“Finish what you have to say,” John said sullenly. “Finish this, Elizabeth.”

“I say to you that his mother who was born a serving maid is now a countess, and is said by many to be a witch-”

John gasped, but she went on.

“A witch. And others say that she is a papist, a heretic, who would have been burned at the stake only a few years ago. I say to you that he is a man who has earned his place by sodomy under the king, and by pandering for the king, who won his wife by kidnap and by rape, who has seduced the king and seduced the prince. Who has been a sodomite with a man and with his son. For all I know he is leagued with the devil himself. Certain, he is deep, deep in sin. And I ask you, John, I beg you, John, to let us go now. To let us leave him now. He has gone to Spain, to the enemy of our country, so he is a traitor even to the king who sins with him. So let us go, John. Let you and me and J get away from here to somewhere where the air is not rank as sulphur with sin and debauchery.”

There was a long silence.

“You are intemperate,” John said weakly.

She shook her head. “Never mind about that. What’s your answer?”

“I have been paid for the full quarter-”

“We can find a way to repay your wages if we leave now.”

He paused for a moment, thinking of what she had said. Then slowly he rose and shook his head. He put his hand on the chimney breast, almost as if he needed to steady himself as he went against his wife’s declared wish, and his own sense, his own deep and hidden sense, that she was right.

“We stay,” he said. “I have given him my promise that I will make him a fine garden. I will not go back on my word. Even if all that you say were true, I would not go back on my word. All I will do for him is garden; there can be no sin in that for us. We stay, Elizabeth, until the garden is finished and then we will leave.”

She stood beside him, looking up into his face, and John saw her face alter, as if he had failed some great test and she would never fully trust him again.

“I beg you,” she said and her voice shook a little, “by everything that I hold sacred, which is everything that this new lord of yours denies, to turn aside from him and walk in the paths of righteousness.”

John shrugged irritably at her scriptural tone. “It’s not like that. I have agreed to make a garden for my lord and we will stay until I have completed it. When it is done we can leave, as I have said.”

He went from the room and she heard him close their bedroom door and the floorboards creak as he undressed to get into their bed.

“It is like that for me,” she said quietly to the dying fire, as if she were swearing a solemn oath. “You have turned aside from the paths of righteousness, husband, and I can walk by your side no more.”

John waited for news of his master but there was silence for the first two, three days. Then news of the escapade of the young prince and the young duke began to leak out. They were incompetent conspirators and, indeed, such incompetent travelers that it was a wonder they were not stopped at Dover as John had hoped. But Villiers threw silver around their journey, and ordered the ships out of Dover harbor on his authority as Lord High Admiral, and soon the court and the old king heard that the boys had been entertained in Paris, ridden halfway across France and finally reached Madrid.

The king saw the whole business as a handsome piece of the knight errantry, like the court masques when the handsome hero wins the fairest lady and then they dance. But the rumor that came back to England, even to the King’s Arms at Chelmsford where John had taken to drinking in the evening, alert for gossip, was that matters were more difficult. The weeks went by and the young men did not come home with a princess for a bride. Instead they sent demands for money and more money.

The king grew fretful, missing the duke, even missing his usually neglected son. The court was robbed of life when Villiers was not there to arrange amusements, the hunting, the masquing, the scandals. John, lingering in the steward’s room, found the courage to ask him outright if he thought their master would hold his place if he did not come home soon, and saw his own worry reflected in William Ward’s eyes.

“They will introduce the king to another man every day that our lord is away,” Mr. Ward said quietly. “And the king does not like demands for money. He will hold it against our lord. He will resent it.” He paused for a moment. “You knew the prince when he was a boy; is he faithful-hearted?”

John thought of the lame boy who stammered on his plea that his handsome brother should wait for him, and was always left behind. The sickly boy who was never anyone’s favorite while his older brother was the heir. He nodded. “Once he gives his love he clings,” he said simply. “If he loves our duke as he loved his brother, then he worships him.”

William Ward nodded. “Then maybe our lord is playing a wiser game than we realize. He may be breaking the heart of the father but there will be another king when the father is gone.”

John scowled at the thought of courtier’s work which was not based on skill and turning of policy, but was grounded on courtship and heartbreak and jealousy; the skills of the bordello, not of the office.

“It must have been the same for Lord Cecil?” the steward asked.

John jerked back at the thought of it. “No! Nobody loved him for his looks,” he said with a half-smile. “They needed him for his abilities. That was why no one could supplant him. That was why he was always safe.”

“Whereas our lord-” The steward broke off.

“What’s he doing in Madrid that takes so long?” John demanded.

“I hear that the Spanish are playing with him,” the steward said very quietly. “And all the time the feeling against the Spanish is rising in the court, in Parliament and in the streets. He’d do better to come home without the Spanish princess. If he brings her home now he’ll pay for it with his life. They’ll tear him to pieces for arranging a heretical marriage.”

“Can’t you write and tell him?” John asked. “Warn him?”

William Ward shook his head. “I don’t advise him,” he said quickly. “He treads his own path. He said the Spanish marriage was a matter of principle.”

“Principle?” John asked. And when the man nodded he turned and went from the room. “That’s very bad,” John said to himself.

Not until July, midsummer in Madrid, during the worst of the hot weather, was Prince Charles finally wearied of waiting, and Buckingham losing his nerve. At last the Spanish completed the marriage contract and Prince Charles put his name to it. He was allowed a brief visit to his bride to promise that she would be Queen of England after a proxy marriage, and that they would next meet as husband and wife at Dover. The King of Spain himself rode out of Madrid with the prince and duke to set them on their way, loaded them with presents and kissed Prince Charles farewell as a son-in-law.

“How do you think he will be received?” William Ward asked John. He had gone into the garden to seek John, who was opening the sluice gates and watching the flow of the river into the duke’s new boating lake. It was a cool sheet of water just to the side of the house. John was planting yellow flag irises in the boggy corner where he had first told Buckingham to shut out the cows. “He must have some trickery up his sleeve. He must know that if he tries to bring a Spanish bride home they will tear him to pieces?”

John looked up from the water channel and wiped his hands on his old breeches. “He can’t be such a fool,” he said anxiously. “He cannot have gotten as far as he has and still be a fool. He must know that there is a balance between king and Parliament and church and people.” He thought of Cecil; he could not help but think of Cecil in this, his successor’s household. “He cannot hold the offices he has and be a fool,” John said stoutly. “He must have some way to turn this all around.”