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  The yew tree allée was overgrown but looked thick and bushy, throwing a welcome green shade against the brightness of the afternoon sunshine. The orangery which John’s father had rebuilt was dilapidated – the white paint was peeling and some of the ornamental woodwork had been wrenched off for the troopers’ campfires – but the silkworm house and the neighbouring gardener’s house were as Hester had left them, swept clean and bare and empty.

  John left his son collecting firewood for the empty grate and unrolling their travelling cloaks for beds as he prowled around the deserted palace.

  The strangest thing was the quiet. Instead of a bustling royal court filled with folly and flirtation, shouted orders, voices calling and musicians playing, there was nothing but the occasional rattle of a shutter banging in the breeze and the insistent coo of the wood pigeons nesting in the trees. The stable yard, which had housed more than a hundred horses, was empty, straws blowing in the yard, the stalls heaped with dung, stale water in the troughs.

  The great front door was shut and bolted. John tried the massive brass handle and then stepped back. The king was due in a few days, surely there should be servants inside setting the palace to rights. Not a face showed at the windows, there was not a movement in the courts.

  John went around to the kitchen quarters and to the bake-house. The fires were out, the place was silent. A heap of ash and a few scattered utensils showed that the cavalrymen had dined before they left, but all the food had been eaten by rats or mice and their droppings were heaped even on the kitchen tables.

  John shook his head in wonder at the desolation of the place, at its transformation from the pinnacle of the social life of the kingdom, with the queen singing about the platonic ideal and the king going hunting on his high-bred Arab horses, to this shell. He turned and trudged back across the bowling green to the silkworm house.

  Johnnie had brought up the pots from the riverside.

  ‘Good lad,’ John said with pleasure, glad of the chance to set about his work and restore normality at least to the flowerbeds. ‘Let’s take these up to the royal court. At least that can be looking right in a couple of days.’

  They worked hard, side by side, and John enjoyed his son’s company. The boy had inherited the Tradescant gift with plants, he handled them as if he loved the touch of the silky white roots, the caress of damp earth. When he hefted a pot in his hand he could tell from the weight whether it needed watering. When he tipped a plant out into his palm he never knocked the blooms. When he set it into a hole and pressed down the earth there was something about his touch which was both precisely judged, and quite unknowing.

  ‘You may be the greatest gardener of us all,’ John said at the end of the second day as they walked homewards with their tools over their shoulders. ‘I don’t believe I had your way with plants when I was your age.’

  Johnnie gleamed. ‘I love the plants. Not so much the rarities,’ he said.

  ‘Not the rarities?’ John asked, amazed.

  His son shook his head. ‘What I’d rather do, more than anything else, would be to collect new plants, to go with you to the Americas, the West Indies, travel, find things, bring them home and grow them. The rarities – well, they just sit there, don’t they? Once they’re in place there is nothing more to do with them except keep them dusted. But plants grow and blossom and fruit and seed and then there’s next year to plant them again. I like how they change.’

  John nodded. ‘I see.’

  He was about to remark that the rarities played their part in the Tradescant family fortune when he heard hoofbeats on the drive. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Could it be the king?’

  ‘Could be.’

  John turned and ran towards the silkworm house, cast down his tools, grabbed his coat and turned to run back to the palace. Johnnie danced on the spot. ‘Can I come? Can I come?’

  ‘Yes. But remember what I said about keeping silent.’

  Johnnie fell into line behind his father, mirrored his father’s long stride, composed his face to a scowl of what he hoped was dignified discretion, and spoiled the effect only slightly by a great bounce at every fourth step as his excitement proved too much for him.

  They ran round to the stable yard and there, in the dirty stall, was the king’s Arab, and a dozen other horses of his escort.

  ‘The king here?’ John asked a trooper.

  ‘Just arrived,’ the man said, easing the girth of his horse. ‘We had to stop at every village for him to touch people.’

  ‘Touch people?’

  ‘They turned out in dozens,’ the man said abruptly. ‘With all sorts of illnesses and sores and God knows what. And again and again he stopped and touched them, so that they would be cured. And they all went off, back to their hovels, back to their porridge of nothing and water, thinking that he had done them a great favour and that we were some kind of beast to imprison him.’

  John nodded.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man asked. ‘If you want a favour of him, he’ll do it. He’s the most charming, generous, agreeable man to ever take a country into disaster and death and four years of war.’

  ‘I’m the gardener,’ John replied.

  ‘Then you’ll see him,’ the man said. ‘He went out to sit in the garden with his companions, while someone cooks his dinner, and sweeps his chamber, and makes everything ready for him so that he can dine in comfort and sleep in comfort. While I and my men do without.’

  John turned on his heel and went round to the royal court.

  The king was seated on a bench, his back against the warm brick wall, looking around him at the newly weeded, newly planted garden. Standing behind him were a couple of gentlemen that John did not know, another stranger strolled on the newly raked paths. When the king heard John’s footsteps he glanced up.

  ‘Ah …’ For a moment he could not remember the name. ‘Gardener Tradescant.’

  John dropped to his knee and heard Johnnie behind him do the same.

  ‘Your w … w … work?’ the king asked with his slight stammer, gesturing to the dug-over beds.

  John bowed. ‘When I heard you were coming to Oatlands I came to do what I could, Your Majesty. With my son: John Tradescant.’

  The king nodded, his dark eyes half-lidded. ‘I thank you,’ he said languidly. ‘When I am returned to my proper place I shall see that you are returned to yours.’

  John bowed again and waited. When there was silence he glanced up. The king made a small gesture of dismissal with his hand. John rose to his feet, bowed, and walked backwards, Johnnie skipping nervously out of the way as his father suddenly reversed, and then quickly copying him. John bowed again at the gateway to the garden and then stepped backwards till he was out of sight.

  He turned and met Johnnie’s astounded face. ‘And that’s it?’ Johnnie demanded. ‘After we came here without being asked, and worked without pay for all this time to make it lovely for him?’

  John gave a little snort of amusement and started to walk back to the silkworm house. ‘What did you expect? A knighthood?’

  ‘I thought –’ Johnnie started and then broke off. ‘I suppose I thought he might have some task for us, or he might be glad of us, he might see that we were loyal and thank us –’

  John snorted again and opened the little white wooden door. ‘This is not a king who has plans or gives thanks,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the reasons he’s where he is.’

  ‘But doesn’t he realise that you needn’t have come at all?’

  John paused for a moment and looked down at the stricken face of his boy. ‘Oh Johnnie,’ he said softly. ‘This is not the king of the broadsheet ballads and the church sermons. This is a foolish man who ran into the war because he would not take advice, and when he took advice at all, always chose the wrong people to guide him.

  ‘I came today as much for my father as for the king. I came because my father would have wanted to know that when the king came to his palace, the gardens were weed