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John wheeled around and stared at him, and the man held his gaze, half a question on his face which was an insult. John spoke a hasty word and was about to strike the man when a serving maid ran between the two of them, a basin in her hand, blinded with hurry.

“What’s the matter?” John asked.

“It’s the king!” she exclaimed. “His fever has risen, and his piss is blue as ink. He is as sick as a dog. He is asking for his physicians but he has only Lady Villiers to attend him.”

“Asking for his physicians?” the man demanded. “Then the duke must send for them, to bring them back.”

“He will do,” John said uncertainly. “He is bound to do so.”

He went to Buckingham’s chamber, and found the duke seated by the window gazing at his own reflection in the darkened glass, as if it would answer a question.

“Shall I ride out and fetch the physicians?” John asked him quietly.

The duke shook his head.

“I heard the king was asking for them.”

“He is well nursed,” Buckingham said. “If anyone should ask you, John, you may tell them that he is well cared for. He needs rest; not a dozen men harrying him to death.”

“I’ll tell them,” John said. “But they tell me that he is asking for his physicians and your mother is not a favorite.”

The duke hesitated. “Anything else?”

“That’s enough,” John warned him. “More than enough.”

“Go to sleep,” the duke said gently. “I am going to bed myself in a minute.”

John shucked off his breeches and shoes, lay down in his shirt and was asleep in moments.

There was a hammering on the bedroom door in the early hours of the morning. John started out of sleep, leaped from his bed and ran, not to the door, but to the duke’s bed, to stand between him and whoever might be outside battering the door down. In that first moment, as he pulled back the bed curtains, he saw that the younger man was not asleep but was lying open-eyed, as if he were silently waiting, as if he had been wide awake and waiting all night.

“All’s safe, Tradescant,” he said. “You can open the door.”

“My lord duke!” the shout came. “You must come at once!”

Buckingham rose from his bed and threw a cape around him. “What’s to do?” he called.

“It’s the king! It’s the king!”

He nodded and swiftly went from the room. John, pulling on breeches and his waistcoat, ran behind him.

Buckingham went swiftly through the door to the antechamber but the guards barred John’s way.

“I’m with my lord,” John said.

“No one goes in but the prince and the Villiers: mother and son,” the guard replied. “His orders.”

John fell back and waited.

The door opened and Buckingham looked out. His face was pale and grave. “Oh, John. Good. Send someone you can trust to fetch His Grace the Bishop of Winchester. The king needs him.”

John bowed and turned on his heel.

“And come back here,” Buckingham ordered. “I have need of you.”

“Of course,” John said.

The court was subdued all day. The king was worse; there could be no doubt of it. But the countess was said to be confident. She was applying another plaster, the king was feverish; she was certain her cure would draw the heat from him.

In the evening a message came that the Bishop of Winchester was too ill to travel. “Get me another bishop,” Buckingham said to John. “Any bloody bishop will do. Get me the nearest, get me the quickest. But get me a bishop!”

John ran down to the stables and sent three menservants riding out to different palaces, with three urgent summonses, and then went back to the gallery outside the king’s rooms to wait for the duke.

He heard the long low groan of a man in much pain. The door opened and Lady Villiers came out. “What are you doing here?” she demanded sharply. “What are you listening for?”

“I am waiting for my lord,” John said quietly. “As he bid me.”

“Well, keep others off,” she ordered. “The king is in pain; he does not want eavesdroppers.”

“Is he getting better?” John asked. “Has his fever broken?”

She gave him an odd, sideways smile. “He is doing well,” she said.

The fever did not break. The king lay sweating and calling for help for two more days. Buckingham said that John could go back to New Hall but he could not bear to go until he had seen the end. The court went everywhere on tiptoe; the flirting and gambling had ceased. Around the somber young prince was an aura of silence — everywhere he went people fell quiet and bowed their heads. The courtiers longed to recommend themselves to him; some of them had sided with his father against him, some of them had laughed at him when he had been a tongue-tied weakly younger son. Now he was the king-to-be, and only Buckingham had completely accomplished the great balancing act of being the greatest friend of the father and the greatest friend of the son.

