The earl held out his arms and John stepped into them and the two men, the one so slight and twisted, the other so broad and strong, wrapped each other in a deep firm hug. Then they broke apart, Cecil rubbing his eyes on the sleeve of his rich jacket while John cleared his throat with a harsh cough. John offered his arm and Cecil took help and leaned on his man. The two of them walked from the knot garden side by side.

‘The bath house!’ the earl said quietly. ‘I’ll never manage anything like it at Hatfield.’

‘And the tulips I’ve just put in! And snowdrops, and lenten lilies!’

‘You’ve planted bulbs?’

‘Hundreds last autumn, for a show this spring.’

‘We’ll dig them up and take them with us!’

John shook his head in silent disagreement but said nothing. They walked slowly towards the ornamental mount. A stream played beside the path on a bed of white marble pebbles. John hesitated. ‘Let’s walk up,’ the earl said.

Slowly the two men followed the twisting path. John had pruned the rambling roses which bordered the path on either side and they lay flat and tidy like withy fencing. Cecil paused for breath, and to ease the pain of his lame leg, John put his arm around his master’s waist and held him steady. ‘Go on,’ Cecil said and they walked slowly side by side round and round the little hill. There were a few foolishly early buds on the roses; John noticed the deep crimson of new shoots, red as wine. At the top of the hill there was a round lovers’ seat, with a fountain plashing in the middle. Tradescant swung his cape down for his master to sit, and the earl nodded for John to sit beside him, as an equal.

The two men looked out across the palace gardens spread below them like a tapestry map. ‘Those woods!’ the earl mourned. ‘The trees we have planted.’

‘The bluebells underneath them in springtime,’ John reminded him.

‘The orchards, my peach-tree wall!’

‘And the courts!’ Tradescant nodded at the smooth grass laid out in every courtyard of the rambling palace. ‘There isn’t grass like that anywhere else in the kingdom. Not a weed in it, and the mowing team trained to go to half an inch.’

‘I don’t see any mud in the knot garden,’ Robert Cecil remarked, looking at the garden as it was meant to be viewed – from on high.

‘There isn’t any now,’ John said with rare impatience. ‘Because I’ve been washing the stones in freezing water all morning.’

‘I shall be sorry to lose the hunting,’ the earl said.

‘I shan’t miss the deer eating my young shoots in spring.’