John walked towards her, his face numb, his voice lost, then he cleared his throat and said quietly, conversationally, ‘I found him. He’s drowned. I’m fetching the cart now.’

She nodded, as calm as he, and Mary Ashmole, watching the two of them, thought them completely insensible, thought that they could not have loved their son at all to be so indifferent to his death.

‘I thought so,’ Hester said gently. ‘I knew as soon as I saw the boat, just as you did. I’ll ready the parlour for him.’ She paused. ‘No. He should lie in the rarities room. He was the most precious thing this house ever had.’

John nodded and went with that strange, slow plod round to the stables where, for a fancy, he did not harness the workhorse, but he took Caesar out of his stable and put him between the shafts of the cart to bring his master home.

They buried him beside his grandfather and his mother at St Mary’s, Lambeth. The new vicar was kind enough not to ask how a fit young man came to drown while boating on his own lake. It was assumed that Johnnie had been drunk, or had hit his head as he fell from the boat. Only John knew that the boat had not been overturned but had been floating peacefully with the oars shipped. Only John knew that his son’s pockets had been filled with broken pieces of flower pots. Only Hester knew that Johnnie had believed that there was no place for the king’s gardeners in England any more. But they neither of them told the other these insights. They both thought that the other had pain enough.

Spring 1653

They could not easily recover. No family can ever fully recover from the loss of a child, and this was a child who had survived infancy during plague years, a childhood during the king’s wars, two dangerous battles, and then died when the country was at peace. For a little while they were like lost people, they greeted each other at mealtimes and they went to church together, past the beautifully carved tombstone for John’s father and the little crosses which marked Johnnie’s and his mother’s graves, and they spoke hardly at all.

The meetings of the philosophers and scientists which had made the Ark the centre of intellectual life were broken up and moved elsewhere. John found he could not concentrate on any argument for more than a few moments, and anyway everything seemed meaningless.

Even the uproar which greeted the end of the long Parliament and Cromwell’s sudden decision to make a parliament of saints, nominated good men of recognised opinions and sanctity who would bring about the changes which the country so badly needed, failed to raise John from his passive dreaming.