Virgin Earth (57 page)

“John! J!” It was Elizabeth’s voice, calling from the terrace. John saw his son’s white face turn toward the house, then his slithering fall down the ladder, and then his run, past his daughter and his father, up the avenue toward the house.

“Is she all right?”

His mother’s face alone was reassurance enough. “She’s fine,” she said. “Very tired. And you have a son.”

J gave a little yelp of delight. “A son!” he yelled down the avenue where Tradescant was limping up with Frances bobbing in his wake. “A son! A boy!”

John checked and a broad smile spread across his face. He turned to Frances. “You have a brother,” he told her. “Your mother has given birth to a little boy.”

She was on her dignity, the powerful dignity of the three-year-old, and determined to be unimpressed. “Is that very good?” she asked.

John scooped her up and swung her to her usual place on his back. “It’s very good,” he said. “It means our name will last forever, with a son to continue the line. Sir John Tradescant of the Ark, Lambeth. It sounds very well indeed.”

“I shall be a Sir too,” Frances said, rather muffled with her face pressed into his back.

“Yes, you will,” John said agreeably. “I shall make sure that the king knows that you need a knighthood, when we next speak.”

Winter 1633–4

The queen took a fancy to J. It was as if she had to find some way of encompassing his refusal to do exactly as she wished about the oak tree. She could not leave his rejection of her plans alone; it rubbed the tender spot of her vanity. When she was walking in the gardens with her ladies, wrapped up in the richest of furs, or watching her courtiers practicing archery at the butts, she would stop if she saw J and call him over. “Here is my gardener who will only plant what he pleases!” she would exclaim in her strong French accent. “The young Tradescant.”

J would take his hat off his head in the chill wind, in obedience to his father’s instructions, and bow, but not very low, in obedience to his wife, and assume an expression of dogged patience as the queen was once more charming to him.

“I want you to plough up the allée of yews. It is so very dark and dreary now it is winter.”

“Of course,” J replied. “Only…”

“There you go!” she cried. “I can never do what I wish in my own garden; Tradescant will always have his own way. Why may I not have those trees grubbed out?”

J glanced down the court to the beautiful allée of trees. They were so old that they had bowed together and interlinked at the top so that they made a perfectly round tunnel. A bare brown earth path ran beneath them, marked with perfectly round white stepping stones. Nothing grew beneath them in the deep greeny light; not even in midsummer did the sunshine filter through. In the heat of the day it was as cool as a cave. To touch such trees other than to prune and shape them would be an act of wanton destruction.

“They are useful to Your Majesty for bows for your archers,” he said politely. “The yew is specially grown for it; it is very strong, Your Majesty.”

“We can get yew anywhere,” she said lightly.

“Not as good as this.”

She threw back her head and laughed like a little girl. J, who knew the ring of real laughter from a mischievous girl, was not impressed by the queen’s coquetry.

“You see how it is? You see?” she demanded, turning to one of her courtiers. The young man smiled responsively. “I am allowed to do nothing with my own land. Tradescant, I am glad I am not your wife. Do you have a wife?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” J disliked it most when the queen became intimate with him.

“At your home? At — what do you call it? — the Ark?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“And children?”

“A boy, and an older girl.”

“But this is very good,” she exclaimed. “And do you adore your wife, Tradescant? Do you do her every wish?”

J hesitated.

“Not all wives are as fortunate as you, Your Majesty,” the courtier swiftly interposed. “There can be few wives who have a husband who adores them as the king adores you. You are a goddess to His Majesty. You are a goddess to us all.”

Henrietta Maria blushed a little and smiled. “Ah, that is true; but all the same, you must be kind to your little wife, Tradescant. I would have every woman in the kingdom as blessed as me.”

J bowed to avoid answering.

“And she must be obedient to you,” the queen went on. “And you must bring up your children to obey you both, just as the king and I are like kind parents to the country. Then both the country and your household will be at peace.”

