Hester led the horse out into the yard. ‘Give me that,’ she said suddenly and snatched the hat from his head. He was too surprised to protest. With one swift movement she plucked the feathers from the hat band and tossed them into the midden heap. ‘Why not carry the king’s colours while you’re about it?’ she demanded.

He nodded. ‘I shall tell His Majesty that the Tradescant house remembers their master. You will be rewarded for this.’

‘The only reward I want is for you to send the horse back,’ Hester said. ‘D’you promise you will send her back to me?’

‘I do.’

Hester stood away from the mare’s head as she stepped delicately on the cobbles, and out of the yard and around the house to the road. Hester stood very still and quiet, listening. If the man had been sighted she would hear the horses’ hooves on the Lambeth road as they chased him. There was silence. Somewhere in the garden a thrush was starting to sing.

Hester realised that she was shivering with cold and with apprehension. She turned and crept across the yard to the kitchen door, slipped off the muddy clogs and went to the fireside. If he was captured and named her as his ally and the Ark as a safe royalist house, then she could face arrest for treason against Parliament, and the punishment for treason was death. The cavalier might ride with feathers in his hat and a light heart even in the middle of defeat; but Hester was only too well aware that the country was at war, and it was becoming a war in which there was no quarter given.

She waited by the fire until the little square kitchen window became light and then she went upstairs and woke Frances and Johnnie.

‘What is it, Mother?’ Johnnie asked, seeing her grave face.

‘We’re going on a visit to Uncle Norman,’ she said. ‘Today.’

They took a boat down the river and the boatman was full of news of a royalist plot which had been uncovered only yesterday. Hester nodded. ‘I have no interest in politics,’ she said.

‘You’ll be interested soon enough if these traitors hand the city back to the king,’ the boatman said. ‘If the king brings in murdering Irishmen and damned Frenchmen to cut the throats of honest Englishmen!’

‘Yes,’ Hester said politely. ‘I suppose I will be then.’

The boatman hawked and spat in the water and rowed steadily on.

Alexander Norman greeted them as if their visit had been planned for months instead of thrown together in Hester’s panic. His housekeeper had prepared two rooms in his small town house next to his work yard in the Minories in the shadow of the Tower. Frances and Hester would share a bed and Johnnie was to have a little attic room.

‘My cousin has long promised me this visit,’ he said to his housekeeper as she showed Hester into the front parlour and took her hat and cape. ‘I insisted it should be May before the City is too hot and unhealthy.’