Hester was hoping that the Scots would march south quickly and relieve Colchester as their first objective. They swept over the border looking like a conquering force and reached Preston Moor, just a mile north of Preston, without anyone standing against them. But there they were met by the Parliament army commanded by Cromwell himself with John Lambert at his side, commanding the cavalry. When Hester heard that it was John Lambert against the only men who could rescue her son, she put her head in her hands at the kitchen table and stayed very still for a long while, as if she were asleep.

When the news reached Colchester of the Scots’ defeat there was no hope left for them. The garrison surrendered to a harsh and unforgiving victor. The war was over, the king defeated once more; and the Tradescants had nothing to do but to wait and see if Johnnie would come home, or if he would be among the many hundreds who would never come home again.

Hester left her place at the Venetian window and put a chair and a table at the front door, which overlooked the road from Lambeth. She put her sewing basket on the table and appeared, to any casual passer-by, as if she were sitting at her work and enjoying the September sunshine after the wet summer days. Only John and Frances knew that the shirt she held in her lap was no further forward by the end of September than it had been on the black day that Colchester surrendered.

Autumn 1648

A carter brought him home, a man who had visited the Ark in his boyhood and remembered it as a palace of treasures, and had a fondness for the Tradescant name. Johnnie, pale, jolted by the rough roads, terribly thin, and with a dark, ill-healing scar from his hipbone to his rib, lay in the back on a heap of sacks.

Hester heard the rumble of the wheels and glanced up from her idle hands holding the unsewn shirt and then dropped her work, overturned her chair and flew out of the front door and into the road.

‘Johnnie!’ she exclaimed as she peered over the tailboard.

He managed a little smile. ‘Mother.’

‘Drive around to the back,’ Hester ordered the driver, her months of passive silence quite forgotten. She jumped up on to the step of the cart, her eyes fixed on her stepson, and held on as they jolted over the little bridge, went past the terrace of the house and into the stable yard. John, picking apples, looked towards the house and saw the cart turning into the yard with his wife clinging like an urchin to the tailgate. He leaped down from the ladder and walked towards the house. He did not run. He feared too much what might greet him.