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  He did not answer her but walked with that same bent-headed trudge round to the stable yard. Hester and Mary heard him shout for the lad and they waited in absolute silence as the two of them walked back down the avenue. John was carrying a long pole, his pruning hook. The lad was carrying a net which they usually used for securing pots in the cart, and a coil of rope.

  Mary Ashmole reached out and took Hester’s icy hand. ‘Be brave, my dear,’ she said inadequately.

  John marched to the lake as if he were about to undertake a disagreeable but essential garden chore, like hedging or ditching. The garden lad stole one swift glance at his stern profile and said nothing.

  John walked to the edge of the landing stage and stretched out with the pruning hook. The blade just reached the painter as it trailed in the water and on the second try he could draw it in towards him.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said to the lad, and stepped into the boat. He rowed out towards the middle of the lake and then shipped the oars and peered downwards. Gently, with meticulous care, he reversed the pruning hook and lowered it into the water, probing with the handle. When he found nothing he rowed one stroke to the side and repeated the whole process in a widening circle.

  The lad, who had been gripped by the horror of this task, found that he was getting bored and started to fidget, but nothing could break John’s intense concentration. He was not thinking of what he might find. He was not even thinking of what he was doing. He just completed each circle and then went a little wider as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise, like a Papist telling her beads, as if it had to be done to ward off some evil. As if it were meaningless in itself, but should be done as a prevention.

  Again and again he rowed another stroke and then probed gently into the dark water. In the back of his mind was a thought of how Johnnie was probably already home after a night’s roistering in the City, or a message would soon come from his sister’s house saying that he had decided to make a sudden visit, or he would reappear with an old comrade from the defeated Worcester army. There were so many other explanations more likely than this one that John worked the water of the lake without allowing himself to think what he was doing, divorced from worry, almost enjoying the paddle with the oars and the movement of the wet-handled pole in the water.

  When he felt something under the gentle probe of the pole he had a moment of mild regret that now he had to interrupt himself, that now he had a different task to do. Gently, with infinite care, he probed again and felt the object roll and move.

  ‘Bundle of rags,’ he whispered to himself, trying to guess at the dimension and weight. ‘Hidden household goods,’ he assured himself.

  He turned to look for the stable lad. ‘Throw me the rope,’ he said, his voice steady and unshaken.

  The lad, who had slumped on the landing stage, got to his feet and inexpertly tried to throw the rope to John. The first attempt fell in the water and splashed John, and the second attempt slapped him with a wet coil.

  ‘Dolt,’ John said and enjoyed the normality of the incompetence of the lad. ‘Fool.’

  He fastened the rope to the ring at the front of the boat. ‘When I give the word, you gently pull me in,’ he ordered.

  The lad nodded, and took a grip on the line.

  John pulled the pole out of the water and brought up the pruning hook. He took his leather gauntlet from the big pocket of his coat and pulled it over the sharp blade. Then he plunged the pole back into the water with the shielded hook first. It snagged against the object, lost its grip, and then caught.

  ‘Now,’ John called to the lad. ‘But steady.’

  The lad was so afraid of doing wrong that he started to pull too lightly. For a moment nothing happened at all, then the little boat started to glide back to the landing stage and John felt the weight of the drowned object on the end of his pole. Gently, smoothly, the boat bobbed towards the landing stage, John gripping the pole and waiting to see the object revealed in the shallow water.

  He saw first a coat, rendered uniformly black by waterlogging, then Johnnie’s white shirt and then his pale, pale face, his open dark eyes, and the swirl and eddy of his fair hair.

  ‘Stop,’ John said hoarsely.

  At once the lad halted.

  The boat rocked, the current of movement which had washed Johnnie up to the surface slipped away and his face sunk out of sight again. For a moment John thought that he could order the world to stop, right there; just as he could command the gardener’s lad and then nothing that must follow would need to take place. He could say ‘stop’ and there would be no drowned child, no heartbreak, no end to the Tradescant line, no silence where Johnnie should have been singing, no terrible gulf where the young man should have been.

  John waited for a long moment, trying to understand the reality and then the awful yawning enormity of his loss. The first step in his grief was the realisation that he could not measure it. His loss was too great for him to imagine.

  The lad holding the rope stood like a statue, a dragonfly whirred noisily over the surface of the water and settled for a moment.

  ‘Go on then,’ John whispered as if this were not his work but he was obeying someone else. ‘All right. Go on.’

  The lad put his weight on the rope and once again the boat glided towards the landing stage, towing its dreadful freight behind it. At the landing stage when it stopped with a bump, John said gently, ‘Tie it fast,’ and waited until the lad had done as he was told.

  ‘Take the pole,’ John said, proffering it, and when the lad had gripped one end of it, John stepped from the boat into the waist-deep water, felt his way along to the other end and gathered the body of his only son into his arms.

  ‘Step aside and wait,’ he said softly to the stable lad. The boy dragged his horrified stare from the waterlogged body and then obediently fled to the shelter of the apple tree where the wasps were feeding drunkenly on fallen fruit.

  John waded for the shore, the weight of Johnnie making him stagger as they got clear of the water. He fell to his knees and cradled the white face in his arms and looked down into the sightless eyes and the pale lips.

  ‘My Johnnie,’ he whispered. ‘My boy.’

  They sat together for a long time before John remembered that Hester would be waiting in painful anxiety and that there was much work for him to do.

  He laid out the body and draped his jacket over his son’s face.

  ‘Watch by him,’ he said simply to the stable lad. ‘I’ll come back with the cart.’

  Slowly he walked along the grassy ride and then turned up the main avenue to the house. He could see Hester pacing on the terrace but when she saw him and took in the slump of his shoulders and his wet clothing, and his missing jacket, she froze very still.

  John walked towards her, his face numb, his voice lost, then he cleared his throat and said quietly, conversationally, ‘I found him. He’s drowned. I’m fetching the cart now.’

  She nodded, as calm as he, and Mary Ashmole, watching the two of them, thought them completely insensible, thought that they could not have loved their son at all to be so indifferent to his death.

  ‘I thought so,’ Hester said gently. ‘I knew as soon as I saw the boat, just as you did. I’ll ready the parlour for him.’ She paused. ‘No. He should lie in the rarities room. He was the most precious thing this house ever had.’

  John nodded and went with that strange, slow plod round to the stables where, for a fancy, he did not harness the workhorse, but he took Caesar out of his stable and put him between the shafts of the cart to bring his master home.

  They buried him beside his grandfather and his mother at St Mary’s, Lambeth. The new vicar was kind enough not to ask how a fit young man came to drown while boating on his own lake. It was assumed that Johnnie had been drunk, or had hit his head as he fell from the boat. Only John knew that the boat had not been overturned but had been floating peacefully with the oars shipped. Only John knew that his son’s pockets had been filled with