In the warm days when the woods seemed to grow and turn green before his very eyes, John returned to his trade of plant collecting and rarity hunting. Already he had sent home a large parcel of Indian goods: clothing, tools, a case of bands and caps made from bark; now he recruited Suckahanna’s son as his porter and every day the two of them left the village for a long stroll in the woods and came back laden with sprouting roots. John worked in companionable silence with the boy, and found that his thoughts often wandered to Lambeth. He felt great affection for Hester and a powerful sense that he should be there with her, to face whatever dangers might come from a country in the grip of an insane war. But at the same time he knew he could not leave Suckahanna and the Powhatan. He knew that his happiness, and his life, lay with the People.

John thought himself a fool: to abandon a wife and then to try to support her, to take a wife and then to think daily of her rival. He wanted so much to be a man like Attone, or even a man like Hobert, who saw life in simple terms, who saw one road and steadily walked it. John did not think of himself as complex and challenged; he lacked all such vanity. He saw himself as indecisive and weak and he blamed himself.

Suckahanna watched him create a nursery bed, heel in the roots, and linger over his cuttings; but she said nothing for many weeks. Then she spoke.

‘What are they for?’

‘I shall send them to England,’ John said. ‘They can be grown and sold there to gardeners.’

‘By your wife?’

He tried to meet her direct black gaze as frankly and openly as he could. ‘My English wife,’ he corrected her.

‘And what will she think? When a dead man sends her plants?’

‘She will think that I am doing my duty by her,’ John said. ‘I cannot abandon her.’

‘She will know that you are alive, and that you have abandoned her,’ Suckahanna observed. ‘Whereas now she may have given you up for dead.’

‘I have to support her in the way that I can.’

She nodded and did not reply. John could not accept the stoical dignity of the Powhatan silence. ‘I feel that I owe her anything that I can do,’ he said awkwardly. ‘She sent me a letter which I got at Hobert’s house. She is in difficulties and alone. I left her to bring up my children and to manage my house and garden in England, and there is a war in my country …’

Suckahanna looked at him but said nothing.

‘I am torn,’ John said with a sudden burst of honesty.

‘You chose your path,’ she reminded him. ‘Freely chose it.’

‘I know,’ he said humbly. ‘But I keep thinking …’