Elizabeth tried not to encourage J’s excitement, but she could not hide her own interest. ‘Was she black?’ she asked.

‘Not at all!’ J exclaimed. ‘Just brown, a beautiful lady, and she had a little baby on her knee. But she didn’t wear bear skins or anything, just ordinary clothes.’

‘J was bitterly disappointed,’ John said with a smile to his wife. ‘He expected something very savage and strange. All she is, is a pretty young woman with a little son. She calls herself Rebecca now and is baptised and married. You would pass her in the street and think nothing more but that she was a fine tall woman, a little tanned.’

‘She said that there are boys and girls of my age who live in the forest and hunt deer,’ J said. ‘And that they can fire a bow and spear a fish from four years old! And that they can make their own pots and sew their own clothes from deer hide, and –’

‘She was making it up to amuse you,’ Elizabeth said firmly.

‘She was not!’

‘She truly wasn’t,’ John said gently. ‘I believed every word she said and I should so like to go, Elizabeth. Not to settle there, but just to take a look at our land and see what the prospects are. Not as planters to be there forever, but just to take a little run over there and see what the land is like. It sounds very fine –’

‘A little run?’ Elizabeth demanded. ‘You speak of the ocean as if it were the cart track to your orchards. Lord Wootton could not spare you from his garden. I could not spare you now we are settled here. It is six weeks at sea on a huge sea. Why can you not stay in the same place, John? Why can you not be at peace?’

He had no reply for that, and she knew he would have no reply.

‘I am sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I just long to see all there may be for me to see. And a new land would have new plants, don’t you think? Things that I might never have seen before. But you are right. I have my garden here, and Lord Wootton’s garden, and the house, and you and J. It is enough for me.’

Summer 1618