John smiled engagingly at him. ‘I need to gather plants and rarities for my Lord Wootton,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back before dusk.’

‘Don’t come to me with an arrow up your arse,’ the captain said coarsely.

John bowed and slipped away before he could change his mind.

A young sailor rowed him to the shore. ‘Can I wait by the boat?’ he asked, his eyes round in his pale face. ‘They say there are terrible people on this shore. They call them the Sammoyets.’

‘Don’t go without me,’ John said. ‘The captain is far more of a terror than the Sammoyets, I promise you. And he will kill you for sure if you maroon me here.’

The lad managed a weak smile. ‘I’ll wait,’ he promised. ‘Don’t be too long.’

John slung a satchel over his shoulder and took a little trowel. In the pockets of his breeches he carried a sharp knife for taking cuttings. He had decided against carrying a musket. He did not want the trouble of keeping the fuse alight, and he thought he was as likely to shoot his own foot off in a moment of abstraction, as confront an enemy.

‘You won’t be too long, will you?’ the lad asked again.

John patted his shoulder. ‘As soon as I have found something worth bringing home I will come straight back,’ he promised. ‘Ten minutes at the most.’

He walked up from the shelving beach and at once plunged into the deep forest. Huge trees, a new fir tree that he had never seen before, interlaced their boughs above his head and made a twilight world which was shadowy green and sharply cold. Underfoot there were thick cushions, as big as bolsters, of fresh damp moss. John knelt before them, like a knight before the Holy Grail, and patted them with loving hands before he could bring himself to dig in his trowel and take a clump to stuff in his satchel.

There were shrubs he had never seen before, many in flower, white star-shaped flowers, and some tinged with pink. He walked on and came to a bush of whorts, with an unusual red flower. John brought out his little knife and took cuttings, wrapped them in more of the damp moss and laid them carefully in his satchel. A few steps more and he was in a clearing. Where the sunlight poured in there were bushes forming fruit like an English hedge mercury except that they were a brighter red and with three sharply-shaped leaves at the head of the twig, and every leaf bearing a berry inside it. In the darker places, beneath the trees, John saw the gleaming blossom of hellebores, thickly growing and carpeting the forest floor.