“I am sorry, mistress, he is dead.”

Her white face went whiter still. “He can’t be,” she said. “I am expecting his baby. I promised him a son.”

“I am sorry,” John repeated.

“Perhaps he will come on another ship.”

John shook his head. “No.”

“He would not leave me,” she said, trying to persuade him. “He would never leave me. He would not have gone in the first place but they pressed him and took him against his will. They promised me that the duke was sailing with them, and that the duke would care for his men.”

John felt a deep weariness spread through him. “I saw him fall,” he said. “He died a hero. But he died, mistress.”

She moved away from him as if his news made him distasteful, as if she would refuse to listen to such a liar. “I shall wait,” she said. “He’ll come in on another ship. He won’t fail me. Not my Thomas. He was never late for a single meeting, not through our courtship. He’s never even late home for his dinner. He won’t fail me now.”

John glanced back. The court party were getting into their coaches. There was a breakfast laid at Captain Mason’s house and fine wines and food waiting. Someone hurled an empty bottle into the sea. John turned from the woman and hurried to Buckingham’s side as he stepped into his coach.

“My lord?”

“Oh! John.”

“Where is Captain Mason’s house?”

Kate laid hold of her husband’s coat and pulled him into the coach.

“Up from the cathedral,” Buckingham said. “But you needn’t come, Tradescant. You can go home.”

“I thought I would be with you…”

Buckingham smiled his merry smile. “See how well I am greeted!” He dropped into his seat, his arm around his wife. “I don’t need your service, John. You can go home to New Hall.”

“My lord, I…” John broke off. The old countess looked sharply at him; he was afraid of her black stare. “You said I should stay with you this day,” he reminded his master.

Buckingham laughed again. “Yes, but thank God I don’t need your care. The king is my friend, my wife is at my side, my mother guards the interests of my family. Go home, John! I shall see you at New Hall when I come.”

He nodded to the footman and the man shut the door.

“But when shall I see you?” John called as the carriage started to move. The footman jostled past him and swung up on the back of the carriage. John wished that he too might at least ride at the back of the carriage, or run behind, or lie like a dog on the floor at their feet. “When shall I see you again?”

“When I come!” Buckingham cried. He waved his hand as John dropped back from the window. “I thank you for your care of me, John. I won’t forget it.”

The lead horse slipped on the cobbles and the carriage checked for a moment. John seized his chance and sprang to the window again. “But I thought I was to stay with you! At your shoulder!… As you said… my lord… as you said!”

Buckingham’s wife was pressed to his side, her fine silk gown crushed in his hold. She peeped up at her husband in a laughing complaint at John’s persistence.

“I have given you leave,” Buckingham said firmly. “Don’t be importunate, John. Go to New Hall. Don’t offend me by asking for more.”

Tradescant skidded to a halt on the cobbles and stood watching the coach rock away down the quayside. The other coaches followed behind the royal coach like some great promenade. Tradescant had to step back to make room for them; and then they were all gone, the trotting horses, the laughing courtiers, the brightness of the liveries, of the courtiers’ clothes, and the dock was left to grayness and mourning once more.

Tradescant stood until the last of them was gone. He could hardly believe the words he had heard his master use to him. When he had been pleading for a place at his side, Buckingham had answered him as if he had been begging for money. Buckingham had slipped, like some beautiful bird, from John’s keeping to another’s. And John might as well whistle to a free bird to come back to its cage as ask the duke to come back to him. John was held and bound by an obsessional desire, by a passionate love and by a sacred oath. He had sworn to love his lord until death. But only now did he realize that Buckingham had sworn nothing.

Tradescant went slowly up the gangplank, to his cabin. Someone had stolen his walking boots and his warm cape on the voyage when he had been too seldom there. He would have to replace them in Portsmouth, where such things were overpriced. He pulled out his pack and started to put his things together. The movement of the ship, rocking at anchor in the harbor, felt half-dead to John after the five-month expedition on rolling seas. The crew had melted away as soon as the officers had gone; there was no sound but the creaking of hard-worked timbers. His cabin showed his neglect of it. These last few days he had spent all his time with Buckingham, and his pallet bed was damp. Even his plants had been forgotten; the earth in the little pots was dry. John fetched a jug of water and dribbled it in, feeling that he must have lost his senses completely that he should have carried his plants through so much and then forgotten to water them for the last three days of the voyage.

He thought that this was how a woman must feel when she has given her love and given her trust and found that her lover was lighthearted and fickle and negligent all along. She feels as if he has taken something precious, a rare seedling, and let it fall. She feels injured – Tradescant felt pain like a wound – but she also feels a fool. Tradescant felt humbled lower than ever in his life before. Being an apprentice gardener was a low station in life but you could be proud of your work and see where it might take you. But being a nobleman’s lover was the work of a fool. Buckingham had used him, had taken him for consolation, to keep his fears at bay, to support his courage and confidence. Now he had his mother and Kate and the king and the court and all his wealth and joy. And all Tradescant had was a new gillyflower, wilting, a large wormwood plant in dry soil, a pain in his backside which was abuse, and a pain in his belly which was grief.

Grimly he picked up his pack, ducked his head to avoid the low beam of his cabin doorway and climbed the companionway to the waist of the ship. He trudged down the gangplank. No one was on board to bid him good-bye, no one was on the quayside waiting to greet him. The white-faced widow started up as she heard a footstep on the gangplank, but then dropped back. Tradescant went past her without a word of comfort. He had no comfort to give. He turned his face away from the sea and trudged, uncomfortable in his shoes on the cobbles, toward the city.

A man fell in beside him. “Did you speak to him about my promotion?”

It was Felton again. “I am sorry,” said John. “I forgot.”

But the man was not angry this time. “Then he must have seen sense himself,” he said joyfully. “Those who call him a fool will have me to reckon with. He has promised me my captaincy. I shall retire a captain and that is worth something to a poor man, Mr. Tradescant.”

“I am glad of it,” John said heavily.

“I shall never fight again,” Felton declared. “It was a bad campaign, badly planned, badly led, cruelly hard. There were times when I wept like a baby. I thought we would never get off that accursed island.”

John nodded.

“He will never do it again, will he?” Felton asked. “The French can fight their own battles now. They don’t need the pain of Englishmen. We should be as we were with the old queen – defenders of our own shores and our own counties. Safe behind our own sea. What are the French and their worries to me?”

“I feel that too,” John said. They had reached the end of the quay. He turned and held out his hand to Felton. “God be with you, Felton.”

“And with you, Mr. Tradescant. Now we are home, maybe the duke will think of the people at home. There’s much poverty. It is pitiful to see the children in my village. They have neither school nor play, and the common land has been enclosed so they have neither milk nor meat nor honey. And bread itself is scarce.”