J hesitated for one more moment. “I wanted to be free of all this.”

“I know,” she said lovingly. “But we have to wait for the right time. Who knows, there may come a time when the whole country wants to be free of him? Then you will see your course. But until then, J, you have to live. We have to eat. We have to live with your father and mother and keep the Ark afloat.”

Finally he nodded. “I’ll tell him.”

J did not speak to his father till dinnertime the following day when the family was gathered together again, Frances beside her mother, John at one end of the big dark wood table and J at the other, Elizabeth seated between her husband and son.

“I have been considering. I will work with you at Oatlands Palace,” J announced abruptly.

John looked up, swiftly concealing his surprise. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said, keeping the joy from his voice. “I shall need your skills.”

Elizabeth and Jane exchanged one swift, relieved glance. “Who will run the business here while we are away?” J asked, matter-of-fact.

“We will,” Elizabeth said, smiling. “Jane and I.”

“Frances too,” Frances said firmly.

“And Frances, of course. Peter will show people round the rarities, he does it beautifully now, like a barker in a fairground; and you will be home often, one of you would be home for a day or two, surely?”

“When the court moves on from Oatlands we will be able to do as we please,” John said. “They will want beauty when they visit; we can do half of that with plants grown here in the seed beds and set in at the right time. When they are not at Oatlands we can go about our business here.”

“I will not hear heresy,” J warned.

“I myself shall guard your tender conscience,” his father assured him.

Reluctantly J chuckled. “Aye, you can laugh, but I mean this, Father. I will not hear heresy, and I will not bow down low to her.”

“You will have to uncover your head and bow,” John told him firmly. “That’s common politeness.”

“The Quakers don’t,” Jane volunteered.

John gave her a swift sideways look under his brows. “I thank you, Mistress Jane. I know the Quakers don’t. But J is not a Quaker-” he glared at his son as if to dare him to confess yet another step down the road to a more and more radical faith “ – and the Quakers do not work for me in the king’s garden.”

“They are still his subjects,” she said staunchly.

“And I honor their faith. Just as J is the king’s subject and has a right to his conscience, inside the law. But he will be obedient and he will be courteous.”

“And what shall we do if the law changes?” Elizabeth asked. “This is a king who is changing the shape of the church itself, whose father changed the Bible itself. What if he changes yet more and makes us outlaws in our own church?”

J glanced at his mother. “That’s the very question,” he said. “I can bend for the moment, but what if matters get worse?”

“Practice before principle,” John said with Cecil’s old remembered wisdom. “We’ll worry about that if it happens. In the meantime we have a road we can all take together. We can obey the king and dig his wife’s garden, and keep our consciences to ourselves.”

“I will not listen to heresy and I will not bow down low to the papist queen,” J stated. “But I can be courteous to her and I can work for my father. Two wages coming in is better than one. And besides-” He glanced up at his father with a silent appeal. “I want to do my duty by you, Father. I want there always to be a Tradescant at Lambeth. I want things working right in their right places. It’s because the king does not work right in his right place that everything is so disturbed. I want order – just as you do.”

John smiled his warm loving smile at his son. “I shall make a Cecil of you yet,” he said gently. “Let us put some order in the queen’s garden and keep the steady order of our own lives, and pray that the king does his duty as we do ours.”

The queen had commanded that John should have lodgings in the park at Oatlands and that everything should be done as he wished. His house adjoined the silkworm house and was warmed by the sun all day and by the charcoal burners which were set about the walls of the silkworm house all night. John at first found the thought of his neighbors the maggots, silently munching their way through mulberry leaves night and day, immensely distasteful; but the house itself was a miracle of prettiness, a little turreted play-castle of wood, south-facing with mullioned windows and furnished by the order of the queen with pretty light tables, chairs and a bed.

He was to eat in the great hall with the other members of the household. The king demanded that dinner be served in the great hall in full state whether he was there or not. The ritual demanded that a cover be set on the table before his chair, that dishes be put before the empty throne and that every man should bow to the throne before entering the hall and on leaving it.

“This is superstition,” John exclaimed unwarily when he saw the men bowing low to the empty chair.

“It is how the king orders it,” one of the grooms of the bedchamber replied. “To maintain the dignity of the throne. It’s how it was done in Queen Elizabeth’s time.”

John shook his head. “Well, I remember Elizabeth’s time, which is more than most do,” he said. “Men bowed to her chair when she was going to sit on it, and bowed to her dinner when she was going to eat it. She was too parsimonious to have dinner served in ten palaces when she was only going to eat in one.”

The man shook his head, warning John to be silent. “Well, this is how it’s done now,” he said. “The king himself ordered it.”

“And when does he come?”

“Next week,” the groom said. “And then you will see a change. The place is only half-alive when Their Majesties are not here.”

He was right. Oatlands Palace was like a village with the plague when the court was elsewhere, the passages between one building and another empty and silent, half the kitchens cold, their fires unlit. But early in September a trail of carts and wagons came down the road from Weybridge, and a hundred barges rowed upstream from London bringing the king’s goods as the court moved to Oatlands for the month.

The palace was under siege from an army of shouting, arguing, ordering, singing cooks, maids, horsemen, grooms, servers and minor gentry of the household. Everyone had an urgent task and an important responsibility, and everyone got in everyone else’s way. There were tapestries to hang and pictures to place and floors to sweep and carpets to lay. All the king’s most beautiful furniture traveled with him; and his bedroom and the queen’s bedroom had to be prepared and perfect. The chimneys had to be swept before fires could be lit, but fires had to be lit to air the damp linen at once. The whole village, spread over nine acres, was in a state of complete madness. Even the deerhounds in the kennels caught the excitement and bayed all night long under the yellow September moon.

Tradescant broke the rule of dining in the great hall and went to Weybridge village to buy bread, cheese and small ale, which he took home to his little house in the gardens. He and the silkworms munched their way through their dinners in their adjoining houses. “Goodnight, maggots,” Tradescant called cheerfully as he blew his candle out and the deep country darkness enveloped his bedroom.

John had given no thought to meeting the king. When he had last seen His Majesty, they had both been waiting for Buckingham to come to Portsmouth. The time before that had been at the sailing of the first expedition to Rhé. When John was led into the king’s state bedchamber he found, with the familiar pang of sorrow, that he was looking around for his master. He could not believe that his duke was not there.