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but with dark skin and tattooed lines over his chin and cheeks, and feathers in his hair which was shaved around a central crest. The other man had a face more handsome than any she had ever seen, fair and strong and as perfect as an angel’s, with clear blue eyes that held her transfixed.
    He was looking straight at her.

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Virginia
    ‘… It is the goodliest and most pleasing territory of the world (for the soil is of huge unknown greatness, and very well peopled and towned, though savagely) and the climate so wholesome that we have not had one sick since we touched land here. To conclude, if Virginia had but horses and kine in some reasonable proportion, I dare assure myself, being inhabited with English, no realm in Christendom were comparable to it …’
    —From a letter sent by Master Ralph Lane, at the new Fort in Virginia, to Master Richard Hakluyt the Elder of the Middle Temple, London, 3rd September 1585
    ‘I have come here before.’
    The tall Indian smiled at Emme in a way that made the lines on his cheeks ripple into crescent moons either side of his wide nose. What he had said was incredible, but little else made any impression on her. Her mind was still reeling from the ordeal of the night before and the revelations of the morning: her degradation at thehands of Lord Hertford and her encounter with the Queen and then Lady Howard. Who was this man? He had been introduced to her as ‘Manteo’, and thus she would address him.
    ‘But how, Master Manteo? When?’
    ‘Two years past. I came here for learning.’
    Inclining his feathered head, with his arms still folded across his broad chest, he walked over to a gentleman with sharp cheekbones who was talking excitedly into the hubbub. She was left with the mariner who had first arrested her with his looks. His blue eyes locked onto her, and she felt touched by warmth as if from the sun that had bronzed his skin, but it was fleeting, like a flash of light from behind dark clouds. What was his name? The events since the last sunset seemed to have fuddled her reason. ‘Kit’ was all she could remember, but she could not call him that.
    ‘Will you tell me more, good sir?’
    The handsome mariner regarded her with an expression between bemusement and gravity, and she realised he had features which would always seem youthful, but that, most likely, he was much older than herself, perhaps by as much as ten years; the tiny creases around his eyes betokened it, and the lack of softness around his jaw. His eyes flickered about the Great Hall, and she followed his gaze, skimming over the hammer beam roof painted blue, red and gold, the battle-scene tapestries brightly lit by candelabra, the portraits of kings between the lofty white windows, the richly dressed courtiers and ladies-in-waiting, the visiting mariners and soldier-adventurers, their ruffs poking above gleaming gorgets, and the door leading to the Privy Lodgings through which the Queen and Sir Francis Drake had just left.
    Then the mariner looked back at her.
    ‘Manteo came here two years ago, brought back by the first expedition sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to explore the Americas north of Florida, but Sir Walter kept him out of sight at Durham House most of the time. Master Harriot, over there, taught him English.’ He gave a nod towards the man with prominent cheekbones.
    ‘That gentleman can speak Indian?’ she asked, amazed.
    The blue of Master Kit’s eyes washed over her, and she caught a trace of the smell of the sea in his clothes. Close to her he seemed as strong as a mast, and his voice had a soft resonance like the boom of a hull sliding through waves.
    ‘He can speak the Algonkian of Manteo’s tribe.’ He looked across to the Indian as if deciding how much to tell her, and she drank in his face while she could. He was the one person in the whole assembly she felt she really wanted to be with, perhaps he had come from places far away and seemed to carry traces of distant shores within him.