He had to wait until April, and then he and the Hoberts rowed upriver and saw their adjoining plots. It was good land. The trees reached down to the water’s edge and their thick canopy shaded the banks. Their wide grey roots stretched out into the flooded river. John tied the canoe he had borrowed to an overhanging trunk and stepped ashore on his own new land.

‘My Eden,’ John said quietly to himself.

The trees were alive with the singing of birds, birds courting and chasing, fighting and nesting. He saw birds that looked like familiar English species but which were bigger, or oddly coloured, and he saw others that were wholly new to him in this new and wonderful world, birds like little herons which were white as doves, strange ducks with heads as bright as enamelled boxes. The soil was rich, dark and fertile, an earth which had never known the plough but which had made and remade itself with centuries of tumbling leaves and rotting vegetation. Feeling almost foolish, John went down on his hands and knees, took a handful of the rich soil, crumbled it between his hands and raised it to his nose and his lips. It was good dark earth that would grow anything in rich abundance.

The bank sloped steeply up from the river, there would be no flooding on his fields, and there was a little hillock, perhaps half a mile back from the river frontage, where John would build his house. When the trees were cleared he would have a fine river view, and he would be able to look down the hill to his own landing stage where his own tobacco would be loaded to take downstream.

John thought his house would be set square to the river. A modest house, nothing like the grand size of Lambeth: a pioneer’s house of one room downstairs and a ladder leading up to a half-floor for storage set in the eaves. A fireplace in one wall, which would heat the whole of the little building, a roof of reeds or maybe even wooden shingles. A floor of nothing more than beaten earth in the first few years, perhaps later John would put down floorboards. Windows which would be bare and open, empty of glass, but with thick wooden shutters to close in winter and bad weather. It would be a house only a little grander than an English pauper might build to squat on common land and think himself lucky. It would be a normal house in this new world, where nothing could be taken for granted and where men and women rarely had anything more than they could build or make for themselves.

Thoughtfully, John reached towards a sprouting vine and pulled away a cutting, tucking it in his pocket. He would grow it around his doorframe. It might be a little hovel in a great wilderness but it would still have a garden.