They watched the flower open in its glorious blaze of colour and then become full-blown. ‘Can’t we keep the petals?’ Frances asked.

‘You can have the petals,’ John said. ‘Perhaps they will keep in sugar and sand in one of the rarities cases.’

Then in November, leaving it as late as possible to give the bulb the greatest chance to grow well, John, watched by J and Frances, tipped the pot and waited for their new wealth to spill out into his hands.

The priceless bulb had not one, not two, but three bulblets growing around the mother plant. ‘Praise God,’ John said devoutly.

With infinite care he took a sharp knife and cut them gently away from the mother bulb and placed them in their own little pots. ‘Four where there was one before,’ he said to J. ‘How can you call it usury when it is the richness of God himself who doubles and quadruples our wealth for us?’

One pot was assigned to the queen. John would keep one. And the remaining two he would send back to Holland in triumph, to Amsterdam in February in bulb-buying time, to make them the richest gardeners the world had ever known, to make them as rich as nabobs.

December 1636

They had a quiet Christmastide at the Ark that year. Jane had always been the one to decorate the house with holly and ivy and hang a kissing bunch of mistletoe over the front door. Neither J nor his father had the heart for it. They bought the children their presents for the twelve days of Christmas, gingerbread, candied fruit, a new gown for Frances and a book, beautifully engraved, for Johnny, but there was a terrible sense of going through the motions of present-giving and celebration. There was a dreadful hollowness at the heart of it where before there had been the unthinking spontaneity of joy.

On Christmas night the two men sat either side of the fire drinking mulled wine and cracking nuts. Frances, allowed to sit up late for the occasion, was between them, seated on a footstool, gazing unblinkingly into the flames, sipping hot milk as slowly as she dared to prolong the moment.

‘D’you think Mama wishes she was here?’ she asked her grandfather. John looked quickly over to J in time to catch his grimace of pain.

‘I am sure she does. But she is happy with the angels in heaven,’ he said.

‘D’you think she looks down on us and sees that I am being a good girl?’

‘Yes,’ John said gruffly.

‘D’you think she would do a miracle, a little miracle, if I asked her?’

‘What miracle d’you want, Frances?’ John asked.