Buckingham nodded as if he had never expected anything less. The herald got to his feet and stood to one side. Buckingham stepped down the gangplank to where his wife was waiting beside his coach. John bowed to the herald and followed his master. Kate Villiers was in her husband’s arms, her little hands clutching his broad shoulders.

‘You are ill?’ Kate whispered passionately. ‘You look so pale!’

He shook his head and spoke over her head to his mother. ‘Things are indeed prosperous?’

She nodded in grim triumph. ‘He is waiting for you in London, desperate to see you. We have orders to bring the Favourite straight to him.’

‘I am the Favourite still?’

Her hard face was bright with triumph. ‘He says that no-one shall call it a defeat. He says that you could have lost the men and the ships and the standards a hundred times over as long as you are safe. He says he cares nothing for four thousand lives as long as the most precious one comes safe home.’

Buckingham laughed aloud. ‘I am safe then?’

‘We are all safe,’ his mother said. ‘Come to the city. Captain Mason has put his house at your disposal. There is a barber waiting for you, the tailor has a new suit of clothes, and the king has sent you gloves and a cape.’

Tradescant drew a little closer to his lord. There was a press of fashionable people pouring out of the coaches and gathering all around him. Someone had pressed a glass in Buckingham’s hand and they were drinking to his safe return. The women’s necks and shoulders were bare to the cold morning air, they were painted as for a masque at court. The men were teetering on high heels, laughing and pressing close to Buckingham. Someone elbowed John in the side and he was pushed to the edge of the crowd. A party was starting, here on the quayside, beside the tattered bulk of the Triumph despite the resentful stares of the poor people, drowning out the sobbing of women whose husbands would never come home.

‘Tell us all about it!’ someone cried. ‘Tell us about the landing! They say that the French cavalry just vanished!’

Buckingham laughed and disclaimed, his beautiful wife pressed close to his side, his arm around her waist. ‘I am grieved to my heart that we came home without accomplishing what we intended,’ he said modestly.

There were immediate cries of disagreement. ‘But you were ill-supplied! And what could any commander do with such men? They are fools, every one of them!’

John looked away. There was one woman clinging to the handrail of the gangplank, looking up at the deck of the empty ship. He went towards her, his place at the fringe of the crowd instantly taken by a pretty woman, her face bright with desire.

‘What is it, mistress?’