Virgin Earth (21 page)

“Not if they fired back,” she said. “And anyway, I thought your quarrel was with the infidels.”

John splashed water into his face and puffed out like a grampus whale. “We had orders which could be read any way you wanted,” he said. “It makes no sense to me. When I leave the garden for any length of time I say to the gardeners, take care of this, and when this flowers do this. I don’t say to them, use your judgment, do as you wish. And that way, when I come home again, I know if they have done well or badly, and they know it too.”

“But the king?” Elizabeth asked.

John lowered his voice. “The king gave them orders which told them to attack the infidel and release our poor captured countrymen, and gave them secret orders to attack Spain, and then orders which were to be open which told them to respect Spain as an ally.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “This is dishonesty,” she said flatly.

John smiled, as if at an old half-forgotten joke. “It’s practice. But not principle.”

“It’s a sin.”

John looked at her thoughtfully. “You’re very sure what makes a sin and what does not, my wife. Are you setting up to be a preacher like your father?”

To his surprise she did not laugh and disclaim, as she would have done only a few years before. “I am studying my Bible more than I have done before,” she told him. “There is a lecturer who teaches me and some other women on Wednesday nights. He’s a man of much learning and wisdom too. And I find I am thinking of things with more care than when I was a girl full of folly.”

John bent his knees awkwardly in the little wooden tub to get his shoulders under the suds. “I don’t remember you as full of folly,” he remarked. “I always thought you were a God-fearing serious woman.”

Elizabeth nodded and again he saw the new gravity about her. “These are fearful times,” she said. “The plague seems to get worse every summer and no one can tell where it strikes. There are rumors about a king and a court who don’t walk in the way of the Lord. And a church which does not reproach them.”

John straightened and rose up from his bath, water cascading all over the floor. Elizabeth handed him a linen sheet and he threw it around his shoulders. She was carefully looking away as if the sight of her husband’s nakedness might lead her into sin. It was that turning away of her head which tripped John into irritation.

“We don’t repeat gossip about the king in this household,” he said flatly. And when Elizabeth was about to argue he held up his hand. “It’s not a matter of piety or truth, Elizabeth. It’s a lesson I learned from my lord. We don’t gossip against the king. The price is too high if you’re overheard. Whatever you are reading at your classes, you keep your mind on your Bible and off King James and his court, or you won’t go again.”

For a moment she looked as if she might argue. “Does this man preach against the authority of God vested in men over their wives?” he demanded.

She dropped her head. “Of course not.”

John nodded, hiding his sense of immense smugness. “Good.”

“You know that all I have ever wanted is for you to come home and stay home,” Elizabeth said, dragging the big bath toward the back door where it could be tipped into the yard. “If you had been home I would have had no time to go to meetings.”

John gave her a sharp look. “Don’t lay it at my door,” he said. “You can go where your conscience leads you as long as it does not take you into treason or into denying the authority of those set over you.
All
of those set over you. Me as your husband, my lord above me, the king above him, and God above him.”

She flung open the door so a cool wind blew in around John’s bare legs. “I would never deny God’s authority,” she said. “And I have not denied the authority of men. Mind you don’t catch cold.”

John turned abruptly and went to the bedroom to get dressed.

1622

“Should we not transplant that chestnut?” J asked his father. John was leaning on his spade, watching his coltish fourteen-year-old son at work. “It must be getting too big for that box,” J said.

“I gave that to your mother the year we were married,” John said reminiscently. “Sir Robert and I bought a dozen of them — no, half a dozen. Five I planted for him at Hatfield and one I gave to your mother. She kept it in a pot at Meopham, and then I moved it into the carrying box when we went to Hatfield, with you so little on the bench seat of the wagon that your feet didn’t reach the board.”

“Shouldn’t we plant it out now?” J asked. “So it can put down great roots?”

“I suppose so,” John said thoughtfully. “but we can leave it another year. I’m going to buy some land at the back of our house, make a bigger garden, so that we can see it spread out. The man who sold it to me said they grow as wide as an oak tree. There’s no room for it in the cottage garden; it would overspread the house. And I’d be loath to plant it here.”

