John shot him a look.

“It’s true,” J maintained. “And he will send for you again.”

“You cannot go,” Elizabeth breathed. “The mission is bound to fail again and you will risk your life for nothing.”

“My John can’t go,” Jane said suddenly. She made a small betraying movement, her hand to her belly. “I need him here.” She flushed. “We need him here. He is to be a father.”

“Oh, my dear!” Elizabeth stretched across the fire and held Jane’s hands in her own. “I am so glad! What a blessing.”

The two women remained clasped for a moment, and Elizabeth closed her eyes in a swift silent prayer. John watched them with a weary sense of exclusion from the world of small joys. “I am glad for you,” he said levelly. “And Jane is right, J cannot go with a baby on the way. If he sends for me, it will have to be me.”

The little family was silent for a moment. “Perhaps he will not send for you?” Jane asked.

John shook his head. “I think he will. And I have promised to go whenever he calls me.”

“To your death?” J demanded passionately.

John raised a weary face to his son. “Those were the very words of my oath,” he said slowly.

The message came in the middle of June, one of the best months of the year for a gardener. John had started his day’s work in the rose garden, dead-heading the blowsy blooms and tossing the petals into a basket for the still room. They would be dried and used in pomanders, or for scattering in the linen cupboards to scent the duke’s sheets. Or they might be claimed by the cooks and candied to decorate the duke’s sweetmeats. Everything in the garden, from drowsily humming bees to falling rosy pale petals, was the duke’s and grew for his pleasure. Except he was not here to see them.

At midday John went around to the front of the house to see the young limes, planted in the long, gently curving double avenue. He had a thought that they might grow better-shaped if their lower branches were pruned, and he had a small axe and a saw for the purpose, and a lad coming behind with a ladder. But before he had done more than whistle to the lad to set the ladder before the first tree, he heard hoofbeats.

John turned, raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw, like a dream, like a long-awaited vision, the single rider still a mile off, his lathered horse going from gray to black as it passed from brilliant sunlight into deep green shadow down the drive. John stepped out from the shade of the trees on to the broad sunny road, waiting in the hot light for the messenger, knowing that it would be his summons, knowing that he must obey. He felt for a moment that it was Death himself, with his scythe over his shoulder, riding between the trees with the drunken bees buzzing wildly and the leaves dripping with nectar and pollen.

John felt a darkness within himself as if the shade of the limes had cast a deep green into his very blood, and a coldness which he thought must be fear. He had never known fear before in this bleak premonitory way. He understood now, for the first time, why the pressed men had whispered to him as he went through the ranks: “Ask him to send us home, Mr. Tradescant, ask him to turn back.” Now he felt as slavish as they, as unmanned as they.

The rider came slowly toward him and Tradescant put up his hand for the letter as if he were warding off a blow from a knife.

“How did you know it was for you?” the messenger asked, sliding from his horse’s back and loosening the girth.

“I have been waiting for it since I heard he was returning to Rhé,” John said.

“Then you will be the only willing recruit,” the man said cheerfully. “There were riots outside his house when the sailors heard he was taking them back there. His carriage is stoned every time he takes it out. They are saying that the expedition is cursed and that it will fall into a whirlpool which stretches down to Hell itself. They drink to his death in the ale houses; they pray for his downfall in the chapels.”

“That’s enough,” John said roughly. “Go and take your horse to the stable. I won’t hear the duke traduced on his own land by his own servant.”

The man shrugged and twitched the reins over his horse’s head. “I’ve left his service. I am on my way to my own home.”

“You have work to go to?”

“No,” he said. “But I’d rather beg from door to door than go with the duke to the Island of Rue. I’m not a fool. I know how it will be commanded, and how it will be paid, and what the risks will be.”

John nodded, his face betraying nothing. Then he turned away and walked from the avenue, across the grass lawn to the lake. He made his way down the pretty little path to the landing stage opposite the boathouse where Buckingham used to row out on summer evenings, sometimes with his wife Kate in the stern, sometimes alone with a rod and line. John sat on the landing stage and looked across the water. The yellow flag irises were in flower as he had promised his master they would be; the fountain they had designed together played into the warm silent air of the afternoon. The water lilies he had planted bobbed gently as the wind breathed across the smooth surface of the lake, their buds just splitting to show cream and white petals. The ducks had had a second brood of ducklings and they came and quacked around him, hoping for corn. John held the letter in his hand, looking at the heavy seal on the fold of the thick cream notepaper. For a moment he did not break it, he did not shatter the impress of Buckingham’s ring; for a moment he sat in the sunshine and thought what he would be feeling if this was a letter from a master who loved him, from a man who loved as an equal. How it would be for him now, if Buckingham was his lover as well as his lord.

John thought that if they were lovers still his heart would leap at the sight of the sealed note; he would be happy at being ordered to his lord’s side; he would go glad-hearted, wherever he was ordered. If they were lovers he would go with his lord to the Isle of Rue, to that bleak island, to that certain death, with a sort of mad joy, that a love as encompassing and wild as theirs could only end in death and that there would be something erotic and powerful about it ending in a battle and the two of them side by side as comrades.

John rubbed his hand across his eyes. No point in dreaming like a lovesick maid and gazing out across the water. This would not be a love letter; these would be orders that must be obeyed whatever his private feelings. He tore the fold of the paper and opened the letter.

John,

I shall need my best traveling coach and some suits of clothes, my hats and the new diamonds. We will need a couple of cows and some hens – order everything as I would wish.

Bring it all to me and meet me at Portsmouth; we will sail at the beginning of July without fail.

You will sail with me and be at my side, as before.

Villiers.

John read the letter once, and then read it again. It was his death warrant.

The evening was very warm. John watched the midges dancing over the still water, his legs dangling above the glassy surface of the lake like an idle boy’s. Even now he found it hard to believe that he must leave all this, and never see it again. The garden he had made, the trees he had planted, the vegetables and flowers he had introduced to New Hall – to England – all this would be taken from him, and he would die on an island half-rock and half-marsh for a cause he had never believed in, serving a master who was no good.

John’s long unthinking uncritical loyalty to his masters had been destroyed. And when John lost his faith in his master, he lost his faith in the world. If his master was not a better man, closer to the angels than his servant, then the king was not set higher again, even closer to heaven. And if the king was not divine, then he was not infallible, as John had always believed. And if the king was not infallible then all the questions that thinking men were posing, about the king’s new powers and the king’s mismanagement of affairs, were questions that John should have been asking. He should have been asking them years ago.