The six men, all bitter rivals, burst into noisy argument. Kate, hunched in her chair, wailed like a child.

Tradescant opened the door. “Her Grace’s ladies!” he shouted. They came at the run. “Take Her Grace to her own chamber,” he said gently. “Now.”

“I want to be here!” Kate cried.

Tradescant took her arm and half-lifted her from the room. “Let me see that he is comfortable and you can come when he is ready to receive you,” he suggested.

She fought against him. “I want to be with my lord!”

“You wouldn’t want him to see you weeping,” John said softly. “With your nose all red, and your eyes puffed up so plain.”

The appeal to her vanity struck her at once. She ran out of the room and John closed the door on her and rounded on the apothecaries. “Which of you is the oldest?” he demanded.

One man stepped forward. “I,” he said, thinking that the prize was to be awarded to seniority.

“And which the youngest?”

A young man, barely thirty, stepped forward. “I am.”

“The two of you get out,” Tradescant ordered brutally. “The other four of you agree on a treatment in whispers, at once.”

He opened the door and the two dismissed men hesitated, caught one fulminating look and stepped outside. “Wait there,” Tradescant said. “If these can’t agree you’ll be employed in their place.”

He shut the door on them and went back to the bed. The duke was as white as marble; he looked like a statue carved from ice. The only color about him was his dark eyelashes sweeping his cheeks and the blue shadows, the color of violets in springtime, under his eyes.

The eyelids fluttered and he looked up at John. “Splendidly done,” he said softly, his throat hoarse. “I just want to sleep.”

“Well enough,” Tradescant said. “Now that I know.” He pointed to the apothecaries. “You three – out of the room.” He pointed to the other. “And you watch the duke’s sleep and guard him from noise and interruption.”

Buckingham made a little gesture with his thin hand. “Don’t you leave me, John.”

John bowed, and swept all the men from the room. “Consult among yourselves and make whatever he needs,” he said firmly. “I shall watch his sleep.”

“He needs cupping,” one of them said.

“No cupping.”

“Or leeches?”

John shook his head. “He’s to sleep and not be tortured.”

“What d’you know? You’re nothing but a gardener.”

John gave the apothecaries a hard unfriendly smile. “I wager I lose fewer plants than you do patients,” he said accurately. “And I keep them well by letting them rest when they need rest, and feeding them when they are hungry. I don’t cup them and leech them, I care for them. And that is what I shall do for my duke until he orders it otherwise.”

Then he shut the door in their faces and stood at the foot of his master’s bed, and waited for him to have his fill of sleep.

Tradescant could guard his master against the household. But when the king heard that the Favorite had been sick and near to death, he sent word that he would come at once, and the whole court with him.

Buckingham, still pale but only a little stronger, was sitting in the bay window which overlooked John’s new knot garden, John standing at his side, when they brought the message from the king.

“I’m back in favor then,” Buckingham said idly. “I thought I was finished for this reign.”

“But you brought Prince Charles safe home,” Tradescant protested. “What more did His Majesty want?”

Buckingham slid a sly sideways smile at his gardener and sniffed at the spray of snowdrops which Tradescant had brought him. “A little less rather than more,” he said. “He envied me the triumphant entry into London. He thought I was setting up to be king myself. He thought I wanted Kit Villiers to marry the Elector Frederick’s daughter and ally myself to the Stuarts.” He laughed shortly. “As though I would put Kit over myself,” he said scornfully. “And then he looks from me to the prince and back again and he fears my influence over the heir. And he’s jealous as an old woman. He cannot bear to see us make merry when he is old and aching and longing for his bed. He cannot bear to think that we are merry without him when he has withdrawn. He has given me everything I ask and now he is jealous that I am wealthy and courted. Jealous that I am the richest man in the kingdom with the most beautiful house.” He broke off and tossed his head.

“Though it is true that it is better not to flaunt your wealth,” Tradescant remarked to the sky outside the bay window.

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m thinking that my old lord loved Theobalds Palace before anything else in the country and the king, this king, in very truth, saw it through his eyes, acknowledged its value and claimed it for himself. And here we’ve only just gotten the avenue planted.”

Buckingham cracked a laugh. “John! My John! If he wants it, he’ll have to have it! Avenue and all. Anything so long as I am back in his favor.”

John nodded. “You think he will forgive you?”

The younger man lay back on the rich cushions heaped in the window-seat and turned his face to look out at the view. John noted, with affection, the perfect profile, white against red velvet.

“What d’you think, John? If I am very pale and very quiet and very submissive, and look – so – would you forgive me?”

John tried to stare at his master unmoved, but he found he was smiling as if his master were a tender wilful maid in the first years of her beauty, at the time when a girl can do anything and be forgiven by everyone. “I suppose so,” he admitted ungraciously. “If I were a besotted old fool.”

Buckingham grinned. “I suppose so too.”

The duke waved farewell to the royal coach and the hundreds of courtiers and outriders, and watched them move slowly down the newly planted avenue. John Tradescant had done his best but the limes in the double-planted avenue were still only saplings. The duke watched the coach with the crown and the nodding feathers rumble from one thin leafy shade to another. When they grew, the trees would be a powerful symbol of the greatness of the house. And by then the prince would be on the throne, with Buckingham as his adviser, and the king, the jealous difficult bad-tempered old king, would be dead.

The king had wept and asked for forgiveness after a long bitter quarrel. He had tolerated Buckingham’s marriage, indeed he loved Kate, and he was even amused by Buckingham’s notorious affairs with every pretty woman at court, but he could not bear to feel that his son the prince had supplanted him in Buckingham’s affections. Tearfully he accused them of conspiring against him and that Prince Charles – never the favored son – had stolen from his father his love, his only love.

He publicly called Prince Charles a changeling and wished that his brother, the handsome and godly Prince Henry, had never died. He publicly called Buckingham a heartbreaker and a false son to him. He called him a traitor and wept the easy tears of an old man, and swore that no one loved him.

It took all Buckingham’s charm to talk the king into a more reasonable frame of mind, and all his patience to tolerate the moist kisses on his face and his mouth. It took all his ready humor and his genuine joy of life to seek to make the elderly king happy again, and the court happy with him. A sick man, newly up from his bed, Buckingham danced with Kate before the king, and sat at his side and listened to his rambling complaints about the Spanish alliance and the Spanish threat, and never showed so much as a flicker of weariness or sickness.

Buckingham waited until the royal carriage was out of sight before he put his hat back on his head and turned away toward the stone steps to the knot garden. Already it was as Tradescant had promised it would be. Each delicately shaped bed was filled with plants of a single uniform color, edged with dark green box and entwined in an unending pattern with another. Buckingham walked around them, feeling his anxiety melt away at the sight of the twisting patterns, at the perfection of the planting.