A look of relief crossed her face. ‘We need a mother,’ she said. ‘I can’t lift Baby John now he’s so big, and I don’t always know what to do when he cries. If he were to be sick, like Mama was sick, I wouldn’t know how to care for him and he might die …’ She broke off and gulped on a sob. ‘We need a mother,’ she said earnestly. ‘A cook isn’t the same.’

‘I’m sorry,’ J said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I thought you would bring us one home from Virginia, with other things in the cart,’ she said childishly.

J thought for a moment of the girl, only a few years older than this one, thanked his luck that he had not been so misled as to bring her back here and burden himself with her care as well as that of his children. ‘There’s no-one in that country who could be a mother to you,’ he said shortly. ‘No-one who could be a wife to me here.’

Frances blinked back her tears and looked up at him. ‘But we need one. A mother who knows what to do when Baby John is naughty, and teaches him his letters.’

‘Yes,’ J said. ‘I see we do.’

‘Hester says breakfast is ready,’ she said.

‘Is Baby John at breakfast?’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Come.’

J took her hand and led her from the room. Her hand was cool and soft, her fingers were long and her palm had lost its baby fatness. It was the hand of an adult in miniature, not the soft plumpness of a little child.

‘You’ve grown,’ he observed.

She peeped up a little smile at him. ‘My uncle Alexander Norman says that I will soon be a proper young lady,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘But I tell him that I shall be the king’s gardener.’

‘You still want that?’ J asked. She nodded and opened the door to the kitchen.

They were all waiting for him at their places around the dark wooden table: the gardener and the two lads, the cook and the maid and the boy who worked in the house and the stables. Hester was at the foot of the table with Baby John beside her, still half-asleep, his drowsy eyes barely showing above the table top. J drank in the sight of him: the beloved boy, the Tradescant heir.

‘Oh, Father!’ Baby John said, mildly surprised.

J lifted him up, held him close, inhaled the sweet warm smell of sleepy child, hugged him tight and felt his heart turn over with tenderness for his boy, for Jane’s boy.