John nodded. ‘I will speak with him, when I can get near him,’ he said. ‘I will not forget you, Felton. You shall have your pay and perhaps you can start again somewhere …’

‘He has forgot me,’ Felton cried passionately. ‘But I will remind him. I will tell him what he has cost me, I will give him pain for pain.’

‘That’s not the way. Be still, Felton, he is the duke, you cannot fight him any more than you can fight the king. He is untouchable.’

Felton shook his head in brief disagreement and turned away. Tradescant looked after him, saw the hunched shoulders and the way his hand strayed to his pocket and saw the outline, through the ragged clothes, of a knife. He glanced around. The place was packed with the duke’s retainers. When he saw one of the officers he could trust, he would warn him that Felton should be watched, and gently hustled out of the house. Then, when he had the duke’s ear, he would tell him that the man must be paid, must be compensated. That men who had followed the duke to certain death, and who had seen their comrades die beside them, could not be cast off as lightly as a mistress forgets an old lover who has fallen from favour.

There was a roar of laughter from the inner room and then a bellowing of a toast. Tradescant knew that his lord must be inside, at the heart of the party. Now he was near to seeing him again he found that his palms were wet with sweat and his throat dry. He rubbed his hands on his breeches, swallowed, and then pushed through the crowd, through the open double door and into the room.

The duke was seated at a table, a map spread before him, his green jacket ablaze with diamonds, his dark hair tumbled about his perfect face, laughing like a boy.

John fell back at the sight and a man behind him swore as he bumped into him, but John heard nothing. He had thought that he knew every line, every plane, of that face, from the untroubled forehead to the smooth cheekbones, but when he saw Buckingham again, in his vitality, in the brilliance of his beauty, he realised he had remembered nothing, only a shadow.