‘Sweet God! Am I supposed to be grateful for this charity? He was a friend of her grandfather! A man in his dotage!’

‘And where have you been?’ Hester turned from the window and suddenly rounded on John. ‘For all that you are full of what I have done and failed to do, what do you have to show for three years away? What treasures did you bring back? A barrel of plants and a handful of feathers! The last coins I sold were to buy your passage home when Johnnie and I had not tasted meat for weeks! How dare you accuse me of failing you! It is you that have failed me!’

‘You have no idea! You have no idea how I have lived and what I have been trying to do.’

‘With some woman? Some Jamestown drab in an inn? Have you been bunked up all these years, spending our money and doing nothing?’

‘I’ve been in the woods, I’ve been searching to understand what I should do –’

‘And the woman?’

‘What of her?’

‘Her name. Tell me her name.’

‘Suckahanna,’ he said unwillingly.

Hester screamed in shock and clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘You have bedded an Indian? A savage?’

His hand flew out before he knew it, he slapped her face hard. She jerked back and her head banged against the knob of the shutter with a horrible thud. She dropped without another sound, knocked unconscious. For a moment he thought he had killed her and knew a fierce, terrible joy that the woman who had abused Suckahanna should be silenced at once, a feeling instantly succeeded by complete remorse. He dropped to his knees beside her and lifted her up from the floor.

‘Hester, wife, forgive me …’

Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. ‘Take your hands from me,’ she spat. ‘You are a foul adulterer. I won’t have you touch me.’

Hester made up her bed in Frances’s old room and moved her clothes out of the master bedroom that night. She cooked a modest dinner for John, she produced a beautifully pressed suit of clothes and set about sewing him a new shirt. She behaved in every way like an obedient and dutiful wife. But he had knocked the love out of her with one impulsive blow, and he did not know how to get it back.