Virgin Earth (11 page)

John’s smile never wavered but his face was dark with regret. “There won’t be another child,” he said. “There will only ever be this one. So we will name him as we wish, and he will be John Tradescant, and I will teach him how to garden.”

Gertrude paused. “Not another child?” she asked. “How can you say such a thing?”

He nodded. “I called the apothecary from Gravesend. He said that she could not manage another birth, so we shall only ever have this, our son.”

Gertrude came back into the room and looked again into the cradle, shocked out of her normal irritability. “But John,” she said softly. “To have to pin all your hopes on just one child! No one to bear your name but just the one! And everything to be lost if you lose him!”

John rubbed his face as if he would rub away his scowl of pain. He leaned over the cradle. The baby’s sleeping fists were as tiny as rosebuds, his dark hair a little crown of fluff around his head. A tiny pulse like a vulnerable heartbeat at the center of his skull. John felt a deep passion of tenderness so powerful that his very bones seemed to melt inside him.

“It’s as well I am used to growing rarities,” he murmured. “I have not a dozen little seedlings to watch; I shall never have more than this one. I just have this one precious little bud. I shall nurse him up as if he was a new flower, a rarity.”

January 1610

“It is done.” Robert Cecil found Tradescant on his knees in the Theobalds knot garden. “I was looking for you. The king wants to call Theobalds his own this year. We are to leave.”

John rose to his feet and rubbed the cold earth from his hands.

“What are you doing?” the earl asked.

“Relaying the white stones,” John said. “The frost disturbs them, throws up dirt and spoils the pattern.”

“Leave it,” he ordered peremptorily. “The king’s gardeners can worry about it now. He wants it, he has pressed me for it, he hinted a hundred thousand different ways, and Rochester pushed him on every time he might have stopped. I’ve fended him off for three years but now I’ve given it to him, God damn it. And now he’s happy, and Rochester is happy, and I have Hatfield.”

Tradescant nodded, his eyes on his master’s face. “You shall make me a splendid garden there,” Robert Cecil said rapidly, as if he were almost afraid of John’s calm silence. “You shall go abroad and buy me all sorts of rarities. How are the chestnuts coming along? We will take them with us. You shall take anything you want from the gardens here, take them with us and we shall start again at Hatfield…”

He broke off. Still John watched him, saying nothing.

The most powerful man in England, second only to the king himself, took two hasty steps away from his gardener and then turned back to face him. “John, I could weep like a babe,” he confessed.

John slowly nodded. “So could I.”

The earl held out his arms and John stepped into them and the two men, the one so slight and twisted, the other so broad and strong, wrapped each other in a deep firm hug. Then they broke apart, Cecil rubbing his eyes on the sleeve of his rich jacket while John cleared his throat with a harsh cough. John offered his arm and Cecil took help and leaned on his man. The two of them walked from the knot garden side by side.

“The bath house!” the earl said quietly. “I’ll never manage anything like it at Hatfield.”

“And the tulips I’ve just put in! And snowdrops, and lenten lilies!”

“You’ve planted bulbs?”

“Hundreds last autumn, for a show this spring.”

“We’ll dig them up and take them with us!”

John shook his head in silent disagreement but said nothing. They walked slowly toward the ornamental mount. A stream played beside the path on a bed of white marble pebbles. John hesitated. “Let’s walk up,” the earl said.

Slowly the two men followed the twisting path. John had pruned the rambling roses which bordered the path on either side and they lay flat and tidy like withy fencing. Cecil paused for breath, and to ease the pain of his lame leg, John put his arm around his master’s waist and held him steady. “Go on,” Cecil said and they walked slowly side by side round and round the little hill. There were a few foolishly early buds on the roses; John noticed the deep crimson of new shoots, red as wine. At the top of the hill there was a round lovers’ seat, with a fountain plashing in the middle. Tradescant swung his cape down for his master to sit, and the earl nodded for John to sit beside him, as an equal.

The two men looked out across the palace gardens spread below them like a tapestry map. “Those woods!” the earl mourned. “The trees we have planted.”

“The bluebells underneath them in springtime,” John reminded him.

“The orchards, my peach-tree wall!”

