John instantly flinched, thinking of the voracious chickens. ‘Put it in a pot, somewhere that you can easily watch it,’ he said. ‘In soil with some muck well stirred in. Water it from the base of the pot with a little water every day. Perhaps it will grow for you.’

‘Shall you not regret giving me this precious nut, if it fails for me?’

John closed her fingers around the nut. ‘It is yours,’ he said gently. ‘Do with it as you will. Perhaps you will be lucky. Perhaps together, now that we are married, we shall be lucky together.’

John stayed a full month at Meopham with his wife, and when the time came for him to go back to Theobalds a number of innovations had been made. She had a pretty little miniature knot garden outside the back door, incongruously planted with leeks, beets, carrots and onions and fenced with rooted willow twigs woven into a dwarf living fence against the marauding chickens. He could both read and write a fair-enough script, the chestnut was in a pot on the windowsill showing a pale snout above the earth, and Elizabeth was expecting their child.

Summer 1608

‘The boy should be called George, for his grandfather,’ Gertrude remarked. She was seated in the best chair in Elizabeth’s parlour. The wooden crib stood beside the open window, and John, leaning against the windowsill, was rocking it gently with his foot and looking down into the sleeping face of the baby. He was a dark-skinned child, with black hair as thick as John’s own. When he was awake his eyes were a deep periwinkle blue. John kept his foot nudging the crib, repressing the desire to lift his son to his face and smell again his haunting smell of spilled milk and sweet buttercream skin.

‘George David, for his grandfather and godfather,’ Gertrude said. She glanced sideways at John. ‘Unless you wish to call him Robert and see if the earl can be persuaded to take an interest in him?’

John gazed out into the garden. The little vegetable knot garden was doing well and this spring he had added another square beside it, planted with herbs for strewing, for medicines, and for cooking. There was now a withy hurdle penning Elizabeth’s hens into the far end of the garden with wormwood planted around it to hide the fencing, to give them shade, and to prevent fowlpest.

‘Or we might call him James in a compliment to His Majesty,’ Gertrude went on. ‘Though it will do him little good, I suppose. We could call him Henry Charles for the two princes. But they say Prince Charles is a sickly boy. D’you ever see him at Theobalds, John?’

She glanced up to John, who had leaned out of the window and was thoughtfully weighing a flowerpot in his hand. Poking from the moist earth was a whippy slim stem crowned with a little hand of green leaves.