‘It puzzles me that God should have made so many things the same, and yet just a little different,’ Tradescant confided. ‘So many things He has made which are the same; but differ only in shape or in colour. And I cannot understand why He should make the difference. Nor how Eden can have looked, crammed with such – ’he sought the word for a moment ‘– such diversity.’

‘Surely every rose is the same,’ the vicar replied. ‘It differs only in colour. And a daisy is a daisy wherever it grows.’

John shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you had looked as closely as I. To be sure they have their families, a rose is still a rose, but there are hundreds of different kinds of roses,’ he explained. ‘Every county has a different sport. They have different shapes of petals, they have different numbers of petals, they have different preferences as to light and shade. Some are scented, they tell me, and some are not. And sometimes I think I see them being made. Making themselves while I watch, almost.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘When they throw a sport, when from one main stem you can see another grow different, and if you take the different one you can breed another from it – God didn’t make that, surely? I made it.’

The vicar shook his head but John went on. ‘And daisies are not the same wherever they grow. I have seen a Kent daisy different from a Sussex daisy and a French daisy which was bigger and tipped with pink. I don’t know how many daisies there are. A man would have to travel the whole world over with his eyes on his boots all the way to be sure. Why should such a thing be? Why should God make hundreds of the same thing?’

The vicar glanced around for rescue but nobody was looking his way. ‘God in His wisdom gave us a world filled with variety,’ he began.

He was relieved to see that Tradescant was not arguing. This was not a man who was quarrelsome in his cups. This was a man urgently in quest of a truth. The vicar had an odd sense of a man in search of his destiny. Tradescant was concentrating, passionately concentrating, with a deep line engraved between his brows as he listened to the vicar’s answer. ‘It was God’s great wisdom to give us many things of great beauty. We cannot question His choice to give us many things which are only a little different, one from another, if you tell me that is how they are.’