J nodded. “I will.” He had no desire to return to the inn and the embittered landlady. He thought if she called the girl a beast in his hearing then he would speak in her defense and then there would be a quarrel and perhaps worse.

He turned to the two women. “What is her name?” he asked the mother.

“Mary.”

“Mary?”

She nodded. “She was taken from me when she was a baby and baptized Mary.”

“Is that the name you use for her?”

She hesitated, as if she was not sure she would trust him. But then there was a murmur from the girl at her side.

“She is called Suckahanna.”

“Suckahanna?” J confirmed.

The girl smiled and nodded. “It means ‘water.’”

J nodded, and then the fact of her speaking his own language suddenly struck him. “You can speak English?”

She nodded.

He had a moment of profound, unhappy bewilderment. “Then why did you never…? You never…? I did not know! All this time we have traveled together and you have been dumb!”

“I ordered her never to speak to a white man,” the woman said. “I thought she would be safer if she did not answer.”

J opened his mouth to argue – it must be right that the girl should be able to speak, to defend herself.

But the mother cut him off with an abrupt gesture of her hand. “I have just come from a month in prison for saying the wrong thing,” she pointed out. “Sometimes it is better to say nothing at all.”

J glanced at the ship behind them. Suddenly he did not want to leave. The realization that the girl had a name, and could understand him, made her intensely interesting. What had she been thinking during their days of silent companionship? What might she not say to him? It was as if she had been a princess under a spell in a romance and suddenly she had found her tongue. When he had confided in her and told her of his feelings, for his home, for his children, for his plants, she had met his confession with an impassive face. But she had understood, she had understood everything he said. And so, in a way, she knew him better than any woman had ever known him before. And she would know that only yesterday morning he was tempted to stay in this new land; to stay with her.

“I have to go. I am promised in England,” he said, thinking that they might contradict him, that he might not have to go, as if the breaking of the spell which had kept her silent might release him too.

The two women said nothing, they simply watched the indecision and reluctance in his face.

“What will become of you two now?” he asked, as if their plans might affect him.

“We will leave Jamestown,” the woman said quietly. “We will go back into the forest and find our people. I thought we would be safer to stay here, my husband and my father are dead. I thought I could live inside the walls and work for the white men. I thought I could be their servant.” She shook her head. “But there is no trusting them. We will go back to our own.”

“And Suckahanna?”

The woman looked at him, her eyes bitter. “There is no life for her,” she 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 traveling 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 forward 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.