She rubbed her hand on her apron. ‘I struggle with it,’ she said in the broad accent of Hampshire. ‘But ’tis like a forest, like the forest of the Sleeping Beauty. When I rest it grows up to my very windows. I was clearing my strawberry bed and I find a plant growing thorns. A strawberry with thorns! The whole garden would grow weeds and thorns if it could.’

‘A thorny strawberry?’ John demanded. He pushed aside the flask of ale. The pain was still deep in his body but he could not deny a small squirm of curiosity. ‘You have a thorny strawberry? May I see it?’

‘Why, what use is it?’ she asked. ‘It grows a green fruit, it is no good for eating nor bottling.’

‘It is a curiosity,’ he said, and found he was smiling, the muscles on his cheeks relaxing from their scowl. ‘I am a great one for curiosities, I would be glad if you would show it to me. Out of your kindness. And I would pay you …’

‘You can have it for nothing,’ she said. ‘But you must fetch it yourself. I threw it with the other weeds on the midden. It’ll take a deal of sorting through.’

John laughed, and then checked himself at the strangeness of the noise. He had not laughed in months. His time with his lord had been a time of passion driving out grief in the darkness. But now he was home, on English soil again, under an English sun and here was this woman with her green thorny strawberry.

‘I will find it,’ he promised her. ‘And I will see if I can grow it in my garden, and if it proves to be a curiosity, or to have some quality, then I will send you a shoot.’

She shook her head at his folly. ‘Are you from London?’

‘Yes,’ he said, he did not want to name New Hall. He did not want to be known as the Duke of Buckingham’s man.

She nodded as if that would account for it. ‘Here we like our strawberries red and fit to eat,’ she said gently. ‘Do not send me a shoot, I do not want it. You can give me a penny for your dinner and for the thorny strawberry, and be on your way. In Hampshire we like our strawberries red.’

Winter 1627

Elizabeth was in the garden before their cottage at New Hall when John came in at the gate. She was cutting herbs in the cool of the evening light, and the basket on the ground before her was bobbing with the seed-heavy heads of camomile flowers. When she heard his uneven step she looked up and started to run towards him but then she suddenly checked. Something in the slowness of his pace and his bowed shoulders warned her that this was not a happy homecoming.