The horn lantern swung on its hook, throwing gentle shadows across the gilded ceiling as the boat heaved and dropped in gentle waters. There was no sound from the deck above them. The night watch was quiet, in mourning. John had a sudden strange fancy that they had all died on the Isle of Rue and that this was some afterlife, on Charon’s boat, and that he would travel forever, his arms around his master, carried by a dark tide into nothingness.

Some time after midnight John stirred, thought for a moment he was at home and Elizabeth was in his arms, and then remembered where he was.

Buckingham slowly opened his eyes. ‘Oh, John,’ he sighed. ‘I did not think I would ever sleep again.’

‘Shall I go now?’ Tradescant asked.

Buckingham smiled and closed his eyes again. ‘Stay,’ he said. His face, gilded by the lamplight, was almost too beautiful to bear. The clear perfect profile and the sleepy languorous eyes, the warm mouth, and the new sorrowful line between the arched brows. John put a hand out and touched it, as if a caress might melt that mark away. Buckingham took the hand and pressed it to his cheek, and then drew John down to the pillows. Gently, Buckingham raised himself up above him and slid warm hands underneath John’s shirt, untied the laces on his breeches. John lay, beyond thought, beyond awareness, unmoving beneath the touch of Buckingham’s hands.

Buckingham stroked him, sensually, smoothly, from throat to waist and then laid his cold, stone-cold face against John’s warm chest. His hand caressed John’s cock, stroked it with smooth confidence. John felt desire, unbidden, unexpected, rise up in him like the misplaced desire of a dream.

The lantern dipped and bobbed and John moved at Buckingham’s bidding, turned as he commanded, lay face down in the bed and parted his legs. The pain when it came to him was sharp like a pain of deep agonising desire, a pain that he welcomed, that he wanted to wash through him. And then it changed and became a deep pleasure and a terror to him, a feeling of submission and penetration and leaping desire and deep satisfaction. John thought he understood the passionate grief and lust of a woman when she can take a man inside her, and by submitting to him become his mistress. When he groaned it was not only with pain but with a deep inner joy and a sense of resolution that he had never felt before, as if at last, after a lifetime, he understood that love is the death of the self, that his love for Villiers took them both into darkness and mystery, away from self.