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  ‘We would have the children,’ she went on. ‘The little boy and my own baby. You would have to promise to love them and care for them like a father.’

  ‘And where would we live? You said you would not live in my house?’

  ‘We would live here,’ she said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. ‘Among the People. You would become a Powhatan.’

  ‘I would learn your language? Live among you as an equal?’

  ‘You are learning it already,’ she observed. ‘You laughed at Musses the other day and she was not speaking English.’

  ‘I can understand some, but –’

  ‘You would have to join the People, as a brother.’

  ‘They would accept me?’

  ‘We would accept you.’

  John was silent, his head spinning. This was a far greater step than his adventure to Virginia, this was a step into the unknown beyond the plantation, into the darkness of unknowable lands.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You would have to decide,’ she repeated patiently, as if she had led a child around a circle of explanation and returned to the key point at last. ‘You would have to decide, my love.’

  John hesitated at the endearment. ‘Do you want me to be with you?’ he asked.

  At once her hands returned to their work, her head bowed and her veil of dark hair tumbled over her face hiding her expression, brushing her naked brown shoulder. ‘You would have to decide, without advice from me,’ she said to the earth. ‘I don’t want a man with half a heart.’

  At midday the women rested. The fields they were working were distant from home, too far to return to the village for the usual meal, prayers and rest. They ate a little cold gruel and fruit which they had brought with them, they said their brief prayers to the sun which stood precisely above each and every one of them, blessing each and every one with light and warmth on the exact centre of her head. Then they rested in the shade of the trees. Suckahanna’s baby was at her breast as she lay back, the little boy playing stalking or marksmanship with his tiny bow and arrow, with the others. John rested near Suckahanna, listened to the ripple of talk, picked out words, one word after another, all of them making more sense to him. He watched her openly now, wondering how it would be if they were married. If she could indeed leave her husband and come to him. If he could indeed become a Powhatan. If he could ever be recognised as a man among the People.

  When they returned to camp he touched her arm. ‘I need to take advice from a man,’ he said. ‘Can one of the men speak my language? Someone I can trust to tell me how a Powhatan man might see this? Not a friend of your husband?’

  At once her dark eyes lit up with laughter. ‘Oh! You don’t trust me!’

  ‘I do –’ John heard himself stammering. ‘Of course!’

  Suckahanna turned her head and babbled a string of words at her sister-in-law who was a few paces ahead. The woman screamed with laughter and turned back, laughing at John, and pointed an accusing finger at him. John picked out among the rapid flow the few words: man, Powhatan, talk, talk, talk, everything.

  ‘What is she saying?’

  ‘She says you are a true man, a Powhatan already. She says all men need to talk, talk, talk among themselves, to make the decisions which are already known.’

  ‘Known?’ John queried.

  Suckahanna veiled her eyes with the downward sweep of her eyelashes. ‘Everyone thinks that you love me,’ she said quietly. ‘Everyone thinks that I love you. We are all just waiting …’

  ‘Waiting?’

  ‘For you. To decide.’

  John went that night before supper to the house of the werowance, the senior man of the village. It stood four-square at the head of the village street, near the dancing ground, at a distance from the smoke of the cooking fires. It was walled with tree bark, and roofed with bark roughly cut in shingles. In the heat of the day the bark walls would be rolled up like curtains, but as the evening grew cold the old men closed out the chill night air. The werowance himself was sitting on a raised platform at the end of the tent; at his side were two of the old men of the tribe. They all carried their sharp hunting knives, John noticed. They all looked grave.

  John stood in the doorway, awkward as a boy.

  ‘You can come.’ The werowance spoke in heavily accented English; but there was neither welcome nor warmth in his voice.

  John entered the darkness of the house and sat, obedient to the small gesture, on a pile of soft deerskin. For a moment he was reminded of King Charles’s wordless gestures to his servants, and the thought gave him a little courage in the darkness of the strange house. He had served the greatest king in England, he could surely bear himself like a man before someone who was nothing more than a savage chief clinging to the edge of unknown land.

  ‘You desire Suckahanna?’ the werowance said briefly.

  John found he was looking at the length and sharpened cane blades of the hunting knives.

  ‘I knew her before she was a married woman,’ he said. His voice sounding weak and apologetic, even in his own ears. ‘We were promised to each other. I promised I would come back for her.’

  The werowance nodded. ‘But you did not come back,’ he observed.

  John gritted his teeth. ‘When I got to my home in my country my father had died and my children needed care. I had to stay.’

  ‘She waited,’ the werowance pointed out. The old men on either side of him nodded, their sharp faces like stone eagles on a lectern in church. ‘She trusted your word.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ John said awkwardly.

  ‘You have a new wife and children in your own country?’

  John thought of a swift lie, thought he might tell them that the plague had taken both his children as well as Jane. But a fearful superstition halted his tongue. ‘Yes, I have children,’ he said quietly. ‘And a wife.’

  ‘And is your wife now the one who waits?’

  John nodded.

  The werowance sighed as if John’s infidelity was a riddle, too tedious and complex to unravel. There was a silence that stretched for a long time. John’s back ached, he had sat awkwardly and now he felt too uneasy to wriggle back on the pile of skins and lean against the wall of the house.

  ‘Where do you want to be?’ the werowance asked him. ‘With Suckahanna or your wife?’

  ‘With Suckahanna,’ John said.

  ‘You will care for her children as if they were your own?’

  ‘Gladly.’

  ‘You know the children are not to be taken to your people? They will stay with the Powhatan?’

  John nodded.

  ‘And their mother stays with us too. She will never go to your country with you.’

  John nodded again. ‘She told me this.’ He could feel a squirm of excitement starting to grow inside him. This had all the signs of an interrogation of a bridegroom, it was not the preamble to a refusal.

  ‘She came to us for a home, she could wait for you no longer. She made her choice and now she is our child. We have taken her to our hearts.’

  The older men nodded. One said something low in their language. The werowance nodded. ‘My brother says that we love her. We would avenge her hurt.’

  ‘I understand,’ John said. He was afraid they would hear the beating of his heart, it sounded so loud in his own ears. ‘I don’t want to take her from you. I know she has made her choice, and that she and her children will be with you.’

  ‘And any children you may have with her,’ came a low growl from another man, speaking clearly in English. ‘They will not be Englishmen, remember. They too will be the People of the Hare.’

  John had not thought of his children being born here, being raised by Suckahanna, being rocked in the papoose, learning deadly accuracy with a reed arrow. He felt his heart leap at the thought of fathering such a son. He swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you choose her, you choose to be with her, to be with us,’ the werowance repeated.