She stepped back from the horse’s head and let him go. He smiled at her as he passed out of the stable yard and round the path which led to the gate. As he rode out he had a sudden sense of joyful freedom – that he could ride away from his home or ride back to it and that everything would be managed without him. This was his father’s last gift to him – his father who had also married a woman who could manage well in his absence. John turned in his saddle and waved at Hester who was still standing at the corner of the yard where she could look after him.

John waved his whip and turned the horse towards Lambeth and the ferry. Hester watched him go and then turned back to the house.

The court was due at Oatlands in late October so John was busy as soon as he arrived planting and preparing the courts which were enclosed by the royal apartments. The knot gardens always looked well in winter, the sharp geometric shapes of the low box hedging looked wonderful thinned and whitened by frost. In the fountain court John kept the water flowing at the slowest speed so that there would be a chance for it to make icicles and ice cascades in the colder nights. The herbs still looked well, the angelica and sage went into white lace when the frost touched their feathery fronds behind the severe hedging. Against the walls of the king’s court John was training one of his new plants introduced from the Ark: his Virginian winter-flowering jasmine. On warm days its scent drifted up to the open windows above, and its colour made a splash of rich pink light in the grey and white and black garden.

The queen’s orangery was like a jungle, packed tight with the tender plants which would not survive an English winter. Some of the more handsome shrubs and small trees were planted in containers with loops for carrying poles and John’s men lifted them out to the queen’s garden at first light, and brought them in again at dusk so that even in winter she would always have something pretty to see from her windows. John placed a lemon and an orange tree, both trained into handsome balls, on either side of the door to her apartments, like aromatic sentries.

‘These are pretty,’ she said to him from her window one day as he was supervising the careful placing of some little trees in the garden below.

‘I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,’ John said, pulling off his hat, recognising the heavily accented voice of Queen Henrietta Maria at once. ‘They should have been in their places before you looked out.’

‘I woke very early, I could not sleep,’ she said. ‘My husband is worried and so I am sleepless too.’

John bowed.