J gazed around Lord Wootton’s graceful garden, at the gray walls and the high tower of Canterbury Cathedral behind. “Why not? It would look well enough.”

John shook his head. “Because it’s your mother’s,” he said gently. “given from me to her the first time I loved her. She rarely comes in here; she’d never see it. It’s her keepsake. We must buy her a bigger house with a bigger garden so she can sit underneath it and rock your babies on her knee.”

J flushed with the quick embarrassment of a young man still too innocent for bawdy talk. “There won’t be babies from me for a while,” he said gruffly. “So don’t count on it.”

“You put your roots down first,” John advised. “Like your mother’s chestnut sapling. Shall we take a break for our dinner now?”

“I’ll go on,” J said. “I want to take a look at those Spanish onions of yours. They should be fit to taste soon.”

“They’ll be very sweet if they’ve grown as well as they do at their home,” John said. “They eat them like fruit in Gibraltar. And take a look at the melon glasses when you’re in the kitchen garden. They should be ripening. Bank up some straw around and under them to keep the slugs off.”

J nodded and trudged off to the kitchen garden. John spread a napkin on the grass and opened his little knapsack. Elizabeth had given him a new-baked loaf, a slice of cheese and a flask of small ale. The crust was gray, the flour was poor this year, and the cheese was watery. Not even good money could buy good provisions. The country was feeling the pinch of bad finances and bad harvests. John made a small grimace and bit into his bread.

“John Tradescant?” John looked up but did not rise to his feet though the man standing above him was splendidly dressed in the livery of the Duke of Buckingham.

“Who wants him?”

“The Duke of Buckingham himself.”

John put his loaf of gray bread to one side and stood up, brushing off crumbs.

“I am John Tradescant,” he said. “What does His Grace want?”

“You’re to go and see him,” the man said abruptly. “You’re summoned. He’s at New Hall at Chelmsford. You’re to go at once.”

“My master is Lord Wootton…” John started.

The man laughed abruptly. “Your master can be Lord Jesus Christ for all that my master cares,” he said softly.

John recoiled. “No need for blasphemy.”

“Every need,” the man insisted. “For you do not seem to understand who commands you. Above my master there is only the king. If my master wants something he has only to ask for it. And if he asks for it, he gets it. D’you understand?”

John thought of the painted youth at Theobalds who sat in King James’s lap, and the jewels around the young man’s neck and the purse at his waist.

“I understand well enough,” he said dryly. “Though I’ve been away from court for some years.”

“Then know this,” the man said. “There is only one person in the world for King James, and that is my master — the beautiful duke.” He stepped forward and lowered his voice. “The duke’s friends can do anything they wish — poison, treachery, divorce! All this they have done and escaped scot-free! Had you not heard?”

John carefully shook his head. “Not a thing.”

“Lord Rochester took the wife of another man, no less than the Earl of Essex’s wife. They declared him impotent! How would you like that?”

“Not at all.”

“Then Rochester and his new wife poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury, who would have betrayed them. She is a declared witch and poisoner. How d’you like that?”

“No better.”

“Found guilty, imprisoned in the tower, and then what d’you think?”

John shook his head, maintaining his ignorance.

“Forgiven overnight!” the manservant said with satisfaction. “If you have the king’s ear you can do no wrong.”

“The king knows best,” John said staunchly, thinking of his lost lord and his advice to be blind and deaf when other men are talking treason.

“And Rochester was as nothing to
my
lord.” The man lowered his voice still further. “Rochester is the old favorite, but my lord is the new. Rochester may have had the king’s ear, but my lord has all his parts. D’you understand me? He has all his parts!”

John kept his face very still; he did not smile at the bawdy humor.

“My master is supreme under the king,” the man declared. “There is no one in England more beloved than my master, George Villiers. And he has decided that you are to serve him.” The man looked down at John’s plain dinner. “Chosen you from every other man in the kingdom!”

“I am honored. But I do not think I can be released from my work here.”

The man flapped a letter in John’s face. “Villiers’s orders,” he said. “And the king’s seal. You’re to do as you are told.”

