John turned, saw the king, and dropped to his knees, flinching a little as his bad knee hit the floor.

The king did not command him to rise. ‘Your l … late master.’ His voice still held traces of the paralysing stammer he had suffered from as a child. Only with his intimates could he speak without hesitation, only with two people, the duke and now his wife, had he ever been fluent.

‘You m … must miss him,’ the king went on. It sounded more like an order than an offer of sympathy.

John looked up and saw the king’s face. Grief had changed him, he looked older and more tired, and his brown hair was thinning. His eyes were heavily lidded, as if he were weary of what he saw, as if he no longer expected to see what he wanted.

‘I grieve for him still,’ John said honestly. ‘Every day.’

‘You I … loved him?’

‘With all my heart,’ John replied.

‘And he I … loved you?’

John looked up at his king. There was passion behind the question. Even after his death Buckingham could still inspire jealousy. John, the older man, smiled wryly. ‘He loved me a little,’ he said. ‘When I served him especially well. But one smile from him was worth a piece of gold from another.’

There was a silence. Charles nodded as if the statement was of little consequence and turned away to the window and looked out into the king’s court below.

‘H … Her Majesty will tell you wh … what she wants done,’ he said. ‘But I sh … should like one court planted with r … roses. Rose petals for throwing in masques.’

John nodded. A man who could turn from the death of his friend to the need of rose petals for masques would be a difficult master to love.

The king looked round, his eyebrow raised.

‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ John said from his place on the floor. He wondered what his master Sir Robert Cecil, who had scolded a greater monarch than this one, would have thought of a king who confided his grief in a gardener but left him kneeling on an arthritic leg.

There was a rustle of silk and high heels tapping.

‘Ah! my gardener!’ said the voice of the queen.

John, already low, tried to bow from a kneeling position and felt himself to be ridiculous. He glanced up. She was a short plump woman, beringed, curled, painted and patched with a low-cut gown which would have incurred Elizabeth’s censure, and a powerful scent of incense around her skirts which would have inspired outrage in the Ark at Lambeth. She gave him a bright dark-eyed smile and extended her small hand. John kissed it.

‘Get up! Get up!’ she commanded. ‘I want you to walk me all around the garden so that I can see what we must do!’