Mutely, Hester held out the sealed and folded paper. ‘If you were twenty years in the vicarage and a good parish priest then you are the man for me,’ she said. ‘These are hard times of change for us all. Will you help me try to bring my family back together? This is my husband’s passage money home.’

He hesitated for only a moment and then he took the paper. ‘Forgive me, I am too absorbed in my own sorrows. I will take the paper; but how will I find your husband?’

‘He’ll find you,’ Hester said with certainty. ‘He’ll be waiting for this. All you have to do is to tell people in Jamestown that you are looking for him and he will find you. Whereabouts are you going in Virginia?’

‘I hope to settle there and found a school,’ the vicar said. ‘The times are against men who believe in the king and God in this country. I trust that the new world will be a refuge for men of steady faith. Half this ship is filled with men like me, who cannot bear the new rule of Parliament and the wild heresies of madmen and self-taught preachers and the like in our own churches.’

‘My husband left at the outbreak of the war,’ Hester said. ‘He could not bear to watch the country being torn apart, and it was tearing him apart too.’

‘He will come home to difficult times,’ the vicar remarked. ‘The fighting may be nearly over, but the bitterness of these years will not be easily restored. And what is to become of the king in the hands of such a crew?’

There was a shout from the bridge and an answering shout from the shore.

‘I must go,’ Hester said hurriedly. ‘I do thank you for accepting the letter for John. He will do all he can to help you when he meets you, I know he will. He will be grateful.’

The vicar bowed. Hester turned for the gangplank and went down it as the lumpers on the dockside shouted to the sailors on the ship and finally cast off from shore.

‘God speed,’ Hester called to the ship. ‘Tell him I am waiting.’

The vicar put his hand to his ear, so Hester waved with a smile on her face and said more quietly, so he would be certain not to hear, ‘Tell him I love him.’

Autumn 1645, Virginia