Buckingham was everywhere. In the sickroom, watching at the king’s bedside, walking with Prince Charles in the garden, moving among the men at court giving a word of reassurance here, a carefully judged snub there.

The Bishop of Lincoln arrived from his palace and was shown in to the king. The whisper came out of the sick chamber that the king, too ill to speak, had assented to the prayers by raising his eyes to heaven. He would die a true son of the English church.

That night John lay in Buckingham’s chamber listening to the quiet breathing, and knew his master was affecting sleep but was wide awake. At midnight the duke got up from his bed, pulled on his clothes in the darkness and went softly out of the bedchamber. John lost all desire for sleep, sat up in his bed and waited.

He heard the sound of a woman’s light footstep down the corridor and then her knock on the door. “Mr. Tradescant! The duke wants you!”

John got up, pulled on his breeches and hurried to the king’s chamber. Buckingham was standing at the window embrasure, looking out over Tradescant’s garden. When he turned from the night to face the room his face was alight with excitement.

“It is now!” he said shortly. “At last. Wake the bishop, and bring him quietly. And then wake the prince.”

John went through the maze of wood-lined corridors, tapped on the bishop’s door and forced his sleepy servant to wake His Grace. When the bishop came out of the room, robed in his vestments and holding King James’s own Bible, John led him through the servants’ hall, past sleeping men and dogs which growled softly as they went by. Only firelight illuminated their way and the moving silver moon which tracked their path through the great high windows.

The bishop went into the chamber. John turned and ran along the broad wood-paneled corridor to the prince’s apartments.

He knocked on the door and whispered through the keyhole. “Your Highness! Wake up! The duke told me to fetch you.”

The door was flung open and Charles came quickly out, wearing only his nightshirt. Without saying a word he ran down the corridor to the king’s chamber and went in.

The palace was completely quiet. John waited outside the royal chamber, straining his ears to hear. There was the low dismal mutter of the last rites, and the prayers. Then there was a silence.

Slowly the door opened and the duke came out. He looked at Tradescant and nodded as if a difficult task had been well done.

“The king is dead,” he said. “Long live His Majesty King Charles.”

Charles was at his shoulder, looking stunned. His dark eyes fell unseeing upon Tradescant. “I did not know…” he said at once. “I did not know what they were doing. Before God, I had no idea that your mother…”

Buckingham dropped to one knee and John followed his example.

“God bless Your Majesty!” Buckingham said swiftly.

“Amen,” Tradescant said.

Charles was silenced; whatever he might have said would never be spoken.

Spring 1625

Three hours later Prince Charles was proclaimed king at the gate of Theobalds Palace, and stepped into the royal coach to ride in state to London. Buckingham, the Master of Horse, did not follow tradition by taking the place of honor, heading the train that rode behind the royal coach. Buckingham walked into the royal coach a mere half-pace behind His Majesty and rode like a prince himself at the new king’s side. Tradescant followed in the long train of the household, closing his ears to the general gasp of horror at his master’s presumption.

They drew up at St. James’s Palace in the afternoon and John waited for his orders. At first he could not find Buckingham’s chamber and waited in the hall. The palace was in complete confusion. King James had been expected to stay hunting at Theobalds for many days, and go afterward to Hampton Court. In his absence his palace had closed down for cleaning and refurbishing. There was no food in the kitchens and no fire in the chambers. The few housekeeping staff who did not travel with the king had been spring cleaning and had swept up the strewing herbs from the floor, and taken down the curtains from the windows and the tapestries off the walls. Serving men and maids ran everywhere, trying to prepare the palace for the new king and his train and do in moments what usually took days to accomplish, delayed all the time by the storm of gossip that was running around the royal courts, explaining how the king had fallen sick, how the Villiers mother and son had nursed him and excluded all others and how the king had died under their care.

