They paid the boatman and retraced their steps to the Tower. Alexander Norman’s timber yard was beside the walls of the Tower on the grounds of a former convent. His house was built alongside, one of the long, thin townhouses pressed against the narrow street. Hester had feared that Frances would be unhappy without a garden, with little more than a dozen pots in the cobbled yard at the back which was overshadowed half the day from the stacks of wood in the timber yard next door. But already the house was draped in climbing roses and honeysuckle was growing up to the very windows, and every window had a bracket fixed outside and a square planting box nailed to the wall with a row of tulips waiting to bloom.

‘I’d have no trouble guessing which house was hers,’ John said grimly, glancing down the street at the other bare-fronted, bare-faced houses.

‘That’s nothing,’ Johnnie said with pleasure. ‘She has a herb garden out the back and an apple tree squashed against the back wall. She says she’ll prune it to keep it small enough. She says she’ll re-pot it every year and prune the roots too.’

John shook his head. ‘She needs a dwarf apple tree,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if one could graft an apple sapling on to a shrub root it might grow small …’

Hester stepped forwards and knocked on the door. At once Frances opened it. ‘Father!’ she said, and slipped down the step, threw her arms around him and laid her head against his shoulder.

John almost recoiled from her touch. In the three years he had been away she had grown from a girl to a woman of nearly eighteen years, and now, with her slight body pressed against him, he could feel the hard swelling of her baby.

He stepped back to see her and his face softened. ‘You’re so like your mother,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a beauty you’ve become, Frances.’

‘She’s the very picture of my Jane.’ Mrs Hurte emerged from the house and shook John and then Hester by the hand. She enveloped Johnnie in a breathtaking embrace but never stopped talking. ‘The very picture of her. Every time I see her I think she has come back to us again.’

‘Come inside,’ Frances urged. ‘You must be frozen. Did you shoot the bridge?’

‘Father wouldn’t let Mother come.’

Frances shot a brief approving look at her father. ‘Quite right. Why should Mother risk drowning because you like it?’

‘She likes it!’ Johnnie protested.

‘I swear I never said so,’ Hester remarked.