She nodded and picked up her burden of dried meat, and set off. John watched her rangy, long stride until the trees hid her, then he turned and set off at a hunting jog downriver to Hobert’s plantation.

John slowed as he recognised the features of Hobert’s boundaries, a pine tree where they had slashed a crude ‘H’, a magnificent oak, bending over the path and shading it with its spreading branches, and then he saw the shingled roof of the Hobert house and a thin spiral of smoke coming from the chimney. John stepped back into the shade of the trees and hunkered down on his heels to watch.

He saw a man bent low under a burden of wood come out of the trees and fling down the cord by the door and straighten up with a sigh. A black man: Francis the Negro slave. He saw the door open and it was Mrs Hobert, speaking sharply and then going indoors. He waited a little longer as it grew cold and the light started to drain from the sky. Bertram must be out late with his gun. John did not move even though the hairs on his arms and his chest stood up, and his skin prickled with goosebumps against the cold. Only when it was nearly dark did he decide that Bertram must already be indoors. He rose to his feet and went silently down the hill to the little house nestling on a piece of flat ground before the river.

He hesitated at the door and then put his eye to the crack to peer into the firelit interior. It was a sparsely furnished room. A table before the fire; two stools and a hewed tree stump served as chairs. A box bed built into the wall was occupied by a man, his shoulder hunched against the room, his head tucked down. A ladder at the back of the room led to a sleeping platform, a string and a piece of sacking serving as a curtain between the two. John thought of the spick and span London house that the Hoberts had left for this venture and felt his heart ache for them, and surprisingly for himself too: another exile in this strange and remote land.

He tapped on the door and called out at the same time: ‘A friend, John Tradescant.’ His own name was awkward in his mouth.

Despite the reassurance he heard a little scream from Mrs Hobert and heard a stool overturn as Francis leaped to his feet.

‘Who?’ she demanded.

‘John Tradescant, your shipmate and neighbour,’ he repeated.

‘We thought you were dead!’ The door opened cautiously and Mrs Hobert’s white face peered out.

John kept back in the shadows. ‘I was with the Powhatan,’ he said.

‘Savages?’

He bit back a retort. ‘Yes. So I look strange …’

She stepped a little further out, female curiosity driving her onwards. ‘Like a savage?’