His spur touched the hunter’s side and it threw up its head and bounded forward. Prince Charles’s horse leaped after, and there was a swirl of dust in John’s face and the two of them were gone.

‘Please God keep him safe, keep them safe,’ Tradescant said, looking after them. His new master and the prince he had known as a lonely incompetent little boy. ‘Please God, stop them at Dover.’

Elizabeth saw at once that something had happened when John came home at dusk for his dinner and stared into his broth without eating. As soon as J had eaten she sent him from the room with a nod of her head, and then seated herself beside John on the settle which stood at the fireside, and put her hand on his. ‘What’s the matter?’

He shook his head. ‘I cannot tell you.’ He glanced down into her worried face. ‘Nothing wrong with me, my dear. Nothing wrong with J, and nothing wrong with the garden. But I cannot tell you. It is a secret and not my secret. I cannot tell anybody.’

‘Then it’s the duke,’ she said simply. ‘He’s done something bad.’

John’s stricken look told her that her guess had struck home.

‘What’s he done?’ she pressed.

He shook his head again. ‘Please God, it won’t be too bad. Please God there will be a happy outcome.’

‘Is he at home?’

He shook his head.

‘Gone to London? Gone to the king?’

‘Gone to Spain,’ he whispered very low.

Elizabeth recoiled from him as if he had pinched her. ‘Spain?’

John gave her a swift unhappy glance and put his finger to his lips. ‘I cannot say more,’ he said firmly.

Elizabeth rose and went to the fire, bent and stirred the poker under the glowing logs. He saw her lips moving in a silent prayer. Elizabeth was a devout woman, a trip to Spain was like a trip to the underworld to her. Spain was the heart of Catholicism, the home of the anti-Christ against whom all good Protestants must struggle and fight from birth till death. Buckingham’s choice of destination at once condemned him in her eyes. He must be a bad man if he chose to go to Spain.

John closed his eyes briefly. He could not imagine what condemnation would be released on his master if Elizabeth, and all the many hundreds, thousands, of devout men and women like Elizabeth, knew that he was planning to bring a Spanish princess home to be queen of England.

Elizabeth straightened up and hooked the poker on to the bracket at the side of the fire. ‘We should leave,’ she announced abruptly.

‘What?’ John opened his eyes again and blinked.

‘We should leave now.’

‘What are you saying? We’ve only just got here.’