said. ‘We can find our people but not our old life. The places where we used to grow our crops are planted with tobacco, the rivers are thin of fish and the game is going, scared away by the guns. Everywhere we used to run, there is the mark of a boot on the trails. I don’t know where she will live her life. I don’t know where she will find a home.’
‘Surely there is room for your people as well as the planters,’ J said passionately. ‘I can’t believe there is not space in this land … we were out for nearly a month and we saw no-one. It’s a mighty land, it stretches for miles and miles. Surely there is room for your people as well as mine?’
‘But your people don’t want us here. Not since the war. When we plant fields they destroy our crops, when they see a fish weir they break it, when they see a village they fire it. They have sworn we shall be destroyed as a people. When my family were killed they took me into slavery and I thought that Suckahanna and I would be safe as slaves. But they beat me and raped me, and the men will soon want her too.’
‘She could come with me,’ J suggested wildly. ‘I could take her to my home in England. I have a son and a daughter there, I could bring them up all together.’
The woman thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘She is called Suckahanna,’ she said firmly. ‘She must be by the river.’
J was about to argue but then he remembered seeing Pocahontas, the great Princess Pocahontas, when he was just a boy himself and had been taken to view her as a child might be taken to see the lions in the Tower. She had not been Princess Pocahontas by then, she had been Rebecca Rolfe, wearing ordinary English clothes and shivering in an English winter. A few weeks later she had died, in exile, longing for her own land.
‘I will come again,’ he said. ‘I will take these things to England and come out again. And next time, when I come, I shall build a house here and you shall be my servant and she shall be safe.’
‘How could she be safe with you?’ her mother asked swiftly. ‘She’s not a child, though she’s so slight. She’s near thirteen now, by the time you come back she’ll be a woman. There’s no safety for a Powhatan woman in the white man’s town.’
J thought for a moment and then took the step, the next step, speaking without thought, speaking from his heart, his unexamined heart. ‘I shall marry her,’ he promised. ‘She will be my wife and I will keep her safe and she shall have her own house and fields here. I shall build her a house beside the river and she need fear for nothing.’
He was speaking to her mother but he was looking at the girl. A deep rosy blush was spreading from the coarse linen neck of the shift up to her forehead where the bear grease still stained her brown skin at the dark hairline. ‘Should you like that?’ J asked her gently. ‘I am old enough to be your father, I know. And I don’t understand your ways. But I could keep you safe, and I could make a house for you.’
‘I should like that,’ the girl said very quietly. ‘I should like to be your wife.’
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.
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.
The carter spat accurately over the side of the wagon and hit the dirt road. ‘Nothing new,’ he said. ‘A lot worse.’
J waited.
‘Everything you can eat or drink is taxed,’ the carter said. ‘But that was true before you went away, I dare say. Now they’ve got a new tax, a rotting crime of a tax: ship money levied on everyone, however far they are from the sea. It’s the ports that should pay ship money, they’re the ones that need the navy to keep them free of pirates. But the king is making all the towns pay, even inland towns. My sister lives in Cheltenham. Why should she pay ship money? What are the seas to her? But she has to.’
J nodded. ‘The king won’t call a parliament, then?’
‘They say he won’t even hear the word mentioned.’
J allowed himself a pleasurable ‘tut tut’ of disapproval.
‘If he called a parliament and asked them to set a tax they would tell him what they think of him as king,’ the carter said baldly. ‘They would tell him what they think about a Privy Council which is advised by a Papist French queen, and a court which is run by Frenchmen and Jesuits.’
‘That can’t be so,’ J said firmly. ‘I’ve only been gone a
