‘Frances has it too,’ Hester said. ‘That ability to love without doubts. For her it’s Alexander, she’s not interested in following a master. But that talent to love a man and his cause is a gift, I really admire it. The more so, I suppose, because it’s not one that I share. I’m ashamed to say that I am a complete turncoat. I spent much of my early life at court and most of my family and friends were of the king’s party; but all I care for now is peace so that we can sell plants and show the rarities.’

‘It’s a gift that comes with a price to pay,’ John observed. ‘Johnnie can’t accept that the king is dead and that it is all over. I had hoped that General Lambert would have turned him into a Parliamentary man if not a Leveller. I would rather have had him in love with liberty than with a dead king.’

‘He’ll grow out of it,’ Hester said comfortably. ‘They were hard years for him. For all of his boyhood he was sure that Prince Rupert would win the war for the king. He thought that King Charles would triumph up to the very last moment. I think even after Colchester he still thought the king might win. But he knows it is all over now.’

In June Johnnie took the king’s melon seedlings in their final largest pots on the cart to the river and loaded them on to a little wherry to take them upriver to Wimbledon. He went alone, he did not even tell his father that he was going, anticipating correctly that John had hoped that the seedlings had been forgotten and might be raised among the others in the melon beds at the Ark.

Johnnie took with him some planks of wood to build the frame, his dinner of bread and cheese in his pocket, a saw and a hammer, and a handful of nails in his belt.

‘Building a house and planting a garden?’ the ferryman asked with a grin.

Johnnie did not smile in reply. ‘I am on an errand,’ he said solemnly. ‘An errand for my master.’

At the manor house he found the garden running to seed and the kitchen garden overgrown. But there was a warm south-facing wall and Johnnie spent the morning setting in his timber framework and banking up earth for the melon bed. Finally he planted the precious seedlings with a good space between each one, and then painstakingly ferried water from the kitchen-yard pump in the empty clay pots with his finger stopping the hole at the bottom.