Buckingham kept to his cabin on the voyage home. It was said that he was sick, as so many of the men were sick. The whole of the Triumph was stinking with the smell of suppurating wounds, and loud with the groans of injured men. Buckingham’s personal servant took gaol fever and weakened and died, and then the Lord High Admiral was left completely alone.

John Tradescant went down to the galley where one cook was stirring a saucepan of stock over the fire. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘You should know,’ the man said sourly. ‘You were there as well as I. Drowned in the marshes, or skewered on a French pike.’

‘I meant, where are the other cooks, and the servers?’

‘Sick,’ the man answered shortly.

‘Put me up a tray for the Lord High Admiral,’ John said.

‘Where’s his cupbearer?’

‘Dead.’

‘And his server?’

‘Gaol fever.’

The cook nodded and laid a tray with a bowl of the stock, some stale bread, and a small glass of wine.

‘Is that all?’ John asked.

The man met his eyes. ‘If he wants more he had better revictual the ship. It’s more than the rest of us will get. And most of his army is face down in the marshes eating mud and drinking brine.’

John flinched from the bitterness in the man’s face. ‘It wasn’t all his fault,’ he said.

‘Whose then?’

‘He should have been reinforced, we should have sailed with better supplies.’

‘We had a six-horse carriage and a harp,’ the cook said spitefully. ‘What more did we need?’

John spoke gently. ‘Beware, my friend,’ he said. ‘You are very near to treason.’

The man laughed mirthlessly. ‘If the Lord High Admiral has me executed before the mast there will be no dinner for those that can eat,’ he said. ‘And I would thank him for the release. I lost my brother in Isle of Rue, I am sailing home to tell his wife that she has no husband, and to tell my mother that she has only one son. The Lord High Admiral can spare me that and I would thank him.’

‘What did you call it?’ John asked suddenly.

‘What?’

‘The island.’

The cook shrugged. ‘It’s what they all call it now. Not the Isle of Rhé; the Isle of Rue, because we rue the day we ever sailed with him, and he should rue the day he commanded us. And like the herb rue his service has a poisonous and bitter taste that you don’t forget.’

John took up the tray and went to Buckingham’s cabin without another word.

He was lying on his bunk on his back, one arm across his eyes, his pomander swinging from his fingers. He did not turn his head when Tradescant came in.

‘I told you I want nothing,’ he said.

‘Matthew is sick,’ John said steadily. ‘And I have brought you some broth.’