The house did not take long to build. There were men in Jamestown who would work at a daily rate, and Bertram and John hired them as a gang to work first on the Hobert house and then on John’s smaller version of the same design. The gang specified that they were to have their food and their ale, and that the nails, the most costly part of the house, were to be supplied: counted out each morning, and checked in at nightfall. They told John that when he wanted a new house built elsewhere, he should burn his old house down and then sift through the ashes for the nails. New timber could be had simply by clearing the woods around the foundations, but new nails had to come from England.

‘But then you never have houses for sale,’ John remarked. ‘You never have houses for newcomers.’

‘They can build their own,’ the man said in the rough frankness of the new world. ‘And if they cannot build their own they can go homeless.’

Sarah Hobert cooked for the men while they built her house, roasting meat over a camp fire on long skewers in a way that the colonists had learned from Indian guides. John thought of Suckahanna squatting beside the little fire with trout skewered on green sticks. Sarah made bread in a heavy dark dough from rye flour; the colonists could not grow wheat in this land. When her own house was finished and the builders moved on to John’s house, she came too and cooked for them there, never complaining that she would have preferred to start digging her own fields or planting her own vegetable patch.

‘Thank you,’ John said awkwardly as the Hoberts got into their native canoe to travel the little way downriver to their own homestead. ‘I could not have built it without you.’

‘Nor could we have built ours so quick without you,’ Bertram said. ‘I will come over in the next month or two to see how you are faring. We will have to be like brothers if we are to survive in this land, John.’

‘It’s funny,’ John said. He took the rope and cast it off, throwing it into Sarah’s waiting hands. ‘I thought this was an easy country to live in, easy to build a shelter, easy to find food. But now it seems to me that we are on the very edge of surviving, all the time.’

They looked at him blankly, their pale faces turned towards him as the current nudged the canoe away from the bank.

‘Of course it is a struggle,’ Sarah replied, stating the obvious. ‘The Lord God ordains that we should struggle our way through this difficult world to righteousness.’

‘But a new world –’ John suggested. ‘A new world of natural goodness, of natural wealth?’

She shook her head and the canoe bobbed. Bertram took up the paddle. ‘Men and women are born to struggle.’