Their faces were blanched white with sickness except where the sun had burned them brick red, their clothes were torn and tattered, their boots worn thin. They were half-starved, their legs and arms pocked with ulcers. There were only a few men brought out on stretchers, very few, and that was because the sick and injured had died in the low-lying marshes, or bled in agony on the voyage home.

As the men came ashore they were claimed by their families. Some stayed to watch the unloading, but most turned for home, wives sobbing over the wrecks of their husbands, mothers grieving over sons, children staring upward, uncomprehending, into the newly aged face, into the head laid open with a livid new scar, or a weeping wound, a man they could not recognize as their father.

The crowd hardly diminished at all, and that was when John realized how many men they had left behind in the marshes of the Ile de Rhé, since more than half of the families waiting to welcome their men home were still waiting. The men would not come, they would never come. They had been left on a small island in a small river before a small French town, as he had warned. As many as four thousand families had lost a father.

If Buckingham had such thoughts he did not show them. He stood very still and straight beside the wheel of his ship, balancing his weight lightly on the balls of his feet like a dancer, his hand on his hips, his head up. When someone from the quayside shouted abuse at him, he turned and looked for them, as if he did not fear to meet their gaze, his smile as ready as ever.

“He has not sent a herald for me,” he said softly so that only Tradescant could hear. “Not soldiers to arrest me; but equally, not a herald to greet me. Am I to be ignored? Simply forgotten?”

“Hold fast,” Tradescant replied. “We are early. It’s only the poor people who have been sleeping at the quayside and around the city who will have known when we were sighted. The king himself could arrive at any moment.”

Someone shouted a curse from the quayside and Buckingham turned his bright smile toward them as if it were a hurrah.

“He could,” he agreed levelly. “He could.”

“There! Look! cried John. “A coach, my lord! They have sent a coach for you!”

Buckingham turned quickly and squinted down the quayside into the bright autumn sunshine. For a heart-stopping moment they could not see the livery of the coach. It could have been a royal warrant to arrest him. But then Buckingham’s laugh rang out.

“By God, it is the royal coach! I am to be met with honor!”

It was unmistakable. Buckingham himself had introduced the fashion for six-horse carriages into England and only he and the king used them. Two postillions in royal livery jogged on the two leading pairs of horses, the coachman sat in scarlet and gold on the box, a footman beside him, and two liveried footmen clung to the rear. The horses had plumes of scarlet in their bridles; their hooves rang on the cobbles. The king’s flags were on the four corners of the coach. The royal herald was inside.

Buckingham ran like a boy to the head of the gangplank to see this bright guarantee of his continuing wealth and power trotting toward him. Behind it came another coach with a crest on the door, and another. Behind that came another coach, and a marching band playing whistles and drums. Two heralds carried Buckingham’s flag. The coach stopped at the gangplank and they let down the steps for the royal herald. Behind him from the second coach came Kate, Buckingham’s wife, and his redoubtable mother the papist countess.

Buckingham strode to the head of the gangplank to greet them, his head tilted, his smile quizzical. John followed, a pace behind him. The herald marched up the gangplank and dropped to his knee.

“My lord duke, you are welcome home,” the man said. “The king sends you greetings and bids you to come to him at once. The court is at Whitehall. And he bids me give you this.”

He produced a purse. Buckingham, with a slight smile, opened it. A bracelet heavy with enormous diamonds spilled out into his cupped hands. “This is a pretty gift,” he said equably.

“I have private messages for you, from His Majesty,” the herald added. “And he bids you use his coach for your journey to him.”

Buckingham nodded as if he had never expected anything less. The herald got to his feet and stood to one side. Buckingham stepped down the gangplank to where his wife was waiting beside his coach. John bowed to the herald and followed his master. Kate Villiers was in her husband’s arms, her little hands clutching his broad shoulders.

“You are ill?” Kate whispered passionately. “You look so pale!”

He shook his head and spoke over her head to his mother. “Things are indeed prosperous?”

She nodded in grim triumph. “He is waiting for you in London, desperate to see you. We have orders to bring the Favorite straight to him.”

“I am the Favorite still?”

Her hard face was bright with triumph. “He says that no one shall call it a defeat. He says that you could have lost the men and the ships and the standards a hundred times over as long as you are safe. He says he cares nothing for four thousand lives as long as the most precious one comes safe home.”

Buckingham laughed aloud. “I am safe then?”

“We are all safe,” his mother said. “Come to the city. Captain Mason has put his house at your disposal. There is a barber waiting for you, the tailor has a new suit of clothes and the king has sent you gloves and a cape.”

Tradescant drew a little closer to his lord. There was a press of fashionable people pouring out of the coaches and gathering all around him. Someone had pressed a glass in Buckingham’s hand and they were drinking to his safe return. The women’s necks and shoulders were bare to the cold morning air; they were painted as for a masque at court. The men were teetering on high heels, laughing and pressing close to Buckingham. Someone elbowed John in the side and he was pushed to the edge of the crowd. A party was starting, here on the quayside, beside the tattered bulk of the Triumph despite the resentful stares of the poor people, drowning out the sobbing of women whose husbands would never come home.

“Tell us all about it!” someone cried. “Tell us about the landing! They say that the French cavalry just vanished!”

Buckingham laughed and disclaimed, his beautiful wife pressed close to his side, his arm around her waist. “I am grieved to my heart that we came home without accomplishing what we intended,” he said modestly.

There were immediate cries of disagreement. “But you were ill-supplied! And what could any commander do with such men? They are fools, every one of them!”

John looked away. There was one woman clinging to the handrail of the gangplank, looking up at the deck of the empty ship. He went toward her, his place at the fringe of the crowd instantly taken by a pretty woman, her face bright with desire.

“What is it, mistress?”

She turned a face to him which was hollowed by long hunger, and sightless with grief. “My husband… I am waiting for my husband. Will he come on another ship?”

“What was his name?”

“Thomas Blackson. He’s a ploughman, but they took him for a soldier. He’d never held a gun before.”

John remembered Thomas Blackson because the man had offered to keep his plants watered while John was on a mission for his master. He was a big man, as patient and hard-working as the oxen he had driven. John had last seen him before the citadel of St. Martin. He had been ordered up a ladder to attack the defenders at the top of the wall. He had gone obediently up the ladder, which was five feet short of the top. The French had leaned over the wall and shot downward at a ridiculously easy target: the big man at the top of the ladder, stalled, just five feet below them.