The young woman called Hester Pooks has a substantial dowry and is a sensible woman. I have spoken to her about you and I believe she would make a good wife to you and a good mother to the children. She is not another Jane, because there never could be another Jane. But she is a straightforward, kind young woman and I think you need one such as her.

Of course it is your decision. But if I had lived long enough to see your return I would have introduced her to you with my earnest recommendation.

Farewell my son, my dear son,

John Tradescant.

J sat very still and watched the kindling twigs in the fire flicker and turn to knotted skeletal lace of dry ash. He thought of his father’s determination and his care, which showed itself in the meticulous nursery and seed bed, in pruning and weeding and in the unending twisting and training of his beloved climbing plants, and showed itself here too, in providing a wife for his adult son. He felt his irritated sense of thwarted independence melt before his affection for his father. And at the thought of the gardens being left to him in trust for another John Tradescant coming behind them both he felt the anger inside him dissolve, and he slipped to the floor and rested his head in his father’s chair and wept for him.

Frances, coming in a little later, found her father composed and seated in the window where he could look out at the cold horse chestnut avenue and the swirls of fog in the early-morning darkness.

‘Father?’ she said tentatively.

He turned and held out his arms to her and she ran into his embrace. He brought her close to him and felt the light tiny bones of her body and smelled the warm clean smell of her skin and hair. For a moment he thought vividly and poignantly of Suckahanna, who was no heavier but whose every muscle was like whipcord.

‘You’ve grown,’ he said. ‘I swear you are nearly up to my chest.’

She smiled up at him. ‘I am nine,’ she said seriously. ‘And Baby John is bigger than when you left. And heavier. I can’t lift him now he’s five. Hester has to.’

‘Hester does, does she? D’you like Hester?’

He thought she looked at him as if she needed help in saying something, as if there were something she could not say. ‘Yes.’

‘Your grandfather thought she might marry me, he thought she might be a mother to you.’