John put his hand on his son’s shoulder and felt the strong sinew and bone. He did not see how he could explain to Johnnie that the whim of a man accustomed all his life to command should not be read as significant. Charles the Last had a fancy to pretend that he might live to eat the melons which would be planted at Wimbledon in the spring, and it was no trouble to him that a servant should go all the way from Windsor to Lambeth and back again to fetch John, and that John should go all the way from Lambeth to Windsor and then home again to enact that fancy.

It would never have occurred to him that it might be inconvenient for a man no longer in his service and no longer paid a royal wage to be summoned once more to unpaid work. It would not have occurred to him that his behaviour was arrogant or wilful. It would not have occurred to him that by naming John as his gardener and entrusting him with the commission he would identify him as a royal servant at a time when royal servants were regarded with suspicion. He had put John to inconvenience, he might have put him in grave danger – he would simply never have thought of it. It was a whim and he was always a man who was happy that others should service his whims.

‘Would you like to plant them?’ John asked, seeking a way out of this dilemma.

Johnnie’s face showed the rush of his emotion. ‘Would you let me?’

‘Of course. You can plant them up, if you like, and when they are ready we’ll transplant them to the melon beds.’

‘I want to make melon beds at Wimbledon,’ Johnnie said. ‘That’s where he wanted them to be.’

John hesitated. ‘I don’t know what’s happening at Wimbledon,’ he said. ‘If Parliament wants me to continue working there, then of course we can make a melon bed. But I’ve heard nothing. They may sell the house.’

‘We have to do it,’ Johnnie said simply. ‘We cannot disobey his command, it was his last order to us.’

John turned back to his nasturtiums and surrendered. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said. ‘When they’re ready for planting out we’ll take them to Wimbledon.’

Slowly, life began to get back to normal. There was a gradual increase of takings at the door from visitors to the rarities room and orders in the book from the new men who now found themselves in possession of the sequestered estates of royalists who were dead or fled or living quietly in poverty. The new men, officers from Cromwell’s army and the astute politicians who had stood against the king at the right time, walked into some fine houses and gardens running to seed which might be restored to beauty.