“I shall go into Lambeth and order the builder to come,” John said. “He’ll be a busy man this day, I should think.”

He rode Caesar down the lane to Lambeth and thought that the crowd in the market was agog with news of the storm damage until he drew closer and heard what they were saying.

“What was that?” he asked, dropping from the saddle. “What did you say, sir?”

“Don’t you know?” A man turned to him, delighted to be first with the news. “Haven’t you heard? He’s dead!”

“Who?”

“The Lord Protector. Oliver Cromwell. Dead in his bed while the storm rattled the roof above him.”

“It’s as if God himself was angry,” a man piously asserted. “It was a sign.”

“A very odd sign then, and rather late in the day,” John said crossly. “If God didn’t like Oliver Cromwell he had plenty of time to demonstrate that before.”

An unfriendly face turned toward him. “Are you one of his old soldiers?” someone asked unpleasantly. “Or a servant of the major generals? Or one of the damned tax collectors?”

“I’m a man who thinks for himself,” John said stoutly. “I serve no master and I owe nothing to any man. And I am absolutely certain that God didn’t blow the slates of my roof last night to show me that Oliver Cromwell was dying. If He is all-wise, then He might have found a way to tell me that didn’t let the rain in.”

Spring 1659

The storm which blew Oliver Cromwell up to his reward in heaven, or down to the devils in hell, did not helpfully indicate his successor. There were many who said that he nominated his son Richard on his deathbed, but John, recalling what his father had said about the succession of kings, remembered that courtiers were never very reliable about deathbed confessions, and that the power of supreme government in England might go to whatever man had the courage to seize it.

The man most fit to succeed was John Lambert, beloved of the army, still the greatest power in the land, and a proven friend of peace, tolerance and reform. But Richard was said to be the heir and a new parliament was summoned to rule with the new Protector.

They were curiously churlish about the job. Richard was not even recognized as Lord Protector until they were forced to acknowledge him so that he could send the fleet to the Baltic to protect English shipping against the Dutch in February. And then in April, the army, impatient with being ignored while they petitioned for back pay, and furious at the increasingly arrogant behavior of the royalists, locked the MPs out of the Commons, Richard among them.

He might be a Cromwell, but he was not an old soldier, and the army suspected that the new breed of politicians and leaders had lost the godliness and republican fire of those who had been forced to fight for their beliefs.

John had promised Hester that he would take her to see Lambert’s orange garden at Wimbledon in the spring. They took a boat to the manor house landing stage and walked through Lambert’s new plantation to the formal gardens before the house. John hesitated when he saw Lord Lambert on the terrace, his wife beside him. Before them were a couple of soldiers with the standard of his old regiment which had been given to Cromwell’s son-in-law.

“What’s going on?” Hester asked her husband quietly.

John shook his head.

“Perhaps we should just wave and go back to the plantation,” Hester suggested tactfully. “It’s maybe a private matter.”

“He’s beckoning us,” John said. “Come on.”

The Tradescants went to the foot of the steps. John Lambert smiled down at Hester with a beam that reminded her poignantly of Johnnie when he had just got his own way in an argument.

“You come at a good moment,” he said to them both. “See. Here’s the standard of my regiment. Restored to me.”

“Restored?” Hester asked, coming up the steps and dropping a little curtsy to Lady Lambert.

“Fauconberg and the rest are dismissed from their posts, and so my lads have come to restore the standard to me. We’re together again.”

“I’m glad for you,” John said. “Congratulations, Lord Lambert.”

“Major General,” Lambert said with a gleam. “And I’d rather be a major general at the head of the best regiment in the army than a lord at my fireside any day.”

Summer 1659

Parliament was dissolved and a new Parliament came in, led by a new Council of State, in May. Among the new council was John Lambert and he gave his vote to the retirement, with pay, of Richard Cromwell, back pay to the army, the cleansing of schools and universities of ungodly ministers and the toleration for all religions except for Catholics and those who would bring the bishops back to England. The rule of the Cromwell family was over, England was a true republic again.

“He’s asked me to take care of his tulips this autumn,” John remarked to Hester as they worked companionably side by side in the Ark’s rose garden. “He thinks he will be in Whitehall all this year. It’ll be odd to work at Wimbledon again.”

“You’ll never be his gardener,” Hester said, astonished.

“No, he has his own gardeners. But I said I would lift the tulip bulbs in the autumn. He wants me to choose the colors for the orange garden, and he trusts me with his dark Violetten tulips.”

Hester smiled. “Not going into service again then, John?”

“Never again,” he said. “Not even for him. I swore I would never serve another master and then the order came from the king for my father and me, and we couldn’t disobey. Anyone else I would have refused.”

“What if Lambert were to become king?” she asked. “He’s the best-loved man in the country. There are many saying that he could be trusted to rule with a parliament. And the army follow no one but him.”

“I’d like to see a gardener on the throne,” John mused. “Think of what the palace gardens could be.”

Hester snorted with laughter. “And that’s the main consideration?”

John grinned reluctantly. “The most important, certainly.”

They heard Frances call from the house and they looked toward the terrace. She was standing with a gentleman at her side. She beckoned to John.

“Who’s that?” Hester asked uneasily. “I don’t recognize him.”

“Perhaps someone with something for sale,” John said, stepping carefully round the rosebushes, and picking up his basket filled with the sweetly scented pastel petals. He walked to the terrace and gave the basket to Frances.

“This gentleman says he has private business to discuss with you,” she said briefly.

John absorbed, as a father can do, that his daughter was deeply offended and determined not to show it.

“The gentleman declined to give his name to me,” Frances said in the same clipped tones. “I’ll take these to the stable yard, shall I?”

John smiled pacifically at her. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said.

“The gentleman asked me to fetch him a glass of wine,” Frances continued stonily. “Can I fetch anything for you, Father?”

“No indeed,” John said. “But please ask Cook to serve the gentleman. You are far too busy, Frances.”

He earned a brief smile for that and then she was gone, her back very straight, her head very high. John turned his attention to the mystery guest who had managed, in so short a time, to mortally offend his daughter.

“I beg your pardon,” the man said. “She was so simply dressed I thought she was your housemaid.” He glanced at John’s own muddy homespun breeches, linen shirt, leather waistcoat and scratched dirty hands.

“We are gardeners,” John said gently. “It’s a dirty job. It rather calls for simple dress.”

“Of course-” the man said hastily. “I did not mean to upset Miss Tradescant.”

John nodded, not bothering to correct him.