Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory

I would not see her again.’

      ‘I am a plant collector,’ J said wearily. ‘See. There are the plants. She was my guide. She made a camp. She hunted and fished for us. She has been a very, very good girl.’ He glanced at her and she gave him a swift encouraging smile. ‘She has been very helpful. I am in her debt.’

      The Indian woman had not followed all of the words but she saw the glance that passed between them and read correctly the affection and mutual trust.

      ‘You are her mother?’ J asked. ‘Just … er … released?’

      The woman nodded. ‘Mr Joseph told me he had given her to you for the month. I thought I would not see her again. I thought you had taken her to the woods to use her and bury her there.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ J said awkwardly. ‘I am a stranger here.’

      She looked at him with a bitter line around her mouth. ‘You are all strangers here,’ she observed.

      ‘She can speak?’ J remarked, tentatively, wondering what it might mean.

      The woman nodded, not bothering to answer him.

      The girl had finished unloading the canoe. She looked at J and gestured to the plants, as if asking what should be done with them. J turned to the woman. ‘I have to fetch some barrels and prepare these plants for my voyage home. I may take a passage on this ship. Can she stay and help me?’

      ‘We’ll both help,’ the woman said shortly. ‘I don’t leave her alone in this town.’ She hitched her skirts a little and went down to the shoreline. J watched the two women. They did not embrace; but they stood just inches away from each other and gazed into each other’s faces as if they could read all they needed to know in one exchange of looks. Then the mother nodded briefly and they turned side by side and their shoulders brushed as they bent over the plants together.

      J went up to his lodging to fetch the barrels for packing the plants.

      They worked until it was dusk, and then they worked again the next day, wrapping the cuttings in earth and damp linen, layering them in the barrel separated by damp linen and leaves, and packing the seeds in dry sand and sealing down the lid. When it was done, J had four half-barrels of plants which he would keep open to the air and damp with fresh water, and one sealed barrel of seeds. He shouted up to the ship and a couple of sailors came down and loaded them for him. At least he would have room to care for them on the voyage home. There were only a couple of people making the return voyage to England. The rest of the space was taken up with the cargo of tobacco.

      ‘We sail in the morning at first light,’ the captain warned him. ‘You’d best get your things aboard tonight and sleep aboard yourself. I can’t wait for passengers, when the tide ebbs we go out with it.’

      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 defence 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 baptised 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 travelled 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 realisation 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