She turned her back to him and stirred something in a pot hanging over the fireplace. Then she moved to a barrel in the corner and drew him a mug of ale.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Four mugs for a penny. I’ll keep the tally.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ J said under his breath and went out into the yard to wash.

She need not have warned him not to drink the water. It came out of the pump in a brown brackish spout, stinking horribly. Still, it was better than seawater, and J stripped and washed all over, and then pulled on his breeches and sat himself down on a pile of sawn wood and shaved himself, feeling his skin with his fingertips to guide his razor.

The ground still heaved uneasily under his feet, as if he were on board ship. But he knew that his father had felt the same when they had made landfall at Rhé or in Russia after his long voyage across the North Sea. He had told him that it was the same after any long voyage. For a moment J thought of his father at home, and the two children. For a moment he had the sweetest of illusions that Jane was there too, caring for them, awaiting his return. It seemed so much more likely that she would be there, waiting for him, than that she should be dead and he never see her again. The moment was so strong that he had to remind himself of the orangery and the pallet bed, and her white-faced determination that she should die alone rather than pass the plague to him and to her children. The thought of it made him sick to the stomach with grief, and he dropped his head in his hands as the cool Virginia twilight wrapped him in darkness, and he knew that he had sailed to the new world, to the new land, but brought his three-year-old grief all that long way with him.

Spring 1638, Virginia

J opened his eyes and saw, instead of the whitewashed walls and ceiling of his Lambeth home, a thatched roof, close to his face. Beneath him, wooden boards, not even a straw mattress; a pace away, a young man on a pallet bed, still deep in sleep. He took in, slowly, the watery smell of something cooking, the discomfort of the hard floor, and the irritating itch of a fresh fleabite. He sat up cautiously, his head swimming. The solid wooden floor of the loft heaved under his gaze with the illusion of movement.

‘You can stir yourselves or it’ll be cold!’ came a shout from the woman who kept the lodging house. In one fluid movement the lad, her son, was up and out of bed and down the ladder to the kitchen below. J pulled on his boots, brushed down his breeches, shrugged his waistcoat over his grubby shirt, and followed him.