‘And every man would have his own little piece of land and grow things?’

‘So they say.’ John smiled grimly. ‘It’s what I always wanted. It’s how I always thought things should be. And now it looks as if the army might destroy Parliament and do it.’

‘Turn on their masters?’

‘Why not? Didn’t Parliament turn on the king?’

‘Would they take from landowners like us? Tax us?’

John shrugged. ‘How would I know what they might do? They might think that these walls should be pulled down as any other.’

Hester nodded and turned back towards the house. He could tell by her slow stride that she was thinking. Halfway to the house she turned and came back to him.

‘I think we should be growing vegetables,’ she said. ‘That’s what they’ll be wanting now.’

The whole family helped in the restoration of the rarities to the room with the high Venetian windows and the smooth, polished floor. They wanted to return it to its previous state, they wanted it restored, without loss of beauty, without loss of richness, without loss of the glamour that hung around it: the scent of the skins, the delight of the multiplicity of things, the joy of the ordered jumble; the big things hanging from the ceiling, the tiny things in their cabinets, the exotic next to the mundane, the historic next to the inventions.

There were some terrible gaps in the collection. The coins had fared the worst and the items made of precious metals. Hester had made inroads into anything which had held its value during the war years and she could not conceal from John that there were trays of Roman and mediaeval coins which would never be stocked again.

Some things had suffered from damp. A triptych altar screen had been leaned against the ice-house wall and its bright colours had been leached away by the moisture of the brick. Many rare skins had rotted and decayed, and some of the woollen clothes were pitted with moth-holes. Vellum pages of illuminated manuscripts had been eaten by ants and the foul dirt of rats and mice was all over the cases which held the flowers dried in sugar.

‘I am sorry, I am sorry,’ Hester cried as one parcel after another was brought out into the light. ‘If I had only known that we would be safe I would never have hidden the things away.’

‘You didn’t know,’ John said generously. ‘And if the soldiers had suddenly swept through we could have lost everything in one night.’

Frances, her hair tied in a kerchief, and Johnnie in his gardening clothes gently beat the dust and the moths from the clothes, rugs and skins outside and then carried them in for Hester and John to rearrange and hang.