Virgin Earth (12 page)

“They say he is an engrosser,” Elizabeth remarked. “Not a wood or a common is safe from his fences. He takes it all to himself.”

“It is his own,” John said stoutly. “He takes what is his by right. Only the king is above him, and God above him.”

Elizabeth gave him a skeptical look but kept her thoughts to herself. She was too much like her father — a clergyman of stoutly independent Protestantism — to accept John’s spiritual hierarchy which led from God in heaven down to the poorest pauper with each man in his place, and the king and the earl a small step down from the angels.

“I fear for myself too,” John said. “He has given me a purse of gold and ordered me to buy and buy. I am afraid of being cheated, and I am afraid of shipping these plants so far. He wants a garden all at once, so I should buy plants as large and fruitful as I can get. But I am sure that little sturdy ones might travel better!”

“There’s no one in the kingdom better able than you,” Elizabeth said encouragingly. “And he knows it. I just wish I might come with you. Are you not afraid to go alone?”

John shook his head. “I’ve longed to travel ever since I was a boy,” he said. “And my work for my lord has tempted me every time I go down to the docks and speak to the men who have sailed far overseas. The things they have seen! And they can bring back only the tiniest part of it. If I might go to India with them or even Turkey, just think what rarities I might bring home.”

She watched him, frowning slightly. “You would not want to go so far, surely?”

John put his arm around her waist to reassure her, but could not bring himself to lie. “We are a nation of travelers,” he said. “The finest of the lords, my lord’s friends, are all men who seek their fortunes over the seas, who see the seas as their highway. My lord himself invests in every other voyage out of London. We are too great a nation with too many people to be kept to the one island.”

Elizabeth was a woman from a village that counted the men who were lost to the sea, and tried to keep them on the land. “You don’t think of leaving England?”

“Oh, no,” John said. “But I don’t fear to travel.”

“I don’t know how you can bear to leave us for so long!” she complained. “And Baby J will be so changed by the time you come back.”

John nodded. “You must note down every new thing he says so that you can remember to tell me when I return,” he said. “And let him plant those cuttings I brought for him. They are his lordship’s favorite pinks, and they smell very sweet. They should grow well here. Let him dig the hole himself and set them in; I showed him how to do it this afternoon.”

“I know.” Elizabeth had watched from the window as her husband and her quick dark-eyed dark-haired son had kneeled side by side by the little plot of earth and dug together, John straining to understand the rapid babble of baby talk, Baby J looking up into his father’s face and repeating the sound until between guesswork and faith they could understand each other.

“Dig!” Baby J insisted, thrusting a little trowel into the earth.

“Dig,” his father agreed. “And now we put these little fellows into their beds.”

“Dig!” Baby J insisted again.

“Not here!” John said warningly. “They need to rest quiet here so that they can grow and make pretty flowers for Mama!”

“Dig! J want dig!”

“Not dig!” John replied, descending rapidly to equal stubbornness.

“Dig!”

“No!”

“Dig!”

“No! Elizabeth! Come and take your son out of this! He is going to destroy these before they even know they’ve been transplanted!”

She had come from the house and swept Baby J up, and taken him down to the end of the garden to pet Daddy’s horse.

“I don’t know that he will make a gardener,” she warned. “You should not count on it.”

“He understands the importance of deep digging,” John said firmly. “Everything else will follow.”

August 1610

John set sail in September, and experienced a rough and frightening crossing after waiting for four dull days off Gravesend for a southerly wind. He landed in Flushing and hired a large flat-bottomed canal boat so that he could stop at every farm and enquire what they had to sell, all the way down the canal to Delft. To his relief the canal boatman spoke English even though his accent was as strong as any Cornishman’s. The boat was drawn by an amiable sleepy horse which wandered along the tow path and grazed on the lush banks during John’s frequent halts. He found farmers of flowers whose whole trade consisted of nothing but the famous tulips, and whose whole fortune rested on being able to produce and then reproduce the new colors of blooms. There were farms like John had never seen before. Row upon row of floppy-leaved stalks were tended by women wearing huge wooden clogs against the rich sandy soil, and big white hats against the sun, working their way down the rows with an implement like a wooden spoon, gently lifting the smooth round bulbs from the ground and laying them softly down, and the cart coming along behind to gather them all up.

