John hoped that they would have heard that England was at war with itself. The Virginia colonists were sworn to the royalist cause but there would have been a ready stream of gossip and fears running around the colony. Enough talk, surely, for the Indian woman and her daughter to realise that perhaps John could not get away? But perhaps they had never thought that he would come. John remembered Suckahanna’s ability to say nothing for a whole month, even though he spoke to her, and laughed with her and worked beside her and watched her every move with tenderness and desire. She had said nothing to him, even though she had understood every word that he had said. She had said nothing to him because she had been ordered by her mother to stay silent. Perhaps, after Nepinough had come and gone, her mother had ordered her to forget him, or to marry a man of her own people, or – worst thought of all – to go and lie with a white man and earn their safety that way. At that thought, John would pull on his boots and stamp up to the deck and look out over the bowsprit to where the horizon of sea and air lay empty and unhelpful, miles and miles away.

‘I’ve never seen a man in such a hurry to go and see some flowers,’ Bertram Hobert remarked as he came beside John one morning near dawn to lean on the rail and look westward with him.

For a moment John thought of confiding in him – his anxious desire for Suckahanna, his undeniable betrayal of Hester – but then he shrugged and nodded.

‘Running from? or running to?’ Hobert pursued.

John shook his head at the tangle of his life. ‘Both, I suppose.’