“No better.”

“Found guilty, imprisoned in the tower, and then what d’you think?”

John shook his head, maintaining his ignorance.

“Forgiven overnight!” the manservant said with satisfaction. “If you have the king’s ear you can do no wrong.”

“The king knows best,” John said staunchly, thinking of his lost lord and his advice to be blind and deaf when other men are talking treason.

“And Rochester was as nothing to my lord.” The man lowered his voice still further. “Rochester is the old favorite, but my lord is the new. Rochester may have had the king’s ear, but my lord has all his parts. D’you understand me? He has all his parts!”

John kept his face very still; he did not smile at the bawdy humor.

“My master is supreme under the king,” the man declared. “There is no one in England more beloved than my master, George Villiers. And he has decided that you are to serve him.” The man looked down at John’s plain dinner. “Chosen you from every other man in the kingdom!”

“I am honored. But I do not think I can be released from my work here.”

The man flapped a letter in John’s face. “Villiers’s orders,” he said. “And the king’s seal. You’re to do as you are told.”

John resigned himself to the inevitable, and rolled up his half-eaten dinner in his napkin.

“And remember this,” the man continued in the same boastful tone. “That what the duke thinks today, the king thinks tomorrow, and the prince thinks the next. When the king goes, the duke and the prince succeed. When you hitch your cart to the star of my master you have a long brilliant future.”

John smiled. “I have worked for a great man before,” he said gently. “And in great gardens.”

“You have never worked for one like this,” the servant declared. “You have never even seen a man such as this.”

John thought that Elizabeth would dislike the move to His Grace’s house at New Hall, Chelmsford, and he was right. She was passionately opposed to leaving Lord Wootton’s service and going near to the hazardous glamour of the royal court. But the little family had no choice. J took his mother’s worries to his father and gained no satisfaction. “Mother does not want to move house, and she doesn’t want you to work for a great lord again,” he said in his halting shy way. “Mother wants us to live quietly; she likes it here.”

“Won’t she speak to me herself?”

“She didn’t ask me to tell you,” J said, embarrassed. “I thought perhaps you didn’t know. I was trying to help.”

John dropped a gentle hand on his son’s narrow shoulder. “I know what she fears, but I am no more free to choose where to live than your mother is free,” he explained. “She is bound by God to follow me, and I am bound by God to go where I am commanded by my lord and by the king above him. And lord and king and therefore God say we must go to the Duke of Buckingham in Essex.” He shrugged. “So we go.”

“I don’t believe that God wants us to go near to vanity and idleness,” J protested.

John turned a stern gaze on him. “What God wants or does not want no man can say, only a priest or the king,” he said firmly. “If the king tells the duke who tells my Lord Wootton that I am wanted in Essex, then that is enough for me; as if God had leaned down from heaven and told me himself.” He paused. “And it should be enough for you too, J.”

J, avoiding the challenge in his father’s gaze, looked away. “Yes, sir,” he said.

The little family had been expecting something impressive of New Hall. The duke had bought it as a palace near to London where he could entertain the king in a style befitting the royal favorite. It had been a summer palace for Henry VIII and had passed around the courtiers as a prize plum of patronage. Buckingham was said to have paid a fortune for it, and was now pulling the place apart to enrich it still further, under the direction of Inigo Jones, who was laying a great sweeping staircase of marble and noble stone gateways.

The Tradescants arrived, as the king himself would arrive on his frequent visits, up the great drive which turned in a full circle before the house. The house fronted the drive full-square, with great turrets on either side and a huge wooden doorway, wide and high enough for two coaches to be driven abreast into the inner courtyard. It was built of handsome stone, every inch carved and crenellated like marchpane on a cake, with three stories of bay windows bulging from the encrusted walls. At each corner stood great towers with bulbous cupolas and flags flying from the poles at the top. In the inner courtyard was a huge cobbled area, as big as a tiltyard, with the great hall on the east side and a handsome oriel window looking out over the quadrangle. On the west side was the chapel for the house, and a bell tolling at the tower end.

Elizabeth looked askance at the stained glass in the huge chapel windows as the wagon halted in the yard. A maidservant came out with a tray of drinks for the travelers, and a groom from the stables emerged and said he would direct the wagon on to the Tradescants’ own cottage.

“His Grace said that you should live in the great house if you please, but he thought you might prefer your own cottage so that you can nurse up plants in your own garden.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said before John could reply. “We don’t want to live in the hall.”

John shot her a reproving look. “The duke is gracious,” he said carefully. “I will need a garden under my eye. A cottage sounds a very good solution. Please show us the way.”

He drained his mug of small ale, setting it back on the tray with a smile at the girl. J, still seated in the back, one arm around the precious chestnut tree, one hand on the tailgate of the wagon, did not even glance at the pretty serving maid but kept his eyes on his boots.

John sighed. He had not imagined the move would be easy but with Elizabeth suspecting papistry and luxury around every corner and with J sinking into the manners of a country bumpkin, he thought that returning to court life would be hard indeed, and that no master, however graceful or powerful, would make up for the differences in the little Tradescant family.

The cottage was some compensation. It had been built as a farmhouse and taken into the demesne of New Hall by the ever-widening wall and ambition of each successive owner. It was as good as Elizabeth’s girlhood home at Meopham, a two-storied, four-bedroomed house with an orchard at the back and a stable yard with room for a dozen horses at the side.

Elizabeth might put up with the disruption of the move for the benefit of the house, John thought, and held that hope in his mind until they had unpacked their goods and penned up the cat so that she should not stray, when a liveried manservant from the house tapped on the open front door and ordered John to wait on His Grace in the garden.

John pulled on his jacket and followed the man back up the drive toward the house.

“He’s in the yew-tree allée,” the man said, gesturing to the right of the house. “He said you were to go and find him.”

“How shall I know him?” John asked, hanging back.

The man looked at him with open surprise. “You’ll recognize him the moment you see him. Without error.”

“How?”

“Because he’s the most beautiful man in the kingdom,” the man said frankly. “Go toward the yew-tree allée and when you see a man as lovely as an angel, that’s my lord Buckingham. You can’t miss him, and when you’ve seen him, you’ll never forget him.”

John puffed a little at the courtier hyperbole and turned toward the colonnade of yew. He had time to note that the allée was overgrown and needed pruning at the head of the trees to make them thicken out at the bottom, before he stepped into the shade. He blinked against the sudden darkness of the thickly interleaved boughs. It was as dark as nighttime beneath the arching branches. The ground beneath his feet was soft with years of fallen brown yew needles. It was eerie and silent in the darkness; no birds sang in the still boughs of the trees, no sun shone into their shade. Then John’s eyes adjusted to the dimness after the dazzle of the sun and he saw George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.