‘She’ll have a good settlement,’ Alexander said suddenly. ‘When I go. She’s well provided for.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘The cooperage will go to my manager, but he’s agreed a price to pay her, and signed a deed. It’s all agreed. She can keep the house if she likes but I thought she’d rather live somewhere else than at the Minories.’

‘I’ll look after her,’ John said. ‘It’ll be as she wants.’

‘She should marry again,’ Alexander said. ‘A younger man. These are better days now, at last. She can take her pick. She’ll be a wealthy young widow.’

John looked cautiously at him, but Alexander spoke without bitterness.

‘I’ll take care of her,’ John repeated. ‘She won’t make a mistake with her choice.’ He paused for a moment. ‘She didn’t make a mistake last time. Though I disagreed at the time. She made no mistake when she chose you.’

Alexander gave a little laugh which turned into a cough. John held his cup till the paroxysm passed and then gave him another sip of the drink. ‘Kind of you,’ he said. ‘I knew it wasn’t your choice. But it seemed like the best life she could have at the time.’

‘I know it,’ John admitted. ‘I know it now.’

The two men sat in companionable silence for a moment.

‘All square then?’ Alexander asked.

John proffered his hand and gripped Alexander’s own. ‘All square,’ he said fairly.

Summer 1657

Elias Ashmole and the physicians, mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, geographers, herbalists and engineers returned to the Ark to argue, discuss and exchange ideas, on the first Sunday of every summer month. By common accord they avoided the subject of politics. It looked to most men as if Cromwell meant to make himself king. Most of the opposition to him had been dispersed, paid or bullied into silence. General George Monck, another turncoat royalist, held down Scotland for the Lord Protector with a heavy hand and the dour efficiency of the professional soldier. Cromwell’s own son Henry held down Ireland. The Cromwells were becoming a mighty dynasty, and the old idealism was lost in the difficulties of ruling a country where any freedom for the many was feared by the powerful few.