Bertram Hobert was consulting the map alongside John. ‘Next to my land,’ he remarked. ‘What d’you say we build one house together and then live in it while we work on the other?’

John nodded thoughtfully. ‘When could we start?’

‘Not till spring. We’d die of hunger and cold out there in the winter. We’ll stay snug in town until spring, and go out as soon as we can.’

John looked out of the open slit of the window at the iron-grey sky and the falling snow and thought of Suckahanna, barefoot in the frozen woods where the snow was dozens of feet deep and where the wolves howled at night. ‘How could anyone survive out there in winter?’

Hobert shook his head. ‘Nobody can,’ he said.

Winter 1642–3, Virginia

Bertram Hobert rented lodgings in town for himself, his wife Sarah and his slave, a black man called Francis. After John complained of the treatment he got at the inn, Hobert said he could stay with them until the spring, and then the whole party would go upriver to look at their new land.

John found the town much changed. A new governor, Sir William Berkeley, had arrived from England and had equipped the official residence with beautiful furniture and goods. His wife, who was already a byword in the community for her looks, was giving parties and all those who could remotely pass as a gentleman and his lady were dressing in their best and walking up the drive to the governor’s house. The roads were paved now, and the tobacco was no longer grown at the street corners and on any corner of spare land. A man could buy or sell using coin and not pinches of tobacco or bills drawn on a tobacco merchant’s. ‘It’s become a town and not a camp,’ John remarked.

Those were the beneficial changes of the four years. There were others that filled him with worry for Suckahanna and her mother. The river was now lined with plantations from its mouth right up to James’s Island. Before each of the planters’ houses the land had been cleared and the fields stretched down to the little wooden piers and quays. On James’s Island itself the fields ran into each other, there was no forest left at all. On the more distant banks the land was black where it had been burned and not yet ploughed. John could not see how Suckahanna and her people could survive in a country which was turning itself into fields and houses. The woods she had roamed every day for mile after mile, hunting turkey or wood pigeon, or looking for roots or nuts, were burned back to a few scorched trees among ploughed fields. Even the river, where she had followed the schools of fish ready to catch them wherever the flow of the water was right, was enclosed by riverfront acres and penetrated by landing piers.