He was stung. “It is Avery House, madam, on the Strand.”

She jumped to her feet in delight and kissed him on both cheeks. “That will do splendidly!” she exclaimed, as if he had agreed. “I will come tomorrow.”

JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

The three men walked for hours on the track that wound through the forest of tall strong trees, the fallen leaves from last year rustling beneath their feet. Ned kept up a brisk pace but both William and Edward were men in their sixties, they had been indoors for months, only walking at dawn and dusk, hoping to be unseen. The hot sun beat down, the flies rose like a thick mist from the brackish water on either side of the narrow path, and swarmed around their faces, constantly biting. Ned called a halt, and they all drank from his bottle.

“How d’you ever find your way?” Edward gasped, taking a sip of water. “This whole forest goes on forever and it all looks the same.”

“I’ve been out this way a few times,” Ned said. “And I was raised on a mire, I learned as a boy how to find little tracks and remember them.”

“You hunt here?”

“No. We’ve got no land rights here and the People like to keep it for themselves, they don’t want boot prints on their paths and guns banging off in their forests and frightening the animals. This is their lands, not ours. Though some of the townsfolk are trying to buy here.”

“You don’t come here for beaver pelts?”

Ned shook his head. “It’s been trapped out,” he said. “Long before I got here. They say that when we first came here there was a dam in every stream: thousands of beavers. Now they’re all gone. The dams are breaking, the lakes behind them are draining away. If you take all the beavers you lose the dam, you lose the lake and that changes the rivers, and so you get no beaver. That’s why they call us stupid.”

“It’s got to be farmed,” William insisted. “Anything else is wasteland.”

“Maybe some land ought to be wasteland?” Ned suggested. “Maybe God made it like that for a reason?”

“ ‘Increase ye, and be ye multiplied, and fill ye the earth, and make ye it subject; and be ye lords to the fishes of the sea, and to volatiles of heaven, and to all living beasts that be moved on earth and be ye lords, or rule ye,’ ” William quoted Genesis.

“Amen,” said Edward.

Ned nodded. “Amen. Are we ready to go on?”

“When will we meet with the savages?” Edward asked.

“When they want,” Ned said with a smile. “They’ll have been watching us ever since we started on this trail.”

Edward hunched his shoulders. “How could they?” he said. “We’ve gone in silence.”

Ned laughed shortly. “Not to them,” he said. “To them we’ve sounded like a fife-and-drum band marching through the woods.”

“We’ve barely spoken,” William protested.

“The deer know, don’t they?” Ned said. “The deer heard us from the first step? The People know the woods as well as the deer.”

“Can’t you order them to show themselves?” Edward said irritably.

“Nay, they’re free men on their own lands.”

They said nothing more as Ned led the way on a path which was no wider than his shoulders, putting one foot before the other, his English boots making clear marks in the mud where moccasins had left no trace.

They went past a deep hole, like a posthole, and Ned paused for a moment, cleared a vine which was trailing across it, and turned to go on.

“Just give me a moment to catch my breath,” William said.

As they waited, Edward idly poked a stick in the side of the hole; the sandy gray soil spilled inwards.

“Don’t do that,” Ned warned him. “It’s important to them. They keep it clear and open. You saw me weed the vine.”

“What is it? A posthole? Out here?”

“It’s a story hole,” Ned replied. “And a signpost.”

“Which?”

“Both. Something happened here, someone was injured during a hunt, or a man asked his wife to marry him, or a woman gave birth, or there was an accident or a meeting or something. So they make this hole at the side of the track so that everyone remembers what took place here. Then, when they’re telling someone where to go, which track to follow, they tell them to turn at that story.”

William was puzzled. “It’s like a way marker, but a register as well?”

“Yes. It’s easy to remember, and to teach the children: their lives are mapped on the land, going back hundreds of years. The Lord only knows how long they’ve walked these trails. The story of their lives is on the land. Their history is their geography.”

Edward shook his head. “They’re strange folks.”

“Strange to us,” Ned said. “But I find my way round here better with the story holes than I ever did with milestones in England.”

“What story does this hole tell?” William asked.

Ned hesitated, curiously reluctant to share with them.

“What does it matter anyway?” Edward demanded, tired and in pain, his face swollen with bites.

Ned led the way on, at a steady walk, on the long twisting path, through wet ground where the moss sucked at their boots, over higher ground where the lighter soil under the pine trees shifted under their feet and made them labor for every step, steadily south, and always behind him he heard the rasping breaths of the two men.

They walked until the burning sun went down behind the hills on their right, and slowly the sky grew milky and then gray and then a dark indigo blue. Ned handed out cornmeal biscuits and some dried meat, and showed them a raised patch of land, sheltered by a few boulders, so that the ground was dry beneath their blankets and they rolled themselves up.

“When will he meet us?” William asked again. “The savage guide?”

Ned shrugged. “When he’s ready.”

“I’m bitten to death,” Edward said, ducking his face under his blanket. “Don’t the bugs trouble you, Ned?”

“Here.” Ned offered a small bottle made from sassafras bark and corked with a piece of the root. “Try it. It works. The Indian woman who minds my ferry traded me the bottle and the oil for some sugar.”

“Does it really stop the biting?”

“Well, I’m seasoned,” Ned said, looking through the canopy of trees at the stars over his head, piercingly silver in the completely black night sky. “I grew up with quatrain fever. I spent my childhood on a mire in Sussex.”

“You owned land in England?” William asked curiously.

Ned thought he had not words to describe Foulmire to an outsider: the moonlight on the hidden paths, the grind and thunder of the tide mill, the strange lonely beauty of the sea flowing through and overspilling the land for miles in every direction, the call of the oystercatchers in their wheeling flight and the setting sun on their white arched wings.

“Nay, we never owned anything much,” he said. “I had the right to work the ferry and my sister was the village midwife. Nobody troubled us as long as we stayed at the water’s edge, poor as water voles. There’s no profit in the tidal lands, there’s no interest in them.”