‘I can,’ J replied. Even his voice was different: taut and colourless. ‘My father and I can care for them here, I will find a good woman to be a housekeeper for us all.’

‘But I should be like a mother to them,’ Mrs Hurte said.

J shook his head. ‘Baby John will stay here with me,’ he said. ‘And Frances could not bear to live anywhere but here. She loves her grandfather, she is never out of his sight. And she loves the garden and orchard. She would pine to death in the city.’

Mrs Hurte would have argued but J’s pale tight face prohibited any further talk. ‘I will expect you for her memorial service in our chapel. We can pray for guidance, then.’

He helped her on to the box seat beside the driver. ‘I won’t come,’ he said. ‘She made me swear not to go into the city in the plague months. She was desperate that we would not bring it to the children. I promised her I would care for them here and if the plague comes any closer I would take them to Oatlands.’

‘You won’t come to see her father preach her memorial sermon?’ Mrs Hurte exclaimed, scandalised. ‘But surely it would be such a comfort for you!’

J looked up at her on the wagon seat above him and his face was a white mask of pain. It was useless to tell this woman that his belief in God had gone in an instant, gone the moment he saw Jane throwing open the bedroom window, breathing the air and trying to rid the room of the imaginary smell of honeysuckle. ‘Nothing will comfort me,’ he said blankly. ‘Nothing will ever comfort me again.’

Instead, he sent flowers. He sent a great boatload of flowers down the river to the city; and the chapel was a garden of the striped white and red Rosamund roses that she had loved so much. On the day of the memorial service J worked in the garden at Lambeth, pricking out seedlings and watering them with a quiet determination, as if he would deny that his wife’s soul was being prayed for that day; as if he would deny his grief itself. At midday the bell of St Mary’s Lambeth tolled thirty-one times – one for each year of her short life – and J uncovered his head to the hot sun and listened to the slow clear sound of the bell, then he went back to his work separating the long silky stems of the seedlings and bedding them soft in the soil, as if only in the seed bed could he escape the memory of her dying, just out of his reach, and forbidding him to come any closer.