She looked at him with quick comprehension in her dark eyes. ‘The first garden? Of Eden? Do you see that as a flowery mead? I have always thought of it as a French garden, with beautiful walks.’

‘Certainly there must have been an orchard.’ John had an enjoyable sense of intellectual freedom, being allowed to speculate about the Bible which, at home, had to be accepted as a revealed truth and read with uncritical devotion. ‘There must have been at least two apple trees.’

‘Two?’

‘To pollinate. Otherwise the Devil himself would have had no fruit for tempting poor Adam!’

‘But I thought the scholars were now saying that Adam did not eat an apple but an apricot.’

‘Really?’ John had an alarming sense of the world shifting beyond the limits of his light-hearted scepticism. ‘But it says apple in the Bible.’

‘Our Bible in English is translated from the Greek which was translated from the Hebrew. There are bound to be errors in the translations.’

‘My son would say –’ He broke off. He was no longer sure what J would say. ‘A man of faith would say that there cannot be errors. That since it is the revealed word of God it must be perfect.’

She nodded as if it did not matter very much. ‘A man of faith would have to have faith,’ she said simply. ‘But a man who questions would be bound to question.’

John looked at her doubtfully. ‘And are you a woman who questions?’

She smiled at him, a sudden smile illuminating her face and making her suddenly a pretty young woman. ‘I have a brain in my head to think for myself – but no elevated principles.’

Her uncle was shocked. ‘Hester!’ He turned to John. ‘Indeed, she does herself an injustice. She is a very principled young woman.’

‘I don’t doubt it …’

Hester shook her head. ‘I am completely respectable, which is what my uncle means; but I am talking about convictions and political principles.’

‘You sound as if you are a doubter,’ John commented.

‘I think for myself but I never neglect the conventions,’ she explained. ‘This is a hard world for all of us, and especially for women. My study has been to avoid giving offence and to advance my own career.’

‘As a painter?’ John asked.

She gave him her open, honest smile. ‘As a painter and a maid for now. But I shall want to marry well and care for my family and further my husband’s prosperity.’

John, accustomed to Jane’s high morality, was torn between shock at her frankness and a sense of freedom at her honesty. ‘Nothing more than that?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t think there is anything more than that.’

‘And she can certainly draw.’ Her uncle moved the conversation into safer areas. ‘I thought I would use her sketches of your flowery mead as a background in some of the pictures for the queen’s walls.’