She left her hands in his, enjoying the warmth of his callused palms. ‘You say that, but you are like a boy setting out on an adventure,’ she said shrewdly. ‘You want to be in the heart of things, my husband. Don’t deny it.’

John gave her a roguish grin and then kissed her quickly on both cheeks. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s true. Let me go with your blessing?’

She was breathless with the sudden casual embrace and felt herself flushing. ‘With my blessing,’ she repeated. ‘Of course you have my blessing. Always.’

He swung himself into the saddle and let the horse walk out of the yard. Hester put her hand to her cheek where his lips had briefly touched, and watched him go.

He had to wait for a place on the horse ferry at Lambeth, and then the traffic on the City side of the river was busier than he had ever seen it. There were hundreds of people milling around in the narrow streets, asking for news and stopping ballad sellers and pedlars of news-sheets to demand what they knew. There were armed groups of men marching down the road, pushing people aside and demanding that they shout, ‘Hurrah! for the king!’ But then down another road would come another group shouting, ‘Hurrah! for Pym! No bishops! No Papist queen!’

John drew his horse back into a sidestreet, fearful of being caught up in a fight, when he saw two of these groups heading towards each other. But the royalists wheeled off quickly to one side, as if they were on an urgent errand that took them away; and the others took care not to see them, and not to give chase. He watched them go and saw that they, like himself, were not ready for a fight yet. They didn’t even want a brawl, let alone a war. He thought the country must be filled with men like himself, like the honest Member of Parliament for Yeovil, who knew that they were in the grip of great times, and wanted to take their part in the great times, who wanted to do the right thing; but were very, very far from knowing what the right thing might be.

John’s father would have known. He would have been for the king. John’s father had had a straightforward faith that his son had never learned. John made a wry face at the thought of the certainties of the man and of his own confused layering of doubts, which left him now still mourning one woman, half in love with another, and married to a third; in the service of a king while his heart was with the opposition; always torn both ways, always on the fringe of everything.