John walked through the gate, and then stopped and blinked. It was like the village he had known, but in miniature; the long houses were too few and built too small. There was a dancing circle but it was compressed against one of the blank encircling wooden walls. There was the central street leading up to the house of the werowance but it could be walked in forty strides. There was no sweat lodge that he could see. All around the houses, planted with the meticulous care of the Powhatan women, were the food crops, cramped up against the houses. John recognised at once the growing stalks of the Indian corn and the amaracock planted between them, and the little shelter built to overlook the field where the children would wait for their mothers to finish their work.

‘Can I talk to them alone?’ John asked the soldier.

‘They don’t speak English,’ he said. ‘You’d better just look for your girl. I can line them up for you. They understand “Muster”.’

‘No, no,’ John said. ‘I can speak Powhatan. Let me speak with them.’

The soldier hesitated. ‘Shout you need help then,’ he said and went back to his seat.

The women working in the field did not raise their eyes at this exchange, they did not take more than a glance at John. But John knew that they would have seen every detail of him, and that if Suckahanna or Attone or any of his people were alive in this cage then they would know within minutes that he had come.

He walked up to the little confined field and spoke in Powhatan.

‘Sister,’ he said. ‘I was the husband of Suckahanna and the friend of Attone. They called me the Eagle when they took me into the People.’

She did not break off her work, her hands still moved in the earth, setting the little plants, dropping in seeds. She did not look up at him, she might as well have been deaf.

‘I have come to find Suckahanna, or Attone, or any of my people,’ John said. ‘Or news of them.’

She nodded at that; but did not pause in the steady, sweeping movement of her hands.

‘Did you know them?’ John asked. ‘Suckahanna, Attone, any of them? She had a little boy –’

The woman turned her head and called a single word, the name Popanow, the child of winter, and a young girl came forwards.

‘I knew Suckahanna,’ she said simply. ‘You must be the Eagle. I would not have known you, they spoke of a hunter and you are too fat and old.’

John concealed the hurt to his vanity and looked at the girl. ‘I don’t remember you.’

‘I was born in the village of the bad water,’ she said. ‘You were long gone.’

‘Suckahanna?’

She paused. ‘Why d’you want to know, white man?’