‘You can’t show these bulbs,’ John said hastily. ‘They must be left undisturbed. Please God they are spawning underneath the soil and I will soon have two or three tulips everywhere I once had one.’

‘And what do you do with the extra tulips?’ she asked, never taking her eyes from the flower except to look down at her page. John watched her; he liked her direct, searching gaze.

‘Some I replant in new pots here and keep them for the king and queen next year, and some I take home and plant in my own garden and keep them as stock for my nursery.’

‘So who owns them?’ she persisted.

‘The king and queen own the parent plants,’ John said. ‘For they commissioned my son to buy them, and paid for them. And the little bulblets we share. My son and I take half and the king and queen take half.’

She nodded. ‘You double your stock every year? That’s a good business,’ she observed.

John thought that she was surprisingly astute for the niece of an artist. ‘But it does not show the profits any more,’ he said ruefully. ‘The market smashed in February. The best of the tulip bulbs were going for prices that would buy you a house. Passed from trader to trader as a paper bond, getting more expensive each time.’

‘So what happened? What stopped the market?’

John spread his hands. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I saw it happen; but I still don’t understand it. It was like magic. One moment they were bulbs, rare and rather precious, but priced within the reach of a gardener who might grow them. Next moment they were priced like pearls and everyone wanted them. All of a sudden it’s as if the Bourse woke up to the fact that they were going mad over flowers, and they were priced like bulbs again. In truth, less than bulbs, because nobody wanted to be a tulip trader any more, to be a tulip gardener was like standing up in public and saying you were a greedy fool.’

‘Did you lose much money?’

‘Enough.’ John was not going to tell her that all of their savings had been in tulip bulbs. That their wealth had blown away just as the windhandel market had blown away and that he and J had sworn a solemn oath, a peasant’s oath, never to trust anything but the value of land ever again.