John stepped forwards to look. The post was square and grand, a fitting size and solidity for the big hall, the ornaments carved on top with acanthus leaves and swags and ribbons. One face of the square pillar was ornate with half-finished carvings but the other was already complete. It showed a man, in the act of stepping down from the plinth, stepping out of the frame of the carving as if he would take his place in the outside world, as if he would take his work to the farthest corners of the world.

In one hand the figure had a long-handled rake, and in the other a grand fanciful flower springing from a huge pot, which was spilling over with fruit and seeds: a cornucopia of goodness. He was wearing comfortable baggy breeches and a stout overcoat, and on his head, at a rakish joyful angle, was his hat. With an awe-struck gasp John recognised himself, carved in wood on the earl’s newel post.

‘Good God! Is it me?’ John asked in a whisper.

Robert Cecil’s hand was gentle on his shoulder. ‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘And a very good likeness, I think.’

‘Why have you put me on your stair post, my lord?’ John asked. ‘Of all the things that you could have had carved?’

The earl smiled. ‘Of all my great choices: the Three Graces, or Zeus, or Apollo, or something from the Bible or the king himself? Yet I chose to have my gardener carved in the centre post of my house.’

John looked at the jaunty confidence of the set of the hat and the brandished rake. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said simply. ‘It’s too much for me. You have taken my breath away.’

‘Fame comes in many guises, Tradescant,’ Robert Cecil remarked. ‘But I think people will remember you when they sit beneath their chestnut trees and when your plants bloom in their gardens. And here you are, and here you will be, as long as my house stands, recorded forever, striding out with a plant in one hand, and your rake in the other.’

Autumn 1611

Elizabeth and Baby J were at last to move to Hatfield House. Gertrude, suddenly seized with maternal tenderness, came to weep over their departure and to see them off, all their goods loaded into one wagon, and Elizabeth sitting beside John on the driver’s seat with Baby J wedged between them.

‘Where’s the chestnut tree?’ John asked.

‘That tree!’ Gertrude exclaimed, but she lacked her old spite.

‘Safe in the back,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Beside the kitchen things.’