The man thrust his foot out and stopped the closing door. ‘I was certain you would give me a good price for this,’ he said. ‘There are other collectors who would pay handsomely. I was doing you the favour of coming to you first.’

‘I thank you for that,’ John said shortly. ‘But we won’t take anything that remains of the king.’ He hesitated. ‘He visited here himself,’ he said, as if it would make the decision clear. ‘It would not seem right to show pieces of him.’

The man shrugged, took his foot from the door and left. Hester closed the door and turned back to look at John.

‘That was well done,’ she said.

‘D’you think we’d ever have got Johnnie to work in the room with the king’s own blood in a jar?’ John asked irritably and went out to the garden, leaving his dinner untouched on the table.

Johnnie’s gloom did not lift as Hester had hoped that it might even when the warmer weather came. In March, when John was planting seeds of nasturtium, sweet pea, and his Virginian amaracock in pots of sieved earth in the orangery, Parliament declared that there would never more be a king or a queen set over the English people. Kingship was abolished forever in England. Johnnie came into the warm room with a small box in his hand, looking grave.

‘What have you there?’ John asked warily.

‘The king’s seeds,’ Johnnie said softly. ‘That he gave you to plant at Wimbledon.’

‘Ah, the melon seeds. D’you know, I’d forgotten all about them.’

A swift, burning glance from Johnnie showed that he had not forgotten, and that he thought the less of his father for his absence of mind. ‘It’s one of the last orders he must have given,’ Johnnie said softly, in awe. ‘And he sent for you by name, just to ask you to plant them for him. It’s like he wanted you to have a task, a quest, to remember him by.’

‘Just melons.’

‘He sent for you, he saved the seeds from his own dinner plate, and asked you to do it. He took the seeds from his own dinner, and he gave them to you.’

John hesitated, dismayed at the tone of worship in Johnnie’s voice. The scepticism which everyone in the country had shared when Charles the Cheat was lying and backsliding from his agreements had quite vanished at the man’s death when he became Charles the Martyr. John granted grudgingly that Charles had done better than anyone could have imagined in making the throne once more a sacred place; for here was Johnnie, who by rights should be disillusioned after a hopeless siege and a bad injury, with his eyes blazing at the thought of the dead king.