Virgin Earth (15 page)

“It means that you have given me a beautiful garden which I will treasure,” she said. She came into his arms and held him close. “And I thank you for it. I see now why the little patch at Meopham was not enough. I never thought of you making a cottage garden like you make grand gardens, my John, but you have given me a little beauty here.”

He smiled at her pleasure and bent his head and kissed her. Her lips were still soft and warm and he thought with rising desire that tonight they would bed in a new room and tomorrow wake to look out on the great parkland of Hatfield, and their new life would begin.

“We’ll see these trees grow strong,” he said. “And we’ll plant the chestnut sapling at the bottom of the garden and sit in its shade when we are old.”

She nestled a little closer. “And we’ll bide at home,” she said firmly.

John rested his cheek against her warm cap. “When we’re old,” he promised, disarmingly.

The very next day the earl himself came down to visit the Tradescants in their new cottage. Elizabeth was flustered and overawed by the grandness of the pony carriage with one footman driving, and another hanging on the back. She came to the gate and curtseyed and stammered her thanks. But John opened the gate and went out to stand at the carriage door as to an intimate friend.

“Are you ill?” he asked Cecil quietly.

Cecil’s face was yellow and the lines of pain were deeper than ever. “No worse than usual,” he replied.

“Is it your bones?”

“My belly this time,” he said. “I am sick as a dog, John. But I can’t stop work yet. I have a plan to reform the king’s finances despite himself. If I can get him to agree then I can sell the whole scheme to Parliament, and hand over to them the farming of benefits in return for a proper wage for the king.”

John blinked. “You want the king to be paid by Parliament? To be its servant?”

Cecil nodded. “Better than this endless haggling, year after year, when they demand that he change his favorites and he demands more money. Anything is better than that. You have to be a king rich in charm to survive holding out an annual begging bowl, and this king is not as the old queen.”

“Can you not rest and come back to it later?” John asked urgently.

The heavy-lidded eyes looked at him. “Setting up as apothecary, John?”

“Can you not rest?”

Cecil flinched as he stretched out his hand to his man, and John saw that even that small gesture cost him pain. He took the hand as gently as he would hold Baby J’s while he slept. Unconsciously, he put his other hand on top of it and felt how cool were the fingers and how sluggish the pulse.

“Do I look so sick?”

John hesitated.

There was a gleam of a smile on Cecil’s face. “Come, John,” he said in a half-whisper. “You always prided yourself on telling me the truth; don’t turn courtier now.”

“You do look very very sick,” John said, his voice very low.

“Sick to death?”

John snatched a quick glance at his master’s heavy-lidded eyes and saw that he wanted a true answer to his question.

“I have no skills, my lord, but I would think so.”

Cecil frowned slightly and John tightened his grip on the thin cold hand.

“I’ve so much more to do,” the Secretary of State said.

“Look to yourself first,” John urged him, and then heard himself whisper, “please, my lord. Look to yourself first.”

Cecil leaned forward and laid his cheek against John’s warm face. “Ah, John,” he said softly. “I wish I had some of your strength.”

“I wish to God I could give it to you,” John whispered.

“Drive with me,” the earl commanded. “Drive round with me and tell me what is planted and how it will be, even though neither of us will be here to see it. Tell me how it will be in a hundred years when we will both be dead and gone. Hale or sick, John, this garden will outlive us both.”

Tradescant clambered into the carriage and sat beside his master, one arm along the back of the seat as if he would protect him from the jolting movement. Elizabeth, forgotten at the gate of her new house, watched them both go.

“You have made me a velvet setting for my jewel,” Cecil said with quiet pleasure as the carriage moved slowly down the avenue of new-planted trees. “We have done well together, John, for a pair of youngsters learning our trades.”

May 1612

Cecil was dying in the great curtained bed in the master chamber of his new fine house. Outside his door, the household staff pretended to go about their work in a hushed silence, hoping to hear the muttered colloquy of the doctors. Some wanted to send him to Bath to take the waters — his last chance of health. Some were for leaving him in his bed to rest. Sometimes, when his door opened, the servants could hear the harsh laboring of his breath and see him propped up on the rich embroidered pillows, the brightness of their spring colors a mockery of his yellowing skin.

