It had started to rain, an icy, penetrating drizzle, and the clouds sat heavily on the roof of the palace. The glass had been stolen long ago from the windows, or smashed by the successive troops quartered in the palace, and the smell of damp plaster and decay seeped into the courts from the derelict building.

‘Let’s go,’ John said. ‘Everything is finished here.’

Johnnie nodded in silence and followed his father to the cart. He climbed on to the box and took the reins of the horse which should have been his war horse, to drive away from the palace which should have been the king’s. The avenue was long gone, felled for timber. They drove between pale stumps where grand trees had once shaded the road.

‘That was a miserable task,’ John said heartily, hoping that Johnnie would agree and that they might share the sadness and then put it behind them.

‘It was burying him and his hopes all over again,’ Johnnie said sombrely; and then said nothing more.

Summer 1651

Johnnie did not forget the melon bed at Wimbledon. Of the consignment he had sent north to Charles Stuart he had kept one fruit back and from it he had another batch of seeds which he insisted on planting in the Lambeth seed bed, and, when they were grown, insisted on taking to Wimbledon.

‘You could grow them here now,’ Hester remarked to him reasonably when she saw him loading the earthenware pots into a carrying basket. ‘There’s no point in taking them all that way.’

‘Of course I must plant them at Wimbledon,’ he said passionately. ‘It was his request.’

‘The garden must be overgrown.’

‘It’s running to seed,’ he said, ‘and the glass has been stolen from the windows of the house. But you can see it was a lovely place, you can tell it was one of our gardens. Every now and then I come across some special flower struggling through the weeds. Father’s Virginian foxgloves, and grandfather’s chestnuts in a little avenue in one of the courts.’

‘We can’t do anything about it,’ she said. ‘We have to leave the old places behind us. Your father gardened for years at Hatfield and after he left he never went back and it was the same at New Hall. Oatlands will be nothing more than a name in a year or two, in a few years no-one will even remember where it was.’

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I just plant the melons. I don’t deny that everything is changed for the moment.’

‘You don’t change,’ she observed.

For a moment his melancholy lifted. He shot her a small, roguish smile as if he hardly dared to trust her with the hope that he kept hidden. ‘Well, everything might change back again one day, mightn’t it? And then I will be glad that I kept faith.’