‘I have to sleep too,’ John said. He and J lifted the board from the trestle legs of the table and stacked it to one side of the little room. ‘I hope you will sleep well here?’ Elizabeth asked, laying a straw mattress and an armful of bedding in the space.

‘Like a babe in a cradle,’ Captain Argall assured her. He kissed her hand in his flirtatious way and ignored her lack of response. ‘Goodnight.’

Elizabeth watched J go up the stairs to his little bed in the attic and then drew the curtains of the four-poster around her and John.

‘I’d have thought you would have leaped at the chance of a fresh start in the new world,’ John remarked as he got into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. ‘You who always want us to be freeholders. We would be freeholders in Virginia of land we could only dream of here. Three hundred acres!’

Elizabeth, pulling her nightgown over her head and only then dropping her skirt and shift, did not answer. John was too wise to demand a reply. He watched her kneel at the foot of the bed to say her prayers and closed his own eyes and muttered his thanks for blessings. Only when Elizabeth was in bed, tying the ties of her nightcap under her chin did she say, suddenly: ‘And who is the governor of this new land?’

John was taken aback. ‘Sir George,’ he said. ‘Newly appointed. Sir George Yeardley.’

‘A courtier. Exactly,’ she said and blew out her candle with an emphatic puff. They lay for a moment in silence in the darkness, and then she spoke: ‘It’s not a new land at all. It’s the same land but in a different place. I won’t go, John. It’s just another form of service. We risk everything, we gamble our savings, our livelihood, and even our lives. We put ourselves in grave danger in a country – one of the few in the whole world where you could not earn a living doing your own trade, no-one will want a gardener there, it’s farmers they need – we put our son into a forest filled with unknown dangers, and we try to make a living from a land that no-one has farmed before. And who makes the profits? The governor. The Virginia Company. And the king.’

‘It’s their land,’ John said mildly. ‘Who else should make the profits?’

‘If it’s their land then they can take the risks,’ Elizabeth declared bluntly. ‘Not I.’