He nodded. ‘Soon he will need a dog,’ he said bitterly. ‘And then he will remember me.’

John was wrong, the duke did not need a dog. Spring came to New Hall but not the duke. The earth warmed and John had the grass courts scythed and seedlings planted out from the nursery beds. He ordered that the roses have their spring pruning and that the buds be pinched off the fruit trees. He set charcoal burners in the hollow wall of the fruit garden to speed the fruit for his lordship to eat when he came … but still he did not come.

The tulips that John had bought with such joy when he and his lord had been adventurers together in Europe, gambling with the crown jewels of England, flowered in their pots and Buckingham did not even see them. As soon as the precious blooms were over John set the pots outside in the dappled shade of his own garden so that he could water them daily and watch the leaves flop and droop, and pray that deep inside the soil the bulbs were growing plump and strong.

‘When will we lift them?’ J asked him, eyeing the dispiriting sight of the limp leaves.

‘In autumn,’ John said shortly. ‘And then we will know if we have made my lord a fortune, or if we have lost him one.’

‘But either way he missed seeing the bloom,’ J pointed out.

‘He missed it,’ John agreed. ‘And I missed showing it to him.’

Everyone in the town of Chelmsford, in the village of Chorley, in the kitchens at New Hall, and even the shepherds in the lambing pens spoke of nothing but the king and Parliament and the quarrel between them, the king and his wife and the quarrel between them, the quarrel between the king and the French, between the king and the Spanish, between the king and the Roman Catholics, and between the king and the Puritans. Inside the enclosing walls of the duke’s park they did not dare say it, but in the ale houses of Chelmsford they had a joke which went: ‘Who rules the kingdom? The king! Who rules the king? The duke! Who rules the duke? The Devil!’

It would have been bad enough if it had stopped there, but the joke spread from the ale-house men to the women, who were more apt to see the work of the Devil in the gross injustice of life and took the jest too literally. From them it spread to the preachers, who knew that the Devil did his work daily, and that the richest pickings for him were around the king who could not rule his wife, nor his court, nor Parliament, nor protect his country.