The boat rocked, the current of movement which had washed Johnnie up to the surface slipped away and his face sunk out of sight again. For a moment John thought that he could order the world to stop, right there; just as he could command the gardener’s lad and then nothing that must follow would need to take place. He could say ‘stop’ and there would be no drowned child, no heartbreak, no end to the Tradescant line, no silence where Johnnie should have been singing, no terrible gulf where the young man should have been.

John waited for a long moment, trying to understand the reality and then the awful yawning enormity of his loss. The first step in his grief was the realisation that he could not measure it. His loss was too great for him to imagine.

The lad holding the rope stood like a statue, a dragonfly whirred noisily over the surface of the water and settled for a moment.

‘Go on then,’ John whispered as if this were not his work but he was obeying someone else. ‘All right. Go on.’

The lad put his weight on the rope and once again the boat glided towards the landing stage, towing its dreadful freight behind it. At the landing stage when it stopped with a bump, John said gently, ‘Tie it fast,’ and waited until the lad had done as he was told.

‘Take the pole,’ John said, proffering it, and when the lad had gripped one end of it, John stepped from the boat into the waist-deep water, felt his way along to the other end and gathered the body of his only son into his arms.

‘Step aside and wait,’ he said softly to the stable lad. The boy dragged his horrified stare from the waterlogged body and then obediently fled to the shelter of the apple tree where the wasps were feeding drunkenly on fallen fruit.

John waded for the shore, the weight of Johnnie making him stagger as they got clear of the water. He fell to his knees and cradled the white face in his arms and looked down into the sightless eyes and the pale lips.

‘My Johnnie,’ he whispered. ‘My boy.’

They sat together for a long time before John remembered that Hester would be waiting in painful anxiety and that there was much work for him to do.

He laid out the body and draped his jacket over his son’s face.

‘Watch by him,’ he said simply to the stable lad. ‘I’ll come back with the cart.’

Slowly he walked along the grassy ride and then turned up the main avenue to the house. He could see Hester pacing on the terrace but when she saw him and took in the slump of his shoulders and his wet clothing, and his missing jacket, she froze very still.