The stonemason glanced down and pulled his cap to J. ‘Handsome, isn’t it?’

J dumped the sapling and ran to the orchard where John was at the top of a fruit-picker’s ladder, pruning out the dead wood on an old pear tree. ‘D’you think this can be a Spanish pear?’ John asked. ‘I brought one back for my Sir Robert from the Lowlands. Could they have got hold of one and planted it here?’

‘Never mind that now,’ J said. ‘The stonemason is putting up a coat of arms on our house!’

John hung his saw on a protruding branch and turned his attention to his son. J, looking up at his father comfortably leaning against the trunk, thought that they had reversed their roles and that John was like a feckless laughing boy scrumping fruit up a tree and he was like the worried older man.

‘I know,’ John said with a gleam. ‘Do us credit, I thought.’

‘You knew?’ J demanded. ‘You knew he had some ridiculous coat of arms drawn up for us?’

‘I don’t think it’s ridiculous,’ John said easily. ‘I drew them myself. I rather like it. Leaves as background, and then the shield laid across it with three fleurs de lys, and then a helmet on top with a little crown and fleur de lys on that.’

‘But what will the College of Heralds say?’

John shrugged. ‘Who cares what they say?’

‘We will care when they fine us, and make us take it down, and humiliate us before our new neighbours.’

John shook his head. ‘Not us,’ he said confidently.

‘But we’re not gentry! We’re gardeners.’

John came stiffly down his ladder and took J by the shoulder, turning him to see the house.

‘What’s that?’

‘Our house.’

‘A good-sized house, new wing, Venetian windows, right?’

‘Yes.’

John turned his son southwards again. ‘And what’s that?’

‘The orchard.’

‘How big?

‘Only two acres.’

‘But beyond it?’

‘All right, another twenty acres … but Father …’

‘We’re landowners,’ John said. ‘We’re not gardeners any more. We’re landowners with duties and obligations and a large family business to run … and a crest of arms.’

‘They’ll make us take it down,’ J warned.

Tradescant waved a dismissive hand and climbed slowly back up his ladder. ‘Not they. Not when they see who’s coming to the Ark.’

J hesitated. ‘Why? Who is coming?’

‘Everyone who is anyone,’ John said grandly. ‘And all their country cousins. When your baby is born he will grow up to be knighted, I don’t doubt it. Sir John Tradescant … sounds very well, doesn’t it? Sir John.’

‘I might call him Josiah, after his other grandfather, a respected city tradesman who knows his place and is proud of it,’ J said mutinously, and had the pleasure of seeing a flicker of doubt cross his father’s face.

‘Nonsense!’ John said. ‘Sir John Tradescant of Lambeth.’

December 1628