted with red spirals.

  ‘Suckahanna!’ he said.

  She stood before him and looked him over, unsmiling, and then she drew a little closer and put out her hand. John, hesitating, not knowing what he should do, put out his hand in reply, and then, as solemn as Parliament men, they shook.

  Her fingers, warm and dry, closed on his and John felt an extraordinary sense of desire at that light touch. His eyes went to her face and he saw, only half-believing, the slow smile spread from her eyes to her lips till her whole face was lightened and joyful.

  ‘John,’ she said sweetly, her accent lilting on his name. ‘Welcome to my people.’

  At once he stumbled into explanations. ‘I meant to come, I meant to come when I said. I didn’t plan to betray you. It was my intention to come to you. But when I got home my father was dead and my children needed a mother –’ He broke off as he saw her shake her head and shrug.

  ‘I knew you meant to come,’ she said. ‘But when you did not come my mother and I had to leave Jamestown and find our people. And then it was time that I should be married, and so now I am married.’

  John would have withdrawn his hand but she held him fast. ‘This is my son,’ she said with a smile to the child in the doorway.

  ‘Your son!’

  ‘The son of my husband. His first wife died and I am now mother to this boy, and I have a girl-child of my own.’

  John felt regret wash over him as painful as sickness. ‘I never thought –’

  ‘Yes, I am a woman grown,’ she said steadily.

  John shook his head as if he would deny the passing of the years. ‘I should have come. I meant to come.’

  ‘Your hand is hurt? And you have been sick?’

  ‘The sickness was my own fault,’ John said. ‘I went hungry for too long and then ate the eggs you sent me – was it you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘They were so good. But I ate them too fast. And I burned my hand on the cooking pot and then the wound broke open …’

  She took his hand and bent her head over it to see the wound. John looked at the crown of her dark head and smelled the faint, familiar smell of her warm skin and the bear-grease fat which deterred insects, and felt desire spread through him until he thought he must draw her close, and that whatever it cost him, he must hold her in his arms, just once, before he died.

  She looked up and at once recognised the desire in his face. She did not flinch back as an Englishwoman would have done. But she did not come forward either. She stood very still and steadily took him in, reading his desire, his fear, his need.

  ‘I think we can heal the wound on your hand,’ she said gently. ‘Come.’

  The little boy at the doorway stepped aside for the two of them and Suckahanna led John out of the hut into the evening light.

  John blinked. He was in the centre of a town square, all around were other long huts, built of wood, and walled with reeds, intricately woven. Each hut had a little spiral of scented smoke above its roof, and a flock of children playing in the doorway. In the centre of the square sat a handful of men, at their ease, talking in low, confident voices, one of them tightening a bow string, another sharpening reeds for arrow tips. They glanced up as Suckahanna led John by, but they made no comment, nor even acknowledged his presence. They took him in, as one animal takes in another. They saw in one devouring glance the way he walked, the prints his boots made on the ground, the scent of him, the matted, ill-kept hair and the pallor of sickness. They assessed his ability to fight, to run, to hide. They sensed his fear of them and his trust in Suckahanna. Then they turned back to their work and their talk as if there was nothing to be said about him or to him – as yet.

  Suckahanna led him towards a little street with the houses set on either side. At the end of it was a large fire and half a dozen of the black pots sitting squat among the embers, and skewers of meat resting on a rack. John felt his stomach clench in hunger but Suckahanna took him past the food to a hut opposite the fire.

  She stood outside and called a word, perhaps a name, and the curtain in the doorway opened and an old woman looked out.

  ‘Suckahanna!’

  ‘Musses.’

  The woman spoke in a rapid flow of language, and Suckahanna replied. Something that she said made the old woman snort with laughter and she shot a quick smiling look at John as if he were the butt of the joke. Then she stretched out her hand to see the burn on John’s palm.

  Suckahanna gestured that he should show her. ‘This is a wise woman, she will cure the wound.’

  Hesitantly, John opened his fingers to show the scar. It was getting worse. Where the blister had burst the raw flesh had got dirty and was now smelling and oozing. John looked at it fearfully. If he had such a wound in London he thought that a barber surgeon would have cut the hand off, to prevent the infection spreading up his arm to his heart. He feared the infection only slightly less than he feared these savages and whatever treatment they might prescribe.

  The woman said something to Suckahanna and Suckahanna laughed, a spontaneous giggle, like the girl John had known. She turned to John. ‘She says you should be purged, but I told her you had already done that for yourself.’

  The woman was laughing, Suckahanna was smiling, but John, in fear and in pain, could muster only a grim nod.

  ‘But she says you should still sweat out your illness before we cure the wound.’

  ‘Sweat?’

  ‘In a –’ Suckahanna did not know the English word. ‘Little house. In a little house.’

  The woman nodded.

  ‘We’ll go there now,’ Suckahanna said. ‘Then we can get the herbs for the wound before nightfall.’

  The woman and Suckahanna led him to the boundary of the village. There was a smaller round hut on the very edge of the little town, its roof at ground level, and thick smoke billowing out from the hole in the centre of the roof.

  ‘It’s very hot,’ Suckahanna explained.

  John nodded, it looked like hell.

  Suckahanna laid a gentle hand on his dirty shirt. ‘You must take off your clothes,’ she said. ‘All of them, and go down into there, naked.’

  Instinctively, John’s hands gripped the belt of his breeches and then he gave a little yelp of pain at the touch of the cloth on his raw palm.

  ‘There!’ Suckahanna said, as if that proved the point. ‘Take your clothes off and go down into the little house.’

  Reluctantly, John pulled his shirt off. The old woman regarded his pale skin with interest, as if he were