Winter 1645, England

In October Frances and Alexander Norman came upriver to Lambeth to stay for two nights. Hester urged them to stay longer but Alexander said he dared not leave his business for too long, the war must be coming to an end, every day he was sending out new consignments of gunpowder barrels and there were rumours that Basing House had fallen to Cromwell’s army at last.

It was not that it was such a strategic point, not like Bristol – the second city of the kingdom – which Prince Rupert had lost only the month before. But it was a place which had captured people’s imagination for its stubborn adherence to the king. When Johnnie knew that Rupert was dismissed from the king’s service, Basing House became his second choice. It was to Basing House where he planned to run and enlist. Even Hester, with memories of a court which were not all of play-acting and folly but which also had moments of great beauty and glamour, longed to know that whatever else changed in the kingdom Basing House still held for King Charles.

It was owned by the Marquess of Winchester, who had renamed it Loyalty House, and locked the gates when the country around him went Parliamentarian. That defiance seemed to Hester a more glorious way to spend the war than gardening at Lambeth and selling tulips to Parliamentarians. Inigo Jones, who had known Johnnie’s grandfather and worked with him for the Duke of Buckingham, was safe behind the strong defences of his own design at Basing House, the artist Wenceslaus Hollar, a friend of the Tradescants, and dozens of others known to Hester had taken refuge there. There were rumours of twenty Jesuit priests in hiding and a giant of seven feet tall. The marchioness herself and her children were in the siege and she had refused free passage out of the besieged house but decided to stay with her lord. She had engraved every window pane of the house with the troth ‘Aimez Loyauté’ so that as long as the house stood and the panes were unbroken it would carry a record that one place at least was always unwaveringly for Charles.

‘I am as bad as Johnnie, for I long to be there,’ Hester confessed to Alexander. They were seated either side of a small fire in the parlour. In the windowseat Frances and Johnnie were playing cards for matchsticks. ‘These are the people I knew from girlhood. It feels wrong to be here in comfort while they are facing the guns.’

‘They were freer to choose than you,’ Alexander said comfortingly. ‘You gave your word to John to protect the Ark. And anyway, you have played your part. When the royalist uprising came to your door you lent your horse and did the best you could.’

Hester snorted. ‘You know how willing that was!’