It was growing dark. The women turned off to their own huts, to the cooking fire. The men were already seated, awaiting their dinner. Suckahanna raised a hand in greeting to one of the men who solemnly watched her supporting John back to the hut. They went through the doorway entwined like lovers and she helped him lie down on the wooden bed.

‘Sleep,’ she said gently to him. ‘Tomorrow you will be better.’

‘I want you,’ John said, his mind hazed with pain, with the smoke, with desire. ‘I want you to lie with me.’

She laughed, a low amused laugh. ‘I am married,’ she reminded him. ‘And you are ill. Sleep now. I shall be here in the morning.’

Spring 1643, England

On a cold day in spring, Alexander Norman took a boat upriver, disembarked north of Lambeth and strolled through the fields to the Ark. Frances, glancing idly from her bedroom window, saw the tall figure coming towards the house and dived back into her room to comb her hair, straighten her gown, and rip off her apron. She was downstairs in time to open the front door to him, and to send the maid running out into the yard to look for Hester and to tell her that Mr Norman was come for a visit.

He smiled very kindly at her. ‘You look lovely,’ he said simply. ‘Every time I see you, you have grown prettier. How old are you now? Fifteen?’

Frances cast down her eyes in her most modest gesture and wished that she could blush. She thought for a moment that she should lay claim to fifteen years, but then she remembered that a birthday invariably meant a present. ‘I’m fifteen in five months’ time,’ she said. ‘October the seventh.’ Without lifting her gaze, modestly directed to the toes of her boots, she could see his hand moving towards the flap on his deep coat pocket.

‘I brought you these,’ he said. ‘Some little fairings.’

They were very far from little fairings. They were three large bundles of ribbon of a deep scarlet silk shot through with gold thread. There would be enough to trim a gown and make ties for Frances’s light brown hair. Despite the shortages of the war, the fashion was still for gowns with sleeves elaborately slashed and trimmed, and Frances had a genuine need as well as a passion for ribbon.

Without taking his eyes from her absorbed face, Alexander Norman said: ‘You do love beautiful things, don’t you, Frances?’ and was rewarded by a look of complete honesty, empty of all coquetry, when she looked up and said: ‘Oh, of course! Because of my grandfather! I have had beautiful things around me all my life.’

‘Cousin Norman,’ Hester said pleasantly, coming into the hall from the kitchen door. ‘What a pleasure to see you, and on such a cold day. Did you come by the river?’