Virgin Earth (41 page)

But Buckingham had been in John’s heart, had penetrated deep inside him. There was nothing which could part them now. It was not a love between a man and a woman which always founders on difference, which always struggles with difference. It was a passion between men who start as equals and fight their way through to mutual desire and mutual satisfaction as equals.

The tension left Buckingham’s shoulders. “I needed to hear that,” he said thoughtfully. “It is like a chain of command; the old king needed me and called me his dog, took me like a dog too. Now I need you, and you shall be my dog.”

The noises on deck grew more urgent, they could hear the sailors shouting to the barges for tow ropes, and then came the gentle bump as the ship dropped her sails and was taken in tow.

“Fetch hot water,” Buckingham said. “I must shave.”

John nodded and did the work of a cabin boy with a heady sense of delight. He stood beside Buckingham while he shaved his smooth skin of the dark stubble, held a linen sheet for him while he washed, and then handed him his clean shirt and his waistcoat and surcoat. Buckingham dressed in silence; his hand when he reached for his perfume bottle was shaking. He sprayed his hair with perfume, set his plumed hat, winking with diamonds, on his head and smiled at himself in the mirror: a hollow smile, a fearful smile.

“I shall go on deck,” he said. “No one shall say that I was afraid to show my face.”

“I will be with you,” John promised.

They went through the door together. “Don’t leave me,” Buckingham whispered as they went up the companionway. “Whatever happens, stay at my shoulder this day. Wherever I go.”

Tradescant realized that his master was fearing worse than humiliation; he was fearing arrest. Better-loved men than he had died in the Tower for failed expeditions. They had both seen Sir Walter Raleigh taken to the Tower for less.

“I shall not leave you,” John assured him. “Wherever they take you they will take me too. I shall always be with you.”

Buckingham paused on the narrow companionway. “To the foot of the gallows?” he demanded.

“To the noose or the axe,” John said, as bleak as his master. “I have sworn I am yours, heart and soul, till death.”

Buckingham dropped his hand heavily on John’s shoulder and for a moment the two men stood, face to face, their eyes locked. Then with one accord they moved together and kissed. It was a passionate kiss, like a couple of fierce animals biting, no tenderness, no gentleness in it. It was a kiss no woman could give. It was a kiss between men, men who have been through a battle where there was death on either side of them and who are finding, in each other’s passion, the strength to face death again.

“Stay by me,” Buckingham whispered, and went up the companionway to the deck.

A cold morning wind was blowing. The beaches of Southsea were spread before them and the green of the town common behind them. The narrow entrance to Portsmouth harbor was ahead, the gray sea walls lined with people, their faces white dots of anxiety. The flags flying over the fort flapped against their poles. Tradescant could not make out if the royal standard was there, or if Buckingham’s flag had been raised in his honor. The sun was not yet up and there was a ragged cold sea mist blowing in with them, as if the ghosts of the men who would not be coming home were drifting in with them across the gray waters.

There was no gun salute, there was no band playing music, there was no applause. The
Triumph,
ill-named, undermanned and defeated, edged into the quayside, as if the ship itself felt shame.

John stood beside Buckingham by the steersman. Buckingham was dressed defiantly in red and gold, like a victorious leader, but when the people on the quayside saw him they let out a deep groan. Buckingham’s bright smile never wavered but he glanced slightly over his shoulder as if to assure himself that John was there.

They ran the gangplank ashore and Buckingham, with a generous gesture of his hand, indicated that the men should go before him. It was a fine gesture but it would have been better if the two of them had gone first, and gotten quickly on horses, and ridden away. For there was another deep groan and then a horrified silence from the dockers and the sailors’and soldiers’ families waiting on shore, as the walking wounded struggled up the companionways from below.

Their faces were blanched white with sickness except where the sun had burned them brick red, their clothes were torn and tattered, their boots worn thin. They were half-starved, their legs and arms pocked with ulcers. There were only a few men brought out on stretchers, very few, and that was because the sick and injured had died in the low-lying marshes, or bled in agony on the voyage home.

