‘Do you forgive me?’ he said urgently into her hair. She smelled of hay from the stable and the clean, familiar smell of soap from her skin, and lavender from her linen. ‘Can you forgive me for leaving you so unkindly and then disappearing like that?’

‘It’s you that should forgive me for refusing to go with you,’ she said quickly. ‘And I regretted it, John.’

He tightened his grip around her. ‘I have been unfaithful,’ he said quickly, to get the confession over and done with before he was tempted to lie. ‘I am sorry.’

She rested her head against his shoulder. ‘That’s the past,’ she said. ‘And in another country. You have come home to me, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She craned her neck to look up into his sad, weary face and realised that he was wearing the same bewildered expression of pain as when they had first met and he had not recovered from the loss of his first wife. ‘What happened, John?’

For a moment he was about to answer her, then they were interrupted by the carter. ‘I can’t unload these on my own,’ he said flatly. ‘And I can’t afford to wait here all day while you two kiss.’

Hester turned with a laugh. ‘I’ll find Joseph to help you.’ She rang the bell which hung at the corner of the yard. ‘You go in, John, you must be frozen, and Johnnie will be longing to see you. He’ll be in the kitchen eating his breakfast.’

John hesitated at the kitchen door, suddenly shy and hardly knowing how to approach his son who had been a boy of nine when he left and was now a youth of twelve. He opened the door slowly and put his head around it.

Johnnie was seated at the scrubbed kitchen table, his bowl of porridge before him, absently spooning it into his mouth, his eyes on his book propped on his mug of small ale. John took in the sight of his son, the fair head with the cropped golden hair, the light hazel eyes, the long nose in the long face and the sweet innocent mouth. You could see his mother in his colouring and the joy in his face, but he was every inch a Tradescant.

He glanced up as the draught from the half-open door blew into the kitchen and put down his book as if he was about to greet his stepmother. Then he saw it was a man looking in at him, and he hesitated.

Very slowly he rose to his feet, very cautiously he looked. John opened the door fully and stepped into the doorway.

‘Father?’ Johnnie asked uncertainly. ‘Is it really you?’