The sun came up, a pale yellow sun swimming in cloud. The mist was burned off the river and the stinging moths came out and formed a cloud around J’s red, sweaty face. He puffed them off his lips but he could not spare a hand from the paddle to swat them away. He shook his head irritably and the canoe made a little wobble in the water.

At that movement she glanced back and saw him, hot, flushed, irritable, and with one smooth stroke she turned the canoe and plunged towards the shade of an inlet.

The trees closed around them, over their heads, around their backs, they were hidden in a world of green. The girl ran the canoe up on a sandbank and stepped out. She slipped off her servant’s smock, folded it carefully and stowed it in the canoe. Then she pointed commandingly at him.

J took off his jacket, then she pointed at his boots.

‘I’ll keep my boots on,’ J said.

She shook her head. Pointed to the vast reach of water, closed her eyes and mimed a man plunging downwards, dragged under by the weight of his boots.

‘Oh,’ J said. ‘All right then.’

He sat on the wet sand and pulled off his boots, stood before her in his stockings, breeches and shirt. She gestured at the rest of his clothes.

J smiled, shook his head. ‘I’ll keep them on …’

She tugged at his shirt with an impatient little hand, and produced from the canoe, with a flourish, a little buckskin skirt, like her own.

‘Indian breeches?’ J asked.

She nodded.

‘I cannot dress like a savage,’ J said reasonably.

She pointed to the dugout canoe, to herself, to the distance they had come and the distance they were to go. Her meaning was clear. You are travelling like one of the Powhatan, with one of the Powhatan. Why not be comfortable?

‘I’ll get bitten,’ J protested. He made little pinchers of his thumb and finger and pinched at the skin of his forearm, showed her the tiny irritating swellings on the skin of his face.

The girl nodded and produced the jar of grease she had used in the forest the day before, held her own smooth arm for his inspection, turned her little unmarked face towards him.

J looked around him in embarrassment. But the woods were loud only with birdsong and impervious to his shame. There was no-one within ten miles in any direction.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said awkwardly.

He stripped off his breeches, grateful for his long shirt tails which hid his nakedness from her. She held out the buckskin skirt. J struggled to put it on, under his shirt. She stepped lightly around to his back, pulled the shirt out of the way and tied the strings of the apron for him. The soft leather nestled against him like another skin. The air was cool on his legs. J felt white and ungainly, a bleached leviathan beside her slight brown body; but he also felt comfortable for the first time since he had arrived in this painfully humid country.