She was an odd mixture of child and woman; that was the first thing he saw about her. The roundness of her face and the open gaze of the dark eyes was that of a child, an inquisitive, bonny child. But the straightness of her nose and the high cheekbones and the strength of her jaw would make her a beautiful woman in only a few years’ time. Her head was not yet level with his shoulder, but the long legs and slim long feet showed that she would grow taller. She was dressed according to Jamestown convention in someone’s cast-off shift which reached down to her calves and flapped around her shoulders. Her hair was long and dark, flowing loose on one side of her head; but the other side, around her right ear, was shaved close, giving her a curious, exotic appearance. The skin of her neck and her shoulders, which he could see around the gaping gown, was painted with outlandish blue ridges of tattoos. She was looking at him with apprehension, but not outright fear; looking at him as if she were measuring his strength, and thinking that whatever might happen next she would survive it.

It was that look that told J she was a child. A woman fears pain: the pain inside her body, and the pain of a man’s command. But this was still a girl, since she had a girl’s confidence that she could survive anything.

J smiled at her, as he would have smiled at his own nine-year-old daughter Frances, left so far away in London. ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you,’ he said.

Years later he would remember that promise. The first thing he, a white man, had said to an Indian: ‘Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.’

J led the girl away from Mr Joseph’s house to the shade of a tree in the centre of what would in England have been the village green, but here was a dusty piece of waste ground between the river and the Back Road. A couple of cows foraged pessimistically around them.

‘I need to find plants,’ J said slowly, watching her face for any signs of understanding. ‘Candlewood. Soapberry. Spoonwood.’

She nodded, but whether she understood him, or was merely trying to please him, he could not tell.

He pointed to the tree. ‘I want to see trees.’ He pointed to where the thick line of the forest fringed the river, beyond the desert of waste ground that the settlers had made around the little town, tree stumps still showing in the new fields, dust blowing away from the exhausted tobacco rows.

‘Will you take me into the woods?’