At once her dark eyes lit up with laughter. ‘Oh! You don’t trust me!’

‘I do –’ John heard himself stammering. ‘Of course!’

Suckahanna turned her head and babbled a string of words at her sister-in-law who was a few paces ahead. The woman screamed with laughter and turned back, laughing at John, and pointed an accusing finger at him. John picked out among the rapid flow the few words: man, Powhatan, talk, talk, talk, everything.

‘What is she saying?’

‘She says you are a true man, a Powhatan already. She says all men need to talk, talk, talk among themselves, to make the decisions which are already known.’

‘Known?’ John queried.

Suckahanna veiled her eyes with the downward sweep of her eyelashes. ‘Everyone thinks that you love me,’ she said quietly. ‘Everyone thinks that I love you. We are all just waiting …’

‘Waiting?’

‘For you. To decide.’

John went that night before supper to the house of the werowance, the senior man of the village. It stood four-square at the head of the village street, near the dancing ground, at a distance from the smoke of the cooking fires. It was walled with tree bark, and roofed with bark roughly cut in shingles. In the heat of the day the bark walls would be rolled up like curtains, but as the evening grew cold the old men closed out the chill night air. The werowance himself was sitting on a raised platform at the end of the tent; at his side were two of the old men of the tribe. They all carried their sharp hunting knives, John noticed. They all looked grave.

John stood in the doorway, awkward as a boy.

‘You can come.’ The werowance spoke in heavily accented English; but there was neither welcome nor warmth in his voice.

John entered the darkness of the house and sat, obedient to the small gesture, on a pile of soft deerskin. For a moment he was reminded of King Charles’s wordless gestures to his servants, and the thought gave him a little courage in the darkness of the strange house. He had served the greatest king in England, he could surely bear himself like a man before someone who was nothing more than a savage chief clinging to the edge of unknown land.

‘You desire Suckahanna?’ the werowance said briefly.

John found he was looking at the length and sharpened cane blades of the hunting knives.

‘I knew her before she was a married woman,’ he said. His voice sounding weak and apologetic, even in his own ears. ‘We were promised to each other. I promised I would come back for her.’

The werowance nodded. ‘But you did not come back,’ he observed.

John gritted his teeth. ‘When I got to my home in my country my father had died and my children needed care. I had to stay.’