Virgin Earth

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 corn flour – 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 recognize any of the berries or nuts that 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, artifacts. 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 center 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 labor 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 labor in a society rich in labor. 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 toward 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 mustache 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.” He felt humiliated at the knowledge. John Tradescant, the apple of his mother’s eye, his father’s only heir, had become a dirty, bedraggled vagrant, clinging to the edge of the known world.

He dragged himself to his feet again. The sky seemed to look down on him as if he were a tiny, tiny insect making its arduous way across a massive leaf on a tree in a forest in a country that was too great for any man to cross.

John stumbled to his door and pushed it open. Only in the cramped room could he restore his sense of scale. “I’m a man,” he said to the four rough wood walls. “Not a tiny beetle. I am a man. This is my house.”

He looked around as if he had never seen it before. The four walls had been made of newly felled green wood, and as the fire heated the room and the weather warmed, the wood had shrunk. John would have to take clay and twigs to patch the gaps. He shuddered at the glimpse of the forest through the cracks of the house walls, as if the wildness outside was seeping in through his house to attack him.

“I can’t,” he said miserably. “I can’t build the house and find food and wash and hunt and clear the land as well. I can’t do it. I’ve been here for nearly two months, and all I can do is survive, and I can barely do that.” His throat closed again and he thought he was going to retch but instead he spat out a hoarse sob.

He felt the waistband of his trousers. He had thought that, for some reason, his belt had been stretching but now he realized that he was thinner. “I’m not surviving,” he finally acknowledged to himself. “I’m not getting enough to eat.”

At once the tiredness which was now familiar, and the ache in his belly which he had thought was some kind of mild illness, made a new and terrifying sense. He had been hungry for weeks and his hunger was making him less and less competent to survive. He missed his shot more and more often, his stock of logs for the fire was harder to cut every day. He had fallen back on gathering firewood rather than making the effort of swinging an ax. This meant that the wood was drier and burned quicker so that he needed more, and it also meant that the land around the little house was no clearer than it had been when Bertram had come over to help him build his house at the start of their time in the wilderness when they had been confident and laughing.

“Spring is here and I have planted nothing,” John said dully, holding a fold of his waistband in his calloused hand. “The ground is not clear, and I cannot dig. I have no time to dig. Just getting in food and water and fuel takes all my time, and I am tired… I am so tired.”

He stretched out his hand for his cloak. It was not folded tidily away in the corner of the room any more but left in the corner where he kicked it to one side in the mornings. He wrapped himself in its thick warmth. Hester had bought it for him when he said that he was going away, he remembered. Hester, who had not wanted to come. Hester, who had sworn that the new country was not for men and women who were used to the ease and comfort of town life, that it would suit only farmers who had no chance of doing well in their home country, farmers and adventurers and risk takers who had nothing to lose.

John lay down on the bare earth floor before the glow of the fire and pulled the collar of the cloak up over his face. Although it was morning he felt he wanted to pull the cloak over his head and let himself sleep. He heard a small, pitiful sound, like Frances used to make when she woke from a bad dream in the night, and realized that it was himself, and that he was weeping like a frightened child. The little sound went on, John heard it as if he were far away from his own fear and weakness, and then he fell asleep, still hearing it.

He woke feeling hungry and afraid. The fire was nearly out. At the sight of the gray ash in the grate John leaped to his feet with a gasp of fear and looked out of the open window. Thank God, it was not dark, he had not slept away the whole day. He stumbled outside, the cloak clinging to his feet, making him stumble, and gathered armfuls of wood from his outside store. He tumbled the logs into the grate and prised off the dry pieces of bark. With little twigs he poked the bark into the heart of the red embers and put his head down into the ash and blew, gently, softly, praying that they would catch. It took a long time. John heard himself muttering a prayer. A little flame flickered yellow like a candle, and then went out.

“Please God!” John breathed.

The little flame flickered yellow again and caught. The twist of bark crisped, burned, and was consumed. John laid a couple of twigs across it and was rewarded by them catching alight at once. Immediately he fed the fire with bigger and bigger twigs until it was burning brightly and John was safe from the coming darkness and cold once more.

He realized then that he was hungry. In his cooking pot was porridge from last night, or if he wished to give himself the labor he could clean out the pot and set some water to boil and try to shoot a bird for meat. There was nothing else to eat.

He put the cooking pot a little closer to the flames so that the porridge would not be stone cold, and went to the door.

The evening was drawing in. The sun had gone behind the trees and the sky above the little house was veiled with strips of thinnest cloud, like the shawl the queen used to wear over her hair when she was on her way to Mass. “Mantilla clouds,” John said, looking up at them. The sky was pale, the color of dead lavender heads in winter, the color of heather in summer, violet and pink with all the brightness drained away.

John shivered. His momentary admiration of the sky had suddenly changed. At once it looked again too vast, too indifferent, it was impossible that a man as small as him could survive under the great dome of it. From the mantilla clouds looking down, John’s home would be nothing more than a little speck, John peeping out would be smaller than a flea. The country was too big for him, the forest too wide, the river too rich and cold and fast-flowing and deep. John had a sense that all his new life was nothing more than an arduous crawling like a little ant from one place to another and that his survival was of no interest to the sky, any more than the life of an ant was of interest to him.

“God is with me,” John said, summoning Jane’s faith.

There was a silence. There was no sign that God was with him. There was no sign that there was any God. John remembered Suckahanna casting smoking tobacco on the river at sunrise and sunset, and thought for a blasphemous moment that perhaps this land had strange gods, different gods, from England; and that if John could somehow creep under the protection of the gods of the new world then he would be safe from the indifferent gaze of the swelling sky.

