Their parents watch.

'John won't allow it.' She says to him. 'We – he – wants Thomas to marry a girl from the town. Maybe the Doctor's child. It would be a powerful symbol of how two cultures can combine. She is very beautiful – she has red hair and perfect skin. Thomas would hate to be her husband. And your daughter, for all she is clever and funny and pretty, is also mad.' There is a long pause. She speaks evenly, without emotion. 'My people would blame it on bad spirits.'

'Mine would do the same.' John, of course, is the one to laugh it. 'Only they would lock her in a cell and let people come and gawp, for a reasonable price.'

The two young people spin and dance, throwing their heads back, as though they have never really lived till now.

'He has made her happy.' He says.

'As she has him.'

'But sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, the world cannot accept it. The world is not always…prepared.' She looks at him, but there is no suggestion he meant to refer to anyone other than their two dancing children.

'Who was her mother?'

'Why? Jealous?'

'No!' but she blushes, and that makes him laugh, before he turns somber.

'She was a Russian woman. She found me in Constantinople – I was being sold. A slave. I saw her in the crowd. She was wearing a veil across her face- but not her hair, which was very thick and black as ink and for a I moment I…' he grins an ironic smile 'I thought she was you.' She takes a moment to register this before he continues.

'She took me back to Russia. She was married, but her husband stayed in Constantinople, settling debts. Russia was…in some ways it reminded me of the New World. All towering trees and thick shadows. But they had serfs there – slaves, I suppose, and she put me in charge of them. I hated myself for it. Those men and women – forced to give up everything for their master. As she was, after a fashion.' He muses into silence, and she is forced to prompt him, forced to ask him why and how he loved her and she can't say why she wants to know, only that she must.

'She showed me her land. She loved it – she really did, finally seemed to grow a voice when surrounded by dark green. She was so little – very delicate and very lost, with large brown eyes that seemed almost always on the verge of tears. But she was kind, and I loved her because I needed her, or someone like her, and she felt the same for me. Who knows, maybe it's not love when it could be anyone before you.

She was very beautiful. Very, very beautiful, and the perfect lady in every way. Other than her hair she couldn't have been less like…'

A beat.

'Me.' Pocahontas whispers. 'Or at least, me as I was.'

They stand in silence for a bit, watch the dancing end and most of the sailors trickle below decks, leaving only a few on watch.

Then they go and sit on the prow, where they won't be seen, and look up at the star sunk sky and feel the wind peel away their skin and tears and all those years, and for a moment both remember corn fields and dark trees and hummingbirds like flicks of light.

The lonely threnody of a violin strikes up from the web of rigging into which Meg has woven herself. The song, sung by her father (as most of the songs she plays were, once upon a time) makes a harmony of the air.

Remember. The wind whispers it. The streaming down of moonlight. I'd rather die tomorrow than live a hundred years without. Better if none of this. Never met. If I never knew you. Precious life. Darkness into light.

Empty as the sky.

She does not cry. She is stronger than that, now. But she turns to look at him, as his daughter plays a lament of a love song, and, in the distance, the sun rises.

It dawns a tentative scarlet, washes everything in red, and empties out the sky of light.