John nodded and did the work of a cabin boy with a heady sense of delight. He stood beside Buckingham while he shaved his smooth skin of the dark stubble, held a linen sheet for him while he washed, and then handed him his clean shirt and his waistcoat and surcoat. Buckingham dressed in silence, his hand when he reached for his perfume bottle was shaking. He sprayed his hair with perfume, set his plumed hat, winking with diamonds, on his head, and smiled at himself in the mirror: a hollow smile, a fearful smile.

‘I shall go on deck,’ he said. ‘No-one shall say that I was afraid to show my face.’

‘I will be with you,’ John promised.

They went through the door together. ‘Don’t leave me,’ Buckingham whispered as they went up the companionway. ‘Whatever happens, stay at my shoulder this day. Wherever I go.’

Tradescant realised that his master was fearing worse than humiliation; he was fearing arrest. Better-loved men than he had died in the Tower for failed expeditions. They had both seen Sir Walter Raleigh taken to the Tower for less.

‘I shall not leave you,’ John assured him. ‘Wherever they take you they will take me too. I shall always be with you.’

Buckingham paused on the narrow companionway. ‘To the foot of the gallows?’ he demanded.

‘To the noose or the axe,’ John said, as bleak as his master. ‘I have sworn I am yours, heart and soul, till death.’

Buckingham dropped his hand heavily on John’s shoulder and for a moment the two men stood, face to face, their eyes locked. Then with one accord they moved together and kissed. It was a passionate kiss, like a couple of fierce animals biting, no tenderness, no gentleness in it. It was a kiss no woman could give. It was a kiss between men, men who have been through a battle where there was death on either side of them and who are finding, in each other’s passion, the strength to face death again.

‘Stay by me,’ Buckingham whispered, and went up the companionway to the deck.

A cold morning wind was blowing. The beaches of Southsea were spread before them and the green of the town common behind them. The narrow entrance to Portsmouth harbour was ahead, the grey sea walls lined with people, their faces white dots of anxiety. The flags flying over the fort flapped against their poles. Tradescant could not make out if the royal standard was there, or if Buckingham’s flag had been raised in his honour. The sun was not yet up and there was a ragged cold sea mist blowing in with them, as if the ghosts of the men who would not be coming home were drifting in with them across the grey waters.