They were not summoned by a message. They responded almost individually, spontaneously, in an uprising which was as much an irritated demand for a return to more peaceful days as a struggle of principle about the existence of bishops.

It was incredible to Hester that the king could be the center of a second catastrophe, even while he was in his prison. Without even being at liberty his mere presence could be the focus of unrest, and the country which had been at peace for nearly two years was suddenly at war again. It was a full-scale war fought in a hundred different pitched battles all over the kingdom, and then news came to Lambeth that Lord Norwich was besieging the City of London itself and was likely to take it for the king. If London fell then Parliament itself would be taken, and then the war must be over and the king would be the victor.

Hester caught Johnnie sneaking a saddle onto the horse in the stable yard, a pack at his side. Her steady temper suddenly broke. “And where the devil d’you think you’re going?”

He turned to her. “You can’t stop me. I’m going to fight for the king.”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m nearly fifteen, old enough to fight.”

It was that spark that fired the charge. Hester sprung on him and seized him by his shirt collar and marched him, like a schoolboy, down the garden path, past the glorious rosebeds where waves of perfume billowed in their wake, to the orchard where John was up a ladder disbudding apple trees.

“The king needs fools!” Hester exclaimed. “A fools’ army for a fool of a king.”

“I will go!” Johnnie proclaimed, struggling out from her grip. “I will not be under your command. I’m a man, I shall play a man’s part.”

Hester thrust him at his father. “He’s fourteen,” she announced baldly. “Says he’s a man. I can’t rule him anymore. You will have to decide. Is he to go to serve the king or not?”

John stepped slowly off the lower rungs of the ladder and looked at his son. “What’s this?”

Johnnie did not look away but faced his father like a young stag facing the leader of the herd. “I want to do my duty,” he said. “I want to serve the king.”

“The king is not served by riots and uproar and Englishmen killing each other in the streets of Maidstone and Canterbury,” John said slowly.

“If that is what it takes-”

John shook his head. “Making peace in a kingdom is done by ceaseless work, ceaseless working toward agreement,” he said. “Haven’t you lived your childhood through a war and seen that at the end there is nothing agreed, nothing is any further forward?”

“I want to do my duty!”

John put his hand on the bough of the apple tree as if he would draw strength from it. “Your duty is to your God and to your father and mother,” he said.

“You don’t even believe in God,” Johnnie shot back. “You don’t believe in anything. You have not done your duty by me as a father – you left us for years. You’re the king’s man but you don’t fight for him, you’re in the pay of Parliament and you joke about being a Parliament gardener. You’re a Virginia planter but you stay at home in Lambeth. I won’t be told my duty by you!”

Hester started forward to protect her stepson against the blow that must come, and then forced herself to pause, and hold back. John did not strike Johnnie but froze, his hand tightened on the bough of the apple tree until the knuckles went pale.

“I am sorry you think so low of me,” John said quietly. “And what you say is true. I lost my faith in God when your mother died and I could not even hold her for fear of spreading the infection to you. I have tried to show my respect to others’ faith. But the heart went out of me. I did leave you and Frances and your stepmother at a time when I should have stayed and protected you – but I thought the king would draw me into fighting and never let me go. And I was right to fear that – he has drawn the whole four kingdoms of men into fighting and he has never let them go. I have my headright in Virginia but I could not keep it without killing people that I have every reason to love and respect. It was a war between countrymen there too.”

Johnnie was about to speak, Hester knowing him so well, knew that he was fighting not to break down in tears and pitch into his father’s arms. He held himself very still, rigid as a soldier under fire.

“But I do have a right to speak,” John said. “Because I know things that you don’t. Because I have thought of things in all this time. I have struggled with one loyalty against another, with one love against another. You might think that I am weak, but this is how my life has come to me. It is not a simple life of simple loyalties. I am not like my father. He found master after master that he could love and follow with a loyal heart. He loved Sir Robert Cecil, and then the Duke of Buckingham, and then the king. He never questioned that they were the master and he the man. But it’s not been like that for me. And it won’t be like that for you. The world has changed, Johnnie. It’s not enough to cite duty anymore and go marching off to the rattle of a recruiting drum. You have to think for yourself, you have to pick your own path.”

There was a long silence in the orchard. Somewhere in the high leaves of one of the trees a blackbird started to sing.

“I beg your pardon for speaking as I did,” Johnnie said stiffly. “And I ask your permission as your dutiful son. I want to go and serve the king. That’s my path. I have considered it for myself. I want to fight for my king.”

John shot a look at Hester as if to ask if she could see a way out. One look was enough. Hester’s face was tragic, both hands gripped under the shield of her apron.

“God bless you and keep you then,” John said slowly. “And come back home the minute you have a doubt, Johnnie. You are the only Tradescant heir, and very dear to us.”

Slowly Johnnie dropped to one knee on the grass for his father’s blessing. Over his bent fair head John looked at Hester and saw that he had said the right thing – they had to let their son go to war.

Dearest Mother and Father,

I write this to you on the road to Colchester. I am riding with Lord Norwich and half a dozen gentlemen and a fine troop of more than a thousand strong. We were rebuffed at London – I got there as they were leaving, unluckily for me – but at least I am in a troop of horse gathering recruits as we go.

The mare is keeping up well and I am sure to feed her every night. We have to forage for our own feed which is hard to do in some of these farms that were poor enough before we arrived and are left worse. Some of the gentlemen use the farmers and laborers very hard, and this does not increase our welcome farther down the road.

The ships will supply us when we are in Colchester and an army is coming to our aid from out of East Anglia. There is no doubt that we will win.

My love to Frances and her husband. You can ask Alexander to delay his supply of barrels of gunpowder as a favor to me. I hope you are all well. Your loving and dutiful son – John

“He signs himself John, not Johnnie,” Hester observed.

“He sounds well,” John answered.

They stood, cheek to cheek in the hall, both of them reading the short letter, and then reading it again.

“She’s a good horse, she’ll keep him safe,” John said.

“He doesn’t sound very happy with the troop.”

John relinquished the letter into her hands and turned toward the garden. “How could he be? A boy who has seen so little of the world, suddenly ridden off to war?”

“Should you fetch him home?” Hester asked.

John paused, hearing the longing in her voice. “I cannot,” he said.