‘How can she? Will she ever not feel the shame?’

‘If we were to go away –’

Attone laughed a brief bitter laugh. ‘Where? D’you think she’d live in Jamestown? D’you think they’d not take her out and hang her or worse? D’you think she’d live with you in that house and send tobacco down the river and pack up your plants for you, and be a wife like the other one, the one you left behind in England? Or d’you think to take her to England and watch her die in exile, as Pocahontas did?’

John shook his head, he felt as bewildered as a scolded child. ‘I’ve been a fool,’ he said.

For a moment Attone softened. He dropped his hand on John’s shoulder. ‘These are foolish times,’ he said. ‘I think at the end of it all, when the Great Hare runs through the world all alone again, we will all seem fools.’

‘Can the People survive?’ John asked in a low whisper.

Attone shook his head.

January 1645, England

Johnnie was in the garden at first light, looking for flowers for his sister’s wedding bouquet. The frost was as thick on the ground as snow, his boots crunched as he walked across the frozen grass. The sun was bright and hard and the air smelled sharp and exciting: of leaf-mould, of coldness, of the earth waiting for sunshine. Johnnie had a powerful sense of being young and alive and that his life, as the only Tradescant heir, was about to begin.

He wanted to give Frances something beautiful. If she had married in springtime she would have carried a bouquet of flowers from the chestnut tree, their grandfather’s pride. If she had married in summer he would have cut the stems and snapped the thorns off a hundred roses. But she had chosen the very heart of the winter and Johnnie feared he could give her nothing from his grandfather’s garden but the shiny hardness of evergreen leaves.

Hester, seeing him bare-headed and wearing nothing warm, swung open her bedroom window, hearing the hinge crack against the frost. ‘Johnnie! What are you doing?’

He turned and waved. ‘I’m picking her a bouquet!’

‘There’s nothing to be had!’

Johnnie shook his head and went on down the garden. Hester watched him go, the lithe little figure with the determined set to his shoulders: Johnnie Tradescant. Then she turned back into the house to wake Frances for her wedding day.