A feast had to be prepared and the comptroller of the royal household had to use all his cash and all of the new king’s credit to buy in food, and set everyone in the kitchen — from the scullions laboring over the bellows to get the kitchen fires alight to the great master cooks — preparing and cooking food so that a king newcome to his kingdom might sit down to his dinner.

A great press of people invaded the palace to see the new king and the first man in the land: the Duke of Buckingham. The poorer people came just to see him, they liked to watch their betters eat, even when their own bellies were empty; and hundreds of others had complaints about taxes, about land ownership, about injustices, which they were eager to place before the new king. When King Charles and his duke came pushing through the hall Tradescant was forced to the back behind dozens of shouting demanding people. But even there, as he was fighting for a space in the crowd, his master looked over the bobbing heads and called to him.

“John! You still here? What did you stay for?”

“For your orders.”

Men craned around to see who had taken the duke’s attention and Tradescant fought his way forward.

“Oh — forgive me, John. I have been so busy. You can go to New Hall now. Call at the docks on the way and get my India goods. Then go home.”

“Your Grace, you have no chamber prepared for you here,” John said. “I asked, and there is none. Where shall you sleep? Shall I go to your London house and bid the lady, your mother, make ready for you? Or shall I wait and we will go to New Hall together?”

The duke looked across to where the young king was moving slowly through the crowd, his hand extended for people to kiss, acknowledging their bows with a small gesture of his head. When he saw Buckingham watching him he gave him a private, conspiratorial smile.

“Tonight I sleep in His Majesty’s chamber,” the duke remarked silkily. “He needs me at his side.”

“But there is only one bed—” John started, then he bit back the words. Of course a truckle bed could be found. Or the two men could sleep in comfort in the big expanse of the royal bed. King James had never slept alone; why should his son do so if he wanted company?

“Of course, my lord,” John said, careful to ensure that none of his thoughts appeared in his face. “I shall leave you, if you’re well served.”

Buckingham gave John his sweet satisfied smile. “Never better.”

John bowed, and pushed his way to the back of the hall and out into the dusk. He wrapped his borrowed cloak around his shoulders and went outside to the stables. The horses were tired after the day’s journey but he had no intention of riding hard. He chose a steady-looking beast and mounted.

“When are you back with us, Mr. Tradescant?” a groom asked.

John shook his head. “I’m going to my garden,” he said.

“You look sick,” the man remarked. “Not taken the king’s ague, have you?”

John thought for a moment of the old king’s long heartsickness for Buckingham, and the net of half-truths and deceptions which were the very heart of court life. “Maybe I have a touch of it,” he said.

He turned the horse’s head eastward, and rode down to the docks. There was only one cartload of goods waiting to be unloaded. He saw it packed on a wagon and ordered it to follow him down the lanes to New Hall, irritated all the way at the noise and the lumbering slowness of the cart in the muddy lanes. His hat pulled low over his eyes, his coat collar turned up against the light cold spring rain, John sat heavily in the saddle, and kept his thoughts on the seasonal tasks of planting and weeding. He did not want to think about the new king, about his great friend the duke, or the old king who had died, a healthy man aged only fifty-nine years, from a slight fever, under their nursing, after his doctors had been sent away. If evil had been done there were men whose duty it was to make accusations. It was not John’s duty to accuse his master or his king, not even privately in his anxious conscience.

Besides, John was not a man who could live with a divided loyalty in his heart. If evil had been done Tradescant had to be blind to it, and deaf to it. He could not love and follow a master and set himself up as judge of that master. He had to give his love and his trust and follow blindly — as he had followed Cecil, as it had been possible to follow Cecil — a master who might bend all the rules but whom you could trust to act only for his country’s gain.

John reached his home in the cool light of the early evening and found Elizabeth in the kitchen, preparing supper for J. “Forgive me,” John said shortly, coming into the house and taking and kissing her hand. “I was called away in haste and I had no time to send you word. Afterward there were great deeds going on, and I was rushed.”

She looked curiously at him but the usual warmth was missing. “J was told that you had gone with the duke to Theobalds at a moment’s notice,” she said. “So I knew you were on another errand for him.”