He felt like a fool who had neglected the chance of a great education. Cecil had been his first master and had taught him not to think of principle but of practice. If he had watched Cecil he would have seen a man who always acted in public as if the king were divine, but always plotted in private to protect him like any fallible mortal. Cecil had not been fooled by the masque of royalty; he was a man like Inigo Jones whose work was to illustrate and support it. Jones had built the staircase and a marble bathroom at New Hall; Tradescant had watched him at work. This was not a priest before the mysteries; this was a man doing a skilled job. He made a stair, he made an illusion of majesty, all the same work, all in the same day. But Tradescant, even with the example of Cecil as chief stage manager before him, had been taken in by the show and the costumes and the ingenious machinery, and had thought that he had seen gods when all that had been before him was a cunning old woman, Elizabeth; her nephew James, a lecher; and his son, Charles, a fool.

John did not feel vengeful; the habit of loving and loyalty toward his masters and beyond them to the king went too deep for that. He felt that he would have to endure the loss of faith as if it were his own fault. To lose faith in the king and his lord was very like to losing faith in God. It was gone but a man still went through the rituals of attendance, and hat-doffing and minding his tongue, so as not to spread doubt among others. John might doubt his lord and his king but no one beyond his immediate family would ever know it. He might doubt that God had ordered him to obey the commandments or had recently included a commandment to obey the king, but he would not stand up in church and deny God when the preacher recited the new prayers for the king and queen which had been added as a collect for the day. John had been raised to be a man of loyalty and duty; he could not step out of his track just because his heart was broken and his faith gone.

For the duke his lover he thought he would never feel anything but a pain where his heart should be, and ice where his blood should be, and an ache where his belly should be. He did not blame his lord for turning away from his gardener to the court. The very suggestion was a foolish one. Of course Buckingham would cleave to the court, however well he was loved by his servants. It was Tradescant who blamed himself for forgetting that the man he loved was a great man, a man of the highest degree in the land, second only to the king. It was folly to think that he would need Tradescant in the days of his glory as he had needed him in the days of the voyage home when the ghosts of the men they had left behind cried every night in the rigging.

As John gave the orders in the stable and the big house to get the carriage ready, as he rode down to Manor Farm and requisitioned two cows in milk, he knew that Buckingham had forgotten him as a lover but trusted him completely as a servant, the most faithful servant of them all who would do everything, and overlook nothing.

Buckingham believed that John was his faithful servant; and Buckingham was right. As John ordered them to pack the duke’s best clothes, and put the diamonds in a purse to wear around his own neck, he knew that he was acting the part of a faithful servant, and that he would act that part until he died. He would take the traveling coach and the clothes, the hats and the new diamonds, some cows and some hens, all the long way down the road to Portsmouth, see them loaded with the press-ganged soldiers on the Triumph and set sail with them to his death.

“We will go to our deaths like herded cattle,” John said quietly to himself as he watched them pull the great traveling coach from the stables and start to polish the gilded ornaments on the corners of the roof. “Like the milch cows which low as they are pushed on board. I am bound by my oath that I will be his until death, and I see now that this was what he meant. He will never have finished with me, nor with any in his company, until we are all dead.”

He turned away, his knee aching as he walked on the uneven cobbles of the stable yard, and went round to the pleasure gardens to find J, his son, who would now inherit all that he had, and would have to become head of the little family, for John was going to the war again and knew this time that he would not come back.

The pleasure garden had been laid out with fountains and waterworks designed by the engineer Cornelius van Drebbel. J had ordered the drying and cleaning of an enormous round marble bowl at the foot of a cascade, and was splashing round inside the bowl checking that it was perfectly clean before he let the water flow back in. In the heat of the day it was a pleasant job, and J was a man young enough to take pleasure in playing about with a cascade of water and calling it work. At the side of the fountain, in the shade, was a hogshead tub squirming with carp waiting to be returned to the water. J looked up when he heard his father’s step on the white gravel and as soon as he saw his father’s face he climbed out of the marble bowl and came toward him, shaking his thick black hair like a spaniel coming out of a river.

“Bad news, Father?”

John nodded. “I am to go to Rhé.”

J held out his hand for the letter and John hesitated only for a moment before passing it to him. J read it swiftly and thrust it back.

“Carriage!” he cried scathingly. “Best diamonds! He has learned nothing.”

“It is his way,” John said. “He has the grand manner and he rides out the storms.”

“Can we say you are sick?” J asked.

John shook his head.

“I will go in your place; I mean it.”

“Your place is here,” John said. “You have a child on the way, perhaps an heir for us, someone to grow the chestnut trees on.” The two men smiled at each other, and then John was grave again. “You’re well provided for, there’s our own land, and the fee from the Whitehall granary. There’s our own cabinet of curiosities; I know they are nothing much yet but you could raise a few pounds on them if you’re ever in need, and with the training you have had under me at Lord Wootton’s garden and here, you could work anywhere in Europe.”

“I won’t stay with the duke,” J said. “I won’t stay here. I shall go to Virginia where there is neither a duke nor a king.”

“Yes,” Tradescant said. “But, of course, he may not come back from Rhé, either.”

“He came home last time without a scratch on him and was greeted in triumph,” J said resentfully.

“Don’t make an enemy of him.”

“He has taken my father away from me for years,” J said. “And now he wants to take you to your death. How do you think I feel?”

John shook his head. “Feel as you like. But don’t make an enemy of him. If you go against him, you go against the king and that is treason and mortal danger.”

“He is too great for me to challenge; I know that. He is too great altogether. There is not a man in England who does not hate and fear him, and now we are to go to war under him again when we know he does not know how to command, he cannot organize supplies, he cannot order an attack, he does not know how the business should be done. How should he know? He was a country squire’s son and got his place by his skill in dancing and talking… and sodomy.”

John flinched. “Enough, J. Enough.”

“I wish to God we had never come here,” the younger man said passionately.

John looked back down the years to the moment that he first saw Buckingham as green as a sapling in the dark allée at New Hall. “We wanted the best gardens in the country. We had to come here.”

The two men were silent.

“Will you tell Mother?” J asked eventually.

“I’ll tell her now,” John said. “She’ll be grieved. You will keep her to live with you and provide for her well when I am gone, J.”