‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a man on the estate who wouldn’t go hungry to keep him in his silks and satin. You’ll see. Now go and buy your trees. Every time you agree a price, make sure that you note down the tenant’s name and the price of his trees. And tell them that I – I and not they – will calculate the difference in the rents and discount the rents next quarter day. Bring me the list when you have done.’

He paused for a moment. ‘Unless I have given you a disliking for your lord and you want to go back to Canterbury?’ he asked. ‘He is as wild as I say, he is as spendthrift as I say, and he is as wealthy as I say. He has more power at his fingertips than any man in the land, and that is probably including the king.’

John had a strong sense of returning to his place at the very centre of things, serving a lord who served his country, a man whose doings were the talk of every ale house in the land. ‘I’ll keep my place here,’ he said. ‘There is much for me to do.’

1623

John and J worked hard all the winter, planning the gardens and pegging out lines for the knot garden, for the terraces, and for the turf benches in the lord’s new orchards. Much of the work had to wait until the spring when the ground was soft enough for digging, but John had a small forest of trees waiting for the earth to warm so that they could be planted, each one labelled with its place, each with a plot reserved for it. For the workers who could neither read nor write, J had instituted a scheme of coloured dots. They had to match the label on the tree marked with three red dots with the plot in the ground marked with three red dots. Or green or yellow. ‘This is code,’ John said admiringly to J.

‘It’s madness,’ J said bluntly. ‘Everyone should be taught to read at dame school. How else can they understand their Bible? How else do their work?’

‘We’re not all scholars like you,’ John said mildly.

J flushed in one of his sudden attacks of bashfulness. ‘I’m no scholar,’ he said gruffly. ‘I don’t pretend to be one. I’m no better than any man. But I do think that all men should be taught to read and write so that they can read their Bible and think for themselves.’