She shook her head. ‘You must know by now that you cannot live there,’ she said gently. ‘You cannot live there alone. You must know by now that you cannot survive in this land alone. You would have died there, my love.’ The endearment slipped out, she flushed and bit her lip as if she would have taken it back.

‘I thought – I thought I might get a servant, or a slave. I thought –’ He hesitated. ‘I have been thinking that you might come with me?’

‘As a servant? As a slave?’ Her look blazed at him.

‘I meant I must have someone to work under me,’ John corrected himself. ‘And I have been praying that you would come to me ever since I made landfall. I meant a servant, and you as well.’

‘I shall never lie under a white man’s roof again,’ Suckahanna said firmly. ‘I have taken my decision, and I am with the People.’

John jumped to his feet and took a stride away from her and then back again. ‘Then there is nothing for me here,’ he cried out. ‘I came to make a new life for myself, to farm virgin earth, to find you. And you tell me I cannot plough or hoe alone. I cannot keep myself or even keep my fire in. I cannot take you away from your people, and I cannot take you to my people. I have been a fool to run from one life to another and still achieve nothing.’

There was a cry from the little platform shelter where the children played. Suckahanna glanced back, listening for her own baby’s voice. They heard another woman call in response and get up from her knees and go to see to the crying child. Suckahanna returned her attention to her gardening, picked up her hoeing stick, picked out little weed seedlings from her row. Without turning her head to see if John was listening she spoke very quietly to him.

‘Perhaps you could be with me,’ she said slowly. ‘Leave your people and join mine.’

‘I can’t live here, seeing you every day,’ John said softly. ‘I want you, Suckahanna. I can’t bear to live near you and yet to sleep every night only a footstep away from you.’

‘I know,’ she said, so quietly that he had to lean forward to hear. But still her hands worked, her hoeing stick piercing the fresh soil and the seeds dropping quickly and accurately through her fingers. ‘I could ask my husband to release me.’

‘Release you?’ John asked incredulously. ‘This is possible?’

‘He might,’ she said evenly. ‘If it was my wish.’

‘Your people let their wives come and go as they choose?’

She shot him a small smile. ‘I told you that we were a proud people. Wives are not slaves. If they wish to leave they must be free to do so, don’t you think?’

‘Yes … but –’