J pressed his tongue to his teeth to stop himself arguing and bowed again.

“And everyone will be happy,” the queen said. She turned to the courtier. “Isn’t that right?”

“Of course,” he said simply. “As long as people remember that they must love and obey you and the king as if you were their parents, everyone will be happy.”

J bore the brunt of the queen’s interest because he was more often at Oatlands than his father in the autumn days. Elizabeth was sick in October with pains in her chest and a nagging cough which would not be eased, and John did not want to leave her.

She got up from her bed to see Baby John baptized at their church in November, but she left the baptismal feast early and John found her lying on their bed shivering, though the maid had lit a fire in the bedroom.

“My dear,” he said. “I did not know you were so ill.”

“I’m cold,” she said. “Cold in my bones.”

John heaped more logs on the fire and took another quilt from the press at the foot of the bed. Still her face was white and her fingertips were icy.

“You’ll mend in the spring,” he said cheerfully. “When the ground warms up and the daffodils come out.”

“I’m not a plant, shedding my leaves,” she protested through her pale lips. “I won’t bloom like a tree.”

“But you will bloom,” John said, suddenly anxious. “You will get better, Lizzie.”

She shook her head so slightly that he could hardly see the movement on the pillow.

“Don’t say so!” he cried. “I had always thought I would go first. You’re years younger than me; this is just a chill!”

Again she made that small movement. “It is more than a chill,” she said. “There is a bone growing in me, pressing on me. I can feel it pressing against my breath.”

“Have you seen a physician?” John demanded.

She nodded. “He could not find anything wrong, but I can feel it inside, John. I don’t think I will see your daffodils next spring.”

He could feel his throat tightening and his eyes burning. “Don’t say such a thing!”

She smiled and turned her head to look at him. “Of all the men who could do without their wives you would be the first,” she said. “Half of our married life you have been away with your gardens or on your travels, and the other half you were with your lord.”

The usual complaint struck him very painfully now she said it for the last time. “Did I neglect you? I thought — you had J and your house — and it was my life before I married you… I thought…”

Elizabeth gave him her gentle, forgiving smile. “Your work came first,” she said simply, “and your lord before everything. But I had third place in your life. You never loved a woman more than you loved me, did you, John?”

Tradescant had a brief memory of a dimpled serving girl at Theobalds, decades, it seemed like centuries, ago, and a dozen half-remembered women between then and now.

“No,” he said, and he spoke the truth. “None that came anywhere near my love for you. I did put the gardens first, and my lord before all else, but there was always you, Elizabeth. You were the only woman for me.”

“And what a long way we have come,” she said wonderingly. Through the wooden floorboards of their bedroom came the muffled sounds of the baptismal party. They could hear Josiah Hurte’s voice above all the others, and then, in a sudden silence, Frances’s delighted giggle as someone swung her up in the air.

John nodded. “A grand house, a collection of rarities, a nursery garden and an orchard, and a post at the king’s palace.”

“And grandchildren,” Elizabeth said with satisfaction. “I feared when there was only J — and then when they had only Frances…”

“That there would be no one to carry our name?”

She nodded. “I know it is a vanity…”

“There are the trees,” John said. “The flowers, the fruits, and my chestnut trees. We nursed them up just as we nursed J. And now there is one in all the greatest gardens of the country. That is our legacy. The chestnut trees we nursed up together.”

She turned her head and closed her eyes. “You
would
say that,” she said, but it was not a complaint.

“You lie quiet,” John said, rising stiffly from the bed. “I will send up the maid with a posset for you. Lie quiet and get well. You will see my daffodils this spring, Elizabeth, and even the pink and white candle blossoms on our chestnut trees.”

In January, as the new baby thrived, and Elizabeth grew weaker and never left her bed, J found his father supervising the lad digging up a small chestnut sapling and transplanting it, roots and all, into a large carrying tub. J and the boy slid their carrying poles into the rings of the tub and moved it, as John directed them, right into the house, into the rarities room, and set it down beside the huge window where it would catch the winter light.

