And he felt even more of a fool when he tried to buy tulip bulbs to take away with him, when he wanted to exchange a sackful of gold – real money – for a sackful of bulbs – real bulbs. Everyone else was trading without ever holding a bulb in their hand. They bought and sold the promise of the tulip crop when it was lifted, or they bought and sold the name of a tulip. Some flowers were so rare that there were only ten or a dozen in the whole country. Such bulbs would never come to market, John was assured. He would have to buy the slip of paper with the name of the tulip written on the top of it, and have it attested at the Bourse. If he had any sense he would sell the slip of paper the very next day as the price jumped and leapfrogged. He should make his profit in the rising market and not hang around the dealers and ask them for real tulips to take home with him. The market was not for a bulb in a pot, it was for an idea of a tulip, the promise of a tulip. The market had gone light, the market had gone airy. It was the windhandel market.

‘What’s that?’ John asked.

‘A wind market,’ a man translated for him. ‘You are no longer buying the goods, you are buying the promise of the goods. And you are paying with a promise to pay. You don’t actually have to give your gold and receive your tulip until – oh – next year. But if you have any sense by then you will have sold it at a profit and you will have made a fortune merely by letting the wind blow through your fingers.’

‘But I want tulips!’ John exclaimed in frustration. ‘I don’t want a piece of paper with a tulip name written on it to sell to someone else. I want a bulb that I can take home and grow.’

The man shrugged, losing interest at once. ‘It’s not how we do business,’ he said. ‘But if you go down the canal towards Rotterdam you will find men and women who will sell you bulbs that you can take away. They will call you a fool for paying money on the nail.’

‘I’ve been called a fool before,’ John said grimly. ‘I can bear it’

He was dining in a tavern at the end of this expedition, drinking deep of the thick ale which the Dutch loved and eating well of their rich food, when the door darkened and a well-loved voice shouted into the gloom. ‘Is my John in here?’

John choked on his ale and leaped to his feet, overturning his stool. ‘Your Grace?’

It was Buckingham, modestly dressed in a suit of smooth brown wool, chuckling like a madman at the sight of John’s astounded face.