The garden was looking as lovely as it did every spring, as if war was not the nation’s chief occupation, as if hunger and plague were not a certainty in the coming summer. The daffodils were bobbing in the orchard and in the tulip beds the spears of buds were thickening and blushing with light stripes of colour. If in the autumn there was anyone left alive who cared to buy tulips there would be a fortune in the rich earth of the Tradescant garden.

But nobody was buying, they were not taking money at the door of the rarities room, they were not selling plants. The Ark was slowly sinking under debt. Joseph was working for half-wages and his keep, the lads had left, run away to war, the maids had been dismissed and only Cook stayed on and shared the work of the house with Hester.

The trees were in their first green leaves, Hester could almost smell their freshness in the air. The grass was growing long; as soon as the daffodils had died back then Joseph would scythe it and rake the clippings away. The branches in the orchards were bobbing with their twigs bursting into leaf and the buds thickening with the promise of flowers to come. It should have been a joyous place; but Hester walked among the fertility and over-brimming life of it like a woman chilled to the bone and weary nearly to death.

She walked to the end of the garden and looked out across the pond. It was years since she had brought Johnnie here to feed the ducks, years since they had sat in the little waterlogged boat and he had rowed her backwards and forwards and told her that he would undoubtedly be a great sailor as his grandfather had been – chasing pirates in the Mediterranean, sailing to the very icy doors of Russia. And now she was the wife of another travelling Tradescant and she thought that this would be the year that she would have to find the courage to face the fact that John was never coming home.

Since he had left she had received only one letter, to say that he was leaving Jamestown and going to build his house further up the river and that she should not expect to hear from him again for some time. Then she had received a consignment of Indian rarities and a couple of barrels of plants, badly packed, and badly shipped, which told her that it was not John who had seen them loaded on board. Since then – nothing. And now there was news of an Indian uprising and Jamestown attacked, and all the planters all along the river scalped and skinned and butchered.