John pushed away from the tree but found that his legs could hardly support him. His sense of loneliness and fear had weakened him. He staggered back towards his house and thanked God there was at least a curl of smoke coming from the chimney, and suppawn in the cooking pot. John felt his throat close at the thought of eating cold porridge again. He fell to his hands and knees and retched. ‘God, my God,’ he said.

A little saliva dribbled from his mouth. He wiped it on his sleeve. The strong brown homespun of the sleeve was stinking. He noticed it when he brought it to his face. ‘My clothes smell,’ he said in quiet surprise. ‘I must smell.’

He touched his hand to his face. His beard had grown and was matted and dirty, the moustache was long around his mouth. ‘My breath must smell, I am filthy,’ he said softly. ‘I am so foul that I cannot even smell myself.’ He felt humiliated at the knowledge. John Tradescant, the apple of his mother’s eye, his father’s only heir, had become a dirty, bedraggled vagrant, clinging to the edge of the known world.

He dragged himself to his feet again. The sky seemed to look down on him, as if he were a tiny, tiny insect making its arduous way across a massive leaf on a tree in a forest in a country that was too great for any man to cross.

John stumbled to his door and pushed it open. Only in the cramped room could he restore his sense of scale. ‘I’m a man,’ he said to the four rough wood walls. ‘Not a tiny beetle. I am a man. This is my house.’

He looked around as if he had never seen it before. The four walls had been made of newly felled green wood, and as the fire heated the room and the weather warmed, the wood had shrunk. John would have to take clay and twigs to patch the gaps. He shuddered at the glimpse of the forest through the cracks of the house walls, as if the wildness outside was seeping in through his house to attack him.

‘I can’t,’ he said miserably. ‘I can’t build the house and find food and wash and hunt and clear the land as well. I can’t do it. I’ve been here for nearly two months, and all I can do is survive, and I can barely do that.’ His throat closed again and he thought he was going to retch but instead he spat out a hoarse sob.

He felt the waistband of his trousers. He had thought that, for some reason, his belt had been stretching but now he realised that he was thinner. ‘I’m not surviving,’ he finally acknowledged to himself. ‘I’m not getting enough to eat.’