John Tradescant, weeping like a woman, was deep digging in the vegetable garden, digging without much purpose, in a frenzy of activity as if his energy and effort could put heart in the earth, could put the heart back into his master.

At midday he abruptly left his vegetable bed and marched determinedly through the three courts on the west of the house, up the allée, past the mount where the paths were rimmed with yellow primroses, out into the woodland side of the garden. The ground was a sea of blue as if the whole wood was deep in flood. John kneeled and picked bluebells with steady concentration and did not stop until he had an armful. Then he went to the house, careless of the mud dropping off his boots, up the stairs where his likeness in wood still stepped blithely out of the newel post, up to the master bedroom. A housemaid stopped him at the door to the anteroom. He would not be allowed further in.

“Take these, and show them to him,” he said.

She hesitated. Flowers in the house were for strewing on the floor, or for a posy to wear at the belt ot hatband. “What would he want with them?” she demanded. “What would a dying man want with bluebells?”

“He’d like to see them,” John urged her. “I know he would. He likes bluebells.”

“I’ll have to give them to Thomas,” she said. “I’m not allowed in, anyway.”

“Then give them to Thomas,” John pressed her. “What harm can it do? And I know it would please him.”

She was stubborn. “I don’t see why.”

John gestured helplessly. “Because when a man is going into darkness it helps him to know that he leaves some light behind!” he exclaimed. “Because when a man is facing his own winter it is good to know that there will still be springs and summers. Because he is dying… and when he sees the bluebells he will know that I am still here, outside, and that I picked him some flowers. He will know that I am still here, just outside, digging in his garden. He will know that I am here, still digging for him.”

The look she turned on him was pure incomprehension. “But Mr. Tradescant! Why should that help him?”

John grabbed her in his frustration and pushed her toward the anteroom. “A man would understand,” he growled. “Women are too flighty. A man would understand that he will be comforted to know that I am still out there. That even when he is gone, his garden will still be there. That his mulberry tree will flower this year, that his chestnut saplings are growing straight, that the new velvet double anemone is thriving, that his bluebells are blowing under the trees of his woods. Go! And get those bluebells into his hands, or I shall have words to say to you!”

He thrust her with such force that she went at a little run to Thomas, who was standing outside the bedroom door, waiting for the orders from his master that never came.

“Mr. Tradescant wants these taken in to his lordship,” she said, thrusting her armful of blossoms at him. Their slim whippy green stems oozed sap like the very juice of life. She wiped her hand on her apron. “He says they’re important.”

Thomas hesitated at the eccentric request.

“D’you know what he said? He said that women are too flighty to understand,” she sniffed resentfully. “Impertinence!”

Thomas’s sense of male importance was immediately stimulated. He took the flowers from her, turned at once to open the door and crept inside.

A doctor was at the foot of the bed, another at the window, and an old woman, part nurse, part layer-out, was at the fireside where a small fire of scented pine cones was crackling, pouring heat into the stuffy room.

Thomas came quietly forward. “Beg pardon,” he said hoarsely. “But his lordship’s gardener insisted he had these.”

The doctor turned irritably. “What? What? Oh, nonsense! Nonsense!”

“Nothing but folly and superstition,” said the doctor from the window. “And likely to spread noxious fumes.”

Thomas stood his ground. “It was Mr. Tradescant, sir. His Grace’s favorite. And he insisted, the maid said.”

Cecil turned his head a little. The dispute was instantly silenced. Cecil crooked a finger at Thomas.

The doctor waved him forward. “Quick. He wants them. But it won’t make a groat of difference.”

Awkwardly, Thomas stepped up to the bed. The aquiline face of the most powerful man in England was etched in sandstone and grooved by pain. He turned his dark eyes sightlessly toward the manservant. Thomas thrust the bluebells into the slack hands. They spilled onto the rich coverlet of the bed, blotting out the scarlet embroidery and the gold thread with blue, blue, nothing but sky blue.

