Uncharacteristically, Hester did not throw a piece of sacking over her cap and go out to help him. She sat at the desk without books before her, without sewing in her hands. She did not even talk to the few visitors who came to see the rarities, though with the river in flood and the country at war again, they might as well have shut the Ark for all the money they took. Hester sat in silence, watching the rain, Frances in silence at her side.

The news came that the English royalist troops had come under attack on the road to Colchester and had had to rush into the town for shelter. There was a brief and terrible battle as the royalists were driven back into the town, before they got the town gates shut and the Parliamentary soldiers locked out. Hundreds of men were killed in close fighting which was bloodier and more bitter than any known in England before. The names of the hundreds of individual soldiers killed in that spiteful skirmish were lost. Hester sat watching the rain, not knowing if her stepson was alive, or face down in the mud outside the gates of Colchester.

It was not a siege, it was a massacre-in-waiting. General Fairfax with John Lambert was commanding the Parliament army and he had ringed the city with a rampart and ditch with ten forts studding the perimeter. No-one would be able to get out alive. The whole city was not just besieged, it was completely entrapped.

‘John Lambert is there?’ Hester asked when Frances brought a news-sheet and read the report of the siege.

‘Yes,’ Frances said, and looked at her mother.

‘What times these are: that John Lambert should be in one army and my boy in another,’ Hester said very softly.

There was another royalist army raised at Kingston upon Thames, commanded by Lord Holland, supported by the Duke of Buckingham, the son of the Tradescants’ old master. John had scowled at the mention of his name and stamped out to lay sandbags at the front door of the Ark. The road to Lambeth was completely under water and the little stream before the house had burst its banks and was spreading over the road and into the Tradescants’ orchard. John was fearful that the River Thames itself would flood and bring salt water to contaminate his land on the north side of the road but there was nothing he could do to prevent it.