‘I was there. I had my bow and my quiver of arrows. I was ready to kill.’

‘And?’

‘They had horses and guns and dogs,’ she said. ‘They were hunting dogs, they would keep coming even with an arrow in their eye. They got me at the shoulder and pulled me down. I thought they would eat me alive. I could hear the crunch of their jaws on my bone and smell their breath on me.’ She swept back her hair and John saw the ragged scars where a deep bite had been gouged out of her neck and shoulder. ‘It’s odd to feel an animal licking your blood,’ she said.

‘My God,’ John whispered.

‘Half a dozen of us were still alive at the end, and they made us walk back to Jamestown.’

‘Suckahanna?’

‘Dead.’

The word was like a blow in the pit of his belly, it fell no lighter for being expected. He had known that Suckahanna would never have been taken alive. He had known from the very start that what he was seeking in this strange diminished village was the news of her death.

‘Attone?’

‘Dead.’

‘Suckahanna’s son?’

‘He got away,’ she said. ‘He could be anywhere. Maybe dead in the forest.’

‘The baby? The little girl?’

‘Died of hunger or fever or something. Before we tried to leave the village of bad water.’

There was a silence. John looked at the girl who had seen so much, who was indeed a child of winter.

‘I shall go.’ He paused. ‘Is there anything I can do for you or for the People?’

‘Would they set us free if you asked them?’

‘No,’ John said. ‘They would not listen to me.’

‘Do you think that they will hold us here forever?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that they mean us to have enough land to plant, but nothing that we can enjoy, nowhere we can run free? Do they think that now we will do nothing more forever than just cling to life at the edge of the white man’s land?’

‘No,’ John said. ‘I am sure not. There is a new government in England and it is pledged to care for the poor and for the men and women who are driven off their land by enclosures. It gives rights to tenants and people who live on the land. Surely they will give you the same rights here.’

She looked at him and for a moment he saw Suckahanna in her eyes with that delicious sense of the ridiculous which had been so often and so lovingly directed at John. ‘Oh, do you?’ she said and then turned and went back to her work.

John walked home dryshod in his English boots across the wooden causeway, not touching the earth, forgetting the marsh flower, not seeing anything but the winter battle in the snow and Suckahanna going down, fighting to the last minute, and Attone falling beside her.