“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t know how to go on without him. The Ark, and the gardens, the royal gardens – I have always worked beside him. I have lost my employer and my master as well as my father.”

She nodded. “He left a letter for you.”

J watched her as she crossed the room and took the sealed letter from a drawer in the table.

“I think it’s about me,” she said bluntly.

J paused as he took it from her. “Who are you?” he asked again.

She took a little breath. “I am Hester Pooks. I’m all but alone in the world. Your father liked me, and my uncle told him I had a good dowry. I met him at court. My uncle is a painter, commissioned by the queen. My family is a good family, all artists and musicians, all with royal or noble patrons.” She paused and smiled. “But not much money. Your father thought I might suit you. He wanted to make sure that there was someone to bring up his grandchildren, and to keep them here. He didn’t want them living in London with your wife’s parents. He thought I would marry you.”

J’s jaw dropped open. “He has found me a wife? I’m a man of thirty years of age and he found me a wife as if I were a boy? And he chose you?”

Hester looked him squarely in the face. “I’m no beauty,” she said. “I imagine your wife was lovely. Frances is such a pretty girl, and they tell me she takes after her mother. But I can run a house, and I can run a business, I love plants and trees and a garden, and I like children, I like your children. Whether or not you want to marry me, I should like to be a friend to Frances in particular. It would suit me to marry you and I wouldn’t make great demands on you. I don’t have great expectations.”

She paused. “It would be an arrangement to suit ourselves,” she said. “And it would leave you free to garden at the royal palace of Oatlands or to go abroad again and know that everything was safe here.”

J looked from her to his letter. “This is outrageous! I have barely been home a moment and already I learn that my father is dead and that some woman, who I’ve never met before in my life, is half betrothed to me. And anyway-” He broke off. “I have other plans.”

She nodded soberly. “It would have been easier if he had lived to explain it himself,” she said. “But you are not half-betrothed, Mr. Tradescant. It is entirely up to you. I shall leave you to read your letter. Is it your wish that I wake the children and bring them down to see you?”

He was distracted. “Are they both well?”

She nodded. “Frances especially grieves for her grandfather but they are both in perfect health.”

J shook his head in bewilderment. “Bring them in to me when they wake,” he said. “No need to wake them early. I will read this letter from my father. I need time. I do feel-” He broke off. “All my life he has managed and controlled me!” he exclaimed in a sudden explosion of irritation. “And just when I think I am my own man at his death I find that he had my future life in his hands, too.”

She paused at the doorway with her hand on the brass door ring. “He did not mean to order you,” she said. “He was thinking that I might set you free, not be a burden. And he told me very clearly that you had buried your heart with your wife and that you would never love me nor any woman again.”

J felt a pang of deep guilt. “I shall never love a woman in my wife’s place,” he said carefully. “Jane could never be replaced.”

She nodded, she thought he was warning her. She did not realize that he was speaking to himself, reproaching himself for that runaway sense of freedom, for his sense of joy with the young girl in the wood so far from home and responsibilities and the normal rules of life.

“I don’t expect love,” Hester said simply, recalling him to the shadowy room. “I thought we might be able to help each other. I thought we might be… helpmeets.”

J looked at her, looked at her and saw her for the first time as she stood in the doorway, framed by the dark wood. He saw the simple plain face, the smooth white cap, the intelligent dark eyes and the strength of her jaw. “What on earth put it into his head?” he asked.

“I think I did,” she said with a glimmer of a smile. “It would suit me very well. Perhaps, when you are over the surprise of it, you will think that it will suit you too.”

He watched her close the door behind her and opened his father’s letter.

My dear son,

I have made a will leaving the Ark entire to you. I hope that it will bring you much joy. I hope that Baby John will succeed you, as you succeed me, and that the name of Tradescant will always mean something to people who love their gardens.

If I am dead when you return then I leave you my blessing and my love. I am going to join your mother, and my two masters, Sir Robert and the Duke, and I am ready to go to them. Do not grieve for me, J, I have had a long life and one which many men would envy.

The young woman called Hester Pooks has a substantial dowry and is a sensible woman. I have spoken to her about you and I believe she would make a good wife to you and a good mother to the children. She is not another Jane, because there never could be another Jane. But she is a straightforward, kind young woman and I think you need one such as her.

Of course it is your decision. But if I had lived long enough to see your return I would have introduced her to you with my earnest recommendation.

Farewell my son, my dear son,

John Tradescant

J sat very still and watched the kindling twigs in the fire flicker and turn to knotted skeletal lace of dry ash. He thought of his father’s determination and his care, which showed itself in the meticulous nursery and seed bed, in pruning and weeding and in the unending twisting and training of his beloved climbing plants, and showed itself here too, in providing a wife for his adult son. He felt his irritated sense of thwarted independence melt before his affection for his father. And at the thought of the gardens being left to him in trust for another John Tradescant coming behind them both he felt the anger inside him dissolve, and he slipped to the floor and rested his head in his father’s chair and wept for him.

Frances, coming in a little later, found her father composed and seated in the window where he could look out at the cold horse chestnut avenue and the swirls of fog in the early-morning darkness.

“Father?” she said tentatively.

He turned and held out his arms to her and she ran into his embrace. He brought her close to him and felt the light tiny bones of her body and smelled the warm clean smell of her skin and hair. For a moment he thought vividly and poignantly of Suckahanna, who was no heavier but whose every muscle was like whipcord.

“You’ve grown,” he said. “I swear you are nearly up to my chest.”

She smiled up at him. “I am nine,” she said seriously. “And Baby John is bigger than when you left. And heavier. I can’t lift him now he’s five. Hester has to.”

“Hester does, does she? D’you like Hester?”

He thought she looked at him as if she needed help in saying something, as if there were something she could not say. “Yes.”

“Your grandfather thought she might marry me, he thought she might be a mother to you.”

A look of relief crossed her face. “We need a mother,” she said. “I can’t lift Baby John now he’s so big, and I don’t always know what to do when he cries. If he were to be sick, like Mama was sick, I wouldn’t know how to care for him and he might die-” She broke off and gulped on a sob. “We need a mother,” she said earnestly. “A cook isn’t the same.”