The older woman put out her hand to J and he felt the roughened palm in his own. Then she took her daughter’s hand and joined them together in a hard grip. ‘When you come back she shall be your wife,’ she promised him.

‘I will,’ the girl said.

‘I will,’ J swore.

The woman released them and turned away as if there was nothing more to be said. J watched her go, and then turned to Suckahanna. She seemed at once very familiar, the easy companion of weeks of travelling and camping, and exquisitely strange, a girl on the edge of womanhood, a virgin who would be his wife.

Carefully, as if he were transplanting a seedling, he put his hand to her cheek, stroked the line of her jaw. She quivered as he touched her but moved neither forwards nor back. She let him caress her face for a moment, for one moment only; and then she turned on her heel and ran from him.

‘Come back soon,’ she called, and he could hardly see her in the darkness as she went swiftly after her mother, only her linen shift gleaming in the dusk. ‘Come in the good time, the fruitful time, Nepinough, and I shall make you a great feast and we will build our house before winter comes.’

‘I will!’ J said again. But she was already gone, and the next day at dawn the ship sailed and he did not see her.

Summer 1638, London

J’s ship arrived at London docks at dawn in early April and he came blearily out of his cabin into the cold English air, wrapped in his travelling cloak with his hat pulled down on his head. A wagoner was idling on the dockside, fiddling with the feedbag at the head of a dozing horse.

‘Are you for hire?’ J shouted down.

The man looked up. ‘Aye!’

‘Come and fetch my goods,’ J called. The man started up the gangplank and then recoiled at the waving fronds of saplings and small trees.

‘Goods?’ he asked. ‘This is a forest!’

J grinned. ‘There’s more than this,’ he said.

Together they humped the barrels filled with damp earth down the gangplank and into the wagon, the whippy branches of trees stirring above their heads. Then J brought another barrel of seeds and nuts, and finally his own small bundle of clothes and a chest of rarities.

‘I know where we’re headed,’ the man said, climbing on to the box and waking the horse with a slap of the reins on its back.

‘You do?’

‘Tradescant’s Ark,’ the man said certainly. ‘It’s the only place in the world that you’d go to with half a forest on board.’

‘Quite right,’ J said, and put his feet up on the board. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked.