So she ghost trips her way along black streets, moving silent as a shadow, pulling herself with ease onto rooftops when dark figures walk past her, or intoxicated male voices come too close for comfort. But when she comes to the house and knocks on the door no one answers. She waits and waits, shaking with filthy feet in her thin cotton nightdress. But no one comes.
So she clambours up the side of the house, digging her fingers into cracks in the stones, pulling herself onto the window ledge. She tries to see into the dark interior. Knocks on the glass.
No one comes. No one answers. But – there – a dark figure lying on the floor, arms resting in a disjointed angle. It is John.
Pocahontas takes a deep breath, to try and stop the shaking terror of her heart. Then she stands up on the ledge. And she kicks a hole in the glass.
Biting her lip to stop the scream of pain. The glass slickers through her skin. A clean wound but – God – it hurts, and there is so much blood.
She's trembling, she might fall, so she reaches through the hole and unlatches the window, almost collapsing inside.
The moon scutters from behind a cloud, and she goes to the unconscious man.
'John. John Smith.' She tries to shake him awake. He does not respond. 'Wake up!' she screams it out of fear – because where is her son, where is her son? And Meg – where is Meg? Then she rolls him over and slaps him twice around the cheek. Slowly, his eyelids flicker open.
'Pocahontas – what?'
'Where are our children? Where are our children, John?'
The house is empty. Pots are smashed. Maps torn from the walls.
She leaves him lying on the ground and tries to find a trace of where they might have gone, who might have taken them. The house has been destroyed, that much is clear – destroyed out of pure malice, no necessityt. She goes into Meg's room – no sign of a struggle, here, but a piece of fabric caught on the door, as though Meg ran out of it. But where would she go?
Her father's room.
It is here that most of the damage lies. Books are scattered across the floor, pages ripped to shreds. A chair has been smashed, and the pillows are opened, feathers coating the room. A few still linger in the air – who ever did this can't have been gone long.
The moonlight slants in. It makes an eerie dream of the bedroom, haloes and silhouettes the feathers caught in the twists and eddies of the silver air. She treads with a slight limp, leaves a little trail of blood upon the ground. In a kind of horror she approaches the bed.
So Meg runs in, sees that her father is not here. She tries to bolt the door – it has been forced upon. She runs to the window – it gapes upon slightly, letting in the feather floating breeze. But something stops her. Who ever is chasing her – they have a gun. She backs away towards the bed.
The pillows have been slashed. And there is blood on the disordered sheets.
Feeling sick, Pocahontas kneels before it. There is so much blood- treacle, thick and black in the moonlight, coating the blue linen, down smearing itself into the streams. She touches it. It is still warm.
So they have to act fast.
Remembering practicality, she tears a strip from the sheets, uses it to bandage her foot, sitting on the bed to do so. Her other foot brushes against something. The box always beside his bed. It has been kicked to the floor, and gapes open.
Inside. She picks it up. Inside is a skeleton of a leaf. An old leaf, older than Meg, than Thomas. But she knows the shape. A leaf from the trees of her land. The leaves that blew in the wind, that day he sailed away from her, man with blue eyes and a wound in his side, taking something from her as essential as breath. Some thing intrinsic to who she was. And he had snatched a leaf from the air.
He kept it with him. All this time.
And she thinks, momentarily, of a compass she dug from the bracken and soil, when she found out he was alive. An old compass, broken, cracked, soil smeared and rusted. She keeps it in one of her draws, beneath handkerchiefs and underskirts, where John will never think to look.
But enough.
So she stands and slips her way back to John, who is sitting, clutching his head. She pours him a drink of small beer, and watches him swallow it.
'Where is my son, John Smith?'
'He left before they came.'
'And where is your daughter?'
He looks at her as though his heart has broken. And his eyes are empty as the sky itself.
'I don't know.'