John exhaled and his breath was a brandy-tinged cloud before his face. He thought briefly of other nights when he had watched and waited. Nights on board ship when the only sound had been the creaking and shifting of the timbers, nights when he had been on watch for icebergs in the perilous cold seas around Russia or when he had swung dizzily to and fro in the crow’s nest and looked for pirate ships in the darkness of the Mediterranean waters. He thought of keeping watch in the cold wet fogs of the Ile de Rhé, and of the one, two, three nights, when he had laid naked beside his lord and watched over his precious sleep.

‘Sleep well now, my lord,’ he said into the silent darkness.

He thought he would carry with him always this inner life which was like grief, but which was not quite grief, which was like love, but which was not quite love, which was like homesickness, but which was not a longing for home. Now that Buckingham was dead and his goods had bought the Tradescants their ark, John felt as if all the struggle of his love for his lord was resolved. He could love him without sin, he could love him without shame. The death of his lord had been the only way out, for John, for Buckingham himself. He might grieve for it but he did not blame himself for failing to give that one word of warning. And Elizabeth was true to her promise and the duke’s name was in her prayers every Sunday.

John sometimes wondered if the other man who had loved Buckingham, the King of England, felt like this; and if for him too, in the round of his court and daily pleasure and other loves and interests – birth like tonight, deaths and marriages – there was always a gap in the procession, always a face missing, that beautiful wilful angel face. And if he felt also that the world was a safer place, a calmer place, but a greyer place, without George Villiers.

John touched that face in his mind, as the king might lay his finger on the lips of a portrait as he passed it; and then he went round to the stable and rattled the door till the stable lad came tumbling down the stairs, and sent him to the Hurtes’ house in London.

Frances set the house by the ears, as a new baby always does. She cried and would not settle at night, and J saw dawn after dawn from the big Venetian windows as he walked her round and round the big room which housed the rarities. Held in his arms, rocked by his continual steady pacing, was the only way she would settle, and the great rarities room was the only place in the house where Jane was not wakened by the distant sound of her cries.