‘I won’t do it,’ J said briefly to his father. ‘I won’t send her into the plague pit in a sack of hessian. They can order all they like. They’re not going to come in the house to fetch her, they’re too afraid for their own skins.’

John hesitated, thinking to argue.

‘I won’t,’ J said fiercely. ‘She’s to be buried with honour.’

John spoke to the church warden, who kept a careful distance on the other side of the little bridge that spanned the roadside ditch. The man was reluctant, but John was persuasive. A small heavy purse was tossed from one side to the other and the next day a lead-lined coffin was delivered to the bridge. A week later, when the Tradescant family and servants were thought to be safe to go out again, the funeral was planned. Jane’s cause of death would not be entered as plague but as the more neutral word ‘fever’, and she would be buried, as J insisted, in the family plot.

The Hurtes came to Lambeth from the city, with their own midwife to lay her out. She was an ancient woman, her face pocked with the scars of old plague sores. She said that she had taken the disease when she was a girl and had survived it, that the Lord of Hosts had saved her for the godly work of laying out the wealthy dead and nursing the few survivors.

‘But why should He save you and not Jane?’ J asked simply, and left her to the task of putting Jane in her special lead-lined coffin.

The Hurtes had wanted to take her to be buried in the graveyard near their chapel in the city but J forced himself to argue with them, and see that his wish was carried out. Jane should be buried at St Mary’s, Lambeth, where her children would go past her grave twice every Sunday. J felt as though he were wading through a thick sea of distress and that if he paused for a moment the waves of grief would wash into his face and drown him completely.

In the end the funeral was an ornate affair with half of Lambeth turning out to honour the young Mrs Tradescant’s passing. J, deep in unhappiness, begrudged everyone else’s grief as if only he could know what it was to love Jane Tradescant and then to lose her; but it comforted John. ‘She was very well-loved,’ he said. ‘She lived so quietly that I never knew she was so well-loved.’

Mrs Hurte took J to one side when the funeral was over and offered to take the two children back with them to the city.

‘No,’ he replied.

‘You cannot care for them here,’ she argued.