‘I want the king to understand that he should make me Father’s apprentice,’ Frances said, putting her hand on John’s knee and looking earnestly up at him. ‘I thought Mama could do a small miracle and open the king’s eyes to me. To my solid worth.’

John patted her hand. ‘You can always do your apprenticeship here,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to serve a master to be a great gardener. You don’t need the king’s recognition. I shall teach you the skills you need here, myself. I am aware of your solid worth, Frances.’

‘And I can garden here after you are gone? So that there is always a Tradescant’s Ark at Lambeth?’

John dropped his hand on her warm head and held it there, like a blessing. ‘A hundred years from now there will be a little bit of a Tradescant in every garden in England,’ he predicted. ‘The plants we have grown are already in bloom in every garden in the country. I’ve never sought for greater fame than that and I have been blessed with seeing it. But I should like to think of you gardening here after I am gone. Frances Tradescant, the gardener.’

1637

The courier did not even enter the house at Lambeth. He stood in the hall on a February morning with the dirt of the roads still thick on his boots, and he brought the two precious tulip pots out from under his cloak.

‘What’s this?’ John asked, astounded.

J, coming in from the garden, his fingers blue with cold, heard the fear in his father’s voice and ran quickly up the hall, tracking mud on the polished wooden floor.

‘Your bulbs, returned,’ the man said shortly.

There was a stunned silence.

‘Returned?’

‘The market has crashed,’ the man said. ‘The Bourse has closed down the trade in tulips. Men are hanging themselves in their rich houses and throwing their children into the canals to drown. The mania for tulips is over and everyone in Holland is ruined.’

John went white and staggered back. He fell into a chair. ‘Henrik Van Meer?’

‘Dead. By his own hand. His wife gone to relatives in France as a pauper with an apron full of tulip bulbs.’

J put his hand on his father’s shoulder. He had a sickly sense of his own fault for never speaking strongly against this passion for mingling plants and money. Now plants and money had split apart.

‘You warned me,’ John said softly to his son, his face shocked.

‘Not well enough,’ J replied bitterly. ‘I spoke as quiet as a child when I should have shouted like a man.’

‘Could you get nothing for them?’ John asked. ‘My Semper Augustus? I would take five hundred for each. I would take four.’