Sarah gleamed at him. “Steal them,” she said.

John was genuinely shocked. “I would not have thought you would have permitted thievery.”

“It is not thieving to take from such as they,” she said firmly. “Do I steal a bone from my dog’s bowl? They have no right to the land, it has been claimed by the king. Everything in the land is ours. When they put meat in their mouths they are poaching from us. This land is a new England, and everything in it belongs to Englishmen and women.”

“You’ll come back to help me harvest, won’t you, John?” Hobert asked.

John hesitated. “If I can,” he said. “It is not easy for me to come and go.”

“Stay here then,” Sarah urged him. “If they are looking askance then you may be in danger. Don’t go back to them.”

“It is not them,” John said slowly. “It’s me. It is hard for me to come and go between this world and theirs.”

“Then stay with us,” Sarah said simply. “You have your bed in the attic, and when our crop is in we will pay you a share. We will come and rebuild your house and clear your field, as we promised. You will be our neighbor again instead of leading this mongrel life.”

John was silent for a moment.

“Don’t press him,” Hobert said gently to his wife. “Come,” he said to John. “I’ll walk up the river with you.”

He took his gun from the hook behind the door, and lit the fuse from the embers in the hearth. “I’ll bring back some meat,” he said, forestalling his wife’s protest that there was work to be done in the field. “I won’t be long.”

John bowed to Sarah and nodded his head to Francis, and the two men left.

Hobert walked beside John instead of jogging behind him. John found it strange to have a man at his shoulder, strange to have to curb his stride to a pace as slow as a child’s, strange to hear the noise they made as they moved so broad and heavy-shod through the wood. John thought that all the game for miles around would be scared away long before Hobert arrived.

“Is the hunting good now the spring is bringing the deer back into the woods?” John asked.

Hobert shook his head. “Less than last year,” he said. “It is the savages. They are taking too much and they are driving the animals deeper and deeper into the woods in the hopes that they can starve us out.”

John shook his head but did not have the energy to contradict him.

“There was news from England at Jamestown,” Hobert said. “The Scots have come over the border, they’re in the war.”

“Against the king?” John asked, astounded.

“Against the king and, more important, on the side of Parliament. There were some saying that the king would have to make terms with Parliament or the Scots. He could never fight against them both.”

“How far south are they?” John asked, thinking of the little house south of the Thames in Lambeth.

“By now? Who knows?” Hobert said carelessly. “Thank God it is not our war anymore, eh, John?”

John nodded absently. “My wife is still at Lambeth,” he said. “My son and my daughter.”

“I thought you had all but left them?” Hobert remarked.

“I should not have done so,” John said, his voice very low. “I should not have left them in the middle of such a war. I was angry with her and I insisted she come with me, and when she defied me I thought I was free to go. But a man with a child and a garden planted is never really free to go, is he, Bertram?”

Hobert shrugged. “I can’t advise,” he said. “It’s an odd life you’re making, that’s for sure.”

“It’s two lives,” John said. “One here, where I live so close to the earth that I can hear its heartbeat, and one there, where I live like an Englishman with duties and obligations but with great riches and great joys.”

“Can a man do both?” Hobert asked.

John thought for a moment. “Not with honor.”

The moment that Suckahanna saw him come from the shadow of the forest and walk past the sweat lodge, the fields and up the village street she knew that something had happened. He walked like a white man with weight in his heels. He did not stride out as the men of the Powhatan. He walked as if something was pulling his shoulders downward, pulling his head down to his feet, pulling his feet so that he looked as if he was wading through a mire of difficulties instead of dancing on smooth grass.

She went out slowly to meet him. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head but he would not meet her eyes. “Nothing. I have done what I promised to do and now I am come home. I need not go again until harvest time.”

“Are they sick?” she asked, thinking that his slouch might be shielding some illness or pain.

“They are well,” he said.

“And you?”

He straightened up. “I am weary,” he said. “I shall go to the sweat lodge and then wash in the river.” He gave her a brief unhappy smile. “And then everything will be as it was.”

In the warm days when the woods seemed to grow and turn green before his very eyes, John returned to his trade of plant collecting and rarity hunting. Already he had sent home a large parcel of Indian goods: clothing, tools, a case of bands and caps made from bark; now he recruited Suckahanna’s son as his porter and every day the two of them left the village for a long stroll in the woods and came back laden with sprouting roots. John worked in companionable silence with the boy, and found that his thoughts often wandered to Lambeth. He felt great affection for Hester and a powerful sense that he should be there with her, to face whatever dangers might come from a country in the grip of an insane war. But at the same time he knew he could not leave Suckahanna and the Powhatan. He knew that his happiness, and his life, lay with the People.

John thought himself a fool: to abandon a wife and then to try to support her, to take a wife and then to think daily of her rival. He wanted so much to be a man like Attone, or even a man like Hobert, who saw life in simple terms, who saw one road and steadily walked it. John did not think of himself as complex and challenged; he lacked all such vanity. He saw himself as indecisive and weak and he blamed himself.

Suckahanna watched him create a nursery bed, heel in the roots, and linger over his cuttings; but she said nothing for many weeks. Then she spoke.

“What are they for?”

“I shall send them to England,” John said. “They can be grown and sold there to gardeners.”

“By your wife?”

He tried to meet her direct black gaze as frankly and openly as he could. “My English wife,” he corrected her.

“And what will she think? When a dead man sends her plants?”

“She will think that I am doing my duty by her,” John said. “I cannot abandon her.”

“She will know that you are alive, and that you have abandoned her,” Suckahanna observed. “Whereas now she may have given you up for dead.”

“I have to support her in the way that I can.”

She nodded and did not reply. John could not accept the stoical dignity of the Powhatan silence. “I feel that I owe her anything that I can do,” he said awkwardly. “She sent me a letter which I got at Hobert’s house. She is in difficulties and alone. I left her to bring up my children and to manage my house and garden in England, and there is a war in my country…”

Suckahanna looked at him but said nothing.

“I am torn,” John said with a sudden burst of honesty.

“You chose your path,” she reminded him. “Freely chose it.”

“I know,” he said humbly. “But I keep thinking…”

He broke off and looked at her. She had turned her head away from him, hiding her face with a sweep of black hair. Her shoulders, showing brown and smooth through the veil of black hair, were shaking. He gave an exclamation and stepped forward to comfort her, thinking that she was weeping. But then he saw the gleam of her white teeth against her brown skin, and she flicked around and was running down the village lane, away from him, and was gone. She had been laughing. Not even her immense courtesy could restrain her amusement any longer. The spectacle of her husband struggling interminably forward-backward, duty-desire, English-Powhatan, was in the end too helplessly funny for her to take seriously. He heard the wild ripple of her laugh as she ran down the path to the garden where the sweet corn was already growing high.