“Victory for the king!” one of the sailors shouted jubilantly back. “We left just as his cousin Prince Rupert had wiped out Parliament’s men. One of the survivors swore there was no doubt about it, the king will have beaten them by now.”

“Thank God for that,” the man replied. And another one cheered. John noted that the report by one trooper of one skirmish had now been elevated into a total defeat and the end of the war, but said nothing. That was how the king’s masquing worked. Only one battle was ever enacted. There was no long, bitter exchange of small victories and small defeats, little setbacks and petty humiliations. One glorious cavalry charge by Prince Rupert had concluded the matter and the colonists could go back to growing tobacco and making money with light hearts.

John shrugged and went below to fetch his bags. He was as far from England and the news as everyone else. He had no reason to think that the war would be a longer and more painful business than the sailor and the colonists believed. Perhaps they were right and he was wrong and already the king was back in Whitehall and planning some new triumph: war with the Irish, or war with the Scots, or – since it was King Charles, as changeable as March weather – war with the Spanish or French. John hefted his bag holding his clothes and his money over his shoulder and went up on deck to the head of the gangplank.

She was not there. Not among the crowd on the quayside, nor back in the shadow of the warehouse walls where he had left her. He shook his head, he had not really expected her to be there, on the quayside; but he could not help the pang of childish disappointment. Somewhere, in a corner of his mind, he had seen himself coming down the gangplank and Suckahanna, a little older, a little more beautiful, running toward him and into his arms. It had been a foolish dream by a man who had already buried one wife and deserted another, a man who knew that love and desire do not always have a happy ending. But John still looked for her, and still knew disappointment that she was not there.

He watched his box being unloaded and then took hold of it and dragged it through the slush up to the inn where he was absolutely certain that he would find the landlady as sour tempered and as inhospitable as four years before.

His first visit was to Mr. Joseph.

“Of course I remember you,” the magistrate said. “You went out into the woods in an Indian canoe and came back with barrelfuls of plants. Were they any good in England?”

“Most of them took,” John said. “Some of them did very well. One of them, the spiderwort, is one of the most beautiful flowers I have ever grown. We had the purple one before, but this is white like a little three-petaled star.”

“And what news of the king?” Mr. Joseph interrupted.

“Good news. Prince Rupert’s cavalry had a great victory at a place called Powick Bridge,” John said, repeating the popular belief. “They say he can’t be stopped now.”

Mr. Joseph nodded. “Well, thank God for that,” he said. “I don’t know what would have been our case if Parliament had won. We’re a royal colony. Do we become a Parliament colony? No one thinks of these things. What about you? Would you have been a gardener to Parliament?”

“I’m here because I don’t know what I would have been,” John admitted. “I couldn’t see my way clear at all.”

The magistrate nodded. “Now what can I do for you? D’you want another Indian guide?”

“I want the same one,” John said, keeping his tone deliberately casual. He wondered if the man could hear the pounding as his heart raced. “I want that girl again. Do you know where she is?”

“What girl?”

John had to force himself to speak quietly and steadily. “You sent me out with a girl, d’you remember? Her baptized name is Mary. Her mother was in prison for a month for accusing someone of rape. You had the girl in service here, d’you remember? When I came back her mother met us and took the girl away. She said they might go back to their own people. Have you seen her since then?”

“Oh, the harlot and her daughter,” Mr. Joseph said, remembering. “No. They must have gone into the woods. I’ve not seen them.”

John had expected anything but this blank refusal. “But… but you must have?”

Mr. Joseph shook his head. “No. D’you want another guide?”

“I want that girl!”

The man shrugged. “I can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

John thought rapidly. “How could I find her? D’you know of other Indians who come in from the forest who might know her?”

Mr. Joseph shook his head again. “They’re settling down at last,” he said with satisfaction. “The ones who have been taken into service are kept here, in town, or safe on the plantations. The ones who have kept to the forest are pushed back, almost every day, farther and farther away from the river, away from the coast. We’re cleaning the land of them. We’re getting them out of the way. If she’s out in the forest with them you’ll not see her again. She could be over the mountains or the other side of York River by now if she’s got any sense.” He paused for a moment. “What d’you want her for?”

“I promised I would take her into my service,” John said smoothly. “I said when I came back and built my house she could come to work for me. She’s skilled with plants.”

“They’re all skilled with plants,” Mr. Joseph said. “Get another one.”

Every new immigrant to Virginia was awarded a headright of land, fifty acres a person. John, arriving for the second time, was awarded a farther fifty acres, marked solemnly on a map held in the new building of the burgesses’ assembly. His father had been persuaded to purchase two headrights when the Virginia Company was founded, so John had his land put together in one spreading acreage of two hundred acres: as big as an English farm. It was upriver from Jamestown, not the most desirable of sites since the tobacco ships would not go too far upstream. The earliest assignments had all been around Jamestown or downriver. Latecoming planters had to ship their goods in their own boats downriver to Jamestown and catch the oceangoing boats there.

John looked carefully at the burgesses’ map. The lines of rivers and mountains were indistinct and vague. The only part of the country that John knew well was the woods where he had lived for the month with Suckahanna, and they were indicated with a rough scribble suggesting inlets and islands and swampy ground. It hardly mattered. There was so much land to be had in the new colony that disputes over boundaries had been left behind in overcrowded England. No one in this new huge country was going to quibble over a mile to the east or ten miles to the west, scale was a different thing in this vast emptiness.

Bertram Hobert was consulting the map alongside John. “Next to my land,” he remarked. “What d’you say we build one house together and then live in it while we work on the other?”

John nodded thoughtfully. “When could we start?”

“Not till spring. We’d die of hunger and cold out there in the winter. We’ll stay snug in town until spring, and go out as soon as we can.”

John looked out of the open slit of the window at the iron-gray sky and the falling snow and thought of Suckahanna, barefoot in the frozen woods where the snow was dozens of feet deep and the wolves howled at night. “How could anyone survive out there in winter?”

Hobert shook his head. “Nobody can,” he said.