As the men came ashore they were claimed by their families. Some stayed to watch the unloading, but most turned for home, wives sobbing over the wrecks of their husbands, mothers grieving over sons, children staring upward, uncomprehending, into the newly aged face, into the head laid open with a livid new scar, or a weeping wound, a man they could not recognize as their father.

The crowd hardly diminished at all, and that was when John realized how many men they had left behind in the marshes of the Ile de Rhé, since more than half of the families waiting to welcome their men home were still waiting. The men would not come, they would never come. They had been left on a small island in a small river before a small French town, as he had warned. As many as four thousand families had lost a father.

If Buckingham had such thoughts he did not show them. He stood very still and straight beside the wheel of his ship, balancing his weight lightly on the balls of his feet like a dancer, his hand on his hips, his head up. When someone from the quayside shouted abuse at him, he turned and looked for them, as if he did not fear to meet their gaze, his smile as ready as ever.

“He has not sent a herald for me,” he said softly so that only Tradescant could hear. “Not soldiers to arrest me; but equally, not a herald to greet me. Am I to be ignored? Simply forgotten?”

“Hold fast,” Tradescant replied. “We are early. It’s only the poor people who have been sleeping at the quayside and around the city who will have known when we were sighted. The king himself could arrive at any moment.”

Someone shouted a curse from the quayside and Buckingham turned his bright smile toward them as if it were a hurrah.

“He could,” he agreed levelly. “He could.”

“There! Look! cried John. “A coach, my lord! They have sent a coach for you!”

Buckingham turned quickly and squinted down the quayside into the bright autumn sunshine. For a heart-stopping moment they could not see the livery of the coach. It could have been a royal warrant to arrest him. But then Buckingham’s laugh rang out.

“By God, it is the royal coach! I am to be met with honor!”

It was unmistakable. Buckingham himself had introduced the fashion for six-horse carriages into England and only he and the king used them. Two postillions in royal livery jogged on the two leading pairs of horses, the coachman sat in scarlet and gold on the box, a footman beside him, and two liveried footmen clung to the rear. The horses had plumes of scarlet in their bridles; their hooves rang on the cobbles. The king’s flags were on the four corners of the coach. The royal herald was inside.

Buckingham ran like a boy to the head of the gangplank to see this bright guarantee of his continuing wealth and power trotting toward him. Behind it came another coach with a crest on the door, and another. Behind that came another coach, and a marching band playing whistles and drums. Two heralds carried Buckingham’s flag. The coach stopped at the gangplank and they let down the steps for the royal herald. Behind him from the second coach came Kate, Buckingham’s wife, and his redoubtable mother the papist countess.

Buckingham strode to the head of the gangplank to greet them, his head tilted, his smile quizzical. John followed, a pace behind him. The herald marched up the gangplank and dropped to his knee.

“My lord duke, you are welcome home,” the man said. “The king sends you greetings and bids you to come to him at once. The court is at Whitehall. And he bids me give you this.”

He produced a purse. Buckingham, with a slight smile, opened it. A bracelet heavy with enormous diamonds spilled out into his cupped hands. “This is a pretty gift,” he said equably.

“I have private messages for you, from His Majesty,” the herald added. “And he bids you use his coach for your journey to him.”

Buckingham nodded as if he had never expected anything less. The herald got to his feet and stood to one side. Buckingham stepped down the gangplank to where his wife was waiting beside his coach. John bowed to the herald and followed his master. Kate Villiers was in her husband’s arms, her little hands clutching his broad shoulders.

“You are ill?” Kate whispered passionately. “You look so pale!”

He shook his head and spoke over her head to his mother. “Things are indeed prosperous?”

She nodded in grim triumph. “He is waiting for you in London, desperate to see you. We have orders to bring the Favorite straight to him.”

“I am the Favorite still?”

Her hard face was bright with triumph. “He says that no one shall call it a defeat. He says that you could have lost the men and the ships and the standards a hundred times over as long as you are safe. He says he cares nothing for four thousand lives as long as the most precious one comes safe home.”

