‘We don’t talk about that time,’ she said shortly. ‘About that winter. We ate what we could, and no blame to those who found what they could.’

J turned to his fellow lodger for an explanation.

‘The graveyard,’ the man said in an undertone. ‘They dug up their dead and ate them.’

The woman’s face was stony. ‘We ate what we could get,’ she said. ‘And you’d have done the same. There’s no such thing as Christian behaviour when you’re starving. We did what we had to do.’

J felt the suppawn dinner rise up in the back of his throat at the thought of what the cook had tasted.

‘We survived,’ she said flatly.

‘I’m sure –’ J stammered.

‘And when the weather got warmer those who were not dead of their wounds, or of grief, or of starvation, died of the plague,’ she went on. ‘All of us packed in to this little town, all of us sick with grief and fear. Hundreds died that winter, and it was all the Indians’ fault. As soon as we could muster men and supplies we went against them. We passed a law and we swore an oath, that not a man or a woman would be left alive.’

The man nodded. ‘We hunted them down like dogs and we pushed them further and further away. It was an order – kill all the men and women and enslave the children. We pretended to be at peace for a while and we watched them plant their crops and commit themselves to their fields, and then, and only then, we went in and destroyed their harvest. They make fish weirs, intricate clever things, we destroyed them wherever we saw them. We drove away the game so that they would starve when they went hunting, we burned them out of their villages so they were homeless, we trampled their crops in the field so they would know hunger as we had known hunger. We took our revenge.’

‘We had some good hunting,’ the woman said reminiscently. She drew three mugs of ale and set them on the table. ‘I remember the soldiers from the fort coming in with the heads of the savages at their belt, and then setting them up along the gate like a gamekeeper stakes up a dead weasel.’

‘And are they finished now?’ J could hear the nervousness in his own voice.

‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘This was sixteen years ago, remember, and there’s not been a word from them since. They cannot live without the spread of land for their game and farming, and we have pushed them backwards and backwards towards the mountains. They used to live always on the move you see: winter inland, summer down towards the sea, spring to the fields. Once we built our houses and cleared the forest we drove them out, drove them like a herd of deer into bad foraging.’

‘They must hate us as their worst enemies,’ J said.