John walked across the little bridge that spanned the stream at the side of the road and then crossed to the acreage on the other side. He had planted a thick holly hedge as a windbreak and to shield the plant beds from curious passers-by and he thought this year he might trim it to make it thicken out and to square off the top like a handsome green wall. He paused for a moment and looked upwards. It would take more than a week of work to cut back the top boughs of the hedge and it would be a painful, awkward job. He smiled at the thought that at least Johnnie would be at home to help him, and then he opened the door set between brick lintels in the hedge and went into the garden.

It was part physic garden, part vegetable plot, a new sort of garden for a new age which prized science and medicine more highly than luxury and prettiness.

But from ingrained habit, John had made his herb and vegetable beds in a pattern like a knot garden, and they were strictly aligned to a central point where he had dug a deep hole, lined it with clay and filled it with water to use as a dipping pond for watering the garden. The beds nearest the pond were all planted with the rarer and more tender herbs that the College of Physicians had asked him to grow. He had planted the edges with lavender to keep insect pests away, and because lavender was a good paying crop, the flower heads could always be sold to the perfume-makers and the apothecaries. Further away from the central pond radiated other geometrically shaped beds growing greens and brassicas, onions, peas, turnips, purple-flowered and white-flowered potatoes – the food crops of the country gardens which John was breeding and cross-breeding, trying to rid them of their tendency to blight, trying to find the largest and the most nutritious.

If ever they were visited by one of the more dour radicals or sectaries who complained of the riot of wealth and colour in the rarities room or in the garden around the house, John would bring him over here and show how, in these beds, he was using his skills in the service of the people and of God.

Johnnie was at the far end of the garden where they had planted row upon row of saplings, ready for sale, and where they had a chestnut tree at each corner. White sheets were laid under the trees and Johnnie came every day at dawn and dusk to get the very best of the nuts before the squirrels ate them.

‘Hey!’ John called from the door to the garden. ‘Message from Alexander.’

Johnnie looked up and came through the garden at a run, his face ablaze with joy and hope. ‘The king’s reached York? I can go to him?’