John watched them. Each set of leaves which had grown from one bulb now had a cluster of three, perhaps even four, bulbs at the end of their white stems. Most of them even carried fat buds at the head where the petals had been and when the women spotted them, and they never missed one however long he watched, they cut them off and popped them in their apron pockets. Where one valuable bulb had been set in the ground and flowered there were now four, and maybe three dozen seeds as well. A man could quadruple his investment in one year for no more labor than keeping the field free of weeds and digging up his capital in the autumn.

“Profitable business,” John remarked enviously under his breath, thinking of the price he paid for tulips in England.

At every canalside market town he had the boatman tie up and wait for him on board, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, as he wandered around the market gardens and picked out a well-shaped tree, a sack of common bulbs, a purse full of seeds. Wherever he could, he bought in bulk, haunted by the thought of the rich green commonland and meadows around Hatfield waiting for forests and plantations and mazes and orchards. Wherever he could find someone who could speak English and had the appearance of an honorable man, he made a contract with him to send on more plants to England as they matured.

“A great planting scheme,” one of the Dutch farmers commented.

John smiled but his forehead was creased with worry. “The greatest,” he said.

Despite his rooted belief that Englishmen were the best of the world, and England undeniably the best country, John could not help but be impressed with the labor these people had put into their land. Each canal bank was maintained as smartly as each town doorstep. They took a pleasure and a pride in things being just so. And their rewards were towns which exuded wealth and a land which was interlaced with an efficient transport system that put the potholed roads of England to shame.

The dykes that held back the shifting sands and the high waves of the North Sea were a wonder to John, who had seen the feckless neglect of the marshes and waterlogged estuaries of the Fens and East Anglia. He had not thought it was possible to do anything with land soured by salt, but he saw the Dutch farmers had learned the way of it and were making use of land that an Englishman would call waste ground and abandon as hopeless. John thought of the harbors and inlets and boggy places all around the coast, even in land-hungry Kent and Essex, and how in England they were left to lie fallow, steeped in salt, whereas in Holland they were banked off from the sea and growing green.

He could not help but admire their labor and their skill, and he could not help but envy the Dutch prosperity. There was no hunger in the Holland Provinces, and basic fare was rich and good. They ate cheese on buttered bread, a double helping of richness and fat, and did not think twice about it. Their cows grazed knee-deep in lush wet pastureland and gave abundant milk. They were a people who saw themselves as divinely rewarded for their struggle against the papist Spanish, and John, idling down the narrow canals, looking left and right for plants and flowers tucked away in the moist grasses, had to agree that the Protestant God was a generous one to this, His favored people.

When they reached The Hague, Tradescant sent the loaded barge back with instructions to ship all the plants directly to England. He stood on the stone wharf and watched the swaying heads of trees glide slowly away. Some of the cherry trees were bearing fruit and he saw, with irritation, that once they were beyond hailing distance the bargee picked a handful and ate them, spitting the stones carelessly into the glassy water of the canal.

In Flanders he bought vines, and watched them pruned of their yellow leaves and thick black grapes in preparation for their journey. He ordered their roots to be wrapped in damp sacking and plunged into old wine casks for their voyage home. He sent a message ahead of them, in the careful script which Elizabeth had taught him, so that a gardener from Hatfield would meet them with a cart on the dockside, to take them back and heel them in the same day, without fail, making sure to water them religiously at dawn every day until Tradescant came home.

