‘Is Grafton like here?’

‘Just as beautiful,’ he says proudly. ‘You know, I wish I could take you to Grafton. I so want to take you there. I wish you could see my home.’

Slowly, I glance sideways at him. ‘I wish it too,’ I say, and then we are both silent.

* * *

My lord stays in London and summons Richard to attend him; but every week or so the wagon comes with tapestries, furniture or books that he has bought for the new house. Waiting in the stable yard as they unpack one of these treasure wagons, I am surprised by a dainty woman, wearing the gown of a townswoman and a modest white cap, who is handed down from the back of the wagon and makes her curtsey to me.

‘I am Mrs Jourdemayne,’ she says. ‘His Grace sent me to you with these as a gift.’

She nods her head and a lad jumps out of the wagon behind her with a wooden tray of tiny clay pots, each one holding a nodding head of a green plant. He sets the tray down at my feet and jumps back into the wagon to fetch another and another until I am surrounded by a little lawn of green and Mrs Jourdemayne laughs at my delighted face. ‘He said you would be glad,’ she observes. ‘I am a gardener and a herbalist. He said that I should bring you these and he has paid me for a week’s work. I am to stay with you and help you plant a garden of herbs, if you wish it.’

‘I do wish it!’ I say. ‘There is a herb garden here by the kitchen but it is very overgrown, and I don’t know what half the things are.’

‘Tell the lad where to take the seedling trays and we will start whenever you want,’ she says briskly.

I call my pageboy and he leads the way for the two of them while I go inside to fetch a broad hat to shield my face, and gloves for my first lesson as a gardener.

She is an odd gardener. She orders the Penshurst senior man to make twelve beds in the old kitchen garden, and while he is digging over the soil she lifts the little herbs, shows me their leaves and their flowers and tells me of their properties. Each new bed is to be named for a house of the planets.

‘This was the comfrey bed,’ Ralph says stubbornly. ‘Where are we going to put the comfrey now?’

‘In the Aquarius bed,’ she says smoothly. ‘Comfrey is a plant that flourishes under the water sign. And this bed here is going to be the place we grow the plants under the sign of Taurus.’

He puzzles over this all night, and in the morning he has a joke ready. ‘What will you plant there? In the Taurus bed? Bull rushes? Bull rushes?’ he asks, and doubles up at his own humour. That jest keeps him laughing all day, but Mrs Jourdemayne is not disturbed. She picks out seedlings from her tray of plants and puts them before me. ‘Taurus is an earth sign,’ she says. ‘When the moon is in Taurus, it favours the growth of crops that live below the soil. Root crops like white and purple carrots, onions, and turnips. It favours the herbs of Taurus, like mint and primrose, tansy, wormwood and yarrow. We’ll plant these in our Taurus bed.’