But they were wise, she said now, and cautious, and they made her wait and watch him. And they realized as they watched him that he did not have the skill to keep himself. He could not feed himself and dig his fields and keep his fire in. It was too much work for a single white man to do. Even the children of the Great Hare live together so that the women can garden and the men can hunt and they can all work together. Then Suckahanna went to the werowance and to her husband Attone, and told them that she would like to be released to go to the Englishman and help him to make his home in the land of the Hare.

But again, they were too wise. They said that the Englishman could not be trusted with the children of Attone. That when Suckahanna returned to him he might take her as a servant and not as a wife. Or he might take her and then abandon her, as white men like to do. They said she should wait and watch.

She waited and she watched and she kept him alive with little gifts and then finally she saw him so near to death and to despair that he got in his canoe and could have drifted forever down to the Great Sea. Then, and only then, was Suckahanna allowed to take his life in her keeping and bring him to the Powhatan.

It was a good story and it lasted through the last hours of the night, when the smoke started to disperse from their wild, dazed heads, and the laughter subsided and the men and women and children drifted away from the dancing ground and the great fire they had built for their revels, and found themselves falling asleep with only an hour left of the night.

Suckahanna and John were among the last to leave. At last there was no hurry, there was no urgency in their meeting. They had their house, the werowance had allowed them to use one of the empty store houses, another house would be built soon. Suckahanna had put deerskin on the sleeping platforms and hung her baskets on the walls. The baby was slung up in its papoose, her little boy was lolled, his heavy head in her lap. Suckahanna smiled at John.

“I’m sleepy too,” she said.

John got to his feet and lifted Suckahanna’s son into his arms. The warm boy clung to him in sleep, with the easy trust of a child who has only ever known a loving touch. John followed Suckahanna to their new house and laid the boy, as she directed, on his little sleeping platform in the corner. Then he sat on the warm skins and watched his wife unbraid her hair, untie her little skirt and drop it to the floor. She stood before him naked.

John rose to his feet, his fingers fumbling for the tie of his own loincloth, found it and dropped the buckskin to the floor so that he was as naked as she. Her eyes traveled all over him, without shame, dark with desire, and she smiled a little, as a woman smiles when she sees that her man desires her: partly in vanity, partly in joy.

She turned with a proud little toss of her head and then stretched out on the sleeping platform, pulling the soft deerskin to one side so that it framed the bronze, smooth length of her, her dark hair spread, her lips half-parted, her breath coming a little faster and her eyes hazy with desire. John moved toward her and kneeled on the sleeping platform, moving over her with a sense of unreality, as if, after all his years of dreaming, this could only be another dream. He bent his head and kissed her and at the warmth and taste of her lips he knew himself to be awake and alive, and more powerfully alive than he had ever been in his life before. He gathered her warm buttocks into his hands and entered her with a quiet sigh of pleasure. Suckahanna’s dark eyes flickered shut.

Summer 1643, England

Hester woke on the morning of 31 May to the sound of gravel rattling against her bedroom window. For a moment she had the absurd thought that it was John, locked out of his own house, summoning her to let him in, to a reconciliation, a return, and to the end of her loneliness and waiting.

She jumped out of bed, ran to the window and looked down. It was a man, wrapped to the eyes in a cape, but she would have recognized the hat, heavy with plumes, anywhere.

“God rot him,” Hester swore under her breath, threw a jacket over her nightdress and ran barefoot down the stairs to let him in at the back door. In the stable yard a dog barked briefly. Hester let the man slip inside and then closed the door behind him.

“What is it?” she asked tersely.

“It’s gone awry,” he said. He dropped the cape from his face and she saw he was drawn and anxious. “I need a horse to get away from here to warn the king.”

“I don’t have one,” Hester said instantly.

“Liar,” he shot back.

“I don’t have one to spare.”

“This is the king’s business. His Majesty shall hear how I am served.”

Hester bit her lip. “Will you send the horse back to me?” she asked. “She’s my husband’s horse and the saddle horse for my children, and she works on the land as well. I need her.”

“The king’s need is greater.”

“Keep your voice down,” Hester hissed. “D’you want to wake the whole house?”

“Then give me the horse!”

She led the way down the hall to the kitchen at the back. He hesitated when he saw the fire banked in for the night. “I need food,” he said.

“You’re going to Oxford, not to America!” Hester said impatiently. “Eat there!”

“Give me some bread and some cheese, and I’ll drink a glass of ale while you are saddling the horse.”

Hester waved him toward the larder. “Eat what you want,” she said. “And come out into the yard as soon as you are done.”

She stepped into a pair of clogs which were on the stone doorstep and unlocked the kitchen door. She pulled the jacket around her shoulders and did up the buttons. John’s mare was in her loosebox, she whinnied when she saw Hester and the dog barked again.

“Hush!” Hester called to them both as she went into the tack room to fetch John’s heavy saddle and bridle. The mare stood obediently while Hester struggled with her tack, and then shifted when a shadow fell over the stable. Hester looked up, instantly afraid that it was Parliament men come to arrest the royalist, and arrest her too as a conspirator. But it was the cavalier, his hands full of bread and cheese, his hat tipped back on his head.

Hester led the horse out into the yard. “Give me that,” she said suddenly and snatched the hat from his head. He was too surprised to protest. With one swift movement she plucked the feathers from the hat band and tossed them into the midden heap. “Why not carry the king’s colors while you’re about it?” she demanded.

He nodded. “I shall tell His Majesty that the Tradescant house remembers their master. You will be rewarded for this.”

“The only reward I want is for you to send the horse back,” Hester said. “D’you promise you will send her back to me?”

“I do.”

Hester stood away from the mare’s head as she stepped delicately on the cobbles, and out of the yard and around the house to the road. Hester stood very still and quiet, listening. If the man had been sighted she would hear the horses’ hooves on the Lambeth road as they chased him. There was silence. Somewhere in the garden a thrush was starting to sing.

Hester realized that she was shivering with cold and with apprehension. She turned and crept across the yard to the kitchen door, slipped off the muddy clogs and went to the fireside. If he was captured and named her as his ally and the Ark as a safe royalist house, then she could face arrest for treason against Parliament, and the punishment for treason was death. The cavalier might ride with feathers in his hat and a light heart even in the middle of defeat; but Hester was only too well aware that the country was at war, and it was becoming a war in which there was no quarter given.

She waited by the fire until the little square kitchen window became light and then she went upstairs and woke Frances and Johnnie.