The Prince of Orange’s gardener admitted Tradescant to the beautiful garden behind the palace of The Hague and showed him around. It was a garden in the grand European style, with large stone colonnades and broad sweeping walks. Tradescant spoke to him of his work at Theobalds, planting between the box hedges and replacing the colored stones of the knot garden with lavender. The gardener nodded with enthusiasm and showed Tradescant his version of the changing style in a little garden at the side of the palace where he had used tidily pruned lavender for the hedges themselves. They made a softer pattern and had more variation of color than the usual box hedge. They did not harbor insects and when a woman passed by, her skirts brushed against the leaves and released a cloud of perfume. When he left, Tradescant had a trayful of rooted cuttings and a letter of introduction to the great physic garden at Leiden.

He traveled overland to Rotterdam, uncomfortable on a big broad-backed horse, all the way seeking out English-speaking farmers who could tell him about the growing of their precious tulips. In the darkened cellars of ale houses, drinking a rich sweet beer which was new to John, called “thick beer,” they swore that the new colors entered into the heart of the flowers by slicing into the very heart of the bulb.

“Does it not weaken them?” John asked.

The men shook their heads. “It helps them to split,” one of them volunteered. He leaned forward and breathed a blast of raw onion into John’s face. “To spawn. And then what do you have?”

John shook his head.

“Two, where you had one before! If they are of another color, and the color often enters at the split, then you have made a fortune a thousand times over. But if they are the same color but have doubled, then you have doubled your fortune at the least.”

John nodded. “It is like a miracle,” he said. “You cannot help but double your fortune every year.”

The man sat back in his seat and beamed. “And it’s more than double,” he confirmed. “The prices are steadily rising. People are ready to pay more and more each year.” He scratched his broad belly with quiet satisfaction. “I shall have a handsome house in Amsterdam before I retire,” he predicted. “And all from my tulips.”

“I shall buy from you,” John promised.

“You have to come to the auction,” the man said firmly. “I don’t sell privately. You will have to bid against the others.”

John hesitated. An auction in a foreign country in a language he did not understand was almost bound to drive up the price. One of the other growers leaned forward.

“You have to,” he said simply. “The market for tulips is all agreed. It has to be done in the colleges, in the appointed way. You cannot buy without posting a bid. That way we all know how much is being made on each color.”

“I just want to buy some flowers,” John protested. “I don’t want to post a bid in the colleges; I don’t understand how it is done. I just want some flowers.”

The first grower shook his head. “It may be just flowers to you, but it’s trade to us. We are traders and we have formed a college and we buy and sell in each other’s view. That way we know what prices are being charged; that way we can watch the prices rise. And not be left behind.”

“Prices are rising so fast?” John asked.

The grower beamed and dipped his face into his great mug of ale. “No one knows how high it can go,” he said. “No one knows. If I were you I would swallow my English pride and go to the college and post my bid and buy now. It will be dearer next season, and dearer the year after that.”

John glanced around the ale house. The growers were all nodding, not with a salesman’s desire for a deal but with the quiet confidence of men who are in an irresistibly rising market.

“I’ll take a dozen sacks of plain reds and yellows,” John decided. “Where is this college?”

The grower smiled. “Right here,” he said. “We don’t leave our dinner table for anything.” He took a clean dinner plate, and scribbled a price on it and pushed the plate across to John. The man at John’s elbow dug him in the ribs and whispered, “That’s high. Knock off a dozen guilders at least.”

John amended the price and pushed it back; the man rubbed the number off and wrote his own total. John agreed and the plate was posted on a hook on the wall of the room. The grower extended a callused hand.

“That’s all?” John queried, shaking it.

“That’s all,” the man said. “Business done in the open where everyone can see the posted price. Fairly done and well done, and no harm to either bidder or seller.”

John nodded.

“A pleasure to do business with you, Mr. Tradescant,” said the grower.

The tulips were delivered to John’s inn the next day and he sent them off with a courier under strict orders that they were not to be out of his sight until he had put them into the Hatfield wagon at London dock. He also sent a letter to Meopham with his love and a kiss for Baby J, and news that he was going on to Paris.