Buckingham laughed aloud. “I am safe then?”

“We are all safe,” his mother said. “Come to the city. Captain Mason has put his house at your disposal. There is a barber waiting for you, the tailor has a new suit of clothes and the king has sent you gloves and a cape.”

Tradescant drew a little closer to his lord. There was a press of fashionable people pouring out of the coaches and gathering all around him. Someone had pressed a glass in Buckingham’s hand and they were drinking to his safe return. The women’s necks and shoulders were bare to the cold morning air; they were painted as for a masque at court. The men were teetering on high heels, laughing and pressing close to Buckingham. Someone elbowed John in the side and he was pushed to the edge of the crowd. A party was starting, here on the quayside, beside the tattered bulk of the
Triumph
despite the resentful stares of the poor people, drowning out the sobbing of women whose husbands would never come home.

“Tell us all about it!” someone cried. “Tell us about the landing! They say that the French cavalry just vanished!”

Buckingham laughed and disclaimed, his beautiful wife pressed close to his side, his arm around her waist. “I am grieved to my heart that we came home without accomplishing what we intended,” he said modestly.

There were immediate cries of disagreement. “But you were ill-supplied! And what could any commander do with such men? They are fools, every one of them!”

John looked away. There was one woman clinging to the handrail of the gangplank, looking up at the deck of the empty ship. He went toward her, his place at the fringe of the crowd instantly taken by a pretty woman, her face bright with desire.

“What is it, mistress?”

She turned a face to him which was hollowed by long hunger, and sightless with grief. “My husband… I am waiting for my husband. Will he come on another ship?”

“What was his name?”

“Thomas Blackson. He’s a ploughman, but they took him for a soldier. He’d never held a gun before.”

John remembered Thomas Blackson because the man had offered to keep his plants watered while John was on a mission for his master. He was a big man, as patient and hard-working as the oxen he had driven. John had last seen him before the citadel of St. Martin. He had been ordered up a ladder to attack the defenders at the top of the wall. He had gone obediently up the ladder, which was five feet short of the top. The French had leaned over the wall and shot downward at a ridiculously easy target: the big man at the top of the ladder, stalled, just five feet below them.

“I am sorry, mistress, he is dead.”

Her white face went whiter still. “He can’t be,” she said. “I am expecting his baby. I promised him a son.”

“I am sorry,” John repeated.

“Perhaps he will come on another ship.”

John shook his head. “No.”

“He would not leave me,” she said, trying to persuade him. “He would never leave me. He would not have gone in the first place but they pressed him and took him against his will. They promised me that the duke was sailing with them, and that the duke would care for his men.”

John felt a deep weariness spread through him. “I saw him fall,” he said. “He died a hero. But he died, mistress.”

She moved away from him as if his news made him distasteful, as if she would refuse to listen to such a liar. “I shall wait,” she said. “He’ll come in on another ship. He won’t fail me. Not my Thomas. He was never late for a single meeting, not through our courtship. He’s never even late home for his dinner. He won’t fail me now.”

John glanced back. The court party were getting into their coaches. There was a breakfast laid at Captain Mason’s house and fine wines and food waiting. Someone hurled an empty bottle into the sea. John turned from the woman and hurried to Buckingham’s side as he stepped into his coach.

“My lord?”

“Oh! John.”

“Where is Captain Mason’s house?”

Kate laid hold of her husband’s coat and pulled him into the coach.

“Up from the cathedral,” Buckingham said. “But you needn’t come, Tradescant. You can go home.”

“I thought I would be with you…”

Buckingham smiled his merry smile. “See how well I am greeted!” He dropped into his seat, his arm around his wife. “I don’t need your service, John. You can go home to New Hall.”

“My lord, I…” John broke off. The old countess looked sharply at him; he was afraid of her black stare. “You said I should stay with you this day,” he reminded his master.

Buckingham laughed again. “Yes, but thank God I don’t need your care. The king is my friend, my wife is at my side, my mother guards the interests of my family. Go home, John! I shall see you at New Hall when I come.”