John nodded. ‘There are plants coming in all the time. I had a nice little flower from the West Indies this very week.’

‘We need a sudden rush,’ J said. ‘So that everyone comes and buys from us. So that everyone remembers our name. We need to make our own mania, a mania for the Tradescant plants.’

John was on his hands and knees beside his son, but he leaned back to rest for a moment. ‘You have an idea,’ he said, looking at J.

‘I thought I should go to Virginia,’ J said. ‘Go and collect rarities by the boxful, bring them back in time for the planting season, spring next year. Hope to bring back some flowers that people will pay good money to own.’

‘We’d have to find the price of your passage,’ John said cautiously. ‘It’s a good plan. But it’s thirty pounds or so to send you out in the first place. And things are tight, J. Very tight.’

J said nothing and John looked again at his son’s bleak face. ‘It’s not just business, is it? It’s because you have lost Jane.’

‘Yes,’ J admitted honestly. ‘I find I cannot bear this place without her.’

‘But if you went to Virginia, you would come back? You are thinking only of a visit? There are your children, and the Ark, and our gardening for the queen. And I am getting old.’

‘I will come back. But I have to get away now. You don’t understand what it is like for me to sleep in her bed at night, and for her not to be there. And I can’t bear to go into that damned orangery. Every time I walk in there to see to a plant or water a tray of seedlings I think she is still lying in the corner and forbidding me to come in and hold her. She died alone like a beggar on a street corner without nursing – and there was so much that I wanted to say to her and ask her –’ He broke off. ‘You don’t understand,’ he repeated.

‘I do,’ John said slowly.

‘No. You can’t possibly understand. When Mother died you had months of warning, and you were even able to give her some flowers at the end. You had time to say farewell. You could hold her –’

‘Once I lost a love, a great love, without warning,’ John said with difficulty. ‘And with much left unsaid. I do know what it is to dream and long for someone, and to think of their death over and over, and of the thousands of ways you could have prevented it, and the thousands of ways you should have prevented it, until you are sick of your own life, since it was not given in exchange.’

J looked into his father’s face. ‘I didn’t know.’