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  Sarah shook her head in absolute refusal. ‘They would poison us and hack us up to eat,’ she said. ‘You may have been lucky, John Tradescant, that they chose to keep you alive. But they have been our enemies since we came here. At first we traded with them and gave them little trinkets for food and for goods. Then we tried to make them come and work for us, clear the land and dig the fields. But they were lazy and idle and when we whipped them they stole what they could and ran away. After that Bertram has shot at them whenever he has seen them. They are our enemies. I won’t have them near me.’

  ‘They have skills that you need to learn,’ John persisted. ‘This dinner you are eating is Powhatan food. You have to learn how they live in the forest in order to live here yourself.’

  She shook her head. ‘I shall live as a God-fearing Englishwoman and I shall make this land into a new England. Then they can come to me to learn.’ She closed her eyes briefly in a prayer. When she opened them she was looking sharply, critically, at John.

  ‘I have unpacked a shirt and pair of breeches belonging to Bertram,’ she said. ‘You can have them in return for the service you have done us by coming to our door in our time of need. You will not want to walk around half-naked as you are.’

  ‘This is how I live now,’ John said.

  ‘Not in a Christian home you don’t,’ she said sharply. ‘I cannot allow it, Mr Tradescant, it is not fit. It is lechery to show yourself like this to me. If my husband were well and in his right mind he would not permit it.’

  ‘I had no thought of lechery, Mrs Hobert –’

  She gestured to the clothes spread at the fireside. ‘Then dress yourself, Mr Tradescant, please.’

  John stayed with the Hoberts for a full week, dressed in English clothes again, but still barefoot. The shirt chafed at his neck, the breeches felt hot and constricting around his legs. But he wore them out of courtesy to Sarah’s feelings, and he did not feel he could leave her until Bertram was well again.

  The fever broke on the third night, and the next day Bertram was well enough to hobble down to the river, leaning on John’s arm.

  The little green tobacco shoots were showing through the earth of the nursery beds. Bertram paused and looked at them as dotingly as if they were sleeping children. ‘Here is my fortune, Tradescant,’ he said. ‘Here is my fortune growing. If we can survive the rest of this cold weather without starving, without falling to the savages, then this will be the making of me. I shall see it sold on the quayside at Jamestown. I shall see it packed and sailing for England. I shall hire a servant, a brace of servants, and I will make myself a life here.’

  ‘God willing,’ John said.

  ‘Stay with us,’ Hobert said. ‘Stay with us and you can take a share in this, John. I doubt I can manage without you and Sarah cannot do it all on her own. Francis has no skill with plants, I am afraid to let him touch them. If I am sick when they need planting out who is going to do the work? Stay with me and see my tobacco plants safely into the field.’

  ‘I can’t stay,’ John said as gently as he could. ‘I have made a different life for myself in this country. But I can come back to you and see that you are well. I’ll come back gladly and work for you. I’ll set out the seedlings for you and show you how the Powhatan plant their food crops so you never need go hungry again.’

  ‘You’ll come back to plant out my tobacco? You swear it?’

  ‘I swear,’ John said.

  ‘Then we won’t need food crops,’ Hobert said buoyantly. ‘We shall buy all we need with what I can earn from the tobacco. And I’ll see you right, John. Next season I shall come to your headright and work for you, as we promised, eh? As we always said we would do.’

  On that promise John left the Hoberts and crossed the river just above the falls where he could jump from boulder to boulder in the fast-moving stream. On the far side he stripped off the breeches and the shirt that he had been given and bundled them up into the crook of a tree. It reminded him of Suckahanna’s girlhood and her attempt to live in the two worlds. She used to wear a long gown and sometimes a bonnet in Jamestown, but when she was free in the woods she wore her buckskin pinny and nothing more.

  The air felt good on his skin again, he felt more of a man in his nakedness than he ever could do in his breeches. He stretched as if he were freed from a constriction greater than a linen shirt, and set off at the Powhatan hunting stride for his home.

  Suckahanna greeted him with the careful courtesy of a deeply offended wife. John neither explained nor apologised until they were alone on the sleeping platform, in the darkness of their house, when the soft sighs from both children showed that they were asleep.

  ‘I could not come back when I said I would come,’ he said to her smooth naked back. ‘Bertram was sick, his wife was hungry and their slave didn’t know what to do.’

  She said nothing and did not turn to him.

  ‘I stayed to feed a hungry woman and nurse a sick man,’ John said. ‘When I showed her how to get food and when he was better I came home again, as soon as I could.’

  He waited.

  ‘Would you have wanted me to leave them to die?’ he asked.

  At last she turned back to him. ‘Better now and by their own failure than later,’ she said simply.

  John gasped as the words struck him. ‘You speak like a heartless woman,’ he protested.

  She shrugged as if she did not much care whether he thought her heartless or kind; and then she turned her back on him again and went to sleep.

  Spring 1644, Virginia

  John did not go back to the Hoberts’ homestead for a month. He hunted with Attone and the other braves, he lived as a Powhatan. But there was a coldness between Suckahanna and him which the routine of ordinary life could not conceal.

  When he judged it was time for the planting out of Bertram’s tobacco he spoke to Attone, rather than Suckahanna.

  ‘My friend who was sick needs me to plant out his tobacco. I should go and help him now.’

  ‘Go then, Eagle,’ Attone said unhelpfully.

  ‘Suckahanna will be angry at my going.’

  ‘Stay then.’

  ‘I’m not asking for help –’

  ‘I’m not giving any.’

  John paused for a moment and bit back his temper. Attone was smiling. He loved to be annoying.

  ‘I’m telling you that I will be away for a while,’ John said patiently. ‘I am asking you to watch Suckahanna for me and fetch me if she is in any need. She will not send for me; she is angry with me. She would not send for me even if she needed me.’

  ‘She will be in no need. The game is coming back, the fish are spawning. What would she need you for? You can go to your smelly friends.’

  John gritted his teeth. ‘If one of the People was in trouble you would go to his help.’

  ‘Hobert is not one of the People. He is not one of mine.’

  John hesitated. ‘Nor is he mine,’ he said, conscious of the pain of divided loyalty. ‘But I cannot see him fail or fall sick or die of hunger. He was good to me once, and I have made him a promise.’

  ‘This is a path in a circle,’ Attone said cheerfully. ‘You are wandering like a man snow-blind, round and round. What is blinding you, Eagle? Why can you not walk straight?’

  ‘Because I am pulled two ways,’ John said grimly.

  ‘Then cut one string,’ Attone said briskly. ‘Before it tangles around your feet and brings you down.’ He rose to his feet and loped down the river towards the fish weir without looking back.

  The Hoberts’ house was amid a sea of green. Bertram had started planting the fields which ran between the house and the river and the absurd flop-leaved plants were three rows thick before the house.

  ‘John, thank God you’ve come!’ Hobert said, kneeling. ‘I was afraid you would fail us.’

  ‘Mr Tradescant, you are very welcome!’ Sarah said from further down the row.

  John, hot in his reclaimed breeches and shirt, waved at them both.