‘You could get the men to help you clear the tree stumps,’ he suggested to Suckahanna. ‘It wouldn’t take long to uproot them and pull them out. Then you could plant your crops in straight rows. Those tree stumps you have left in will only grow back within a season, and then you’ll have all the work to do all over again.’

‘We want the trees to grow back,’ she said. ‘We don’t want this field for more than a season.’

‘But if you cleared it properly then you could use it year after year,’ John insisted. ‘You would not have to move on. You could have the same fields and keep the village in the same place.’

Decidedly, she shook her head. ‘The earth gets weary of working for us,’ she said. ‘We plant a field here and then we set her free. We move on to another place. If you plant corn in the same field three years running, then in the third year you will harvest nothing. The earth gets weary of hungry men. She has to rest like a woman with a baby at the breast, needs to rest, needs some time alone. She cannot be always feeding.’

‘White men plant the same fields, and go back to them year after year,’ John observed.

‘White men did,’ she corrected him. ‘All around Jamestown now they are finding that the land is tiring of them. The land is weary of the hungry white mouth which eats and eats and eats and cannot be satisfied and will not move on.’

She moved to the next row with her hoeing stick. In each hole she dropped four grains of corn and two bean seeds. Behind her another woman came sowing pumpkin seeds. Later, beneath the crops, they would plant the quicker-growing amaracocks for their lush, thirst-quenching fruit.

John picked up a stick of his own and hunkered down beside her. ‘I’ll help,’ he said.

She could not repress a giggle at the sight of him, and then she shook her head. ‘This is women’s work, only women do it.’

‘I can do it. I’m a gardener in my own country. I can plant.’

Still Suckahanna refused. ‘I know that you can. And any Powhatan man can do it, if he has to. But women like to do it. It is what we do.’

‘To serve the men?’ John asked, thinking of the delicious idleness of the hunting men when they returned to camp and found their dinner waiting for them and their fields cleared and planted, their houses swept clean, the sweat lodge heated and ready for them.