Gertrude came back into the room and looked again into the cradle, shocked out of her normal irritability. ‘But John,’ she said softly. ‘To have to pin all your hopes on just one child! No-one to bear your name but just the one! And everything to be lost if you lose him!’

John rubbed his face as if he would rub away his scowl of pain. He leaned over the cradle. The baby’s sleeping fists were as tiny as rosebuds, his dark hair a little crown of fluff around his head. A tiny pulse like a vulnerable heart beat at the centre of his skull. John felt a deep passion of tenderness so powerful that his very bones seemed to melt inside him.

‘It’s as well I am used to growing rarities,’ he murmured. ‘I have not a dozen little seedlings to watch, I shall never have more than this one. I just have this one precious little bud. I shall nurse him up as if he was a new flower, a rarity.’

January 1610

‘It is done.’ Robert Cecil found Tradescant on his knees in the Theobalds knot garden. ‘I was looking for you. The king wants to call Theobalds his own this year. We are to leave.’

John rose to his feet and rubbed the cold earth from his hands.

‘What are you doing?’ the earl asked.

‘Relaying the white stones,’ John said. ‘The frost disturbs them, throws up dirt and spoils the pattern.’

‘Leave it,’ he ordered peremptorily. ‘The king’s gardeners can worry about it now. He wants it, he has pressed me for it, he hinted a hundred thousand different ways, and Rochester pushed him on every time he might have stopped. I’ve fended him off for three years but now I’ve given it to him, God damn it. And now he’s happy, and Rochester is happy, and I have Hatfield.’

Tradescant nodded, his eyes on his master’s face. ‘You shall make me a splendid garden there,’ Robert Cecil said rapidly, as if he was almost afraid of John’s calm silence. ‘You shall go abroad and buy me all sorts of rarities. How are the chestnuts coming along? We will take them with us. You shall take anything you want from the gardens here, take them with us and we shall start again at Hatfield …’

He broke off. Still John watched him, saying nothing.

The most powerful man in England, second only to the king himself, took two hasty steps away from his gardener and then turned back to face him. ‘John, I could weep like a babe,’ he confessed.

John slowly nodded. ‘So could I.’