The earl’s cunning courtier face crinkled into laughter. ‘Better than from the old queen, you mean? Good God! I should think so! There never was a woman like her for taking half your wealth and giving you nothing but a smile in return. King James has a freer hand for his favourites …’ He broke off and turned back towards the house. ‘With all the favourites,’ he muttered. ‘Especially if they’re Scots. Especially if they’re handsome young men.’

They walked side by side together, the earl leaning heavily on John’s shoulder.

‘Are you in pain?’ John asked.

‘I’m always in pain,’ his master snapped. ‘I don’t think about it if I can help it.’

John felt a sympathetic twinge in his own knees at the thought of his master’s twisted bones. ‘Doesn’t seem right,’ he said with gruff sympathy. ‘That with all the striving and worry you have to suffer pain as well.’

‘I don’t look for justice,’ said England’s foremost law maker. ‘Not in this world.’

John nodded and kept his sympathy to himself. ‘When do we have to leave?’

‘When I have made Hatfield ready for us. You’ll come with me, won’t you, John? You’ll leave our maze and the fountain court and the great garden for me?’

‘Your Grace … of course …’

The earl heard at once the hesitation in his voice. ‘The king would keep you on here if I told him you would stay and mind the gardens,’ he said a little coldly. ‘If you don’t wish to come with me to Hatfield.’

John turned and looked down into his master’s wretched face. ‘Of course I come with you,’ he said tenderly. ‘Wherever you are sent. I would garden for you in Scotland, if I had to. I would garden for you in Virginia, if I had to. I am your man. Whether you rise or fall, I am your man.’

The earl turned and gripped John’s arms above the elbows in a brief half-embrace. ‘I know it,’ he said gruffly. ‘Forgive my ill humour. I am sick to my belly with the loss of my house.’

‘And the garden.’

‘Mmm.’

‘I have spent my life on this garden,’ John said thoughtfully. ‘I learned my trade here. There’s not a corner of it that I don’t know. There’s not a change that it makes from season to season that I cannot predict. And there are times, especially in early summer, like now, when I think it is perfect. That we have made it perfect here.’

‘An Eden,’ the earl agreed. ‘An Eden before the Fall. Is that what gardeners do all the time, John? Try to make Eden again?’

‘Gardeners and earls and kings too,’ John said astutely. ‘We all want to make paradise on earth. But a gardener can try afresh every spring.’