John dropped to his knees on his mattress and then hunkered down. He read it all over again. The paper was fragile in parts where it had been wetted by sea water or rain, the ink had run on one or two words but the voice of Hester, her idiosyncratic, brave little voice sounded across the sea to her husband, telling him that she was keeping faith with him.

John was completely still. In the silence of the house he could hear the scratch of a squirrel’s claws on the roof above his head. He could hear a log shift in the hearth in the room below. Hester’s love and steadiness felt like a thread that could stretch all the way from England to Virginia and could guide him home, or it might wrap around his heart and tug at it. He thought of Frances growing up so mischievous and so beautiful, and of his funny little scholarly son who prayed for him every night and thought he was wrestling with bears, and then he thought of his wife, Hester, a true wife if ever a man had one, fortifying his house with her little drawbridge, managing the business and showing people the rarities even while she watched the progress of the war and planned their escape. She deserved better than a husband whose heart was elsewhere, who exploited her skill and her courage, and then left her.

John dropped his head in his hands. He thought that he must have been mad to leave his wife and his children and his home, madly selfish to leave them in the middle of a war, mad with folly to think that he could make a life for himself in a wilderness and mad with vanity to think that he could love and marry a young woman and make his life all over again, to his own mad pattern.

John stretched out on his mattress and heard a low groan of pain, his own sick heart.

He lay very still for some time. Down below Francis the Negro came in with a load of wood and dumped it by the hearth. ‘You in here, Mr Tradescant?’

‘Here,’ John said. He dragged himself to the ladder and came down, his knees weak, the very grip of his fingers on the rungs seemed powerless.

Francis looked more closely at John and his face slightly softened. ‘Was it your letter? Bad news from your home?’

John shook his head and passed his hand over his face. ‘No. They’re managing without me. It just made me think I should be there.’

The Negro shrugged, as if the weight of exile was unbearably heavy on his own shoulders. ‘Sometimes a man cannot be where he should be.’

‘Yes, but I chose to come here,’ John said.

A slow smile lightened the man’s face, as if John’s folly was deliciously funny. ‘You chose this?’