“I should be praying,” John said quietly. He did not observe Sundays here in the wilderness. He did not even pray before his meals nor before he lay down to sleep at night. “I don’t even know when Sunday is!” John exclaimed.

He could feel panic rising up in him at the thought that he had slept during this day; but he did not know how long he had slept. He did not know how far the town was downriver, how long it would take him to get there, that he did not even know what day it was.

“I cannot go into town dressed like this and stinking like an animal!” John said. But then he stopped. How was he to get clean if not in town? He could hardly wash and dry the clothes he needed unless he was prepared to run as naked as a savage in the forest. And how could he pay for all his laundry to be done in the town like some fine gentleman? All his money should be spent on hiring laborers to clear his land, buying seed corn, buying tobacco seeds, new axes, more spades.

John thought of the wealth of the house at Lambeth. He thought of the servants who did the work for him: the cook who prepared the meals, the maid who waited in the house, the garden and the gardeners, his wife Hester who ordered it all done; and how he had wildly, madly decided that none of it was for him any longer, and that his life belonged somewhere else, with another woman. Now he looked ready to die in that somewhere else. And the other woman was lost to him.

“That is all this place is to me,” he said softly. “Somewhere else. I am living in somewhere else and I am going to die in somewhere else unless I can get myself home again.”

A sharp, acrid scent reminded him abruptly of his dinner. He turned with a cry of distress. The cooking pot was spewing a dark smoke into the room, it had overheated and the porridge had stuck to the bottom of the pot and was burned.

John lunged to pull it away from the fire and then recoiled as the hot metal handle scorched into his hand. He dropped the pot and cursed, his hand burning with pain. He had a little water left in his cup and he poured it over the burn. The skin puckered up and turned white. John felt the sweat break out on his face at the pain and he cried out again.

He turned from the room and ran out of the door, down to the river. At the little beach before the house he knelt down to the water and plunged his hand in. The cold water felt like a blow from a whip against the damaged skin, but slowly the pain eased. “Ah God, my God,” John heard himself saying. “What a fool! What a fool I am!”

When the pain had eased a little he took his hand from the water and looked at it fearfully. The handle of the cooking pot had left a white stripe along his palm. The skin was dead-looking, swelling fast. John tried to flex his fingers; at once a sharp pain ran like a blade across his hand.

“So now I have only one good hand,” he said grimly, “and burned dinner.” He looked again at the sky. “And night coming on.”

He turned and walked slowly back up to the little house, his head full of thoughts and fears. The fire was still lit, which was one good thing. He pushed the overturned cooking pot with his booted foot. It rolled on the earth floor. It was cool, he had been down by the river for perhaps an hour. He had not known that the time was passing. He set it on its little feet and peered inside. There was nothing that he could eat. The porridge was blackened and charred almost to ashes.

John took the pot and went down to the river once more, picking his way in the twilight, which was coming on in a rush like a dark cloak thrown over the forest. He left the pot to soak in the water while he looked at his fish trap. It was empty. John went back to his pot and arduously, with his good left hand, tried to scrape out the charred remains, swill it and rinse it clean.

He filled the pot with water and, carrying it in his left hand, went back up the beach and up the little hill to his house. Where the trees had been felled before the house the forest was already regaining the land. Small vines and little weeds and ground-covering plants were invading the space. If John did not get out and dig soon the forest would crowd back in and his house would be all but forgotten, marked only on a map in the governor’s office as a headright, once claimed but then neglected, ready for another fool to take the challenge and try to make a life in the wilderness.

In the house John poured his drinking water into his cup, spilling some on the floor in his one-handed clumsiness, then he put a scoop of powdered corn flour into the water and set it to heat. This time he did not take his eyes from it, but stood over it, stirring as it thickened and came to the boil, and then set it to one side to cool before serving it into his trencher. He had made enough for breakfast tomorrow so he could eat when he woke in the morning. His stomach rumbled. He could not remember the last time he had eaten fruit or something green. He could not remember when he had last eaten meat that was not wood pigeon. He thought, absurdly and suddenly, of English plums and the sharp sweetness of their flesh. In his father’s garden there were thirty-three different varieties of plum tree, from the rare white diapered plum of Malta, which the Tradescants alone grew in all of England, to the common dark-skinned plum of every cottage garden.

He shook his head. There was no point thinking about home and the wealth his father had left him. There was no point thinking about the richness of his inheritance, the flowers, the vegetables, the herbs, the fruit. There was no point thinking about any food which he could not catch or grow in this unhelpful land. All there was for dinner tonight, and breakfast the next day, was an unappetizing mess of corn porridge. And unless he could find a way to fish and shoot with only one hand, that would be all there was for a day or so, for a week or two, until his hand healed.

With his belly full of porridge John drank water and took off his boots, ready to sleep. His cloak was missing. He looked around for it, cursing his own laziness in not hanging it up every morning. It was nowhere to be seen. John felt a disproportionate alarm. His cloak was missing, the cloak Hester had given him, the cloak he always slept in. He could feel an absurd panic rising up in him and threatening to choke him. He strode to the corner of the room where his goods were piled and turned them over, tumbling them to the ground in his haste. His cloak was not there.

“Think!” he commanded himself. “Think, you fool!”

He steadied himself and his breathing, which had become hoarse and anxious, settled down. “I must stay calm,” John said to himself, his voice quavery against the darkness. “I have left it somewhere. That’s all.”

He went through his movements. He had slept in his cloak in the afternoon and then he had run outside when the fire had burned out. He remembered then. His cloak had been tangled around his feet and he had kicked it away in his haste to get some dry wood to relight the fire.

“I left it outside,” he said quietly. “Now I’ll have to get it.”

