They bowed their heads while Bertram spoke a blessing on their food and then they ate in silence. John looked covertly at Bertram and his wife while they ate their gruel. This land had changed them both. Sarah had been a redoubtable, God-fearing woman in England, the wife of a small farmer, and a trader in her own right. This land had made her hard. Her face was pinched and determined. The fat had been rubbed off Hobert too. In England he had been round-faced and ruddy-cheeked but here he had faced death and terror. His face was engraved with lines of suspicion and hatred. This was a country in which only a man of remarkable courage and persistence could survive. Prosperity was harder and took even longer.

Sarah bowed her head as she finished her dinner and then she rose from the table. There was not a moment to spare for leisure. There was never a moment to spare for leisure.

‘Are you ready to work?’ she asked John

He felt the letter crackle in his pocket. ‘I’m ready,’ he said. The suppawn lay heavy in his belly, and although John knew it was old cornflour and stale water, the pain, the deep pain in the centre of his body, was not indigestion but guilt. He should never have left England. He should never have sought and loved another woman. He should have stayed with the woman his father had chosen for him and brought up his children with her. He had run from his life like a schoolboy playing truant and now he realised that a man cannot have two lives. He has to choose. Attone’s rough, sarcastic counsel was right – a man pulled two ways by two threads must cut one of them.