“And the courts!” Tradescant nodded at the smooth grass laid out in every courtyard of the rambling palace. “There isn’t grass like that anywhere else in the kingdom. Not a weed in it, and the mowing team trained to go to half an inch.”

“I don’t see any mud in the knot garden,” Robert Cecil remarked, looking at the garden as it was meant to be viewed — from on high.

“There isn’t any
now,”
John said with rare impatience. “Because I’ve been washing the stones in freezing water all morning.”

“I shall be sorry to lose the hunting,” the earl said.

“I shan’t miss the deer eating my young shoots in spring.”

The earl shook his head. “You know they say that this is the fairest garden in England? And the greatest palace? That there never was and never will be a palace and garden to match it?”

John nodded. “I know.”

“I couldn’t keep it,” the earl said. “It’s his revenge on my father for the execution of his mother, you know. He wanted to take my own father’s house, his pride and his joy. What could I say? I hedged and twisted and turned and showed him other men’s houses. It’s my own fault. We built it too grand and too beautiful, my father and I. It was bound to draw out envy.”

John shrugged. “It is all the king’s,” he said simply. “The whole country. And each of us is nothing more than his steward. If he wants anything, we have to give it.”

The earl threw him a curious sideways glance. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

John nodded, his face open and guileless. “He is the king under God. I would no more refuse him than I would skip my prayers.”

“Please God he always has subjects as loyal as you.”

“Amen.”

“Leave washing the stones now and start preparing the plants for moving, and dig up those damned bulbs.” The earl got to his feet with a grunt of discomfort. “My bones ache in this cold weather.”

“I’ll leave the bulbs,” John replied.

The earl raised an eyebrow.

“You’ve given him the house and the grounds,” John said. “I can be generous too. Let the king have these tulips in spring and I shall go myself to the Lowlands to buy you a fine crop for Hatfield, as we planned. We can make a new garden at Hatfield; we don’t have to scrump from here.”

“A lordly gesture from a gardener?” Cecil asked, smiling.

“I have my grander moments,” John said.

Hatfield House in Hertfordshire had been the home and the prison of the young Elizabeth during the dangerous years of her half sister’s rule, when she had been a studious girl with a deep fear of the executioner’s axe. It had been Robert Cecil’s father who had come to her in the garden to tell her that she was now queen.

“I’ll keep the tree she was sitting under,” Robert Cecil said to Tradescant as they surveyed the quagmire the workmen had made in the building of the huge new house. “But I’m damned if I’ll do anything with that poky little hall. It can’t have been impressive even when it was new-built. I’m not surprised the queen was in the garden. Nowhere else to sit.”

“If you cut away all around it so that it stood on a hill instead of so low, you could make it into a banqueting hall for summer, or a masquing theater…”

The earl shook his head. “Leave it. An extra hall with its own kitchen and stables is always useful if someone important comes with a big entourage. Come and see the new house!”

He led the way up the garden, John following him slowly, looking everywhere with his quick perceptive glance. “Fine trees,” he remarked.

“They can stay,” the earl said. “Mountain Jennings does the park and a Frenchman has designed the garden. But you plant it.”

John suppressed an instant, unworthy pang of envy. “I’d rather plant a garden than design it anyway.”

“You know it comes to the same thing after the first summer,” Cecil said. “The Frenchman goes back to Paris, and you have a free hand then. Anything you don’t like, you can tell me it has died — I’m not likely to know.”

John chuckled, “I can’t see me lasting long in your employ if I kill off your plantings, my lord,” he said.

The earl smiled. “Never mind the plants, what about the new house?”

It was a large stately house, not as big as Theobalds, which was built as a palace and had sprawled to become a village, but it was a grand beautiful house in the new style, fit to display the staggering wealth of the Cecils, fit to welcome the prodigal luxury of the Jacobean court, fit to take its place as a great display house of Europe.

“Surrounded by great courts on every side,” the earl pointed. “A hundred rooms, separate kitchen and bake house altogether. I tell you, John, it has cost me nigh on thirty thousand pounds for the house alone, and I expect to spend as much again on the park and gardens.”

John gulped. “You’ll be ruined!” he said bluntly.

The earl shook his head. “The king is a generous master to those who serve him well,” he said. “And even to those who serve him ill,” he added.