He went slowly to the door and put his hand on the wooden latch. He paused. Through the cracks between the planks the colder night air breathed against his face like an icy sigh. It was dark beyond the wooden door, dark with a density that John had never seen before in his life, a blackness which was not challenged by firelight nor candlelight nor torchlight for dozens of miles in one direction, and hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of miles westward. It was a darkness that was so powerful and so completely void of light that John had a foolish, superstitious fear that it he opened the door, the night would rush into the room and extinguish the fire. It was a darkness which was too great for him to challenge.

“But I want my cloak,” he said stubbornly.

Slowly, fearfully, he opened the door a little way. The clouds were thick between him and the stars, the darkness was absolute. With a little whimper John dropped to his hands and knees like a child and crawled over the threshold of his house, his hands before him feeling his way, hoping to touch his cloak.

Something brushed against his outstretched fingers and he recoiled with a sob of fright, but then he realized that it was the soft wool of his cloak. He gathered it up to him as if it was a treasure, one of the king’s most beautiful sacred tapestries. He bundled it to his face and smelled his own strong scent, not with distaste but with a sense of relief at smelling something human in this icy empty darkness.

He did not dare to turn his back on the void. With one arm tucking his cloak to his chest, he backed, still on his hands and knees, into his doorway like a frightened animal retreating into its lair, and then he shut the door.

His eyes, strained wide open against the darkness, blinked blindly when he was back in the fitful flickering light of the cottage. He shook out his cloak. It was wet with dew. John hardly cared. He wrapped himself in it and lay down to sleep. Lying on his back, his eyes still wide open in fear, he could see the steam rising off himself. If he had not been so deep in despair he would have laughed at the sight of a hungry man supping on porridge, a cold man wrapped in damp cloth, a pioneer with one hand. But none of it seemed very funny.

“Dear God, keep me safe through the night and show me what I must do in the morning,” John said as he closed his eyes.

He waited in the darkness for sleep to come, listening to the sounds of the forest outside his door. He had a moment of acute terror when he heard a pack of wolves howling in the distance, and thought that they might smell the food and come and ring the cottage with their bright yellow eyes and their lean, serene faces. But then they fell silent and John fell asleep.

When he woke in the morning it was raining. He put his cloak to one side and put the pot by the fire to heat. He stirred the porridge but when he came to eat it he found he had no appetite. He had gone through hunger into indifference. He knew he must eat; but the gray porridge, dirty with the old ash from the inside of the pot, was tasteless in his mouth. He forced himself to swallow five mouthfuls and then put the pot in the fireplace to stay warm. If there were no fish in the trap, and if he could not shoot something, then it would be porridge for dinner as well.

The stocks of wood beside the fire were low. John went outside. The woodpile was low too and damp from the rain. John took nearly all of it and stacked it inside the house to dry. He went to grasp his ax to go and cut some more but the pain from his burned hand made him cry out. He could not use the ax until the burn was healed. He would have to gather wood, break up what he could by stamping on it, and burn the longer branches from one end to another, pushing them into the heart of the fire as they were consumed.

He went out into the rain, his head bowed, wearing only his homespun coat, leaving his cloak behind to dry. He had seen a fallen tree rather like an oak when he had been out with his gun a few days ago. He trudged toward it. When he got there he saw that some of the branches had split from the main trunk. There was wood that he could use. Using only his left hand, he pulled a branch away from the rest of the tree, and tucked the limb under his arm. It was hard work getting it home. The broad sweep of the branch kept getting caught in the undergrowth, wedged against trees, enwrapped in ground vines. Again and again John had to stop and go back and break it free. The forest of John’s headright was thick, almost impenetrable, it took John all the morning to travel just one mile with his firewood, and then another hour to break it up into manageable logs before bringing it inside the house to dry.

He was soaked through by the rain and by sweat and aching with tiredness. The burn on his hand was oozing some kind of liquid. John looked at it fearfully. If the wound went bad then he would have to go to Jamestown and put himself in the hands of whatever barber surgeon had set up in the town. John was afraid of losing his hand, afraid of the journey to Jamestown, one-handed in a dugout canoe, but equally afraid of staying on his own in the cottage if he became ill. He could taste the sweat on his upper lip and recognized the scent of his own fear.

He turned to the fire, wanting to think of something else. The fire was burning well and the room was warm. John looked out through the open window and through the gaps in the plank walls. The forest outside seemed to have come a little closer, to have advanced through the sheets of rain to press a little nearer to the solitary house.

“Don’t let it destroy me,” John whispered, knowing himself to be absurd. “Don’t let me come all this way and try so hard, to be just grown over as if I were nothing more than the dead body of a dog.”

There was nothing to eat but yesterday’s porridge. John did not bother to heat it. Warm or cold, it was equally unpleasant to him. He took a spoon and made himself eat four spoonfuls and then took a drink of water. He knew that he should go out into the forest with his gun and shoot a wood pigeon, a squirrel, anything he could get, for its meat. But the rain was too forbidding and the darkening sky was threatening thunder. John felt a sense of deep, helpless terror at the thought of being out there amid all that powerful green life, with the rain pouring more life and more energy into the avid earth, and him the only thing in the woods that was cringing and growing weaker every day.

“I’ll sleep while it rains,” he said, trying to comfort himself. “I’ll take the gun out at twilight, that’s always a good time.”

He took off his wet coat and his sodden breeches and spread them out to dry, then he pushed one of the big branches into the heart of the fire, wrapped himself up in his warm cape, and fell asleep.

John felt as if he had slept for perhaps a minute and then he woke with a start of terror to the realization that it was dark. He could not see the window. The whole cottage was in darkness. Only the embers of the fire glowed, the branch of the tree had quite burned through and fallen away from the hearth.

