He glanced at her quickly, as if her ignorance surprised him. ‘All times are dangerous to men with great power,’ he explained. ‘My lord is the greatest in the land. Every day he faces one danger or another. If he sends for me I go without question and I make no plans other than his will.’

Elizabeth nodded. There was no arguing with a man’s duty to follow his lord.

‘I’ll wait till I hear from you then,’ she said.

John kissed her forehead in that passionless meaningless gesture which seemed to have started with their betrothal and hung over them still. Elizabeth curbed her impulse to turn up her face and kiss him on the lips. If he did not want to kiss her, if he did not want to lie with her, then it was not the part of a good wife to complain. She would have to wait. She would have to do her duty by him, as he did his by his lord.

‘Thank you,’ John said, as if she had obliged him in some little courtesy, and went out to saddle his horse, mounted the animal and rode him from the back of the cottage to the village street. Elizabeth was at the doorway, her head high; none of the village gossips would know that her husband was leaving her as virginal as she had been on her wedding day.

John doffed his hat to her, conscious also of the dozens of watching windows. He did not lean down to kiss her, nor did he offer one word of assurance or comfort. Seated high on his horse he looked down on the pale face of the wife he was leaving without bedding and knew himself to be behaving badly, with his duty as an excuse as well as an obligation. ‘Farewell,’ he said shortly, and turned his horse and rode briskly out at a trot. The knowledge of his unkindness to a woman who, wedding night or no, mother-naked or clothed, had said no more than she had every right to say, and who, before that accursed interruption, had laid warm and pleasant to his touch, galled him all the way along the lanes going north to Gravesend.

He met his master at the quayside, at the docks of the East India Company, the air rich with the smell of cinnamon and spices and loud with the curses of the dockers.

A merchant welcomed them on board his ship at the gangplank. ‘Follow me,’ he said and led them between the sailmakers and the rope chandlers to the captain’s cabin. ‘A glass of wine?’ he offered.

The earl and his gardener nodded.

‘I have some curious roots,’ he said when they had a glass each. ‘I bought them for their weight in gold because I knew that a man such as yourself, Your Grace, would pay much more for them.’

‘And what are they?’ the earl asked.