John left his son collecting firewood for the empty grate and unrolling their travelling cloaks for beds as he prowled around the deserted palace.

The strangest thing was the quiet. Instead of a bustling royal court filled with folly and flirtation, shouted orders, voices calling and musicians playing, there was nothing but the occasional rattle of a shutter banging in the breeze and the insistent coo of the wood pigeons nesting in the trees. The stable yard, which had housed more than a hundred horses, was empty, straws blowing in the yard, the stalls heaped with dung, stale water in the troughs.

The great front door was shut and bolted. John tried the massive brass handle and then stepped back. The king was due in a few days, surely there should be servants inside setting the palace to rights. Not a face showed at the windows, there was not a movement in the courts.

John went around to the kitchen quarters and to the bake-house. The fires were out, the place was silent. A heap of ash and a few scattered utensils showed that the cavalrymen had dined before they left, but all the food had been eaten by rats or mice and their droppings were heaped even on the kitchen tables.

John shook his head in wonder at the desolation of the place, at its transformation from the pinnacle of the social life of the kingdom, with the queen singing about the platonic ideal and the king going hunting on his high-bred Arab horses, to this shell. He turned and trudged back across the bowling green to the silkworm house.

Johnnie had brought up the pots from the riverside.

‘Good lad,’ John said with pleasure, glad of the chance to set about his work and restore normality at least to the flowerbeds. ‘Let’s take these up to the royal court. At least that can be looking right in a couple of days.’

They worked hard, side by side, and John enjoyed his son’s company. The boy had inherited the Tradescant gift with plants, he handled them as if he loved the touch of the silky white roots, the caress of damp earth. When he hefted a pot in his hand he could tell from the weight whether it needed watering. When he tipped a plant out into his palm he never knocked the blooms. When he set it into a hole and pressed down the earth there was something about his touch which was both precisely judged, and quite unknowing.

‘You may be the greatest gardener of us all,’ John said at the end of the second day as they walked homewards with their tools over their shoulders. ‘I don’t believe I had your way with plants when I was your age.’

Johnnie gleamed. ‘I love the plants. Not so much the rarities,’ he said.

‘Not the rarities?’ John asked, amazed.