He met her eyes and she thought that never before in their life together had she seen him look as if the light had gone out for him.

“I will not burden you with my sorrows, Elizabeth,” he said gently. “I will mend. I am not a boy in springtime. I will mend.”

Her grave look never wavered. “Perhaps you should tell me, John. Or tell your Saviour. A hidden secret is like a hidden pain; it can only grow worse.”

He nodded as if he knew all about hidden pain now. “I shall try to pray. But I am afraid that my faith was never very strong, and I seem to have lost it.”

She would have been shocked if she had believed him. “How can you lose your faith?” she asked simply.

He looked away, over his garden. Was it on the island? Did his faith fall sick like the soldiers who had to sleep on the wet ground? Or did it drown in the sea where the causeway was treacherous and they lost the last standard? Or did it bleed to death on the voyage home when the injured men cried out so loud that he heard them, even over the noise of the creaking ship? Was it always a chain that had linked John to his lord, the lord to the king and the king to God, and the loss of one meant the loss of all? Or had he forgotten his faith just as he had forgotten everything, even the gillyflower and the wormwood plants, because he had fallen deep into love and deep into joy and made a god of another man?

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Perhaps God has lost me.”

Elizabeth bowed her head and made a quick silent prayer that she might have guidance as to how she might help him.

“You are right, and you have been right all along,” he said at last. “We are ruled by a fool who is in the hands of a knave. I have seen men die for the folly of those two, for all my life: in the plague in London, in the villages up and down the land where people are driven out of their homes and out of their gardens for the landlords to make sheep runs, and on that cursed island where we set a siege with less food in our stores than the besieged, where we marched with ploughboys and criminals, where we had scaling ladders which were yards too short, and where the commander was playing at soldiers, and the king forgot to reinforce us.”

His bitterness was like an explosion in that quiet garden, even worse than his blasphemy. She had thought she would never hear such words from him, who had been Cecil’s man, who had served the old queen. This was a stranger to her – a bitter man carrying the scars of fatal betrayal, who finally spoke treason aloud.

“John-”

He bared his teeth in a hard smile at her surprise. “You should be pleased,” he said cruelly. “You warned me enough. Now see: I have heeded your teachings and lost my faith in my lord, in my king and in my God. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

Dumbly she shook her head.

“Didn’t you warn me and warn me that he was a sodomite and a puppet master? Didn’t you beg me to leave his service on the very day we came here? Didn’t you give me a long spoon to sup with the Devil when I started keeping his secrets safe?”

Her hands were over her mouth; her shocked eyes looked at him in silence.

John hawked and spat like a soldier, as if the taste of bile was too bitter for him.

Without thinking, Elizabeth scuffed dirt over the spittle. “John,” she whispered. “I never meant that you should lose your faith. I meant only to caution you-”

“I am cautioned now,” he said. “I am checked. I am stopped short.”

There was a silence. Somewhere in the fine woods of the duke’s estate the pigeons were cooing, warmly, easily. John looked up at the sky and saw a flock of rooks heading for home in the tall trees.

“What shall we do?” Elizabeth asked, as if she were in a wilderness with wreckage all around them.

He looked around, at the fine house and the garden, as if they gave him no pleasure at all. “I am his servant,” he said slowly. “He has paid me all he is going to pay me; he told me that. He will use me as he wishes. When he needs me – I am to be there. I am the duke’s man; I have sworn a solemn oath to be his man till death.”

She took a sharp breath at that. “An oath?”

“He asked it of me and I gave it,” John said grimly. “I gave him everything he asked and I swore a solemn oath that I am his man. I will have to learn to live with that. I am a servant; I am lower than a servant, for he has commanded me to be his dog and I have licked his foot.”

“You think he is a fool and a betrayer and you have sworn to be his man?” she asked incredulously.

“Just so.”

They were silent for long moments. She thought that some dark compact must have taken place between her husband and the master he now hated. She did not dare to think what one had done, what one had submitted to. Whatever had taken place it had sent John home as a broken man.

“Do you hate him?” she whispered.

The look he gave her was that of a man carrying a mortal wound deep in his belly. “No,” he said softly. “I love him still. But I know that he is no good. That’s worse than hatred for me. To know that I have given my word and my love to a man who is no good.”

She took his hands in hers and felt how cold they were, as if his heart were beating slowly, painfully. “Can’t you escape him?”

He shook his head. “I am his, in every way that there is, until death.”

They sat in silence for long moments, Elizabeth chafing his hands as if he were cold from sickness and she had to warm him. She thought that there was nothing that she could say which would take that dark painful look from his face. The sun was setting slowly in the deep red of autumn and a cool wind began to blow.

“The chestnut tree flowered this summer,” she said inconsequently. “As you left, d’you remember you asked me to look to it, for you?”

He did not raise his gaze from his boots. “The sweet chestnuts?”

“No. Your sapling. The one you gave me. The chestnut from Turkey. It bore a strange beautiful blossom, like huge pine cones, a white blossom of many flowers with tiny scarlet freckles inside them, and smelling sweet.”

“Eh? My sapling flowered? At last?”

“As you left. And it is setting seed,” she said. “You will have nuts off it this year, John. You can see the seed cases already. They are very strange, I had forgotten how strange. They are fat and fleshy and with a few thick spikes. But they are holding to the tree and swelling with the ripeness of the nut inside.”

He straightened up and looked at her. “Are you sure?”

“I think so,” she said with loving cunning. “But you had better see for yourself; you know there is no one who has your skill with trees.”

“Perhaps I should take a look.” He got to his feet and winced as his boots rubbed his sore feet, but he stepped out down the garden path to where his tree was kept in its great carrying case at the bottom of the garden near the kitchen garden wall.

“I wish we had named it for you,” she said, suddenly struck by how little they owned, now that he was a vassal and had lost everything. “I wish we had called them ‘Tradescantia’ when Lord Cecil first gave them to you to grow. You were the first to grow them; you had the right.”

John shrugged his shoulders as if it did not matter what they were named as long as they grew tall and strong. “The name does not matter. Rights do not matter. But to grow a new tree, to put a new tree into the gardens of England – now that is to live forever.”

J did not come home till dusk and he did not know his father was returned until he came in through the front door and saw the Portsmouth-bought walking boots side by side inside the doorway. He hesitated, but it was too late. John, sitting at the well-worn table, had already seen him.

J was dressed in a suit of gray broadcloth, white linen bands at his throat, plain without lace. On his head was a tall plain black hat, unadorned by feather or badge. Over his shoulder was his warm coat of black.