All the prepared speech he had rehearsed on the long, cold ride beside the wintry river went from his head. He forgot to caution her against accepting him, he forgot to promise her that he would always be her friend even if he could not be her husband, he forgot all the things he had thought he would say. He just waited for her answer.

She smiled at once, as if he had brought her a ribbon of exceptional magnificence. ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

He could hardly believe that she assented so easily. At once he wanted to warn her against the wrong decision. ‘But I am much older than you, you should take time to think, to talk to your mother, perhaps to write to your father …’

She leaned towards him and her arms came around his neck. He felt the warmth of her breath on his cheek and he drew her close and at once knew desire, and a passionate sense of protectiveness.

‘I don’t need to ask anyone,’ she said very quietly. ‘I thought you would never ask me. I have been waiting for what seems like forever. I have always known what I would say.’

Winter 1644, Virginia

Winter clamped down on the coastal plain of Virginia as if it had taken sides in the war and was in savage alliance with the colonists. All the food stores of the Powhatan had been looted or fired, there was not enough to eat and even the skills of the women could not feed the tribe from the fish and crabs on the shoreline or the frozen berries left on the trees. The braves went out hunting every day and came back with duck and geese shot on their migrating journey southward. The meat was shared with strict fairness and then mothers gave their portion privately to their children and the old people pretended that they were not hungry.

When they had started the war they had thought that it would be over in one great rush – as battles generally were. There was a persistent belief that the white people would simply go, back to where they came from, especially since they always spoke of that other place as ‘home’, and talked of it with longing. Why would a man abandon his own fields, his own woods, his own game, and scratch a life on the edge of a strange river? If things went badly for him why would he not take one of the great ships and go, as easily and as unexpectedly as he had come?