John drew a breath. Lambeth seemed a long way away, Hester more dead to him than his first wife, Jane. His own children half-forgotten. The pulse in his blood, the drumming beat in his ears, was for Suckahanna. ‘I will,’ he said.

Faster than the eye could follow, like a striking snake, the werowance snatched at John’s wrist, twisting it so that he fell to his knees before the basilisk gazes of the three old men. The pain shot up John’s arm to his shoulder, the grip on his wrist joint was so powerful that he had to stay on his knees.

‘Against your own people?’ the werowance demanded.

‘It won’t come to that,’ John gasped. He could feel the bones in his arm starting to bend, an ounce more pressure and they would break. ‘I know that they have treated your people badly but they have the land they need now, it won’t come to a war.’

‘They have driven us back like helpless deer,’ the man said, his grip unchanging. ‘And they will drive us back and back, every time they need an inch more land. Is that not so?’

John did not dare to answer. He felt the sweat standing on his back, the muscles in his arm singing with the pain. ‘I can’t say.’

‘They use the land and leave it, like a hog in a stall, don’t they? They foul it and then it is good for nothing. So always they need more land, and more land, and then more?’

Abruptly the werowance let John go and he pitched face down on the rushes of the floor, biting his lips to keep from crying out. He could not contain his panting breath, he whooped like a hurt child.

‘So there will come a time when every inlet of the river and every tall standing tree sees an Englishman hammering in a stake.’

John sat back on his heels, fingered his forearm, his shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he conceded unwillingly.

‘So when you say you are our brother, you must realise that we will call on you as our brother. You will die beside us when we run forward. Your hands will be red with the blood of white men. You will have their scalps tied to your belt.’

John thought of the Hoberts in their little house hidden among the trees, and the inn at Jamestown, the serving maid at the governor’s house, the rough kindliness of the planters, the hopeful faces of the emigrants when they first docked at the quay. The werowance clapped his hands, a sharp ringing sound.

‘I knew you couldn’t do it,’ he remarked, and rose to his feet and walked from the house.

John scrambled to his feet and took three rapid strides after him. One of the old men stuck out a bony leg and John tripped and pitched down to the skins on the floor.