John leaned over. The parkland was so immense that the grand house, drawn to scale, showed as nothing more than a little box in the centre. He ran his eye over the gardens. All the courts were to be planted with different flowers, each with their own ornate knot garden in different patterns. There was to be a great walk of espaliered fruit trees, and a grand water feature of a river running along a terrace edged with seats and planted with tender fruit trees in tubs. The water for the terrace was to be fed from a gigantic fountain splashing from a copper statue standing on a great rock. Further away from the house were to be wooded walks and orchards, a bowling green, and a mountain large enough to ride a horse up a winding path to the top.

‘Will this ease your homesickness for Theobalds?’ Cecil asked jokingly.

‘It will ease mine,’ John replied, looking at the magnitude of the plan and thinking, his imagination whirling, of how he would ever get the thousands of fruit trees, where he would buy the millions of plants. ‘Will it ease yours, my lord?’

The earl shrugged. ‘The service of a king is never easy, John. Don’t forget that. No true servant of a king ever sleeps well at night. I shall miss my old house.’ He turned back to the plan. ‘But this will keep us busy into our old age, don’t you think?’

‘This will keep us busy forever!’ John exclaimed. ‘Where am I to get a thousand golden carp from for your water parterre?’

‘Oh!’ Cecil said negligently. ‘Ask around, John. You can find a hundred pairs, surely! And they will breed if they are well kept, I don’t fear it!’

John chuckled reluctantly. ‘I know you don’t fear it, my lord. That is to be my job.’

Cecil beamed at him. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘And they are reroofing a fine cottage for you here, and I shall pay you an increase. How much did I promise you?’

‘Forty pounds a year, sir,’ John replied.

‘Call it fifty then,’ the earl said genially. ‘Why not? I’m hardly going to notice it with the rest of these bills to pay.’

Summer 1610

John decided that Elizabeth and Baby J should remain at Meopham while he was travelling in Europe to buy the earl’s trees. Elizabeth protested that she wanted to live in the new cottage in Hertfordshire, but John was firm.

‘If Baby J should be ill, or you yourself sick, then there is no-one there who would care for you,’ he said in the last days of August, while he planned and packed his clothes for the journey.

‘There’s no-one here in Meopham who would care for me,’ she said inaccurately.

‘Your whole family is here, cousins, sisters, aunts, and your mother.’

‘I can’t see Gertrude wasting much time on my comfort!’