The man slipped away in the crowd, and Tradescant pushed further in. A man ahead of him turned at the tap on his shoulder and Tradescant recognised him.

‘Mr Tradescant!’

‘It’s Felton, isn’t it? That was made captain?’

At once John saw that something was terribly wrong. The man’s face was pale, and two deep lines grooved either side of his mouth. ‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’

He shook his head. ‘I prayed that I might take it, but I did not. She died in my arms.’

John edged slightly back. ‘Who died?’

‘My wife. Oh! you need not fear I carry it. They put us out of the village, both of us, and did not let me back into my house until I had buried her on the cold ground where she lay and stripped myself naked and burned my clothes. Then they let me into my home, walking as naked as a sinner. But when I got back into the house, d’you know what I found?’

John shook his head.

‘My little daughter, dead of hunger, behind the locked door. No-one had gone in to feed her, they were all afraid of catching the plague, and besides, there was no food in the whole village.’

John was silent, facing the horror of the man’s story.

‘I was never paid, you see,’ Felton said, his voice a dull monotone. ‘Not the captain’s pay that was promised me, not the lieutenant’s pay that I had earned. Not my campaign money, not my discharge money. Not a penny. When I came home to my wife and daughter I had nothing but my Lord Admiral’s promise, and we could not eat that. When she sickened, I could not buy physic for her, I could not even buy food. When she died I had to bury her in the ground where she lay.’

He laughed shortly. ‘And they’ve enclosed it now. I cannot even get in to put up a cross at her head. It was common land. I thought I would plant a rose bush beside her grave, but now it is a sheep run, and my lord’s beasts patter over her sleeping face.’

John found he was scowling. ‘Before God I am sorry for you,’ he said.

‘And now we are to sail again,’ Felton went on, his eyes burning in his white face. ‘Back to that damned island. It is all to be as it was before. More death, more pain, more folly. We will have to do it all again, and again and again until he has his fill of it.’

‘Are you serving?’ John asked.

‘Who would go willingly who had been there once before? Would you?’

John shook his head. ‘I am bound by a promise to go,’ he said.

‘And I am bound by a promise too,’ Felton said. ‘A different promise from you, I should think. A sacred promise to God.’