He took his bowl, spoon and pot down to the river and washed them, watching the reeds to his left for movement, in case Suckahanna was hiding there, watching him, and laughing at him having to do woman’s work. Then he filled the pot with fresh water and went back up to his house.

The room was still silent and empty. John took down his axe from the hook above the fireplace and went out to cut wood from the felled timber before the house. The great felling of trees to clear land for planting would have to wait. Firewood was the most important. The fire must not, on any account, go out. Enough people had warned him of the danger in Jamestown, and that was in a town where you could borrow a couple of glowing embers from the house next door and carry them home on a shovel. Here in the wilderness, a fire was like a spark of life itself. If it went out it might take a couple of hours to get it lit again, even with a good tinderbox and dry wood, and if darkness and cold were coming on, that would seem a very long time. If a pack of wolves had found the courage to come to the door, it would feel like an eternity with neither light nor fire to scare them away, and no means of firing the musket.

John cut and split logs for most of the morning and then piled them on either side of the fireplace to dry. He opened the rough-planed door of his house and looked down to the river. He was aching with fatigue and yet all he had done was get in one, perhaps two, day’s supply of firewood. He had nothing for dinner but more suppawn porridge, and nothing at all for supper. He set the pot on the fire to heat the water and felt, for the first time, a dark sense of foreboding that surviving would be a struggle in this country which no longer seemed rich and easy.

‘I must think,’ John said into the silence of the house. ‘Suckahanna and I ate like princes, every day, and she was not chopping trees all morning. I must try to live like her, and not like an Englishman.’ He scraped the last of the porridge from his wooden bowl and put it to one side. ‘I’ll put down a fish trap,’ he resolved. ‘And at dusk when the birds are coming back to the trees to roost I’ll shoot a couple of pigeon.’

He felt the juices rush into his mouth at the thought of roast pigeon. ‘I can do that,’ he promised himself. ‘I can learn to live here, I am a young man still. And later, when Bertram and Sarah come over, Sarah can teach me how to make bread.’