Hester pressed her finger to her lips and then put it down, as if making a fingerprint in sealing wax on the J at the end of the letter. John was coming home to her. She found she cared not at all that he was coming home penniless, without plantation, or tobacco, or pride. She cared not at all that he was trapped in a foreign land and could not even earn his passage home. All that mattered was that John was coming home, at last.

She sat only for a few minutes in the light of the window and then she set to raising the money to send him at once. Twenty pounds was a substantial sum. Fortunately the letter had come in September, the very time for the sale of tulip bulbs, and the order for John Lambert had been despatched only a week before. Any day now she expected his payment.

Hester threw a shawl over her head and went out to the terrace. Johnnie was working with Joseph, lifting and labelling the tulip bulbs from their beds. When she called him and he looked up she saw his face was still dark with sorrow.

Johnnie’s hero Prince Rupert had failed to keep Bristol for the royalists though he had promised his king he would hold it for months. The wildest rumour was circulating: that Rupert had played the king false on purpose. They were saying that he and his brother, the Elector Palatine, now eating his dinner in London at the expense of Parliament having stolidly changed his coat and abandoned his uncle, had conspired all along to have one brother on each side so that they would profit whichever side won. Some people even said that Rupert hoped for the throne of England himself.

Ever since the news had come in of the fall of Bristol Johnnie had come down to breakfast with red eyes, and he had been quiet and moody all the day. When Hester wanted him for work in the garden she had to find him first, and half the time he would be down at the little lake, sitting in the rowing boat, adrift in the middle, slumped in despair over the dripping oars.

‘How are the tulips?’ she asked.

He nodded, as if he could not take joy even in them. ‘They’ve done well. For every bulb that went in, we are raising three. It’s been a good year for tulips, if for nothing else.’

Joseph nodded. ‘I’ve never seen such a crop,’ he said. ‘Something’s going right at least.’

‘More than one thing,’ Hester said. She tied the ends of the shawl crosswise around her waist and thought it felt like a tight and loving embrace. ‘I have a letter here from Virginia.’

The shadow left Johnnie’s face and he jumped to his feet from the bed of tulips. ‘He’s coming home?’

‘He’s coming home,’ she assented. ‘At last.’