‘Is my father with you? Are the braves coming home?’

‘They are at war,’ John said. ‘I am alone.’

The boy checked his loving run forwards into John’s arms and suddenly looked at him as if a terrible fear was invading him, as if his trust and certainty in John was suddenly unreliable. ‘You are not with the men?’

‘I could not do it,’ John said simply. He had thought that the worst thing would have been to tell Suckahanna; but the bright gaze of her son was hard to meet. The light went slowly out of the boy’s face.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said plaintively, willing it to be difficult, too complex for his understanding, tempting John to create another explanation.

‘I could not kill an Englishman,’ John said heavily. ‘I thought I could do it, but when it came to it, I could not. I left my home in England because I could not choose sides and kill Englishmen, and now I am here, in this new land, and I still cannot choose sides and kill.’

The boy’s eyes scanned his face. ‘I thought you were a brave,’ he said reproachfully.

John shook his head. ‘No. It seems I cannot be.’

‘But you are my father’s friend!’

‘Not any more.’

‘And Suckahanna loves you!’

A movement behind him made him turn. Suckahanna was standing there, watching John. The man and the boy turned and faced her, waiting for her judgement.

‘So you have decided at last,’ she said calmly. ‘You are an Englishman after all.’

Slowly John dropped to his knees, both his knees, in the gesture he had only ever used before to the greatest queen in Europe, and then unwillingly. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I did not know it until the moment when I could not shed their blood. I am sorry, Suckahanna.’

She looked at him and through him, as if she understood everything about him, and for a moment John thought that he would be forgiven, and that the steady, constant love between them could overcome even this. But then she turned away and snapped her fingers for her boy and walked, light-footed, down the street in the dawn light. She did not look back at him. He knew she would never look at him with love again.

The braves came home jubilant. The first wave of the attack on the isolated houses along the riverside had gone perfectly. The attack on Jamestown had hit the sleeping town and taken it unawares. As many as five hundred colonists had been killed, but as soon as the alarm was given the Indian army had fallen back. Although the fort was taken unawares, the town was now so spread out, and the houses so defended with shutters and stout doors, that no single battle could complete the war. The braves had fallen back to regroup, to heal the wounds and bury the dead, and then they would push forwards again.