The ships will supply us when we are in Colchester and an army is coming to our aid from out of East Anglia. There is no doubt that we will win.

My love to Frances and her husband. You can ask Alexander to delay his supply of barrels of gunpowder as a favour to me. I hope you are all well. Your loving and dutiful son – John.

‘He signs himself John, not Johnnie,’ Hester observed.

‘He sounds well,’ John answered.

They stood, cheek to cheek in the hall, both of them reading the short letter, and then reading it again.

‘She’s a good horse, she’ll keep him safe,’ John said.

‘He doesn’t sound very happy with the troop.’

John relinquished the letter into her hands and turned towards the garden. ‘How could he be? A boy who has seen so little of the world, suddenly ridden off to war?’

‘Should you fetch him home?’ Hester asked.

John paused, hearing the longing in her voice. ‘I cannot,’ he said.

She would have argued but he raised his hand to check her. ‘Don’t reproach me, Hester, it means as much to me as it does to you to see my son enmeshed in this war. I have prayed just as hard as you that we would be at peace before he reached his manhood. I thought it was over. I was sure it was over. But I can’t fetch him home like a naughty schoolboy. He has to walk his own path.’

He looked at her and saw the blank agony on her face.

‘He is my son!’ she said passionately. ‘Joking about gunpowder.’

John paused, bleak with worry, nodded, and went out to his garden.

July 1648

Frances was at the Ark for the plague months of the summer and Hester found that her stepdaughter’s company was the only one she could bear, as they waited for news of Johnnie. The war was favouring the king and she could hope that Johnnie would march into London as part of a triumphant royal army. In July the Scots confirmed in the most dramatic way that they had changed sides and were now for the king, when they crossed the border with an army of nine thousand men to fling against the battle-weary, underpaid, disillusioned forces of Parliament.

It was an appallingly wet summer. The roses in the garden filled with rain and rotted in their blooms. The strawberries and raspberries were washed into sodden pulp on their stems. Hester spent the days watching the rain pour down the great panes of Venetian glass in the rarities room, looking out at the flooded garden, at her husband splashing around ankle-deep in mud, digging ditches to drain the sodden land into the stream outside the house which was already bubbling over the little bridge and still rising.