She shook her head. “Since they wanted us to serve under the Commission of Array there has been nothing,” she said. “And they risked our lives for a lost cause then. There is nothing you can do for the king unless you can persuade him to come to terms with his people. Can you do that?”

“No.”

As soon as John’s new boots were ready he put them on, dressed in his best suit and announced his intention of formally visiting his daughter in her new home. Hester and Johnnie, also dressed in their best, went with him in the boat downriver.

“Will he be angry?” Johnnie asked under the noise of the oars in the water.

“No,” Hester said. “The moment he sees her she’ll have him wrapped around her finger like always.”

Johnnie chuckled. “Can we shoot the bridge?” he asked.

Hester hesitated. Timorous passengers would make the ferrymen leave them on the west side of Tower Bridge and walk round to rejoin their boat at the other side. The currents around the pillars of the bridge were terrifyingly swift and when the tide was on the ebb and the river was full, boats could overturn and people could drown. It was Johnnie’s great passion to shoot the rapids and generally Hester would stay in the boat with him, her hands gripping the side, her knuckles white, and a smile firmly fixed on her face.

“Do what?” John asked and turned around.

“Shoot the bridge,” Johnnie replied. “Mother lets me.”

John looked in surprise at his wife. “You can’t enjoy it?” he asked.

One glance at her face told him that she was terrified. “Oh, I don’t mind,” she said. “Johnnie loves it.”

John gave a short bark of laughter. “Then Johnnie can do it,” he said firmly. “You and I will land at the Swan Stairs like Christians and Johnnie can meet us on the other side.”

“But I like Mother coming too!” Johnnie protested.

“That’s as may be,” John said firmly. “But I’m home now, and you’re not going to drown my wife to keep you company. You can shoot the bridge on your own, my boy.”

The ferryman set them ashore at the steps. John put his hand under Hester’s elbow as they climbed to the top and turned to wave to Johnnie as he sat in the prow of the boat to gain full pleasure from the terrifying ride.

“Look at his face!” Hester exclaimed lovingly.

“You are too indulgent to him,” John said.

She hesitated. John was his father and the head of the household. Restoring the power to him was hard for her, just as regaining his position was for him. “He’s still only a boy,” she remarked. “Not yet thirteen.”

“If he was in Virginia-” John started and then bit back the rest.

“Yes,” she said softly. “But he isn’t. He’s a good boy and he has been courageous and faithful through these difficult years. If he was a planter’s son, living in the wilds, then I dare say he would be a quite different boy. But he is not. He is a boy who has had to have his childhood in the middle of a war and he has seen all of the adults around him most terribly afraid. You are right to restore the rules, John, but I won’t have him blamed for not being something he has no business to be.”

He turned and faced her but she did not drop her gaze. She stared at him fiercely as if she did not care whether he beat her or sent her home in disgrace. Not for the first time John was reminded that he had married a redoubtable woman and, despite his temper, he remembered also that she was fiercely defending his son, just as she had fiercely defended the garden and the rarities.

“You’re right,” he said, with the smile she loved. “And I will be restored to my place at the head of the household. But I won’t be a tyrant.”

She nodded at that, and when they strolled together to the other side of the bridge where the boat was waiting she slid her hand in the crook of his arm and John kept it there.

They paid the boatman and retraced their steps to the Tower. Alexander Norman’s timber yard was beside the walls of the Tower on the grounds of a former convent. His house was built alongside, one of the long, thin town houses pressed against the narrow street. Hester had feared that Frances would be unhappy without a garden, with little more than a dozen pots in the cobbled yard at the back, which was overshadowed half the day from the stacks of wood in the timber yard next door. But already the house was draped in climbing roses and honeysuckle was growing up to the very windows, and every window had a bracket fixed outside and a square planting box nailed to the wall with a row of tulips waiting to bloom.

“I’d have no trouble guessing which house was hers,” John said grimly, glancing down the street at the other bare-fronted, barefaced houses.

“That’s nothing,” Johnnie said with pleasure. “She has an herb garden out the back and an apple tree squashed against the back wall. She says she’ll prune it to keep it small enough. She says she’ll repot it every year and prune the roots too.”

John shook his head. “She needs a dwarf apple tree,” he said. “Perhaps if one could graft an apple sapling onto a shrub root it might grow small…”

Hester stepped forward and knocked on the door. At once Frances opened it. “Father!” she said, and slipped down the step, threw her arms around him and laid her head against his shoulder.

John almost recoiled from her touch. In the three years he had been away she had grown from a girl to a woman of nearly eighteen years, and now, with her slight body pressed against him, he could feel the hard swelling of her baby.

He stepped back to see her and his face softened. “You’re so like your mother,” he exclaimed. “What a beauty you’ve become, Frances.”

“She’s the very picture of my Jane.” Mrs. Hurte emerged from the house and shook John and then Hester by the hand. She enveloped Johnnie in a breathtaking embrace but never stopped talking. “The very picture of her. Every time I see her I think she has come back to us again.”

“Come inside,” Frances urged. “You must be frozen. Did you shoot the bridge?”

“Father wouldn’t let Mother come.”

Frances shot a brief approving look at her father. “Quite right. Why should Mother risk drowning because you like it?”

“She likes it!” Johnnie protested.

“I swear I never said so,” Hester remarked.

Mrs. Hurte surged outward rather than into the house, took John by the arm and drew him aside. Hester silently admired the tactical skill of her stepdaughter. This was generalship as gifted as Oliver Cromwell’s with his New Model Army. Mrs. Hurte would change John’s mind in favor of the match in two sentences of complaints. Both Hester and Frances strained their ears to hear her do it.

“You’re home too late,” Mrs. Hurte said reproachfully to John. “This is a bad business, and you too late to prevent it.”

“I don’t see that it is bad,” John remarked.

“A man of fifty-six and a girl of seventeen?” Mrs. Hurte demanded. “What life can they have together?”

“A good one.” John gestured to the pretty house and the tracery of carefully pruned rose branches. “A boy of her own age could not hope to give her so much.”

“She should have been kept at her home.”

“In these times?” John asked. “Where safer than beside the Tower?”

“And now expecting a baby?”

“The older the bridegroom, the sooner the better,” John rejoined swiftly. “Why should you be so against it, Mother? It was a marriage for love. Your own daughter Jane had nothing less.”

She bit her lip at that. “Jane brought a good dowry and you two were well matched,” she said.

“I will see that Frances is properly dowered when peace is restored and I can sell the Virginia plants and restore the rarities to their proper place,” John said firmly. “I am trading in a small way with the West Indies and I expect to see a profit on that very soon. And Frances is well-matched. Alexander is a good and faithful friend to this family and she loves him. Why should she not marry the man of her choice in these times when men and women are making their own choices every day? When this whole war has been fought for men and women to be free?”