For a while he thought the cold weather would never lift and free them from the idle life of Jamestown, but Hobert swore he would not go upriver while the snow was still thick on the ground. ‘A man could die out there and no-one ever know, and no-one ever care,’ he said. ‘We stay in town until the ground warms up and until we can row upriver without great bergs of ice crashing down around us. I won’t take the risk of moving from the town until spring.’

‘And then it would be more dangerous to stay,’ his wife said quietly. ‘They have terrible fevers here in the hot weather, Mr Hobert. I would rather be well away from here before the summer comes.’

‘In good time,’ he said with a glance at her under his eyebrows which warned her to hold her peace and not join in with the councils of men.

‘In God’s time,’ she said pleasantly, not the least overawed.

John knew that Hobert was right but still he felt impatient. He asked all the townspeople he met if they remembered the girl or her mother, but people told him that one Indian looked like another, and if the girl had vanished then no doubt she had been stealing or betraying her master and had run off to the woods to her own people.

‘And precious comfort she’ll get there,’ one woman told him as she waited by the town’s only deep well for her turn to draw water.

‘Why?’ John asked urgently. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Because every day they get pushed back a little more. Not now in the winter, because our men don’t go out into the woods in winter, it gets dark too early and the cold can kill a man quicker than an arrow. But when spring comes we will make up packs of dogs and bands of hunters and go hunting the redskins, we force them back and back and back, so the land is clear for us and safe for us.’

‘But she’s only a girl,’ John exclaimed. ‘And her mother a woman all alone.’

‘They would breed if left alone,’ the woman said with stout indifference. ‘I don’t mean to shock you, mister, but it’s us or them on this land. And we’re determined that we shall be the victors. Whether it’s wolves or bears or Indians, they have to fall back and give way before us or die. How else can we make this land our own?’

It was a ruthless logic that John could hardly condemn, for he himself held four headrights of riverside land and virgin forest and he heard himself talking with anticipation of the trees he would clear and the house he would build, and he knew that his own land was another two hundred acres where the Powhatan would never hunt again.

April 1643