He turned another corner and saw a little wooden house, built like his own Virginian shack had been. On either side of it a tall wooden fence ran as if to enclose a huge field. The little hut was a gate house, the only way in to the enclosed acres. On the porch lounging in the sun were two men in remnants of what had once been good jackets, chewing tobacco and spitting into a brass bowl placed conveniently between them. They watched him as he walked up and John felt self-conscious and needlessly guilty as they stared at him, walking along the deserted road towards the village that no-one ever visited.

‘Good day,’ John said.

One man got to his feet and nodded a greeting.

‘I have come to seek a servant of mine,’ John said, succumbing to the prejudice of the place. ‘I have been a long time in England. I wondered if she was here.’

‘Might be,’ the man said unhelpfully. ‘We’ve got a hundred and sixty-two of ’em here.’

‘And where will I find the others?’ John asked, looking around, thinking there must be another village nearby.

‘That’s all there is,’ the man said. ‘D’you have a pass?’

John handed over Sir Josiah’s letter. ‘I mean, where are the other Powhatan? The rest of them?’

The man could hardly read; he only looked at the paper and at the seal on the bottom. ‘That’s all there is left,’ he said simply.

John hesitated at the enormity of what the man was saying. ‘There is surely another village elsewhere in the colony with more people?’ he asked. ‘There were thousands of them when I was last here, thousands.’

The man shook his head. ‘This a-one hundred and sixty-two is all that is left of the Powhatan,’ he said. ‘Unless they start having babies again. But they don’t show any disposition at the moment.’

The other man sniggered. ‘Most unwillin’.’

‘Can I go in?’ John asked.

‘I’ll take you,’ the soldier said.

He lit the fuse on his musket and held the gun across his chest, the fuse between his two fingers, the end of it aglow. Then he led the way into the enclosed village.