He broke off and looked at her. She had turned her head away from him, hiding her face with a sweep of black hair. Her shoulders, showing brown and smooth through the veil of black hair, were shaking. He gave an exclamation and stepped forward to comfort her, thinking that she was weeping. But then he saw the gleam of her white teeth against her brown skin, and she flicked around and was running down the village lane, away from him, and was gone. She had been laughing. Not even her immense courtesy could restrain her amusement any longer. The spectacle of her husband struggling interminably forwards-backwards, duty-desire, English-Powhatan, was in the end too helplessly funny for her to take seriously. He heard the wild ripple of her laugh as she ran down the path to the garden where the sweetcorn was already growing high.

‘Aye, you can laugh,’ John said to himself, feeling himself wholly English, as leaden-footed as if he were wearing boots and breeches and weighed down by a hat. ‘And God knows I love you for it. And God knows I wish I could laugh at myself too.’

When the snows were melted from even the highest hills, when there were no sharp frosts in the morning, when the ground was dry beneath the light summer moccasins of the braves, there was a meeting called by the ancient lord, Opechancanough. John the Eagle went with Attone and with one of the senior advisors of the community to represent their village, travelling along the narrow trails, northwards up the river to the great capital town of Powhatan. It nestled in the dry woodlands, at the foot of the mountains on the edge of the river which John had once known as the James River, but which he now called the Powhatan, and the waterfall at the side of Powhatan town was Paqwachowng.

They sighted the town of about forty braves at dusk, and paused outside the city boundaries.

‘You’re to keep quiet until spoken to,’ Attone said briefly to John. ‘The elder will do the talking.’

John looked without resentment at the older man who had led the way at a hard pace for the journey of many days. ‘I didn’t even want to come,’ he protested. ‘I’m hardly likely to interrupt.’

‘Didn’t want to come, when you can see new plants and trees and flowers? And take them back to Suckahanna when we sail downriver by canoe?’ Attone mocked.

‘All right,’ John allowed. ‘But I’m saying I didn’t ask to come. I didn’t want a place here.’

The older man’s sharp beaky face turned to him. ‘But your place is here,’ he said.

‘I know it, older one,’ he said respectfully.

‘You will answer questions but not give opinions,’ the man ruled.

John nodded obediently and fell into file at the rear.