‘No gold yet. Not yet, Mrs T,’ Captain Argall said. ‘But who can say what there might be deeper in the mountains? No-one has gone further than the shoreline and up the rivers a little way. What could be there? Gold? Diamonds? Rubies? And what need have we of these anyway while we can grow tobacco?’

‘Why d’you dislike the idea so much, Elizabeth?’ John asked her directly.

She looked from him to J’s excited face and Captain Argall’s determined good humour. ‘Because I have heard travellers’ tales before, but I have heard nothing good of this plantation,’ she said. ‘There’s Mistress Woods at Meopham who lost two brothers to Virginia in the starving time when half the settlement died of hunger. She told me that they were digging over the graveyards looking for meat, reduced to worse than savagery. There’s Peter John who paid for his own passage home and kissed the ground at London docks, he was so glad to be alive. He said the forest was filled with Indians who could be kind or wicked as the mood took them, and only they knew whether they were your enemy or friend. There’s your own friend, Captain John Smith, who swore that he would live the rest of his days there, and yet he was brought home a cripple –’

‘John Smith would never say a word against Virginia!’ Argall interrupted. ‘And he was hurt in an accident which could have happened anywhere. He could have been boating on the Thames.’

‘He was hurt in an accident but only after he had fought against Indians and been captured by them and been so close to death by execution that he near died of fear,’ Elizabeth maintained stoutly.

‘The Indians are at peace now,’ Argall said. ‘And I have played my part in that. Princess Pocahontas is Mrs Rebecca Rolfe now and all the Indians are coming into Christian schools and living in Christian homes. You’re speaking of old fears. It was hard in the early years but it is all at peace now. Pocahontas is married to John Rolfe and other Indians and white men will marry. In a few years all the wars will be forgotten.’ He glanced down at J’s attentive face, drinking in the stories. ‘You will have an Indian playmate to show you the paths through the woods,’ he promised. ‘Perhaps an Indian maid to be your sweetheart.’

The boy blushed scarlet. ‘How did Princess Pocahontas come to marry Mr Rolfe?’ he asked.

Sam Argall laughed. ‘You know the story as well as me!’ he exclaimed. ‘I captured her and held her hostage, and all the while she was weaving her spell and capturing John. So go to bed and dream of it, young J. Your mother and father and I will talk more of it later.’