Buckingham did not even turn his head to look at him. ‘John, I want nothing, I said.’

John came a little closer and set the tray on a table by the bed. ‘You must eat something,’ he urged, as gentle as a nurse with a child. ‘See? I have brought you a little wine.’

‘If I drank a barrel I would not be drunk enough to forget.’

‘I know,’ John said steadily.

‘Where are my officers?’

‘Resting,’ John said. He did not say the truth, that more than half of them were dead and the rest sick.

‘And how are my men?’

‘Low-spirited.’

‘Do they blame me?’

‘Of course not!’ John lied. ‘It is the fortune of war, my lord. Everyone knows a battle can go either way. If we had been reinforced …’

Buckingham raised himself on an elbow. ‘Yes,’ he said with sudden vivacity. ‘I keep doing that too. I keep saying: if we had been reinforced, or if the wind had not got up that night in September, or if I had accepted Torres’s terms of surrender the night that I had them, or if the Rochellois had fought for us … if the ladders had been longer or the causeway wider … I go back and back and back to the summer, trying to see where it went wrong. Where I went wrong.’

‘You didn’t go wrong,’ John said gently. He sat, unbidden, on the edge of Buckingham’s bed and passed him the glass of wine. ‘You did the best you could, every day you did your best. Remember that first landing when you were rowed up and down through the landing craft and the French turned and fled?’

Buckingham smiled, as an old man will smile at a childhood memory. ‘Yes. That was a day!’

‘And when we pushed them back and back and back into the citadel?’

‘Yes.’

John passed him the bowl of soup and the spoon. Buckingham’s hand trembled so much that he could not lift it to his mouth. John took it and spooned it for him. Buckingham opened his mouth like an obedient child. John was reminded of J as a baby tucked into his arm, seated on his lap, feeding from a bowl of gruel.

‘You will be glad to see your wife again,’ he said. ‘At least we have come safe home.’

‘Kate would be glad to see me,’ Buckingham said. ‘Even if I had been defeated twenty times over.’

Almost all the soup had gone. John broke up the dried bread into pieces, squashed them into the dregs and then spooned them into his master’s mouth. Some colour had come into the duke’s face but his eyes were still dark-ringed and languid.

‘I wish we could go on sailing and never get home at all,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t want to get home.’