His first thought was that it was a terrible storm which had darkened the sky, but then he heard the silence of the outside, all he could hear was the patter of rain on leaves, an awful, remorseless, unforgiving patter of steady rain on fresh leaves. John struggled to his feet. He found that he was half-naked, wearing only his shirt, and remembered that only minutes ago he had taken off his sodden trousers and jacket and lain down for a rest. He pulled them on; they were dry, they had been dry for hours.

“It’s night,” John suddenly realized. “I slept all the afternoon and now it is night.”

He looked around the room as if everything might have changed during his long, enchanted sleep. His heap of goods, the tools he had thought he would use to farm his new land, his stores of dried goods, were all there; and higgledy-piggledy beside them was the pile of wood that he had brought in only this morning.

He took a couple of logs and put them on the fire. When they burned up the shadows in the room leaped and flickered at him; but the window and the cracks in the walls looked darker and more ominous than ever.

John bit back a sob of misery. It might be the middle of the night or just before dawn, but he could not lie down and sleep again. All his senses were alert, he felt surrounded by danger. His certainty was that it was afternoon, early afternoon, and that he should be out fetching firewood, checking the fish trap, hunting, or at the very least starting to clear a patch of ground and digging so that he could plant his seeds. But the darkness, the strange, inexplicable darkness outside the house was impenetrable.

“I shall have to wait until dawn.” John tried to speak calmly but the quaver in his voice frightened him and made him fall silent. He thought instead, arranging the words in his mind so they sounded like calm good sense. “It will be good to start early in the morning. I shall take my gun and shoot wood pigeon while they are still roosting. I might get a couple and then I could dry the meat. I might get several and then I could smoke them in the chimney and always have meat to eat.”

The darkness outside the window did not lift at all.

John sat down before the fire, stretched his legs before him and looked into the flames. Hours passed. His head nodded and he stretched out before the fire and closed his eyes. He slept. At dawn he woke, warned by the growing chill that the fire was dying down, got up and heaped more wood on the embers. He slept again. It was not until the middle of the morning that he woke. His empty stomach rumbled but he did not feel hungry; he felt weak, light-headed and weary.

“I’ll sleep again,” he said. He glanced toward the closed shutters of the window. Around the frame was a line of bright golden light. The storm had blown away and it was a beautiful sunny day.

John looked at it without interest. “I’m tired,” he said to the silent room. He slept.

When he woke it was early afternoon. The ache in his belly was hunger, but all he felt was thirst. There was no water left in his beaker. “I shall have to go down to the river,” he said unhappily to himself. He heaped more wood on the fire and looked at the ash-filled hearth as if it were a greedy enemy. “I suppose I could let it go out,” he said thoughtfully, rejecting the wisdom of those who had told him never to let the fire go out, that the fire was his light and protection and savior. “I could let it go out during the day. Just light it at night.”

He nodded to himself as if approving a statement of good sense, and opened the door. Then he stopped dead.

On the doorstep was a small basket, beautifully woven in colored strings. Inside it were three warm new-laid duck eggs, a loaf of pale yellow corn bread, a handful of nuts and a leaf wrapped around some dried fruits.

John exclaimed and looked out at once toward the forest where the trees were thick at the edge of his felled patch. Nothing moved. There was no skirt of buckskin flicking out of sight, no gleam of dark oiled hair.

“Suckahanna?” he called. His voice was low, he had spoken in nothing but a low whisper for so many weeks he thought he had forgotten how to shout her name. He tried again. “Suckahanna?”

There was no answer. A jay shrieked and a wood pigeon clattered in the branches as it flew away, but there was no other sound.

John bent and picked up the basket. Surely this was a gift from her, seeing his door closed, guessing how low this country had brought him? He took the basket inside and set it down by the fireplace, and then, feeling his desire for food rekindled at the sight of the eggs, he went quickly down to the river and filled his cooking pot with water.

He set the eggs on to boil but he could not wait for them to cook before tasting the other food. While they were bubbling in the pot he broke the bread and ate it, and then cracked the nuts on the hearthstone and ate the sweet kernels. The juices rushed into his mouth, the taste of a food which was not corn flour porridge was so strange and desirable that the corners of his jaw suddenly pained him sharply, as if he had bitten into a lemon. It was passionate desire for food, for a new taste. When the eggs were boiled John broke off the tops, so careless that he scalded his mouth, and ate the whites and sucked the yellow yolks down in great desirous gulps. The yellow tasted like blood, he could feel the strength of it coursing through him, making him wholehearted again, courageous, enterprising, making a pioneer out of a man who moments ago had been a lost boy.

“My God, I was hungry!” he said. He took the last piece of bread and ate it, relishing the slightly sweet taste of it and the pale yellow color. Then he took a handful of the dried fruit and put it in his mouth. At once his mouth was filled with flavor as strong as sherbet, as sharp as redcurrants. It was a fruit he did not know, wrinkled like raisins but as sharp-tasting as sour greengages. John held the sweet mass in his mouth and sucked it and sucked it as the sharpness and sweetness poured out of the dried skins and into his throat.

He sat entranced, his mouth pursed around the flavor, as if nothing in the whole world could be as good as this moment when he was fed at last, after months of hunger.

When he had finished his meal there were only a few of the fruits left over. He had eaten everything else. “I should have saved some,” John thought regretfully. “I am as greedy as a savage to pour it down my throat and not save any for my dinner.” Then he realized that he could not have stopped himself from eating. He simply would not have had the willpower, and that without the strength from the meal he could not have gone on.

“And now I shall check my fish trap, and I shall clear a patch of ground and plant some seeds,” he said determinedly. “Thank God I have the strength to do it.”

