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  ‘What about the mermaid’s tail?’ Johnnie asked. ‘And the whale’s jaw?’

  ‘We can’t even lift them,’ Frances said. ‘What will we do? How can we hide them in safety?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hester said. Her hands kept moving, packing, folding, smoothing, but her voice was full of despair and weariness. ‘We just pack everything we can, I suppose. And for the rest? I don’t know.’

  At night Hester and the children and the gardener, Joseph, carried the boxes carefully to the ice house, and stacked them inside. The ice house was lined with brick, it was damp and dark. Frances shivered and pulled her hood over her head, fearing spiders and bats. The boxes filled the small circular room. When they came out they nailed up the door. Hester had an odd, superstitious feeling that it was as if they were mourners before the family vault and that all that was most precious to them had been buried.

  ‘I’ll plant a couple of shrubs before it tomorrow,’ Joseph promised, ‘and grow some ivy over the door. In a month or so you won’t know it’s there.’

  ‘I hope we have a month or so,’ Hester said. ‘Cut some branches and lay them over the door to hide it while the ivy is growing. And put a couple of saplings in.’

  ‘Is the king’s army coming so soon?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘The king himself is coming,’ Hester said grimly. ‘And please God that whether he wins or loses the battle is over swiftly and the winners bring the country back to peace, because I don’t think I can bear another year like this one.’

  Within days in the city of London everything was rationed and nothing could be bought. The king’s army was coming down the Great North Road and no wagons could get into London to feed the people. The Lord Mayor of London himself set up distribution points where people could buy food and set fair prices so that racketeers could not profit from the city’s desperation. Joseph was drafted out every day to dig trenches to protect the city from the cavalry, and there was even an inquiry from the local commander of the trained bands as to how old Johnnie might be, and when he would be old enough to serve.

  Johnnie, with his home under siege from the king, was wild to sneak out at night and get to the king’s army. ‘I could be a scout,’ he said. ‘I could be a spy. I could tell the king where the ditches are dug, where the cannon are mounted. He needs me, I should go to him.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Hester snapped. The sense of an impending disaster for the house and the children she loved was wearing her patience very thin. ‘The king has enough fools running to his standard. You are a child. You will stay home like an obedient child.’

  ‘I am nearly eleven!’ he protested. ‘And the head of the household.’

  Hester gave him a small smile. ‘Then stay and defend me,’ she said. ‘We hold the treasures of the country here. We need to stay at our post.’

  He was a little mollified. ‘When I am a man I shall train and join Rupert’s cavalry,’ he promised.

  ‘I hope that when you are a man you will be a gardener in a peaceful country,’ she said fervently.

  At the end of March there was extraordinary news which came into the city as gossip and was confirmed within the day in broadsheets and pamphlets and ballads. Despite all premonitions and fears, despite all likelihood, the Parliament army, working men officered by those who had never been gentlemen at court, had met the king’s army at Alresford outside Winchester, fought a long, hard battle and won a resounding victory. It was all the more impressive because the battle had turned on a cavalry charge by the royalists which, for once, did not end in a rout of terrified Parliament infantry being cut down as they fled. This time the Parliament men stood their ground, and the king’s horse, thrown back into the twisting, deep lanes of Hampshire, could not come around again, could not regroup, while the Parliamentary infantry doggedly and determinedly slugged their way uphill to Alresford ridge, and were in Alresford before nightfall.

  There were bonfires all over Lambeth that night, and precious candles showed at every window. The next Sunday there was not a man, woman nor child who did not attend a service of thanksgiving. The tide of the war had ebbed for a moment, for a moment only; and no cavaliers would be riding through the narrow streets of Lambeth for a month or two at least. And there would be no Papist Irish murdering soldiers either. The news came filtering through that the Parliamentary forces had captured all the Irish-facing ports of Wales. The king could not bring the Papists into England. Even in Scotland the small royalist forces were being driven back.

  ‘I think the king will have to come to terms with Parliament,’ Alexander said to Hester one evening in April. ‘He’s on the defensive for the first time and the royal army is not one which fights well in retreat. He doesn’t have the advisors or the determination to carry on.’

  ‘And what then?’ Hester asked. She had a basketful of sweet pea pods from last year in her lap and she was shelling the seeds ready for planting. ‘Do I unpack the rarities from their hiding places?’

  Alexander considered for a moment. ‘Not until peace is declared,’ he said. ‘We’ll wait and see. It maybe that the tide is turning at last.’

  ‘D’you think the king will make peace with Parliament and come meekly home?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘What else can he do?’ he said. ‘He has to come to terms with them. He is still king: they are still Parliament.’

  ‘So all this pain and bloodshed has been for nothing,’ Hester said blankly. ‘Nothing except to teach the king that he should manage his Parliament as his father and the old queen managed theirs.’

  Alexander looked grave. ‘It’s been an expensive lesson.’

  Hester threw a handful of dried empty pods into the fire and watched them spark and flare up. ‘Damnable,’ she said bitterly.

  April 1644, Virginia

  John had hoped that he had been summoned to Opechancanough’s war council as a simple brave, companion to Attone. But as the days wore on at the town of Powhatan he found he was summoned every morning to speak with Opechancanough. At first the questions were pointed and direct. The fort at Jamestown: was it true that the town had grown so large that all the people could not fit inside the walls? Was it true also that the walls had been allowed to fall into disrepair, that a proper watch was no longer kept, that the cannon were rusty?

  John answered as truly as he knew, warning Opechancanough that he had been nothing more than a visitor passing through Jamestown, and not a resident who knew the town inside out. But as the questions went on Opechancanough revealed that he knew the answers as well as John. The wise old commander had many spies watching the fort. He was using John as a check against them, and they against him. He was testing John’s own ability to tell the truth, proving his loyalty to his adopted people.

  Once he was satisfied that John would honestly tell him all that he knew, then the questions changed. He asked instead what hours the white men rose in the morning, what they drank for their breakfast, if they were all drunkards, half-drowned in fiery spirits by the time darkness fell. Did they have a special magic in their use of gunpowder, cannon, or flintlock, or could the Powhatan people seize these goods and turn them against their makers? Was the god of Englishmen attentive to them in this foreign land, or might He simply forget them if the real people rose up against them?

  John struggled with the concepts of magic, warfare, and theology in a foreign language, and in a different way of thinking. Over and over again he found himself saying to the older man, ‘I am sorry, I don’t know,’ and saw the dark brows snap together and the crumpled face darken with anger.

  ‘I really don’t know,’ John would say, hearing the nervousness in his own voice.

  Over and over again Opechancanough would return to the English communications. If a settler discovered the uprising, how quickly could he take the news to Jamestown? Did the English have a method of sending signals in smoke? Or a code of drums?

  ‘Smoke?’ John asked disbelievingly. ‘No. Nor drums. Soldiers only drum the march forwards or