John nodded. ‘Maybe not. But she would do her duty by you. She would make sure that you had a fire and water and food. Whereas at Hatfield I know no-one but the workmen. Not even the house staff are fully at work yet. The place is still half-built.’

‘They must be finished soon!’

John was incapable of explaining the scale of the project. ‘It looks as if they could build for a dozen years and never be done!’ he said. ‘They have the roof on now, at least, and the walls complete. But all the inside fittings, the floors, the windows, there is all that to do. And the panelling is yet to come, there are hundreds of carpenters and woodcarvers on site! I tell you, Elizabeth, he is building a little town there, in the middle of a hundred meadows. And I must plant the meadows and turn them into a great garden!’

‘Don’t sound so overawed!’ Elizabeth said affectionately. ‘You know you are as excited as a child!’

John smiled, acknowledging the truth. ‘But I fear for him,’ he confided. ‘It is a great task he has taken on. I can’t see how he can bear the cost of it. And he is buying property in London too, and then selling it on. I fear he will overstretch himself and if he gets into debt –’ He broke off. Not even to Elizabeth would he trust the details of Cecil’s business arrangements, the bribes routinely taken, the Treasury money diverted, the men bankrupted by the king one day on charges of treason or offences against the Crown whose estates were bought up by his first minister at knockdown prices the next.

‘They say he is an engrosser,’ Elizabeth remarked. ‘Not a wood or a common is safe from his fences. He takes it all to himself.’

‘It is his own,’ John said stoutly. ‘He takes what is his by right. Only the king is above him, and God above him.’

Elizabeth gave him a sceptical look but kept her thoughts to herself. She was too much like her father – a clergyman of stoutly independent Protestantism – to accept John’s spiritual hierarchy which led from God in heaven down to the poorest pauper with each man in his place, and the king and the earl a small step down from the angels.

‘I fear for myself too,’ John said. ‘He has given me a purse of gold and ordered me to buy and buy. I am afraid of being cheated, and I am afraid of shipping these plants so far. He wants a garden all at once, so I should buy plants as large and fruitful as I can get. But I am sure that little sturdy ones might travel better!’

‘There’s no-one in the kingdom better able than you,’ Elizabeth said encouragingly. ‘And he knows it. I just wish I might come with you. Are you not afraid to go alone?’