She was afraid, very afraid, and she had been afraid every market day since Parliament had been recalled and the king had come home defeated from the war with the Scots. The women would not always serve her, they overcharged her and leaned on the scales when they were weighing out flour. And the apprentice boys ran after her and called out names, and when the stone had struck her back she had thought it would be the first of a hail of stones which would hit her and knock her from the box of the wagon and beat her down in the street.

‘Hester! Hester!’ John held her as the storm of crying swept over her. ‘My dear, my dear, my little wife!’

She broke off from crying at once. ‘What did you call me?’

He had not been aware of it himself.

‘You called me little wife, and your dear –’ she said. She rubbed her eyes, but kept her other hand firmly on his collar. ‘You called me dear, you’ve never called me that before.’

The old closed look came down on his face. ‘I was upset for you,’ he said, as if it was a sin to call his own wife an endearment. ‘For a moment I forgot.’

‘You forgot that you had been married before. You treated me like a wife you are … fond of,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I am glad,’ she said softly. ‘I should like you to be fond of me.’

He disengaged himself very gently. ‘I should not forget I was married before,’ he said firmly, and went into the house. Hester stood beside the cart, watching the kitchen door closing behind him, and found she had no more tears left to cry but only loneliness and disappointment and dry eyes.

Summer 1641

Hester did not go to market again all summer. And she had been right to fear the mood of the village of Lambeth. The apprentice boys all ran wild one night and the fever was caught by the market women and by the serious chapel goers, who made a determined mixed mob and marched through the streets shouting, ‘No popery! No bishops!’ Some of the loudest and most daring shouted, ‘No king!’ They threw a few burning brands over the high walls of the empty archbishop’s palace, and made a half-hearted attempt at the gates, and then they broke the windows down Lambeth High Street at every house that did not show a light at the window for Parliament. They did not march down the road as far as the Ark and John thanked God for the luck of the Tradescants, which had once again placed them on the very edge of great events and danger and yet spared them by a hair’s breadth.