It was not a cottage he had given them at all – not two cramped rooms on the ground floor and a rickety stair to a hayloft bedroom – but a proper house with a fence all around it and a path of handsome brick chippings leading up to the front door set flush in the middle with two windows, proper glazed windows with panes set diamond-wise in thick lead, on each side of it.

‘Oh! oh!’ Elizabeth slid down from the hard driving seat, lost for words.

A thick blond thatch sat weightily on the low roof. The beams in the walls were so new that they were still golden against the pale pink of the limewashed plaster.

‘New built!’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘New built for us?’

‘For us and no other. Step inside,’ John invited her.

With J at her heels, looking around at everything with eyes as wide as a hunting owl, Elizabeth stepped over the threshold of her new home and found herself inside a stone-flagged hall with a fire already lit in the fireplace to welcome her. To the right was the kitchen, with a big stone sink and a broad fireplace. To the left was a small room she could use as she pleased: a still room, or a drawing room; and immediately before her was a genuine solid flight of stairs with well-made wooden treads and risers which led to two more rooms above. Each one of them was big enough for a full-size bed, never mind the cramped little bed and Baby J’s truckle that they had brought with them on the wagon from Meopham.

‘And a garden,’ John said exultantly.

‘A garden!’ Elizabeth laughed at the predictability of her man; but let him lead her back down the stairs and through the kitchen to the back door.

Cecil had bidden John take what he wanted from the saplings and plants of the palace gardens and make his own little Eden. John had created in the small walled plot a little orchard, a walk of trellised apple and plum trees, a pottager by the back door with herbs for cooking and salad vegetables, a bed of strawberries, and a kitchen garden bed of beans and peas and onions and greens.

‘It looks so – rooted!’ Elizabeth found the word at last. ‘As if it had been here forever.’