First he loaded the fire with the broken branches, remembering the wisdom of the rule that he should always keep the fire in. Then he went out of the cottage and left the door open behind him so that the cool, clean wind could sweep in and blow away the stench of him living like a dog, sleeping like a dog, and never getting clean. He went down to the river and stripped off his shirt and his breeches and left them piled under stones in the water while he waded into the icy river and washed. When he came out, shivering with cold, he pulled out his clothes and rinsed them roughly until the shirt was evenly pale gray instead of dirty and stained. Then he wrung them, still favoring his hurt hand, and shook them out as he jogged back to the house on bare feet. The fire was blazing. He upended the cooking pot and balanced a couple of sticks so he could spread the wet clothes before the heat. Then he went back outside, bare-arsed, wearing only his jacket for warmth, and started to break up firewood.

When he had made a good pile he stacked it and then went inside for his spade and pick. He paused for a moment looking over his land, his new land. It was no hunger-born illusion that the forest was creeping back. Long trails of vines were moving in like snakes across the cleared patch, speckles of weeds were springing like a green plague across the clean soil. Nothing would stop this earth regenerating. By felling the trees all John had done was let in the low-growing plants, which were colonizing the clearing.

John marked out with his eye a line that would run parallel with the front of his house and stop before the doorway. It would be a vegetable bed with young tobacco plants interspersed with eating plants. Salad vegetables would be quick to grow, and he had seed potatoes, turnip, carrot, leek and pea seeds as well. Other planters up and down the river, with laborers to work for them, some of them enslaved, some of them free, had taken the risk of planting nothing but tobacco, assuming that they could buy everything else they wanted, all their food, all their building materials, all their clothes, from the profits of one cash crop. Men like that had died in the early years, or begged from the Indians and called it trade, or gone barefoot into town and pleaded for charity. But when the tobacco grew, and the price of tobacco started to rise, the gamble for some of them had paid off. John thought of the little cottage gardens that his mother had told him about, in the village of Meopham, where every house, however small, had a patch of ground behind it which grew food to keep the worst of the winter hunger away. John realized that he was reduced to a level that his parents had congratulated themselves on leaving behind; but then he thought more cheerfully that perhaps this was his starting place, as Meopham had been theirs.

He hefted the pick and swung it into the ground. At once it jarred on a root and he felt the sudden pain as the new skin on the palm of his hand split open and drained a dripping water. He caught his hand up and looked fearfully at it. The skin which had looked so dead and white had peeled off the wound and was pouring, not blood, but a clear liquor. The pain was so sharp that John’s head rang with it for long moments. Then he slowly bent, took the ax and the spade, tucked them under his arm, and brought them back to the house. He could not dig one-handed. His garden would have to wait.

Inside the house he took a strip of linen that had once been destined to be a white stock if he were invited to somewhere fine, and wound it around his hand, tying it tight to staunch the flow. It stung painfully as he wrapped it, and he felt the cloth stick into the wound.

“The thing is,” he said quietly to the empty room, “is that I don’t rightly know what to do for the best.”

John thought he should wait till his shirt and breeches were dry and then walk, though it would be a long walk, to the Hobert plantation and see what Sarah Hobert could do for a grievous burn. “She may have a salve,” John said. “And I could stay the night with them, and talk. And they’ll have bread.”

The high spirits of the morning were draining out of him. He felt his shirt, anxious now to leave. The shirt was dry and sweet-smelling but the breeches, made of thick homespun, were still wet. John was thinking of wearing them wet when a sudden pain gripped him deep in his belly.

It was the food, shoveled down into his shrunken stomach, too rich for a system which had been living at starvation level. “Ah God!” John exclaimed. The pang of it was like a sword thrust into his heart.

He doubled up and ran, bent double, for the door. He had scarcely cleared the house when he voided himself and felt his strength burst and then trickle from him. He clung to the doorframe with the pain of it and then felt his hands and even his fingertips grow weaker as the pain seized him in the belly and shook him, like a monster’s jaws.

“What a fool I am, what a fool…” he gasped between spasms. He thought he should have known that his body could not take the richness of such food after weeks of hunger. “What a fool… what a fool.”

The attack subsided and John half-stumbled and half-crawled back indoors. The stink was very bad but he could not get down to the river again to wash. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down before his fire. He realized that he would not be well enough to walk to the Hoberts”. He could not paddle his canoe one-handed. He could not dig his garden until his hand healed, and until this dreadful flux passed he would be fit for nothing. He would be hard-pressed to get down to the river and then he would be unable to walk up the hill again. He lay in the warmth of the fire, thanking God that he had thought to make it big this morning, and then closed his eyes. Every time the pain in his belly woke him with a spasm of hurt he turned his eye toward the door. If Suckahanna did not come again with food, with water, and with herbs to heal his burned hand, John thought he would probably die there, lying before a dying fire, bare-arsed, sick as a dog, and with one worthless and perhaps poisoned hand, and nothing fit to eat.

She did not come. When dusk fell John crawled to the door and pushed it shut, fearful of the night creatures. If the wolves came closer tonight it would be only the closed door that would keep them from him, and they could break that down with one spring. John himself did not have the strength to load his gun. He felt himself sweating into his cloak and then a wet sensation and a terrible stench which meant that he had emptied his bowels again. He could do nothing but lie in his own filth. Some time in the night he was sick on the floor, the vomit spreading in a pool around him, and then the smell of it made him sick again but he brought up only burning bile from his empty belly. He hauled himself up on one elbow and put more wood on the fire. Then he slept.

He woke in the morning, aching all over and shivering as if he had an ague. His hand was throbbing and the fingers were turning black. The house stank like a kennel and his cloak was stuck to his back by a dried pelt of excrement. He crawled to the door and opened it, kicking the cloak off his back as he went. His skin was raw and sore and his sight kept coming and going, the open door a wavering oblong of gold and green light.

