When Alexander went back to the City he left Frances at her father’s house. The warmer weather had brought the plague into London again and there was talk of it being the worst for many years. The poorer people had gone without fuel and proper food through the hard winter, and when the warm plague winds blew they had no strength to fight the infection. Within months the plague carts were going up and down the narrow streets all night and the white crosses were appearing on door after door. Alexander could do nothing to protect himself but stay in his house and work in his yard, and ban his apprentices from going out as much as possible. But he would not expose Frances to infection.

John found he was absurdly overanxious about his daughter. She looked so like her mother as she grew rounder and her face took on a glow as her pregnancy progressed. He did not want to speak of Jane to his second wife, and he did not want the shadow of her death to hang over the house. He took to spending long hours in the garden, not coming in until the slow early summer dusk, and he found that while he was digging, weeding, and transplanting the Virginian seedlings he was turning over in his mind the different sorts of love a man can have: for his work, for the girl he married for love, for the children she bore him, for the woman he married for convenience, and for the woman he loved hopelessly, helplessly, completely.

He even acknowledged at last his love for the king, the foolish, selfish, intractable master who had so persistently known less and understood less than his servants. John had thought all the loves were threads which pulled him one way and another and would be, as Attone had warned him, a rope to trip him up. But as he walked back to his house past the tulip beds, and saw the shape of their cupped petals against the greater darkness of night, he thought that perhaps the threads could be the warp and woof that wove into the fabric of his life, and made him what he was, a man who had loved very deeply in different ways; and that the different loves were not a betrayal, but a richness.

He was pinching out the buds on the cherry trees in the orchard one day in June when he saw Johnnie come flying out of the kitchen door, and rush to the stable. A moment later he was pulling the saddle horse out of the stall and jumping on her back, bare-back, and trotting out of the yard.

‘What is it?’ John shouted. He slid down the ladder and ran towards the house. ‘Is it Frances?’

He ran into the kitchen and found the cook boiling a pan of water. ‘Is it Frances?’ he demanded.