The Normans stayed at the Ark through the summer, but still Alexander grew no better. They all maintained the gentle fiction that he would improve when the colder weather came, as before they had pretended that he would be better when he felt the summer sun.

When he said he wanted to go home in August Frances did not argue with him, though the summer months were the most dangerous for the plague in the City. She simply sent the garden boy to the river to hail a boat to take them down to the Tower and told the stable lad to harness the cart.

‘He’s very ill,’ Hester cautioned her. ‘He’s too ill to make the journey. You should stay here.’

‘I know,’ Frances said simply. ‘But he wants to be home.’

‘Settle him in and as soon as he is feeling better you come back here,’ Hester said. ‘There’s plague in the City, I’d rather you were here.’

Frances shook her head. ‘You can see as well as I can that he will not feel better, even when he is home. I will stay with him until the end.’

‘Oh, Frances.’

‘I knew that this was likely to happen when I married him,’ Frances said. Her eyes were filled with tears but her voice never faltered. ‘And he knew it too. We were neither of us such fools as to think that I would not lose him. We were prepared for this from our wedding day. He warned me of it. I have no regrets.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Hester decided. ‘You’ll need someone to run the house while you nurse him.’

‘Thank you,’ Frances said. ‘I’ll want you with me.’

Alexander died in his bed, as he had wanted, with Hester at the foot of the bed and Frances holding his hand. He whispered something and she could not hear what he said. She leaned a little closer to hear the words.

‘What is it, my love? Say it again?’

‘You were the sweetest –’ he paused for a breath and Frances leaned a little closer. ‘The sweetest flower in all of John’s garden.’ He smiled at her for a moment, then he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

Frances buried her husband in the church where they had been married and walked back to her house with her father and stepmother on either side of her.

Hester had ordered in a dinner from the nearby bake-house and Alexander’s apprentices, his family from Herefordshire, and his friends from the City drank to his memory, ate their dinner and then left.

The house was oddly silent without the tapping of hammers from the yard and continual rasp of the saws.