Johnnie shook his head. ‘Weary,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t born to be a huckster. I hate it. How they do go on, don’t they? And the smaller the plant the more ado they make about the price.’

John laughed eagerly. ‘Yes. It’s been a long business. But tomorrow we’ll go.’

‘And then they’ll pull it down and it will be as if it was never here,’ Johnnie said dreamily.

John tied the string of the purse and slipped it into his deep pocket. ‘Come on,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Before we are completely benighted.’

He marched briskly down the avenue with Johnnie keeping step beside him. They were warm by the time they saw the yellow light of the ale house and smelled the mixture of woodsmoke and frying bacon.

‘You go on,’ John said. ‘I’ll take this purse and put it in the goldsmith’s vault.’

Johnnie nodded and went ahead of his father. John stood back and watched his son walk away. ‘Johnnie!’ he suddenly called.

The young man hesitated and turned, his face a pale blur in the twilight.

‘It’s being rid of the old to prepare for the new,’ John said. ‘A baptism. Not a funeral, you know.’

It was a melancholy business the next morning, for all of John’s forced brightness. They loaded the cart with leftover tools and the pots which they had filled with the rescued plants during their stay, and then they went round the garden and orchard and orangery in one final tour to see what had been overlooked.

The rose garden was a desert of pitted holes, like the face of a beloved woman pocked with scars. The very shape of the garden had gone, the trees which had given it a structure had been uprooted, the trellised arbours which had been pulled down as people cut off the climbing roses were left as smashed wood in the mud. The lavender borders were ragged, some plants missing, some trodden down. A few snowdrops which had struggled up at the base of the wall in the queen’s court had been crushed by someone in their haste to cut down a creeper. A pot had been dropped and smashed and the shards left where they lay, cluttering up the path. The whole palace, once so rosy in pink brick and so immaculately gardened, with smooth lawns and sculpted arbours, was now a tangle of overgrown hedging and churned mud. Even the bowling green which had been John’s great pride was pocked with weeds and the richer green of winter moss shone in moist patches among the paler green of weak winter grass.