He turned from the horse and came to the door of the stable and took her cold hands in his. ‘Hester, my wife, my love,’ he said. ‘We have lived our lives in some of the wildest and strangest times that this country will ever see. Don’t deny me the chance to fight just once, on the side I believe in. That, in a way, I have always believed in. I have spent my life wavering from one view to another, from one country to another. Let me be wholehearted for this, just once. I know that Lambert is right. I know that what he wants for this country, a balance of power and justice for the poor, is what this country needs. Let me go and fight under his standard.’

‘Why is it always fighting?’ she cried passionately. ‘I can’t bear it, John. If you should be lost …’

He shook his head. ‘I want to go back,’ he said simply. ‘I want to go back to Edgehill where the king was first defeated in the first war. I was never there. I ran from it, just as I ran from the war of the Powhatan in Virginia.’

She would have interrupted him, sworn that it was not a war, sworn that he was not a man who ran from conflict, but he stopped her.

‘It was not that I was afraid, I’m not saying that I ran like a coward. But there was nothing that I saw clearly enough to die for. I knew the king was in the wrong; but I pitied him. I knew the queen was a fool; but she was a charming fool. I didn’t want to see her driven into exile. I think of her now sometimes, and I can’t believe that she has been brought so low. Many women are feather-brained and yet they don’t pay for their folly as she has had to pay. The cause didn’t seem wholly right to me. It didn’t seem wholly clear to me. Right up to the scaffold when they took him out and beheaded him, it didn’t seem quite right to me.’

Hester would have pulled her hands away from him but he held her fast. ‘You’re talking like a royalist,’ she said hotly.