She would say, “First of all, Jonah prepared a prayer of thanksgiving. For he had been saved from the sea into which the sailors had thrown him. For he had nearly drowned. For the water had encompassed him and he had kept swallowing it and coughing it up and breathing it in again so that his throat and stomach had started to fill with minnows and bits of green seaweed. And he was still retching while he composed his prayer.

“And the Good Spirit, the Beautiful One, saw him preparing his prayer and said, ‘Jonah, stop that. First vomit up and spit out all of those minnows and fragments of seaweed and calm yourself. And then prepare your prayer. How can you think in a fitting manner while you are suffering this vomiting?’ And Jonah did what he was told and then he made his prayer and spoke it to the Lord.

“Afterward he looked about him to see what he could do. Then he made the best of it and found the softest spot in the fish’s stomach and put his coat down on it and used it for sleeping and for a watching post, a lookout, to see what marvels would be passing through before his eyes and to see what he could catch for his dinner, for he was hungry after all the vomiting.

“ ‘Now,’ said the Good Spirit, ‘you are finally doing something intelligent. Feeding yourself.’ ”

Then Mary thought of how she might spread Jonah’s story out for Thomas over days and days. In this way, she distracted herself from the heat for a while.

It was true that I could try to leave the Seneca now and try to find someplace like Joppa, as Jonah had done. I glanced at the sleeping Thomas.

But he had the darkest eyes and although his hair was fair, his skin was of a brown color. Would white children play with him? Would they laugh at him? Would the English I could teach him be good enough? Most likely he would be forever fatherless there, in that white country.

“THE KING of England—”

She did not hear the rest of Tree’s sentence for this unusual name on her adopted mother’s lips.

The King of England, I thought, could he see Tree, would fall in love with her at once; but Tree, could she see the King of England, would study him.

“I DID not quite understand what you said.”

“The King of England has offered a bounty to those who would bring in white prisoners.”

Mary suddenly understood why the white trader who was visiting their village, the Dutchman John Van Sice, had kept trying to engage her in conversation, why he had pressed her to take walks with him. She half laughed and told Tree that she had thought Van Sice was interested in her for her being white and unusual-looking but now she understood that it was because she was white and sellable.