‘Yes, even like this one,’ J said earnestly. ‘Why should my lord duke have the Great Park of five hundred acres and the Little Park of three hundred? Why should he own the common road, and the green before the gate? Why does he need an avenue of a mile of lime trees? Why should he enclose good fields, productive fields, and then plant a few pretty trees and grass and use it for walking and riding? What folly to take good farming land and plant it with shrubs and call it a wilderness when children are dying for lack of food in Chorley, and people are driven out of their cottages because their plots of land have been taken away from them?’

‘Because he is the duke,’ John said steadily.

‘He deserves to own half of the county?’

‘It is his own, given to him by the king, who owns the whole country.’

‘And what did the duke do for the king to earn such wealth?’

John had a sudden vivid recollection of the rocking cabin and the swaying light and Buckingham rearing above him, and the wound like a swordthrust which was the extreme of pleasure and pain all at once.

J waited for a reply.

‘Don’t,’ John said shortly. ‘Don’t torment me, J. It is bad enough that you should come into my house looking like a hedgerow lecturer. Don’t torment me about the duke and the king and the rights and the wrongs of it. I have been close to death, my life hanging on whether the king would remember his friend on a barren island far away, or not. And then he did not. I have no stomach for an argument with you.’

‘Then I may wear what I choose, and pray as I choose?’

John nodded wearily. ‘Wear what you will.’

There was a silence as J absorbed the extent of his victory. Tradescant turned his back on him and returned to his seat at the table. J stepped out of his mud-caked working boots and came into the room in his socks.

‘I am thinking of taking a wife,’ he announced quietly. ‘And leaving the duke’s service. I want to go to Virginia and start again, in a country where there are no lords and no kings, and no archbishops. I want to be there where they are planting an Eden.’

He had thought his father defeated, and was pressing his advantage while he had it. But John raised his head and looked hard at his son. ‘Think again,’ he counselled him.

They ate dinner in awkward silence and then J put on his hat and went out into the darkness, carrying only a small lantern to light his way.

‘Where’s he going?’ John asked Elizabeth.

‘To evening prayers, at the big house,’ she said.

‘They have prayer meetings on my lord’s doorstep?’

‘Why not?’