There was a black earthenware pot of clean water on the doorstep, and another pot beside it of warm corn porridge. John heard his sore throat give a little sob of gratitude. He drew the pot of water toward him and sipped it cautiously. His stomach rumbled but the dreadful spasms of pain had passed. He pulled himself ’round to sit on the doorstep and lifted the pot of porridge to his lips. It was not porridge as he made it, in his dirty scorched cooking pot. It was light, faintly scented with herbs, as yellow as blancmange, flavored with something like saffron. John took a cautious sip and, despite a growl of hunger from his belly, made himself wait, sip water, pause. Then he took another.

Cautiously, eating so slowly that his breakfast took most of the morning, John ate the porridge from the pot and drank most of the water. An hour later, he found he could stand without fainting. Warily, he pulled himself up the doorframe and bundled his stinking cloak out of the house. A row of cleared and dug earth extended along the front of the house, from the point where John had thrown one blow of the pickax to where it ended, neatly squared, before the door. John looked at it and then rubbed his eyes as if it were a dream, a dream from fever and from his sickness.

No. It was real. She had come in the night and cleared a row of earth for him to plant his seeds. She had come and seen his sickness and realized that he had eaten too fast and put himself at the very door of death through his own greed and stupidity, and she had left him, not a little feast, but a thin meal of gruel and water, so that he would get well again. She was keeping him as if he were a child, choosing his food for him, doing his work for him. John felt ready to weep for gratitude that she was prepared to give him food, fetch his water, do his work. But he knew also a sharp, contrasting discomfort that she should see him so unmanned, that she had seen he could do nothing in this new land, not even survive.

“Suckahanna?” he whispered.

Still there was no reply, just the calling of birds, and the quacking of ducks in the river.

John gathered his foul cloak and hobbled down to the river to soak it in his washing place, and lowered himself into the cold water to try to get clean. Again he labored up the slight slope to his house, lugging the wet cloth, his feet tender on the stones of his field. His hand was sore, his head thudding, his stomach quiveringly tender. “I cannot survive here,” John said as he reached his door after a long, arduous struggle up the little hill. “I must find a way to get downriver to Bertram, I will die here.”

He wondered for a moment if he should wait for her, if he were to lie before the fire whether she might come and live with him, as they had planned. But he was warned by the cautious way she had approached him. He could not count on her to rescue him. He must help himself. “I shall go downriver to Bertram,” he said. “If she wants to come to me she will know how to find me there.”

His breeches and his shirt at least were clean and dry. It took him a long time to pull them on. His boots went on with a struggle which left him panting for breath, and he bent over to ease the swimming of his head. He did not take his gun for he could not load it nor keep the fuse lit in the canoe. There was nothing else that he could carry. This new country which he had been certain would make him rich had made him poorer than a pauper. All he could carry were the clothes that he stood up in, all he could manage to do was to stagger like a drunkard down the hill to where the canoe was pulled up, out of reach of the tide.

He thought for a little while that he would never get it down the small beach and into the deep water. He pushed for a while and it moved no more than an inch. Then he had to rest, and then he had to push again. It was a process that took most of his strength and courage. When the canoe finally rocked in the water he could hardly find the energy to climb in. He thought that his weight had grounded it, but when he took the paddle in his one good hand he managed to lift the weight a little and the canoe slid into the middle of the river into the deeper water.

The tide was on the ebb and the current of the river was flowing seaward. The canoe picked up speed. John tried to use the paddle to steer it closer to the bank but with one hand he could not control it. He thrust the paddle into the water and the canoe spun around it; in a second he would be swamped and the canoe would sink. He made one desperate shove, pointed it downriver, and then clung to the side as it bucked and weaved in the fast current, shaking as it tumbled in the white water. John looked at the bank which seemed to be tearing past him. Nothing seemed familiar though he and Bertram had watched carefully, pointing out landmarks, so that he would be able to make this journey, so Bertram would know when he was nearing John’s headright. He thought he recognized a tall single pine with its roots extending deep into the water, and he dug the paddle in again, trying to turn the canoe toward the shore. The current snatched the paddle, John lunged to grab it back, and then the paddle was flicked like kindling from his hand and the canoe was turning and turning in the dizzying flood and John could neither steer it nor control it, nor do anything but duck down on the wet floor of the canoe and give himself up for lost.

John opened his eyes. Above him was a high, rounded roof made of lashed branches, and thatched with broad leaves. He was lying on some sort of bedstead made of branches spread with mats. He turned his head, half-expecting to see the familiar face of Bertram Hobert or Sarah’s restrained smile. The place was empty.

It was not a house built by a normal Englishman, that at least was clear. It was a domed-ceilinged square hut, roofed and walled with leaves, floored with woven mats and deerskins spread on the earth. In the center of the hut was a small fire with a tiny heart of red which kept the hut warm and filled it with light, acrid smoke. On the walls were hung the skins of animals, and a basket half-woven, and other baskets bulging with goods. The only light filtered in through the hole in the roof above the fire, and flickered at the skins which curtained the door. John swung his feet down to the floor and took two cautious steps to go out.

At once a brown-skinned child popped his head inside the room, took one look at John standing, and, without moving, without taking his eyes from the Englishman, opened his mouth and let out a yell. John froze to the spot, heard running footsteps and then a woman stood behind the child, her hand on his shoulder, and another woman behind her, poised with a bow raised and an arrow on the string.

John dropped to sit on the bed, spread his hands, tried to smile.

“Hello,” he said. He nodded, trying to look reassuring, peaceable. “Hello.”

The two women nodded in reply, saying nothing. Remembering the weeks of silence from Suckahanna, John did not make the assumption that they could not understand him, although their eyes remained blank and black.

“Thank you for bringing me here. The canoe was too strong for me. I was trying to get to my friend’s house – Bertram Hobert – but the current swept me away.”

Again they nodded, saying nothing.

