‘Sleep,’ J would say to his wife as the wail from the crib warned them of another restless night. ‘I will walk her,’ and he would wrap the tiny thing in a warm blanket, throw his father’s soldiering cape over his nightshirt and take her downstairs to walk and walk her around the echoing moonlit room, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for three, until she quieted and slept and he could creep back into his bedroom and lay her, as tender as a seedling, back in her little crib.

Jane did not have enough milk and Elizabeth said there was nothing for it but for her to stay in bed, eat as much as she could bear, and rest, rest, rest. ‘You must think and worry no more than a milch cow,’ she insisted when her daughter-in-law protested. ‘Or else it will be a wet nurse for Frances.’

In the face of such a threat Jane fell back against the pillows and closed her eyes. ‘I shall bring you some chicken broth at noon,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Sleep now.’

‘Where is Frances?’ Jane asked. ‘With J?’

‘J is sleeping like a dead man in the parlour,’ Elizabeth said with a smile. ‘He sat down at the table to bring the planting records up to date, and his head fell into the inkpot and he was gone. I’ve wrapped him with a rug and left him. Frances is with John.’

‘Does John know how to care for her? Will you watch him?’

‘John has his own methods,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But I will watch him.’

She glanced from the bedroom window and saw John and his granddaughter, but did not think she would point them out to Jane. John had strapped the baby to his back in an outlandish savage fashion that he must have seen on one of his voyages. She was wrapped in a fold of blanket against his back with two ends of the blanket knotted around his chest and two around his belly. With the baby held warm and snug against his homespun coat John was walking through the garden and down towards the orchard to see that his chestnut saplings were all surviving the frost.

Elizabeth watched for a moment, and curbed her desire to hurry out and take the child from him. The baby was not crying, John’s rolling limp was soothing to her, and as he walked he was singing a low muttered song: ‘Tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding …’, a nonsense song. Frances, soothed by the gentle pressure of his warm back, lulled by the weak winter sunlight, and enjoying the irregular motion of his walk, slept and woke and slept again as John went down to the end of his orchard to check his fruit trees, and came back again.