John resigned himself to the inevitable, and rolled up his half-eaten dinner in his napkin.

“And remember this,” the man continued in the same boastful tone. “That what the duke thinks today, the king thinks tomorrow, and the prince thinks the next. When the king goes, the duke and the prince succeed. When you hitch your cart to the star of my master you have a long brilliant future.”

John smiled. “I have worked for a great man before,” he said gently. “And in great gardens.”

“You have never worked for one like this,” the servant declared. “You have never even seen a man such as this.”

John thought that Elizabeth would dislike the move to His Grace’s house at New Hall, Chelmsford, and he was right. She was passionately opposed to leaving Lord Wootton’s service and going near to the hazardous glamour of the royal court. But the little family had no choice. J took his mother’s worries to his father and gained no satisfaction. “Mother does not want to move house, and she doesn’t want you to work for a great lord again,” he said in his halting shy way. “Mother wants us to live quietly; she likes it here.”

“Won’t she speak to me herself?”

“She didn’t ask me to tell you,” J said, embarrassed. “I thought perhaps you didn’t know. I was trying to help.”

John dropped a gentle hand on his son’s narrow shoulder. “I know what she fears, but I am no more free to choose where to live than your mother is free,” he explained. “She is bound by God to follow me, and I am bound by God to go where I am commanded by my lord and by the king above him. And lord and king and therefore God say we must go to the Duke of Buckingham in Essex.” He shrugged. “So we go.”

“I don’t believe that God wants us to go near to vanity and idleness,” J protested.

John turned a stern gaze on him. “What God wants or does not want no man can say, only a priest or the king,” he said firmly. “If the king tells the duke who tells my Lord Wootton that I am wanted in Essex, then that is enough for me; as if God had leaned down from heaven and told me himself.” He paused. “And it should be enough for you too, J.”

J, avoiding the challenge in his father’s gaze, looked away. “Yes, sir,” he said.

The little family had been expecting something impressive of New Hall. The duke had bought it as a palace near to London where he could entertain the king in a style befitting the royal favorite. It had been a summer palace for Henry VIII and had passed around the courtiers as a prize plum of patronage. Buckingham was said to have paid a fortune for it, and was now pulling the place apart to enrich it still further, under the direction of Inigo Jones, who was laying a great sweeping staircase of marble and noble stone gateways.

The Tradescants arrived, as the king himself would arrive on his frequent visits, up the great drive which turned in a full circle before the house. The house fronted the drive full-square, with great turrets on either side and a huge wooden doorway, wide and high enough for two coaches to be driven abreast into the inner courtyard. It was built of handsome stone, every inch carved and crenellated like marchpane on a cake, with three stories of bay windows bulging from the encrusted walls. At each corner stood great towers with bulbous cupolas and flags flying from the poles at the top. In the inner courtyard was a huge cobbled area, as big as a tiltyard, with the great hall on the east side and a handsome oriel window looking out over the quadrangle. On the west side was the chapel for the house, and a bell tolling at the tower end.

Elizabeth looked askance at the stained glass in the huge chapel windows as the wagon halted in the yard. A maidservant came out with a tray of drinks for the travelers, and a groom from the stables emerged and said he would direct the wagon on to the Tradescants’ own cottage.

“His Grace said that you should live in the great house if you please, but he thought you might prefer your own cottage so that you can nurse up plants in your own garden.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said before John could reply. “We don’t want to live in the hall.”

John shot her a reproving look. “The duke is gracious,” he said carefully. “I will need a garden under my eye. A cottage sounds a very good solution. Please show us the way.”

He drained his mug of small ale, setting it back on the tray with a smile at the girl. J, still seated in the back, one arm around the precious chestnut tree, one hand on the tailgate of the wagon, did not even glance at the pretty serving maid but kept his eyes on his boots.

John sighed. He had not imagined the move would be easy but with Elizabeth suspecting papistry and luxury around every corner and with J sinking into the manners of a country bumpkin, he thought that returning to court life would be hard indeed, and that no master, however graceful or powerful, would make up for the differences in the little Tradescant family.