He glanced up as the draft from the half-open door blew into the kitchen and put down his book as if he was about to greet his stepmother. Then he saw it was a man looking in at him, and he hesitated.

Very slowly he rose to his feet, very cautiously he looked. John opened the door fully and stepped into the doorway.

“Father?” Johnnie asked uncertainly. “Is it really you?”

John took two swift steps across the kitchen floor and wrapped his boy in a tight hug and inhaled, half-weeping, half-kissing the top of his silky head. “It’s me. Praise God I am home with you, Johnnie, and you safe and well.”

Hester came in behind him and hung her cape on the hook. “Did you recognize him?” she demanded.

Father and son answered “No!” together and then laughed together. John made himself release his son, forced himself to let the boy go.

“He is grown,” Hester said proudly. “And as much help to me in the garden as any man could be. And he is a scholar; he keeps the rarities and garden accounts now, and the planting records.”

“And school?” John demanded.

A shadow crossed Hester’s face. “The school has been closed this last year. The teacher was dismissed, some quarrel about theology. So we do the best we can at home.”

“And where is Frances?” John asked, looking around for her.

Something in Hester’s silence made him stop, fear gripping him. “Where is Frances? Hester, tell me. Please God, tell me that she is not lost.”

“No! No!” She rushed to reassure him. “She is well, in great beauty and well. It’s just… you were not here and I did not know you would return. I didn’t know what I should do for the best and I was at my wits’ end to keep her safe…”

“Where is she?” John shouted.

“She’s married!” Johnnie interrupted. “Safe at the Tower with Alexander Norman.”

“She married Alexander Norman?” John demanded.

Hester nodded, her eyes on his face.

“Not my father’s executor? Not my uncle? Not that Alexander Norman?”

Hester gave the smallest confirming nod.

“You married my daughter off to a man old enough to be her father? A friend of her grandfather?”

“I did.”

“It was her choice,” Johnnie said stoutly. “And she is happy.”

“By God, this is most ill-done!” John swore. “I can’t believe it! When did this happen?”

“A year ago,” Hester said quietly.

“Why?” he asked blankly. “Why did you let it happen? Why did you not write to ask for my permission?”

She turned away from him and tied her house apron around her waist as if she was weary of the whole conversation. “I could not be sure of keeping her safe,” she said. “Before Cromwell had the ruling of the army no woman was safe on the streets. I never knew whether the king would retake London or no and then there would have been the cavaliers to face as well. The apprentices rioted every other night, I could not let her step out of the front door.”

“You could have taken her to Oatlands!” he flung at her.

She turned at that. “Oatlands!” she exclaimed bitterly. “What do you think the palaces are like now? Oatlands was Prince Rupert’s headquarters! D’you think I could keep a pretty girl safe in a barracks? She was as much at risk there as in the stews of the City.”

“You could have put her on a ship to me!”

She blazed up at that. “And where were you? I had two letters from you in three years, one parcel of Indian goods and one consignment of plants. What was I to imagine? I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead. I had to take all the decisions on my own and I did what I thought was the best. Alexander offered her a home and promised me that he would love her and keep her safe. And she wanted to marry him. She accepted him on her own account. And they are happy, anyone can see that.”

“I shall get her home,” John swore. “I shall have the marriage annulled. She is not to be his wife.”

“She is expecting his baby.” Hester spoke calmly as her heart hammered in her ears. “She will come home for the confinement, and she visits us often. But she will not leave her husband, even at your bidding, John.”

He flung out of the room at that and she heard him stride across the hall. Johnnie shot one scared look at her and she put her hand on his shoulder. There was a great bellow from the rarities room: “Mother of God! Where are the rarities? What have you done?”

Hester turned Johnnie on his heel and pushed him gently toward the kitchen door. “Wrap up warmly and go and sweep the snow off the trees,” she said.

“What will you do?”

“I shall have to explain to him how we live now. It will be hard for him to understand.”

“Then he should never have gone away,” Johnnie said.

They had a bitter row in the half-empty room. John in his horror at the changes could not even hear that the finest of the rarities were safely in hiding. Every confession that Hester had to make, that she had sold one or other of the treasures for food, merely heightened his anger by a further notch.

“You have betrayed me!” he yelled at her. “You have betrayed my trust, my sacred trust in you. You have sold my treasures, you have sold my daughter!”

“What was I to do?” Hester shouted back, as angry as him. “You were gone. This summer I was going to tell your son that I feared you must be dead. I had to survive without you. I had to manage somehow. We had one true friend in the whole world and Frances loves and trusts him. She wasn’t sold. He took her without a dowry.”

“Sweet God! Am I supposed to be grateful for this charity? He was a friend of her grandfather! A man in his dotage!”

“And where have you been?” Hester turned from the window and suddenly rounded on John. “For all that you are full of what I have done and failed to do, what do you have to show for three years away? What treasures did you bring back? A barrel of plants and a handful of feathers! The last coins I sold were to buy your passage home when Johnnie and I had not tasted meat for weeks! How dare you accuse me of failing you! It is you who has failed me!”

“You have no idea! You have no idea how I have lived and what I have been trying to do.”

“With some woman? Some Jamestown drab in an inn? Have you been bunked up all these years, spending our money and doing nothing?”

“I’ve been in the woods, I’ve been searching to understand what I should do-”

“And the woman?”

“What of her?”

“Her name. Tell me her name.”

“Suckahanna,” he said unwillingly.

Hester screamed in shock and clapped her hand over her mouth. “You have bedded an Indian? A savage?”

His hand flew out before he knew it, he slapped her face hard. She jerked back and her head banged against the knob of the shutter with a horrible thud. She dropped without another sound, knocked unconscious. For a moment he thought he had killed her and knew a fierce, terrible joy that the woman who had abused Suckahanna should be silenced at once, a feeling instantly succeeded by complete remorse. He dropped to his knees beside her and lifted her up from the floor.

“Hester, wife, forgive me…”

Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. “Take your hands from me,” she spat. “You are a foul adulterer. I won’t have you touch me.”

Hester made up her bed in Frances’s old room and moved her clothes out of the master bedroom that night. She cooked a modest dinner for John, she produced a beautifully pressed suit of clothes and set about sewing him a new shirt. She behaved in every way like an obedient and dutiful wife. But he had knocked the love out of her with one impulsive blow, and he did not know how to get it back.

It was as if the heart had gone out of her and out of the house altogether. The garden was neglected, the topiary and the knot garden hedges were growing out and losing their shape. The gravel on the paths was no defense against the constantly springing weeds. The warm nursery beds by the house had not been prepared with sieved earth for the coming of the new season as they should have been. The fruit trees had not been properly pruned in the autumn. Even the chestnuts had not all been planted and grown on ready for sale in the early summer.