‘I’ll go up,’ Buckingham declared. ‘Many with him?’

‘A score,’ John said. ‘No-one of importance.’

Buckingham went wearily up the stairs. ‘Make sure they make up a bed for me,’ he threw over his shoulder. ‘And get a bed for yourself in my chamber. I want to have you close, John, I may be busy these next days.’

John poured himself a glass from the duke’s own flagon and went to do as he had been told.

The household was starting to wake, although many had not slept at all. The word was that the king had been hunting and had fallen sick. At first it was a light fever and expected to pass, but it had taken hold, and the king was rambling. He feared for his life, sometimes he dreamed he was back in Scotland with buckram wadding beneath all his clothes to ward off an assassin’s knife, sometimes he called out for forgiveness from the enemies he had tried on a pretext and then hanged and drawn and quartered. Sometimes he dreamed of the witches that he thought had haunted his life, the innocent old women he had ordered drowned or strangled. Sometimes, and most pitifully of all, he called out to his mother, poor Mary of Scotland, and begged her forgiveness for letting her go to the executioner’s block at Fotheringay without a word of comfort from him, though she sent letter after letter addressed to her beloved son and never forgot the baby he had been.

‘But he will recover?’ John asked one of the maids.

‘It is only the ague,’ she said. ‘Why should he not recover?’

John nodded and went to the duke’s bedroom. The cold March dawn was turning the sky from black to grey, the frost was white on the terraces. John leaned his elbows on the windowsill and watched the familiar landmarks of Theobalds, his first great garden, swim upward from the mist. In the distance he could see the woods, bare-branched now, and cold; and underneath them deep in the frozen earth would be the bulbs of the daffodils that he had planted for the king who was now old, and to please the master who was long dead.

He wondered what Cecil would have thought of his new master, if he would have despised or admired the duke. He wondered where Cecil was now; in a garden, he thought, the blessed last garden where flowers were always in bloom. John felt great tenderness for the master he had lost and this garden they had loved together.

Then the door behind him opened and Buckingham came into the room.

‘Shut the window for the love of God, John!’ he snapped. ‘It’s freezing!’

John obeyed and waited.

‘Get some sleep,’ the duke said. ‘And when you wake I want you to go to London, and fetch my mother.’

‘I could go now,’ John volunteered.