“But sixty thousand pounds!”

The earl chuckled. “My money,” he said grimly. “My show house, and in the end my grand funeral. What else should I do with it but spend it on what I love? And what a garden we will make, won’t we, John? Do you want me to scrimp on the plantings?”

John felt his excitement rising. “Have you the plans?”

“Over here.” The earl led the way to a little outhouse, his boots squelching in the mud. “As soon as the workmen have finished you can sow grass here, get the place clean.”

“Yes, my lord,” John said automatically, looking at the plans spread out on the table inside.

“There!” Cecil exclaimed.

John leaned over. The parkland was so immense that the grand house, drawn to scale, showed as nothing more than a little box in the center. He ran his eye over the gardens. All the courts were to be planted with different flowers, each with their own ornate knot garden in different patterns. There was to be a great walk of espaliered fruit trees, and a grand water feature of a river running along a terrace edged with seats and planted with tender fruit trees in tubs. The water for the terrace was to be fed from a gigantic fountain splashing from a copper statue standing on a great rock. Farther away from the house were to be wooded walks and orchards, a bowling green and a mountain large enough to ride a horse up a winding path to the top.

“Will this ease your homesickness for Theobalds?” Cecil asked jokingly.

“It will ease mine,” John replied, looking at the magnitude of the plan and thinking, his imagination whirling, of how he would ever get the thousands of fruit trees, where he would buy the millions of plants. “Will it ease yours, my lord?”

The earl shrugged. “The service of a king is never easy, John. Don’t forget that. No true servant of a king ever sleeps well at night. I shall miss my old house.” He turned back to the plan. “But this will keep us busy into our old age, don’t you think?”

“This will keep us busy forever!” John exclaimed. “Where am I to get a thousand golden carp for your water parterre?”

“Oh!” Cecil said negligently. “Ask around, John. You can find a hundred pairs, surely! And they will breed if they are well kept, I don’t fear it!”

John chuckled reluctantly. “I know you don’t fear it, my lord. That is to be my job.”

Cecil beamed at him. “It is!” he said. “And they are reroofing a fine cottage for you here, and I shall pay you an increase. How much did I promise you?”

“Forty pounds a year, sir,” John replied.

“Call it fifty then,” the earl said genially. “Why not? I’m hardly going to notice it with the rest of these bills to pay.”

Summer 1610

John decided that Elizabeth and Baby J should remain at Meopham while he was traveling in Europe to buy the earl’s trees. Elizabeth protested that she wanted to live in the new cottage in Hertfordshire, but John was firm.

“If Baby J should be ill, or you yourself sick, then there is no one there who would care for you,” he said in the last days of August, while he planned and packed his clothes for the journey.

“There’s no one here in Meopham who would care for me,” she said inaccurately.

“Your whole family is here, cousins, sisters, aunts and your mother.”

“I can’t see Gertrude wasting much time on my comfort!”

John nodded. “Maybe not. But she would do her duty by you. She would make sure that you had a fire and water and food. Whereas at Hatfield I know no one but the workmen. Not even the house staff are fully at work yet. The place is still half-built.”

“They must be finished soon!”

John was incapable of explaining the scale of the project. “It looks as if they could build for a dozen years and never be done!” he said. “They have the roof on now, at least, and the walls complete. But all the inside fittings, the floors, the windows, there is all that to do. And the paneling is yet to come; there are hundreds of carpenters and woodcarvers on site! I tell you, Elizabeth, he is building a little town there, in the middle of a hundred meadows. And I must plant the meadows and turn them into a great garden!”

“Don’t sound so overawed!” Elizabeth said affectionately. “You know you are as excited as a child!”

John smiled, acknowledging the truth. “But I fear for him,” he confided. “It is a great task he has taken on. I can’t see how he can bear the cost of it. And he is buying property in London too, and then selling it on. I fear he will overstretch himself and if he gets into debt—” He broke off. Not even to Elizabeth would he trust the details of Cecil’s business arrangements, the bribes routinely taken, the Treasury money diverted, the men bankrupted by the king one day on charges of treason or offenses against the Crown whose estates were bought up by his first minister at knockdown prices the next.