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John thought that perhaps others had believed like him: that a king in his health simply could not die. That something would intervene, that God himself must prevent such an act. That even now, time might run backwards and the king be found alive. That John might wake up one morning to find the king in his palace and the queen demanding some absurd planting scheme. It was almost impossible to accept that no-one would ever see him again. The chapbooks, the balladeers, the portraitists all fostered the illusion of the king’s surviving presence. There were more pictures of King Charles and stories about him than there had ever been during his life. He was better beloved than he had ever been when he had been idle and foolish and misjudging. Every error he had made had been washed away by the simple fact of his death, and the name he had given to himself: the Martyr King.

  Then came the reports of miracles worked by his relics. People were cured of fits or sickness or rashes like the pox by the touch of a handkerchief which had been dipped in his blood. The pocket knives made from his melted-down statue would heal wounds if laid against them, would protect a baby from violent death if used to cut the cord. A sick lion in the Tower zoo had been comforted by the scent of his blood on a rag. Every day there was a new story about the saint, the people’s saint. Every day his presence in the country grew stronger.

  No-one was wholly unmoved; but Johnnie, still weak from his injury and defeat at Colchester, was struck very hard. He spent day after day in the boat on the little lake, lying wrapped in his cloak, his long legs folded over the stern and the heels of his boots dipping in the water while the boat drifted around nudging one bank and then another, and Johnnie stared up at the cold sky, saying nothing.

  Hester went down to fetch him for his midday dinner and found him rowing slowly to the little landing stage to come in.

  ‘Oh Johnnie,’ she said. ‘You have your whole life before you, there’s no need to take it so hard. You did what you could, you kept faith with him, you ran away to serve him and you were as brave as any of his cavaliers.’

  He looked at her with his dark Tradescant eyes and she saw the passionate loyalty of his grandfather without the security of his grandfather’s settled world. ‘I don’t know how we can live without a king,’ he said simply. ‘It’s not just him. It’s the place he held. I can’t believe that we won’t see him again. His palaces are still there, his gardens. I can’t believe that he is not there too.’

  ‘You should get back to work,’ Hester said, grasping at straws. ‘Your father needs help.’

  ‘We are gardeners to the king,’ Johnnie said simply. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘There’s the trading business for Sir Henry in Barbados.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll never be a trader. I’m a gardener through and through. I’d never be anything else.’

  ‘The rarities.’

  ‘I’ll come and help if you wish it, Mother,’ he said obediently. ‘But they’re not the same, are they? Since we packed and unpacked them again. It’s not grandfather’s room any more, it’s not the room we showed the king. We have most of the things and it should be the same. But it feels different, doesn’t it? As if by packing them and hiding them away, and then unpacking them, and then hiding them again, somehow spoiled it. And people don’t come as they used to. It’s as if everything is changed and no-one knows yet how.’

  Hester put her hand on his arm. ‘I just mean you should stop brooding and return to work. There is a time to mourn and you do yourself no favours if you exceed it.’

  He nodded. ‘I will,’ he promised. ‘If you wish it.’ He hesitated as if he could not find the words for his feeling. ‘I never thought that I could feel so low.’

  The three of them were at dinner when there was a knock at the door. Hester turned her head and they listened to the cook stamping irritably along the hall to open it. There was the noise of a mild disagreement. ‘It’ll be a sailor with something to sell,’ Hester said.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Johnnie said, pushing back his chair. ‘You finish your dinner.’

  ‘Call me before you agree a price,’ John warned him.

  Johnnie scowled at his father’s lack of trust; and went out of the door.

  They heard him shout an oath, and then they heard the noise of his running footsteps down the hall, and the door to the terrace slam as he set off down the garden.

  ‘Good God, what now?’ John sprang to his feet and went to the front door. Hester paused by the window to see Johnnie, head down, running blindly towards the lake. She hesitated, and followed her husband.

  A bewildered man was at the front door. ‘I offered him this for sale,’ he said, showing a dirty piece of black cloth. ‘I thought it was the sort of thing you would like for your collection. But he jumped back as if it were poison and fled from me. What ails the lad?’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Hester said shortly. ‘What is it?’

  The man suddenly gleamed with enthusiasm. ‘A piece of pall from the scaffolding of the Martyr King, Mrs Tradescant. And if you like it you can have it and a pen-knife cast from the metal of his statue. And I may be able to find you a scrape of earth soaked with his sacred blood. All very reasonable considering the rarity of it and the price you will be able to charge for those coming to see it.’

  Hester instinctively recoiled in distaste. She looked to John. His eyebrows were knotted in thought.

  ‘We don’t take such things,’ he said slowly. ‘We buy rarities, not relics.’

  ‘You have Henry VIII’s hunting gloves,’ the man pointed out. ‘And Queen Anne’s nightgown. Why not this? Especially as you could make your fortune with it.’

  John took a swift turn away from the doorstep and down the hall. The man was right, anything to do with the king would be a goldmine for the Ark, and they were barely making enough money to pay the cook’s and Joseph’s wages.

  He turned back to the front door. ‘I thank you, but no. We will not exhibit the king’s remains.’

  Hester found that her shoulders had been hunched while she waited for her husband’s decision. ‘But please do bring us any other rare things you have,’ she said pleasantly, and went to shut the door.

  The man thrust his foot out and stopped the closing door. ‘I was certain you would give me a good price for this,’ he said. ‘There are other collectors who would pay handsomely. I was doing you the favour of coming to you first.’

  ‘I thank you for that,’ John said shortly. ‘But we won’t take anything that remains of the king.’ He hesitated. ‘He visited here himself,’ he said, as if it would make the decision clear. ‘It would not seem right to show pieces of him.’

  The man shrugged, took his foot from the door and left. Hester closed the door and turned back to look at John.

  ‘That was well done,’ she said.

  ‘D’you think we’d ever have got Johnnie to work in the room with the king’s own blood in a jar?’ John asked irritably and went out to the garden, leaving his dinner untouched on the table.

  Johnnie’s gloom did not lift as Hester had hoped that it might even when the warmer weather came. In March, when John was planting seeds of nasturtium, sweet pea, and his Virginian amaracock in pots of sieved earth in the orangery, Parliament declared that there would never more be a king or a queen set over the English people. Kingship was abolished forever in England. Johnnie came into the warm room with a small box in his hand, looking grave.

  ‘What have you there?’ John asked warily.

  ‘The king’s seeds,’ Johnnie said softly. ‘That he gave you to plant at Wimbledon.’

  ‘Ah, the melon seeds. D’you know, I’d forgotten all about them.’

  A swift, burning glance from Johnnie showed that he had not forgotten, and that he thought the less of his father for his absence of mind. ‘It’s one of the last orders he must have given,’ Johnnie said softly, in awe. ‘And he sent for you by name, just to ask you to plant them for him. It’s like he wanted you to have a task, a quest, to remember him by.’

  ‘Just melons.’