“Is Jamestown anywhere near here?” John asked. He wondered if he had been swept far below the town, down to the edge of the sea perhaps. “Jamestown? Anywhere near? Jamestown?”

The woman with the arrow on the string smiled briefly. “Nowhere near,” she said. She spoke with a strange Welsh lilt to her voice.

“You speak English!” John exclaimed.

She did not nod or smile, nor did she release the tension on the bowstring.

“I am a peaceful man,” John said. “I was trying to farm outside my house, on my land beside the river. I went hungry, and I burned my hand. I was going to find my friend to get help. I am a peaceful man. I am looking for an Indian girl, an Indian woman. Suckahanna.”

Neither of the women responded to the name.

“I want to make her my wife,” John said, plunging in. “If she will have me. I have come back to Virginia-” He broke off. It occurred to him that perhaps in their ignorance they did not know the name of their country. “I have come back here, from my home, to be with her.”

“Suckahanna is married to my brother,” the woman with the bow on the string said precisely. “He went with her when she took her gifts of food to you. We did not realize that you would eat it all at once – like a pig with acorns. We did not mean to make you sick.”

John felt embarrassment burn under the skin of his face. “I was foolish,” he said. “I was very hungry.” The thought of these people discussing his greed, and perhaps watching him void himself and retch, made him want to close his eyes and be anywhere else, even back in his own little house facing death, rather than here with the woman looking at him in mild curiosity.

“Why did Suckahanna not show herself?” he asked. “I would be her friend now she has a husband.” He looked at the arrow on the string again. “I never wronged her,” he said hastily. “I wanted to marry her when I thought she was a maid.”

The woman’s face did not soften. John thought in sudden, rapid terror that perhaps they had saved him for some dreadful execution. There were stories in Jamestown of men having their bellies cut open and their guts dragged out before their eyes. “I meant her no harm,” John said. “I meant none of you any harm.”

“Your house is where we hunt,” the other woman observed. “You have frightened away the game birds and the deer are making other paths in the woods to get away from your burned field and the smell of you.”

“I am sorry,” John said again. He thought of the governor’s map and the empty spaces of forest unmarked by any names. “I thought the forest was empty.”

They looked at him as if his words were simply incomprehensible. “Empty?”

“Empty of people,” John corrected himself. “I knew there were animals living there. But I did not think it was your land.”

“The animals do not own the land,” the woman with the arrow pointed at his body said slowly, as if she were trying to understand some alien logic.

“No,” John agreed.

“But you know they are there, they pass through the forest.”

“Yes.”

“We pass through the forest too, we follow them when we hunt them, we clear land for a season to grow our food. How can land be empty?”

John swallowed on a dry throat, his head thudded sharply. “It is how we white men speak,” he said helplessly.

The woman with the bow nodded, the arrow still pointing at his belly. “You people said you would come here for just a little while, look for precious metal and then go,” she observed. “Now you tell us that the land is empty and you build your houses on the game trails and fell the trees of the forests and never let them grow again.”

“I am sorry,” John said. “We did not know that you were living here. If you would help me to get to Jamestown I could tell the governor…”

He trailed off. Suddenly she turned the arrow away from him as if she had lost interest in the whole conversation. “We will decide what is to be done with you when the men come home,” she said abruptly. “Stay here till then.”

John spread his hands, trying to indicate his obedience and harmlessness.

“The child will bring you something to eat,” the other woman said. “Do not shit in here. You must go to the forest for that.”

John felt his face burn scarlet and cursed himself for a fool to be so ashamed for having diarrhea when he could be facing disemboweling.

“Of course not,” he said, clinging to his dignity.

The woman looked at him. “We all saw you,” she said. “But we are clean. We are the People, the Powhatan. You must do your dirt in the forest while you are with us, and cover it up after.”

“I will,” John said. “I am thirsty.”

“The child will bring you food and drink,” the other woman said. She slid her arrow into a quiver strapped to her side. “Don’t gorge yourself.”

“And Suckahanna? Is she here?” John tried to ask the question with a calm, neutral voice but his head hammered again at the thought of her.

They looked at him indifferently, and then they turned and went out.

The child brought a pot filled with icy cold water. John sipped at it carefully. The pot was coal-black, as smooth as marble in his hands. He could not think how it had been made, it was as elegant as a funerary urn in the king’s collection.

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 forward, his ears aching with the effort to hear more clearly.

“Suckahanna?” he whispered.

The child, recognizing 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 recognized 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 center 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 center 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 toward 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 center 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 a ham ready for smoking. John shot a swift, frightened look at the little house.

“Suckahanna – am I to be killed?” he asked. “I would rather die with my breeches on.”

She did not laugh at his fears. She shook her head. “I would not lead you to your death,” she said simply. “I kept you safe in the woods for a month, didn’t I? And then I told you that I loved you. Nothing has changed.”

It was like that easy rush of desire that he had felt when he met her. All at once he trusted her. He untied the laces of his breeches and dropped them to the floor. He heel-toed out of his boots and shucked off his stinking stockings. He stood before the two of them naked and felt his genitals shrivel at the curious, bright gaze of the old woman and Suckahanna’s evident lack of interest.

“Go down in there,” she said, gesturing to the steps which led down into the smoke-filled darkness. “There is a bed. Lie down. You will be hot, you will sweat like a fever. When Musses calls you, you can come out. Not before.”

John took one step toward the hut and hesitated. Suckahanna’s familiar hard little hand pushed him in the small of the back. “Go on,” she said insistently. “You always are thinking, John. Just do.”

He smiled at the truth of that and went down the steps in a little rush of temporary courage, and pitched headlong into the darkness.

