John found he was absurdly overanxious about his daughter. She looked so like her mother as she grew rounder and her face took on a glow as her pregnancy progressed. He did not want to speak of Jane to his second wife, and he did not want the shadow of her death to hang over the house. He took to spending long hours in the garden, not coming in until the slow early summer dusk, and he found that while he was digging, weeding, and transplanting the Virginian seedlings he was turning over in his mind the different sorts of love a man can have: for his work, for the girl he married for love, for the children she bore him, for the woman he married for convenience, and for the woman he loved hopelessly, helplessly, completely.

He even acknowledged at last his love for the king, the foolish, selfish, intractable master who had so persistently known less and understood less than his servants. John had thought all the loves were threads which pulled him one way and another and would be, as Attone had warned him, a rope to trip him up. But as he walked back to his house past the tulip beds, and saw the shape of their cupped petals against the greater darkness of night, he thought that perhaps the threads could be the warp and woof that wove into the fabric of his life, and made him what he was, a man who had loved very deeply in different ways; and that the different loves were not a betrayal, but a richness.

He was pinching out the buds on the cherry trees in the orchard one day in June when he saw Johnnie come flying out of the kitchen door, and rush to the stable. A moment later he was pulling the saddle horse out of the stall and jumping on her back, bareback, and trotting out of the yard.

“What is it?” John shouted. He slid down the ladder and ran toward the house. “Is it Frances?”

He ran into the kitchen and found the cook boiling a pan of water. “Is it Frances?” he demanded.

“She’s taken ill,” the cook said. “Mrs. Tradescant has put her to bed and sent Johnnie for the apothecary. Pray to God that it’s not the plague.”

“Amen,” John said and in the same breath: “Damn you for speaking such fears.” He strode from the kitchen and ran up the stairs in his gardening boots, shedding mud on the polished wood treads. “Hester? Hester?”

She came out of Frances’s room and he saw at once from her face that his daughter was gravely ill. “What is it?” he demanded. “Not-” He lowered his voice. “Not the plague?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “She grew very hot and said she would like to rest, then she just fainted clean away.”

He glanced superstitiously at the closed door. “Move her into our room,” he said.

“She’s in her own room, I don’t want to trouble her and move her,” Hester said uncomprehendingly.

He shifted from one foot to another, fearful of even saying the words. “Please,” he said. “Her mother took the plague in that room, it was our bedroom. She made me move her from there to the orangery and there she died. Please don’t let Frances be in that room.”

Hester stepped toward him and took his dirty hands in her cool fingers. “John, these are old fears,” she said. “This is Frances, not Jane. This is a fever, not the plague. She is a strong young woman and I will nurse her as well as I can. I won’t move her when she is comfortable in her own bed, and who better to watch over her from heaven than her own mother?”

He hesitated for a moment. “Does she need anything?”

Hester thought quickly for a task to keep John occupied and to give him a sense of purpose. “I need herbs,” she said. “Feverfew and chamomile, and sweet cicely against infection. Can you pick them for me?”

He nodded and went quickly toward the stairs.

“And write a note and send it to Alexander,” Hester said. “Don’t worry him too much, just tell him she has a fever, and she would like to see him, if he can come.”

John paused, obedient as a frightened boy. “Herbs or letter first?” he asked.

“Letter,” she said. “Then the herbs, and then why don’t you pot her up a couple of tulips? She’d like to see them.”

“I’ll bring her up the Semper,” John said, promising the best of them all. “The Semper Augustus.”

Alexander came up the river at dawn the next day and had the boat set him down on the bank as near to the Ark as he could get. John saw him from the window in the stable yard, taking off his cape and his waistcoat and even his trousers and leaving them in the stable. He shouted for Joseph to work the pump, stripped off his shirt and washed under the stream of icy water before rubbing himself briskly dry with a sheet and pattering to the kitchen door all but naked.

Cook let out a delighted little scream of shock but Alexander Norman paid no attention to her and walked past her to the hall.

“Forgive me,” he said briefly to John. “But there is a lot of sickness in the City and I wanted to take no risk of bringing it to you here. Are you free of it in Lambeth?”

“Half a dozen dead in the village this week,” John said grimly. “I thank you for taking care. You can borrow a shirt and breeches of mine.”

“Is she better?” Alexander asked.

John shook his head. “The fever grew worse overnight and Hester says she is still hot.”

“But it isn’t…?” Alexander could not bring himself to name the plague.

“Hester says not.”

The two men looked into each other’s anxious faces and for the first time since his return to England John knew the pleasure of finding a man who could understand what he was feeling. His own worry was graven deep into Alexander’s face. They both looked as if they had spent the night praying. He reached out his arms and Alexander gripped him tightly.

“Please God it is not…”

“Please God,” John replied.

“She is so precious to me…”

“I know, I know.”

“I sent her away from the City the moment I thought there was a risk…”

“It’s in Lambeth anyway. There is nowhere you could be sure that she would be safe.”

“But not her…”

“I feel so fearful,” John said very low. “I think of her mother and her prettiness – and Frances is so like her – and I think that perhaps there is a weakness?”

Alexander shook his head. “There’s no way of tracing where it comes from or who takes it,” he said. “That’s the very devil of it. You just don’t know. Is everyone else well? Johnnie? Hester?”

“We’re all well,” John said. “And God knows we would all willingly take it for her.”

Alexander bowed his head for a moment. “D’you forgive me for marrying her?” he asked irrelevantly.

John gave a short laugh. “For everything she has ever done or ever can do, if only she will be well again,” he said. “I knew I loved her but I never knew that the very thought of losing her would be like my own death to me.”

“And the baby?”

“They’re both hanging on,” John said. “Hester says they are both hanging on.”

There was nothing for the two men to do. A couple of times there was a knock at the door and John went to admit a visitor to the rarities room and one to walk around the garden; but the rest of the time he and Alexander sat in silence in the parlor, either side of the cold fireplace, straining to hear footsteps upstairs, waiting for news. Johnnie took up a position on the top of the stairs outside Frances’s room carving at a twig with his pocketknife. All the day, he sat like a little choirboy at a vigil, listening to the gentle murmur of talk and the irregular sigh of Frances’s breath.

There was little Hester could do, though she never left Frances’s bedside. She sponged her forehead with vinegar and lavender water, she changed the sheets when they grew wet with sweat, she held her hand and spoke to her quietly and reassuringly when Frances tossed in fever-colored nightmares, and she held her shoulders so that the young woman could sip a drink of cool well water.