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of the sweetest-smelling. He knew, because his Tess had made it.
    One glimpse of her. One word. One of each, and then I’ll seek out Burbage and watch my son make his debut before the Queen.
    He tried the door – bolted within. But its lintel had handholds which he knew because he had gouged the bricks himself for the purpose. The wall was topped by shards of broken pottery because this was Southwark; but when he’d placed them there at Tess’s behest, he’d left himself a passage through. He found it now, put one leg across; perched there, swinging his other leg over. Readying – a mound of raked leaves below would break his fall – he saw movement. Steadying, he saw her.
    He had chosen not to breathe in the sour alley; here, he had no choice. The first sight of her always stopped his breath and it mattered little whether they had been apart for a year or for a month, as now. Each renewed sight a link in a chain of breathlessness back to that first sight of her thirteen years before. In another garden, this one belonging to the house they both served, the Earl of Essex’s, and the countess’s youngest lady-in-waiting looking back with a combination of bewilderment and desire that was a mirror for his own.
    Forbidden, of course. However much the earl valued him and his sword, John Lawley was merely a soldier, with Tess a gentleman’s daughter. Forbidden . . . and thus all the more impossible to resist. The courtship was brief; the passion, due to the necessities of war, briefer. A single night that created one life and changed several.
    He only discovered he was a father on his return from war a year later. Discovered too that, fleeing the shame she’d brought on her family, Tess was already mistress of the Spoon and Alderman, purchasing the lease with the aid of the Countess of Essex, who had always loved her. Over the years since there had been some nights when that passion had again been impossible to resist. But on each subsequent morning, his proposal was declined. ‘I will never marry,’ she’d declare, steel in voice and eye. ‘What is good enough for our sovereign is good enough for me.’
    I will never marry, he thought, as he watched her move to a different raised parterre, bend again. ‘Tess,’ he called, as he dropped from the wall, landing on the wet leaves, rolling off them and on to his feet a few paces from her.
    She gave a cry, swiftly suppressed. She clutched snowdrops to her, vivid white against the damask gown she was wearing, one he’d never seen. He thought that strange, her attire. As proprietress of the tavern, she wore an apron to protect her from spilt food and ale. In the garden, she wore a smock against the dirt. This new dress was rich crimson-dyed wool, a brocaded front studded with river pearls. And her thick russet-brown hair, usually poorly gaoled within wooden combs, was held now by tortoiseshell brevets, not a hair astray.
    Her eyes, however, were the same. Green as springtime meadows, widening now in shock, while eyebrows that usually shaded the meadows like summer hedgerows had been thinned to a line.
    ‘John,’ she cried, those eyes moving from him to the wall behind. ‘Are you pursued?’
    ‘Not this time.’
    ‘No?’ Her brow contracted. ‘Then why did you not enter by the front door?’
    ‘Because there were men at it, preventing entrance.’
    ‘Only of drunks.’ She looked at him more closely. ‘Are you drunk, John?’
    He was not . . . but neither was he entirely sober. So he just shook his head.
    Her gaze moved over his borrowed clothes, his rough-hewn beard. ‘’Tis a miracle then – for rumour had you drunk as a lord from Twelfth Night till the eve of Lent.’
    Rumour? When he’d striven to keep his debauch discreet by seeking the perimeter taverns? ‘Well, I am not sho now,’ he slurred. ‘So. Now.’
    ‘Indeed?’ She walked past him, turning along one of the gravel paths that ran between the parterres, stopping before the brick wall that