“What are you doing?”

“Forcing it,” John said abruptly.

Beside the tub was a big half-barrel of daffodils that had been lifted from the orchard, their green shoots only just showing above the damp earth.

“We need an orangery,” John said. “We should have built one years ago.”

“We do,” J agreed. “But for delicate plants from abroad; not for daffodils and chestnut saplings. What are you doing with them?”

“I want to get them in flower,” John said. “As soon as I can force them.”

“Why?”

“To please your mother,” John said, telling only half the story.

Every night John banked in the fire so the plants were warm all night, every day he sprinkled them — three, four times a day — with warm water. In the evening he set candles around them to give them extra light and warmth. J would have laughed but there was something about his father’s intensity which puzzled him.

“Why d’you want them to bloom early?”

“I have my reasons,” John said.

Spring 1634

John achieved his goal. When Elizabeth died in March, her room was filled with the golden light of dozens of daffodils, and the sweet scent of them perfumed her room. The very last thing she saw as her eyes wearily closed was John coming in the door, his face warm with a smile, and his hands filled with the exquisite pink and white pyramid blossoms of his chestnut trees.

“For you,” he said and bent and kissed her.

Elizabeth tried to say, “Thank you. I love you, John,” but the darkness was creeping in; and in any case, he knew.

After the funeral John moved back to the silk house at Oatlands for the rest of the season. He did not feel that he wanted to be at his home, without Elizabeth. At night he could not sleep; but he liked the warmth of the pretty wooden house, and there was something strangely comforting about the thought of the thousands of silkworms, sleeping in their little cocoons, next door, dreaming whatever dreams silkworms spin.

The queen had authorized the building of a coalhouse and a new and beautiful orangery, and John supervised the building in the short hours of springtime daylight. It was another light-timbered fanciful building like a little wooden palace. It went up quickly and John wrote to J, telling him to bring some citrus whips when he next came.

Apart from the building, there was little to do in the gardens in the cold spring days, but John liked to walk around and see that the streams and fountains were clear of leaves, and that the little green snouts of bulbs were pushing their way defiantly through the cold earth. When it was warmer he would plant a new bowling green for Their Majesties, and he watched the men digging, rolling and harrowing the earth until every smallest stone was gone and the ground was ready for the seed. They grumbled when he made them dig in the old rotted dung from the stables and then water it till it froze and melted and froze again, but John insisted that the ground be rich and smooth before the seed was scattered.

When the snowdrops were thick as ice under the trees, snow-white and green, John thought of his lord Buckingham, who had loved to see the first snowdrops at New Hall. But when the daffodils came through he thought of Elizabeth, who had died with their golden color all around her. There could be no doubt that Elizabeth had gone straight to heaven, he thought. She had lived a life which was as blameless as any woman’s, and she had died surrounded by that golden blaze of glory. At least he had been able to give her that.

As for the duke, it was impossible that there could be a God who loved beauty who could resist him. The king himself loved him and prayed for his soul every day. John felt that the two people in the world that he had truly loved were at peace, and he found he could bear the short cold days and the long cold nights.

He was thinking of the two loves of his life — his passion for the duke and his steady reliable affection for Elizabeth — and watching the water in the fountain of the great court when a shadow fell on the basin of the fountain and he looked around. It was the king. John pulled his hat from his head and dropped to his knee on the cold stone.

“How many years is it now, since your master died?” the king asked abruptly. He did not look at John, but kept his gaze on the cold water in the marble basin.

“Five years and seven months,” John said instantly. “He died toward the end of summer.”

“You can get up,” the king said. He turned from the fountain and started to walk down the path, a small gesture that commanded John to follow him.

“I don’t think a man like that can ever be r… r… replaced,” the king said, half to himself. “Not in a king’s council, not in the heart.”

John felt the usual dull ache at the thought of Buckingham.