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  The man did not hesitate. ‘I have orders to take a thousand English pounds.’

  J choked but John nodded. ‘Do your orders permit you to take some now and some when the bulb has bloomed? Any buyer would want to see the flower.’

  ‘I can take eight hundred now and a note of hand to be redeemed in May.’

  J drew close to his father. ‘We cannot. We cannot lay our hands on such a sum.’

  ‘We’ll borrow,’ John said softly. ‘It’s half the price we’d have to pay in Amsterdam.’

  ‘But we’re not in Amsterdam,’ J argued urgently. ‘We don’t speculate in bulbs.’

  But John was glowing with excitement, his eyes alight. ‘Think what the king will pay for a Semper!’ he said. ‘If it makes two bulbs instead of the one, think what profit we will make. We’ll take it back to Amsterdam and sell it, and we’ll make a fortune and our name as bulb growers. To sell a Semper grown in England on the Bourse itself!’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ J muttered to himself. ‘We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel to meet the new tax, we missed two months of visitors in the summer because of the plague, and now we are staking eight years’ wages on one bulb?’

  John turned to the man. ‘Here’s my hand on it,’ he said grandly. ‘I shall have the money for you tomorrow. Come back at noon.’

  For the rest of the day the Tradescants, father and son, called in their debts all around the city, then moved on to favours owed them, and went frankly to the great men in the trading houses and borrowed money, offering the bulb as security and finally selling shares in it outright. Their name was so good and the desire to cash in on the Dutch speculation was so strong that they could have borrowed money against the bulb’s profits twice over. The hysteria in Holland had spread to the whole of Europe. Everyone wanted shares in tulips, the market for which had been rising for years and was rising in great leaps every day. John did not have to struggle to find shareholders in his bulb, he could have sold it outright by midday. By the time they met back at the Ark at dusk they had covered the loan.

  John was triumphant. ‘I could have sold it over and over!’ he crowed. ‘This will make our fortune. I shall buy us a knighthood with this profit, J. Your son will be Sir Johnny on the wealth that we have made today!’

  He broke off, seeing J’s solemn face and the heaviness of his eyelids. ‘Is it just that you have no zest for anything?’ John asked his son tenderly.

  The young man’s face was bleak. ‘She has not been in her grave a year and we are speculating and gambling.’

  ‘We are trading,’ John said. ‘Jane had no objection to honest trade. She was a merchant’s daughter. She knew the value of profit. Her own father has taken a share in this venture.’

  ‘I think she would have called it gambling,’ J said. ‘But you are right – I have no zest for anything. It is the heaviness of my heart which makes me think this too great a risk for us, I suppose. Nothing more than that.’

  ‘Nothing more than that!’ John clapped his son on the back. ‘The profit from it will make your heart light,’ he promised.

  They kept the bulb in the orangery, warm in the pale spring sunshine as it poured through the windows, but shaded from the midday sun so the leaves should not scorch. Every morning John watered it himself with tepid water spiced with his own mixture of stewed nettles and horse dung. The bulb put out fresh green leaves and then finally, from its secret heart, the pointed precious snout of a flower.

  The whole household held its breath. Frances was in and out of the orangery every day watching for the green of the flower to blush into colour. John never passed the door without glancing in. Only J remained wrapped in his own darkness. He could not see the orangery as a place where their fortune was slowly blooming, he could not forget that Jane had lain there, and it seemed to him that nothing good could come out of that room, in the wake of her small lead-heavy coffin.

  ‘It’s white! It’s red and white!’ Frances exploded into her grandfather’s bedroom one morning while he was dressing.

  ‘The tulip?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! It’s red and white!’

  ‘A Semper Augustus!’ he crowed and, still half-dressed, grabbed her hand and ran down the stairs with her. At the door to the orangery they stopped, afraid to run towards the plant as if the very pounding of their feet on the bare boards could shake the colour from the petals.

  The exquisite rounded perfect petals had blushed into colour in the dawn light, though they were still tightly closed together. They were clearly a deep blood-coloured crimson slashed like a silk doublet with white.

  ‘I have made my fortune,’ John said simply, looking at the miracle-flower on its slender wax-green stem. ‘This day I have made my fortune, Baby John will be a baronet, and none of us will ever work for another man again.’

  They showed it in the rarities room, of course, as the most valuable tulip in the world. When the courier came for the rest of his money they had borrowed only two-thirds of it. The rest they had taken from visitors, flocking to see the priceless tulip.

  When the queen at Oatlands heard of it she said she would buy it as it stood, in the pot, and J was about to name a figure which would cover their purchase price and give them a Christian profit of two per cent. But John was there to forestall him.

  ‘When the bulb is lifted, Your Majesty, we will be honoured to give it to you,’ he said grandly.

  She beamed, she loved presents. John pulled J away before he could argue. ‘Trust me, J. We will plant up one of the bulblets for her and still have the mother bulb. And she will reward us later for our generosity. Don’t fear. She knows as well as I how these matters are gracefully done.’

  They watched the flower open in its glorious blaze of colour and then become full-blown. ‘Can’t we keep the petals?’ Frances asked.

  ‘You can have the petals,’ John said. ‘Perhaps they will keep in sugar and sand in one of the rarities cases.’

  Then in November, leaving it as late as possible to give the bulb the greatest chance to grow well, John, watched by J and Frances, tipped the pot and waited for their new wealth to spill out into his hands.

  The priceless bulb had not one, not two, but three bulblets growing around the mother plant. ‘Praise God,’ John said devoutly.

  With infinite care he took a sharp knife and cut them gently away from the mother bulb and placed them in their own little pots. ‘Four where there was one before,’ he said to J. ‘How can you call it usury when it is the richness of God himself who doubles and quadruples our wealth for us?’

  One pot was assigned to the queen. John would keep one. And the remaining two he would send back to Holland in triumph, to Amsterdam in February in bulb-buying time, to make them the richest gardeners the world had ever known, to make them as rich as nabobs.

  December 1636

  They had a quiet Christmastide at the Ark that year. Jane had always been the one to decorate the house with holly and ivy and hang a kissing bunch of mistletoe over the front door. Neither J nor his father had the heart for it. They bought the children their presents for the twelve days of Christmas, gingerbread, candied fruit, a new gown for Frances and a book, beautifully engraved, for Johnny, but there was a terrible sense of going through the motions of present-giving and celebration. There was a dreadful hollowness at the heart of it where before there had been the unthinking spontaneity of joy.

  On Christmas night the two men sat either side of the fire drinking mulled wine and cracking nuts. Frances, allowed to sit up late for the occasion, was between them, seated on a footstool, gazing unblinkingly into the flames, sipping hot milk as slowly as she dared to prolong the moment.

  ‘D’you think Mama wishes she was here?’ she asked her grandfather. John looked quickly over to J in time to catch his grimace of pain.

  ‘I am sure she does. But she is happy with the angels in heaven,’ he said.

  ‘D’you think she looks down on us and sees that I am being a good girl?’