“From John Tradescant,” Thomas said.

The light sweet scent of the bluebells poured like fresh water into the room, drowning the smell of fear and sickness. Their color shone like a blue flame in the dark chamber. The great lord looked down on the scattered flowers and inhaled their cold fresh perfume. They seemed to come from a world a hundred miles away from the overheated bedchamber, a clean spring world outside. He turned his head to the little window and his crumpled face stretched into a small smile. Though the casement was opened only the smallest crack, he could hear the thud of a spade into the flower bed beneath his window, loud as a faithful heartbeat, as John Tradescant and his master set about their different tasks: digging and dying.

October 1612

When they buried the earl, after dragging him to Bath for the cure and then back home again, there was still a place for John Tradescant at Hatfield House. But the heart had gone out of the garden for John. He kept looking around for Cecil, wanting to show him one of the grand new sights of the garden, expected to see him picking mulberries in summer and limping down the dark shade of the newly growing pleached allée. He kept wanting to consult him, he kept wanting to exchange that swift conspiratorial smile of triumph: that a plant had grown, that a rarity had taken root, that seeds had struck.

When he took a mug of small ale and a loaf of bread to his potting shed he kept expecting to see his lord there before him, lounging against the bench, be-ringed fingers dabbling in the soft sifted earth, taking a rest from letter writing, from plotting, from the sleight of hand of foreign policy, seeking John to share a bit of dinner together, a companion who needed no lies, no courting, seated on a barrel of bulbs to watch John transplanting seedlings.

“I am sorry, my lord,” John said to the new earl, Cecil’s son, finding his old master’s title sluggish on his lips. “I cannot settle here without your father. I was in his service too long to make a change.”

“You will miss the garden, I expect,” the new Lord Cecil remarked. But he did not know, as his father had known, the intense joy of making a garden where before there had been nothing but meadow.

“I will,” John said. Robert Cecil’s favorite flowers, the pinks, were in full bloom. The chestnut saplings which they had bought as glossy nuts a full five years ago were leggy and strong and putting out green palmate leaves like beggars’ hands. The cherry-tree walk was a maze of ordered blossom and the tulips were ablaze in the new flower beds.

“I can’t garden here without him,” he said simply to Elizabeth that night.

“Why not?” she asked. “It’s the same garden.”

“It’s not.” He shook his head. “It was his garden. I chose things that would delight his eyes. I thought of his tastes when I planned the walks. When I had something new and rare I considered where it would flourish, but also where would he be certain to see it? Every time I planted a seedling I had two thoughts — the angle of the sun shining on it, and my lord’s gaze.”

She frowned at the sound of blasphemy. “He was only a man.”

“I know, and I loved him as a man. I loved him because he was a man and more mortal and frail than many others. He would lean on me when his back pained him—” Tradescant broke off. “I
liked
him leaning on me,” he said, conscious that he could not explain the mixture of elation and pity that he felt all at once when the greatest man in England after the king would confide his pain and take help.

Elizabeth pressed her lips together on hasty words and kept her jealousy to herself. She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and reminded herself that the lord he had loved was dead and buried and a good wife should show some sympathy. “You sound as if you have lost a brother, not a lord.”

He nodded. “A lord is like a brother, like a father, even like a wife. I think of his needs all the time, I guard his interests. And I cannot be happy here without him.”

Elizabeth did not want to understand. “But you have me, and Baby J.”

John gave her a sad little smile. “And I will never love another woman or another child more than I love the two of you… but a man’s love for his lord is another thing. It comes from the head as well as the heart. Loving a woman keeps you at home; it is a private pleasure. Loving a great lord takes you into the wider world; it is a matter of pride.”

“You make it sound as if we are not enough,” she said resentfully.

He shook his head, despairing of ever making her understand. “No, no, Elizabeth. It doesn’t matter. You are enough.”

She was not convinced. “Will you seek another lord? Another master?”

The expression that passed swiftly across his face was deeper than mourning; it was desolation. “I will never see his like again.”