Hester waved him towards the larder. ‘Eat what you want,’ she said. ‘And come out into the yard as soon as you are done.’

She stepped into a pair of clogs which were on the stone doorstep and unlocked the kitchen door. She pulled the jacket around her shoulders and did up the buttons. John’s mare was in her loosebox, she whinnied when she saw Hester and the dog barked again.

‘Hush!’ Hester called to them both as she went into the tack room to fetch John’s heavy saddle and bridle. The mare stood obediently while Hester struggled with her tack, and then shifted when a shadow fell over the stable. Hester looked up, instantly afraid that it was Parliament men come to arrest the royalist, and arrest her too as a conspirator. But it was the cavalier, his hands full of bread and cheese, his hat tipped back on his head.

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.’