John turned his head away. ‘Oh, I can tell you that,’ he said bitterly. ‘We do a clever little trick, us Englishmen. We start by assuming that everything in the world is ours, everything that ever was, everything that ever will be.’ He thought of the king’s elegant assumption that the world was constructed for his pleasure, that every work of art should belong to him, almost by right. ‘In our own country anyone who is not powerful and beautiful is a lesser person, not worth thinking about. When we go overseas we find many men and women who are not like us, so we think they are lesser still. When we find people whose language we can’t understand we say they can’t speak, when they don’t have houses like our houses we say they can’t build, when they don’t make music like our music or dance like we dance we say they can only howl like dogs, that they are animals, that they are less than animals because less useful to us.’

‘So Bertram Hobert takes me as his plough-horse.’

‘And I swagger around, thinking that I can come to this country and that the land is empty and I can take a headright, and the woman could have no better future than to love me,’ John said bitterly. ‘And so I walked away from the land I already owned and the woman to whom I owed a duty. Because I am an Englishman. Because the whole world is to be made for my convenience.’

The door opened and Sarah Hobert stood in the doorway, mud encrusting her boots. ‘Pull them off,’ she said abruptly to Francis. ‘I’ve come to make dinner.’

Francis kneeled at her feet. John stepped back into the darker corner of the room. Sarah came into the room in her stockinged feet and pulled off her cape, spread it out on the hooks to dry. ‘It’s raining again,’ she said. ‘I wish it would stop.’

She put the cooking pot on the edge of the fire and stirred it briskly. It would be suppawn for dinner again. Francis took four bowls from the fireside and put them on the rough trestle table, and pulled up the two stools and the two logs which served as chairs. Bertram came into the room, heeling himself out of his boots, carrying a pitcher of fresh water from the river.