Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory

neck, and J noticed for the first time that there were no midges and moths around her. She thrust the pot towards him.

      Squeamishly, J dipped his hand into the pot and brought out a little grease on the tips of his fingers. It smelled rancid like old sweat and well-hung meat. J could not help a swift expression of distaste at the powerful stink, he wiped the grease away on a leaf and shook his head again. The girl was not offended. She merely shrugged and then corked the pot with a bundle of leaves, and put it in a woven bag which she drew out from under the tree trunk along with a small quiver made of reeds holding half a dozen arrows, and a small bow.

      The quiver she hung at her side, the bow over her shoulder, the soft woven bag across her body to hang on the other hip. Then she nodded to him briskly, to indicate she was ready. She gestured towards the river – did he want to go along the shoreline?

      J pointed towards the deeper trees to their left. She nodded and stepped before him, made that little confident gesture that told him to follow behind her, and led the way.

      She moved as quietly as an animal through the shadows and the trees. Not even the arrows in her quiver rattled together. The tiny, almost invisible, track was blocked at every pace by a fallen log or a strand of creeper stretching from one tree to another. She trotted over the one and ducked beneath the other without ever breaking her steady stride. J, out of breath, breaking twigs and kicking stones with his heavy shoes, ducking beneath vines, rubbing his face against the trailing disagreeable stickiness of spiders’ webs and the stinging moths, stamped behind her like a pursuing cart horse.

      She did not look around. ‘Well, she hardly needs to look to know that I am following her,’ J thought. The noise alone was enough to alert all of Virginia. But she did not even glance to see if all was well with him. She just went at her slow steady trot, as if having been assigned the task of taking him into the deep forest she need no longer consult him until she delivered him to his destination.

      They jogged for about half an hour as J’s breathing went from a pant to a straining, painful snatching for breath, until at last they came to a clearing where she paused and turned. J, who had been watching every step on the treacherous path, though blinded by his own sweat and dazzled by a cloud of stinging insects, dropped to the ground and whooped for air. Courteously she hunkered down beside him, sitting on her heels, and waiting, composed and silent, for the white man to stop panting and mopping his face, and grabbing at his side where he had a stitch and at his ankle where he had a sprain.

      Slowly J fell silent. The noises of the wood which had been obscured by his trampling progress rose up all around him. There were frogs croaking from the river behind them, there were crickets singing. There were birds singing in the thick canopy of leaves above them, pigeons cooing, jays calling, and an interweaving of sounds which J, a town boy, could not recognise.

      He heard the rasp of his own breath subside and he turned to look at her. She was quiet and composed.

      J gave her a small, almost apologetic, smile, and lifted his hand to the neck of his thick linen shirt and flapped it to indicate his heat. She nodded solemnly and pointed to his thick jacket.

      J, feeling every inch a fool, slid his arms out of the sleeves and handed it to her. She folded it as carefully as a housewife in England and put it beside them and scattered a handful of leaves and moss on it. At once it had disappeared. J blinked. He could not even see the outline of it. She had hidden it completely.

      She turned and pointed at his breeches and his boots. J shook his head.

      Again she pointed at his breeches and mimed pulling them down. J, feeling like an aged virgin clutching to modesty, held the waistband tighter to him. He saw the glimpse of a smile cross her face but then she moulded her expression into impassivity. She gave a little shrug which said as eloquently as any words that he might wear his breeches if he chose to be hot and uncomfortable, and keep his boots if he wanted to alert the whole forest by his heavy tread.

      She made a small gesture with her hand that said: ‘Here. Trees,’ and then she sat back on her heels and looked at him expectantly.

      The trees were coming into leaf. J gazed around in wonderment at the height of them, at the richness of the growth, at the vines which looped one to another and twisted around them. Some of them he could recognise as English trees and he found he was nodding towards them, almost as a man might greet the welcome sight of an acquaintance in a strange land. He saw elderberry bushes, oak, hornbeam, cherry trees, walnut trees and dogwood with a sense of relief. But there was also a jumble, an overwhelming richness of foliage and trunk, bark and small flowers, that he could not name, could not identify, that crowded upon him, all beautiful or interesting, large or shapely, calling for his attention and competing with each other. J rubbed his hand across his sweating face. There was a lifetime’s work here for a plant collector; and he had promised his father to be home by early summer.

      He glanced at the girl. She was not watching him, she was sitting on her heels, waiting patiently, as steady and still as the trees around them. When she felt his gaze upon her she looked up and gave him a small shy smile, a child’s smile, as if to say that she was proud of her little cleverness in bringing him to the heart of the wood, happy to wait until she could demonstrate her cleverness at fetching him home. It was a smile that no father could have resisted. J smiled back at her. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘This is just what I wanted.’

      The girl did not lead him home until the evening and then her little bag was packed with seedlings that J had dug from the forest floor. J was carrying his hat like a bowl, filled to the brim with tiny tree seedlings, each showing no more than a pair of leaves, a white stem and a trail of little roots. There were more plants packed into the pockets of his breeches. He had wanted to put some in her quiver but she had shaken her head decisively, and when he proffered the plants again, she had stepped back from him to show him why she refused.

      In one swift movement the bow came off her shoulder and into her hand, with the other hand she had an arrow out of the quiver and notched on the bow. She was ready with a sharpened reed arrow head in moments. She nodded; her meaning was clear. She could not waste time fumbling with plants in her quiver.

      J tried to hide a smile at this child’s seriousness over a child’s toy. She was certainly deft; but the bow was a tiny one and the arrows were as light as their flights: made of reed, tipped with sharpened reed.

      ‘May I see?’ he asked.

      She unstrung the arrow from the bow and handed it to him. At once he realised his mistake. The arrow in his hand was a killing blade. The reed at its head was honed to razor sharpness. He drew it against his thumb and there was no pain, but a fine line of blood bloomed at its touch.

      ‘Damnation!’ he swore, and sucked his thumb. It might be made of reed, it might be so light that a young girl could carry it all day; but the arrow head was sharper than a knife.

      ‘How exact is your aim?’ J asked her. He pointed to a tree. ‘Can you hit that?’

      She stepped towards the tree and pointed instead to a leaf which was shifting slightly in the wind before the trunk. She stepped back, notched the arrow into the bow and let fly. The arrow whistled softly in the air and thudded into the tree trunk. J stepped forward to look. There were traces of the leaf around the arrow shaft: she had hit a moving leaf at twenty paces.

      J made a little bow to her, and meant the gesture of respect.

      She smiled, that little gleam of pride again, and then pulled the arrow from the tree trunk, discarded the broken arrow head and replaced it with another, put the arrow back in her quiver and led the way from the forest clearing at her usual trot.

      ‘Slower,’ J commanded.

      She glanced at him. He was clumsy with tiredness, his leg muscles singing with pain, and unbalanced by his burden of seedlings. Again he saw that small smile and then she turned and walked before him with a loping pace which was only a little slower. She paused for a moment in the clearing where he had thrown off his jacket and picked it up, dusted off the leaves and handed it to him. Then she led the way back to the hollow tree at the edge of the forest. She hid her bow and arrow in the trunk and drew out her