John, who had bathed and changed into his russet suit with a rich lace collar, rose slowly from the table.

“You’re dressed very plain,” he said cautiously.

Elizabeth heard the front door slam and came slowly from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

J measured his father and spoke steadily. “I believe that finery is a waste of a man’s money and an abomination in the sight of the Lord.”

John wheeled around and looked accusingly at Elizabeth. She met his gaze without flinching. “You’ve turned him into a Puritan at last,” he said. “I suppose he preaches and bears witness and can fall down in a faint if required?”

“I can speak for myself,” J said. “And it was not my mother’s decision, but my own.”

“Decision!” John scoffed. “What can a boy of eighteen decide?”

J flinched. “I am a man,” he said. “I am nineteen now. I earn a man’s wage, I do a man’s work and I give a man’s whole duty to my God.”

For a moment they thought John would roar out his temper. J braced himself for the blast of anger, but to his surprise none came. The older man’s shoulders dropped and he turned and fell heavily in his chair. “And how long will you draw a wage here, looking like that?” he asked. “When the king comes to visit? When Archbishop Laud comes to visit? Do you think they want to see a sectary in their garden?”

J’s head went up. “I don’t fear them.”

“Yes, I daresay you are longing for martyrdom, to be burned at the stake for your beliefs, but this is not a burning king. He will merely turn away from you and Buckingham will dismiss you. And where will you work then?”

“For a nobleman who shares my faith,” J said simply. “The country is full of men who believe in worshipping our God in simplicity and in truth, who have turned against the waste and sin of the court.”

“Do I have to spell it out?” John shouted. “They will turn you off and no one will employ you!”

“Husband-”

“What?”

“You told me yourself that your faith in the king and the duke has been shaken,” Elizabeth said gently. “J is trying to find his own way.”

“What way?” John demanded. “There is no other way.”

“There is going back to the Bible and seeking a way through prayer,” J said earnestly. “There is the beauty of hard work, and turning away from show and masques and waste. There is sharing the land, every man to have his own piece of ground to grow his own food so that none go hungry. There is opening up the enclosed sheep runs and the enclosed parks so that everyone can share in the wealth which God has given.”

“Opening parks?”

“Yes, even like this one,” J said earnestly. “Why should my lord duke have the Great Park of five hundred acres and the Little Park of three hundred? Why should he own the common road, and the green before the gate? Why does he need an avenue of a mile of lime trees? Why should he enclose good fields, productive fields, and then plant a few pretty trees and grass and use it for walking and riding? What folly to take good farming land and plant it with shrubs and call it a wilderness when children are dying for lack of food in Chorley, and people are driven out of their cottages because their plots of land have been taken away from them?”

“Because he is the duke,” John said steadily.

“He deserves to own half of the county?”

“It is his own, given to him by the king, who owns the whole country.”

“And what did the duke do for the king to earn such wealth?”

John had a sudden vivid recollection of the rocking cabin and the swaying light and Buckingham rearing above him, and the wound like a swordthrust which was the extreme of pleasure and pain all at once.

J waited for a reply.

“Don’t,” John said shortly. “Don’t torment me, J. It is bad enough that you should come into my house looking like a hedgerow lecturer. Don’t torment me about the duke and the king and the rights and the wrongs of it. I have been close to death, my life hanging on whether the king would remember his friend on a barren island far away, or not. And then he did not. I have no stomach for an argument with you.”

“Then I may wear what I choose, and pray as I choose?”

John nodded wearily. “Wear what you will.”

There was a silence as J absorbed the extent of his victory. Tradescant turned his back on him and returned to his seat at the table. J stepped out of his mud-caked working boots and came into the room in his socks.

“I am thinking of taking a wife,” he announced quietly. “And leaving the duke’s service. I want to go to Virginia and start again, in a country where there are no lords and no kings, and no archbishops. I want to be there where they are planting an Eden.”

He had thought his father defeated, and was pressing his advantage while he had it. But John raised his head and looked hard at his son. “Think again,” he counseled him.

They ate dinner in awkward silence and then J put on his hat and went out into the darkness, carrying only a small lantern to light his way.

“Where’s he going?” John asked Elizabeth.

“To evening prayers, at the big house,” she said.

“They have prayer meetings on my lord’s doorstep?”

“Why not?”

“Because the king has ruled how the church services are to be arranged,” John said firmly. “And they are to be done by a certified vicar in church on Sunday.”

“But Buckingham’s own mother is a papist,” Elizabeth pointed out. “And the queen herself. They do not obey the king and the archbishop. And they do far worse than simple men reading their Bible and praying in their own language to God.”

“You cannot compare Her Majesty with simple men, with J!”

She turned her calm face to him. “I can, and I do,” she said. “Except that my son is a godly young man who prays twice a day and lives soberly and cleanly while the queen…”

“Not another word!” Tradescant interrupted her.

She shook her head. “I was only going to say that the queen’s conscience is her own concern. I know that my son takes nothing but what is his own, bows to no graven idols, avoids priests and their wickedness and says nothing against the king.”

John said nothing. It was undeniable that the queen did all of these things. It was undeniable that the queen was a wilful papist who had sworn that she hated her husband and hated his country, and would neither speak the language nor smile at the people.

“Whatever his conscience, J has taken the duke’s wage,” John pointed out. “He is his man while he draws that wage. The duke, right or wrong.”

Elizabeth got up from the table and stacked the dinner platters for washing. “No,” she said gently. “He works for the duke until he can find himself another, better master. Then he can leave him, he can leave without a moment’s regret. He has sworn no loyalty, he has given no promise. He does not belong to the duke until he is released by death. He does not follow the duke, right or wrong.”

She looked across at John. The candle on the table showed the heaviness around his eyes, and the determination in her face. “It is only you who are so bound,” she said. “By your own love for him. And by an oath of your own making. Not J. You have bound yourself, John; but my son, thank God, is free.”

John heard in the kitchen of New Hall that the duke’s homecoming had been sweeter than his own. The whole royal court had ridden out of London to meet him in a great cavalcade of riders with seventy coaches carrying the ladies to throw rose petals and rosewater and greet the returning hero. The queen alone had avoided his triumphal return, but only her immediate household had stayed away and sulked. The king had thrown a great dinner to celebrate the triumphal return, and after dinner he had drawn Buckingham away from the crowds and into his private bedchamber and the two men had spent the night together, alone.