The hut was filled with acrid herbal smoke and the heat was intense. He understood now that the hut was set deep like a cellar so that the very earth was like an oven, holding the heat inside. At the very center of the hut was a small fireplace heaped with red embers, and a jar of dried leaves beside it. There was room for a little bench of stones which were so hot to the touch that John had to sit gingerly, and let his skin become accustomed to their warmth.

“Put the pot of herbs on the fire!” Suckahanna called from the outside.

Reluctantly, John poured the dried leaves onto the fire. At once the hut was filled with a billow of black smoke which sucked the very air out of his lungs and left him choking and whooping for breath. The smoke felled him, like a helpless tree, so he stretched out along the stones and felt his eyes run with tears against the acrid fumes. His nose hurt with the heat, the very coils inside his ears ached with the intense heat and the airless, powerful scent. He felt himself drifting into an extraordinary dream state. He saw Frances with a trowel and a watering pot in the garden of Lambeth, he saw the Duke of Buckingham throw back his dark head and laugh, he saw Johnnie at the moment of his birth, scarlet, wet and squalling, he saw Jane smiling through the candlelight on their wedding night. He saw his father dying in a bed of flowers, he saw the Rosamund roses he had sent down the river for Jane’s memorial service at her father’s chapel.

From far, far away he heard a voice call something in a strange language and he opened his eyes. The smoke had cleared a little, the heat seemed less intense. His skin was pink, like a baby’s. He was damp all over with sweat and his skin was smooth as a sun-warmed lizard.

“She says you can come out!” he heard in English. But it was not the command but the sound of Suckahanna’s voice which brought him from his daze, up the steps and out into the sunlight.

“Ah,” the old woman said with pleasure at his appearance. She nodded at Suckahanna, and then tossed a buckskin cape around John’s shoulders to keep the chill of the evening air from him.

John looked around for his clothes. Everything was gone except his boots. Suckahanna was standing among a small group of women, they were all looking at his nakedness with a cheerful curiosity.

Suckahanna stepped forward and held out a bundle of clothing to him. As John took it he saw that it was a clout – a piece of cloth to twist between his buttocks and tie on a strap around his waist – a deerskin kilt and a deerskin shirt. He recoiled. “Where are my clothes?”

Suckahanna shook her head firmly. “They smelled,” she said. “And they had lice and fleas. We are a clean people. You could not wear those clothes in our houses.”

He felt ashamed and unable to argue.

“Put those on,” she said. “We are all waiting for you.”

He tied the strings of the clout around his waist and felt better with his nakedness hidden from so many bright black eyes. “Why are they all here?”

“To find the herb for your hand,” she said.

John looked down into his palm. The wound was cleaner from the sweating, but there was still a crease of rotting flesh at its center.

He pulled on the shirt and straightened the kilt. He thought that he must look absurd with his big white legs under this beautifully embroidered skirt and then his own heavy boots on his feet; but none of the women laughed. They moved off, one trotting behind another, with the old woman at the front and Suckahanna at the rear. She glanced back at John. “Follow,” was all she said.

He remembered then the unbearable steady pace she would use when they were in the woods together. All the women moved at that remorseless trot that was too fast for him to walk and too slow for him to run. He walked and then ran after them in short, breathless bursts and Suckahanna never turned her head to see if he could keep up, but just kept her own steady pace as if there were neither thorns nor stones under her light moccasins.

The old woman in the front was running and watching the plants on either side of the path. John recognized a master plants-woman when she stopped and pointed a little way into the wood. She had spotted the one she wanted, at a run, in the twilight. John peered at it. It looked like a liverwort, but a form that he had never seen before.

“Wait here,” Suckahanna ordered him and followed the other women as they went toward it. They seated themselves down in a circle around it and they were silent for a moment, as if in prayer. John felt a strange prickling on the back of his neck as if something powerful and mysterious was happening. The women held out their hands over the plant as if they were checking the heat over a cooking pot, and then their hands made weaving gestures, one to another, above and around the plant in a constant pattern. They were humming softly, and then the words of a song emerged, softly chanted.

The darkness under the trees grew more intense; John realized that the sun had set and in the upper branches of the trees there was a continual rustle and chirping and cooing of birds settling down for the night. On the forest floor the women continued to sing and then the old woman leaned forward and picked a sprig of the herb, and then the others followed suit.

John shifted restlessly from one sore foot to another. The women rose to their feet and came toward him, each chewing on the herb. John waited, in case he too had to eat it, but they walked around him in a circle. Suckahanna stopped first and gestured that he should hold out his hand. John opened his fingers and Suckahanna bent her mouth to his palm and gently spat the chewed herb into the wound. John cried out as the juice accurately hit the very center of the rotting flesh, but he could not pull his hand away because she was holding it tight. The other women pressed around him and each spat, as hard and as accurately as a London urchin, so that the chewed juice from the herb did not rest on the wound but penetrated deep inside. John yelped a little at each blow as he felt the astringent juice entering the rotting flesh. The old woman came last and John braced himself. He was right to think that her spit would be as hard as a musket ball, right into the very center of his damaged palm. As he cried out she whipped out a leather binding from the pocket of her apron, spread a leaf on top of the wound and tied it tight.

John was half-dizzy from the pain and Suckahanna ducked under his arm and supported him as they walked back to the village.

It was growing dark. The women turned off to their own huts, to the cooking fire. The men were already seated, awaiting their dinner. Suckahanna raised a hand in greeting to one of the men who solemnly watched her supporting John back to the hut. They went through the doorway entwined like lovers and she helped him lie down on the wooden bed.

“Sleep,” she said gently to him. “Tomorrow you will be better.”

“I want you,” John said, his mind hazed with pain, with the smoke, with desire. “I want you to lie with me.”

She laughed, a low amused laugh. “I am married,” she reminded him. “And you are ill. Sleep now. I shall be here in the morning.”