“Hold a little,” the king interrupted again, and then shockingly, leaned forwards, lifted his black ebony cane, and poked the prosecutor, hard, in the back.

“God, no,” James said to himself.

Cook caught his breath but continued with accusations, the king poked at him again, and again, then, like the slow unfolding of a nightmare, the silver tip at the end of the cane fell to the floor with a heavy thud and rolled loudly to a standstill. Cook paid no attention to the stick against his shoulder, nor to the king’s interruption, but as the silver ring rolled to a standstill he froze, as still as the ferrule, as if he were afraid to look round to see what the king would do next. He took a breath as if to continue with the prosecution case. But he did not speak.

Nobody moved. James realized he was gripping his wooden seat, stopping himself getting up and picking up the silver ferrule for the king. Half the audience were holding themselves rigid so that they did not betray themselves by getting to their feet to serve the man who had never had to do anything for himself. Nobody was attending to the prosecutor anymore. Everyone was looking from the shining tip of the cane on the floor, to the king, who had never in his life picked up anything.

The silver ring lay on the floor beside the prosecutor’s polished shoes, the prosecutor standing like a statue beside it. The bench of judges was still, the Lord President frozen. Nobody knew what to do, and everyone felt it was strangely important.

Slowly, in the long silence, Charles himself rose from his chair, opened the little door to his enclosure, came out, bent down, and picked up the heavy cane tip, twisting it back into place on the handsome stick. He looked from the Lord President to the prosecutor as if he could not understand that they had not stopped everything to serve him. All his life someone had bent and fetched and carried for him, but here, with more than a thousand subjects in the room, nobody had moved. He smiled slightly, inclining his head a little, as if he had learned something important and disagreeable, and then he went back to his chair in a silence so profound that James thought they could have been passing a sentence of death.

James left the hall at the end of the day’s hearing, sick to his belly from lack of food and at what he had heard and seen. He went back to his safe house and, with his head thumping, wrote his report, translated it into the code that they had agreed, and took the letter down to Queenhithe. The master of a ship was waiting for him.

“We sail with the tide,” he warned.

“Go now,” James said. “This is all I have to send. Someone will be waiting for you when you dock. They’ll ask for the paperwork from Monsieur St. Jean.”