‘When I am gone will you tell her that I loved her?’ John asked. ‘And that I went because I believed she wanted me gone. Tell her it was not uncertainty, and not knowing where I belonged. Will you tell her that my whole heart was with her?’

Attone shook his head, a lazy gesture. ‘I will tell her that you loved her as much as a man like you can love.’

‘What would a man like you do?’ John cried out in frustration. ‘If you’re saying that my love is less – what would your love be like? What would you do?’

Attone laughed at that. ‘Oh! Beat her, I suppose. Love her. Give her a baby to care for. Send her out in the fields to work. Bring her home at night and keep her awake all the night with lovemaking until she is too tired to do anything but sleep. Don’t ask me, Eagle, she left me for you. If I knew how to manage her she would never have married you.’

John laughed unwillingly. ‘But you will tell her that I love her?’

‘Oh go, Englishman,’ Attone said, suddenly weary of the whole thing. ‘I will tell her the words if I can remember them, but we have no interest in words. And words from Englishmen mean less than nothing. You are a faithless race, and you talk too much. Go and see if your talking can save Opechancanough and then go back to your people. Your time here with us is finished.’

John washed himself clean in the river but the paleness of his skin seemed stained forever by the redness of the bear grease. He asked Musses to cut his hair for him, in a short crop, the same length on both sides, so that he no longer had the side plait of the Powhatan braid. She did it neatly, with two sharpened oyster shells, and gathered up the fallen locks and threw them on the fire.

‘Going home?’ she asked.

‘I have nowhere else to go,’ John replied, hoping for sympathy.

‘Goodbye,’ she said pleasantly and walked away.

John rose up from her fire, took a knife and his bow and arrow and went to find Suckahanna. She was at a corner of the camp, a deerskin strung taut on the curing frame; she was rubbing oil into the skin to keep it supple and sweet.

‘I am going to Jamestown to speak for Opechancanough,’ John said.

She nodded.

‘After, I shall take a ship for England.’

She nodded again.

‘I may never come back,’ he warned.

The tiniest of shrugs greeted that remark and she turned around and tipped some more oil into her palm and worked it into the skin.