Suckahanna led him toward a little street with the houses set on either side. At the end of it was a large fire and half a dozen of the black pots sitting squat among the embers, and skewers of meat resting on a rack. John felt his stomach clench in hunger but Suckahanna took him past the food to a hut opposite the fire.
She stood outside and called a word, perhaps a name, and the curtain in the doorway opened and an old woman looked out.
“Suckahanna!”
“Musses.”
The woman spoke in a rapid flow of language, and Suckahanna replied. Something that she said made the old woman snort with laughter and she shot a quick smiling look at John as if he were the butt of the joke. Then she stretched out her hand to see the burn on John’s palm.
Suckahanna gestured that he should show her. “This is a wise woman, she will cure the wound.”
Hesitantly, John opened his fingers to show the scar. It was getting worse. Where the blister had burst the raw flesh had got dirty and was now smelling and oozing. John looked at it fearfully. If he had such a wound in London he thought that a barber surgeon would have cut the hand off, to prevent the infection spreading up his arm to his heart. He feared the infection only slightly less than he feared these savages and whatever treatment they might prescribe.
The woman said something to Suckahanna and Suckahanna laughed, a spontaneous giggle, like the girl John had known. She turned to John. “She says you should be purged, but I told her you had already done that for yourself.”
The woman was laughing, Suckahanna was smiling, but John, in fear and in pain, could muster only a grim nod.
“But she says you should still sweat out your illness before we cure the wound.”
“Sweat?”
“In a-” Suckahanna did not know the English word. “Little house. In a little house.”
The woman nodded.
“We’ll go there now,” Suckahanna said. “Then we can get the herbs for the wound before nightfall.”
The woman and Suckahanna led him to the boundary of the village. There was a smaller round hut on the very edge of the little town, its roof at ground level, and thick smoke billowing out from the hole in the center of the roof.
“It’s very hot,” Suckahanna explained.
John nodded, it looked like hell.
Suckahanna laid a gentle hand on his dirty shirt. “You must take off your clothes,” she said. “All of them, and go down into there, naked.”
Instinctively, John’s hands gripped the belt of his breeches and then he gave a little yelp of pain at the touch of the cloth on his raw palm.
“There!” Suckahanna said, as if that proved the point. “Take your clothes off and go down into the little house.”
Reluctantly, John pulled his shirt off. The old woman regarded his pale skin with interest, as if he were a ham ready for smoking. John shot a swift, frightened look at the little house.
“Suckahanna – am I to be killed?” he asked. “I would rather die with my breeches on.”
She did not laugh at his fears. She shook her head. “I would not lead you to your death,” she said simply. “I kept you safe in the woods for a month, didn’t I? And then I told you that I loved you. Nothing has changed.”
It was like that easy rush of desire that he had felt when he met her. All at once he trusted her. He untied the laces of his breeches and dropped them to the floor. He heel-toed out of his boots and shucked off his stinking stockings. He stood before the two of them naked and felt his genitals shrivel at the curious, bright gaze of the old woman and Suckahanna’s evident lack of interest.
“Go down in there,” she said, gesturing to the steps which led down into the smoke-filled darkness. “There is a bed. Lie down. You will be hot, you will sweat like a fever. When Musses calls you, you can come out. Not before.”
John took one step toward the hut and hesitated. Suckahanna’s familiar hard little hand pushed him in the small of the back. “Go on,” she said insistently. “You always are thinking, John. Just do.”
He smiled at the truth of that and went down the steps in a little rush of temporary courage, and pitched headlong into the darkness.
The hut was filled with acrid herbal smoke and the heat was intense. He understood now that the hut was set deep like a cellar so that the very earth was like an oven, holding the heat inside. At the very center of the hut was a small fireplace heaped with red embers, and a jar of dried leaves beside it. There was room for a little bench of stones which were so hot to the touch that John had to sit gingerly, and let his skin become accustomed to their warmth.
“Put the pot of herbs on the fire!” Suckahanna called from the outside.
Reluctantly, John poured the dried leaves onto the fire. At once the hut was filled with a billow of black smoke which sucked the very air out of his lungs and left him choking and whooping for breath. The smoke felled him, like a helpless tree, so he stretched out along the stones and felt his eyes run with tears against the acrid fumes. His nose hurt with the heat, the very coils inside his ears ached with the intense heat and the airless, powerful scent. He felt himself drifting into an extraordinary dream state. He saw Frances with a trowel and a watering pot in the garden of Lambeth, he saw the Duke of Buckingham throw back his dark head and laugh, he saw Johnnie at the moment of his birth, scarlet, wet and squalling, he saw Jane smiling through the candlelight on their wedding night. He saw his father dying in a bed of flowers, he saw the Rosamund roses he had sent down the river for Jane’s memorial service at her father’s chapel.
From far, far away he heard a voice call something in a strange language and he opened his eyes. The smoke had cleared a little, the heat seemed less intense. His skin was pink, like a baby’s. He was damp all over with sweat and his skin was smooth as a sun-warmed lizard.
“She says you can come out!” he heard in English. But it was not the command but the sound of Suckahanna’s voice which brought him from his daze, up the steps and out into the sunlight.
“Ah,” the old woman said with pleasure at his appearance. She nodded at Suckahanna, and then tossed a buckskin cape around John’s shoulders to keep the chill of the evening air from him.
John looked around for his clothes. Everything was gone except his boots. Suckahanna was standing among a small group of women, they were all looking at his nakedness with a cheerful curiosity.
Suckahanna stepped forward and held out a bundle of clothing to him. As John took it he saw that it was a clout – a piece of cloth to twist between his buttocks and tie on a strap around his waist – a deerskin kilt and a deerskin shirt. He recoiled. “Where are my clothes?”
Suckahanna shook her head firmly. “They smelled,” she said. “And they had lice and fleas. We are a clean people. You could not wear those clothes in our houses.”
He felt ashamed and unable to argue.
“Put those on,” she said. “We are all waiting for you.”
He tied the strings of the clout around his waist and felt better with his nakedness hidden from so many bright black eyes. “Why are they all here?”
“To find the herb for your hand,” she said.
John looked down into his palm. The wound was cleaner from the sweating, but there was still a crease of rotting flesh at its center.
He pulled on the shirt and straightened the kilt. He thought that he must look absurd with his big white legs under this beautifully embroidered skirt and then his own heavy boots on his feet; but none of the women laughed. They moved off, one trotting behind another, with the old woman at the front and Suckahanna at the rear. She glanced back at John. “Follow,” was all she said.
He remembered then the unbearable steady pace she would use when they were in the woods together. All the women moved at that remorseless trot that was too fast for him to walk and too slow for him to run. He walked and then ran after them in short, breathless bursts and Suckahanna never turned her head to see if he could keep up, but just kept her own steady pace as if there were neither thorns nor stones under her light moccasins.