Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“They go out hunting; I weed the paths,” John said unhelpfully.

“I hear the queen misses him and pines for him, and has become a papist for consolation…”

John shrugged.

“And what of the children, the royal princes and princesses?”

John looked deliberately vague. He was disinclined to gossip and in any case he had seen more than enough of the royal princes and princesses. Princess Mary was only a baby and not yet at court but Prince Henry, the heir and the darling of the whole court, was an arrogant boy whose charm could be blown away in a moment’s rage. His sister, Elizabeth, had all the Tudor temper and all the Tudor hastiness, and poor little Prince Charles, the second surplus heir, the rickety-legged runt of the litter, ran behind his stronger, older, more attractive siblings all the day, breathless with his weak chest, stammering with his tied tongue, longing for them to turn and pay him attention.

They never did. They were courted beloved spoiled children, the first children of four kingdoms, and they had no time for him. John would see them boating on the lake or riding across the park and never looking back as poor little Charles struggled to keep up.

“I scarcely see Their Highnesses,” he said.

“Oh, well!” Gertrude leaped to her feet in frustration. “Tell Elizabeth I called in to wish her well. I’m surprised she is not downstairs by now. Tell her that I said she should stir herself. And tell her that the baby should be called George David.”

“No, I don’t think so,” John said in the same quiet tone of voice.

“What?”

“I will not tell her any of that. And you shall not tell her either.”

“I beg your pardon?”

John smiled his easy smile. “Elizabeth shall stay in bed until she is well again,” he said. “We were lucky not to lose her. It was a hard birth for her, and she was hurt inside. She shall rest as long as she wants. And we won’t be calling the child George or Robert or James or Charles or Henry or David. He’ll be John, after my grandfather, and after my father, and me.”

Gertrude flounced toward the door. “It’s very dull!” she exclaimed. “You should save your name for another child. The first child should be named in such a way as to encourage a sponsor!”

John’s smile never wavered but his face was dark with regret. “There won’t be another child,” he said. “There will only ever be this one. So we will name him as we wish, and he will be John Tradescant, and I will teach him how to garden.”

Gertrude paused. “Not another child?” she asked. “How can you say such a thing?”

He nodded. “I called the apothecary from Gravesend. He said that she could not manage another birth, so we shall only ever have this, our son.”

Gertrude came back into the room and looked again into the cradle, shocked out of her normal irritability. “But John,” she said softly. “To have to pin all your hopes on just one child! No one to bear your name but just the one! And everything to be lost if you lose him!”

John rubbed his face as if he would rub away his scowl of pain. He leaned over the cradle. The baby’s sleeping fists were as tiny as rosebuds, his dark hair a little crown of fluff around his head. A tiny pulse like a vulnerable heartbeat at the center of his skull. John felt a deep passion of tenderness so powerful that his very bones seemed to melt inside him.

“It’s as well I am used to growing rarities,” he murmured. “I have not a dozen little seedlings to watch; I shall never have more than this one. I just have this one precious little bud. I shall nurse him up as if he was a new flower, a rarity.”

“It is done.” Robert Cecil found Tradescant on his knees in the Theobalds knot garden. “I was looking for you. The king wants to call Theobalds his own this year. We are to leave.”

John rose to his feet and rubbed the cold earth from his hands.

“What are you doing?” the earl asked.

“Relaying the white stones,” John said. “The frost disturbs them, throws up dirt and spoils the pattern.”

“Leave it,” he ordered peremptorily. “The king’s gardeners can worry about it now. He wants it, he has pressed me for it, he hinted a hundred thousand different ways, and Rochester pushed him on every time he might have stopped. I’ve fended him off for three years but now I’ve given it to him, God damn it. And now he’s happy, and Rochester is happy, and I have Hatfield.”

Tradescant nodded, his eyes on his master’s face. “You shall make me a splendid garden there,” Robert Cecil said rapidly, as if he were almost afraid of John’s calm silence. “You shall go abroad and buy me all sorts of rarities. How are the chestnuts coming along? We will take them with us. You shall take anything you want from the gardens here, take them with us and we shall start again at Hatfield…”

He broke off. Still John watched him, saying nothing.

The most powerful man in England, second only to the king himself, took two hasty steps away from his gardener and then turned back to face him. “John, I could weep like a babe,” he confessed.

John slowly nodded. “So could I.”

The earl held out his arms and John stepped into them and the two men, the one so slight and twisted, the other so broad and strong, wrapped each other in a deep firm hug. Then they broke apart, Cecil rubbing his eyes on the sleeve of his rich jacket while John cleared his throat with a harsh cough. John offered his arm and Cecil took help and leaned on his man. The two of them walked from the knot garden side by side.

“The bath house!” the earl said quietly. “I’ll never manage anything like it at Hatfield.”

“And the tulips I’ve just put in! And snowdrops, and lenten lilies!”

“You’ve planted bulbs?”

“Hundreds last autumn, for a show this spring.”

“We’ll dig them up and take them with us!”

John shook his head in silent disagreement but said nothing. They walked slowly toward the ornamental mount. A stream played beside the path on a bed of white marble pebbles. John hesitated. “Let’s walk up,” the earl said.

Slowly the two men followed the twisting path. John had pruned the rambling roses which bordered the path on either side and they lay flat and tidy like withy fencing. Cecil paused for breath, and to ease the pain of his lame leg, John put his arm around his master’s waist and held him steady. “Go on,” Cecil said and they walked slowly side by side round and round the little hill. There were a few foolishly early buds on the roses; John noticed the deep crimson of new shoots, red as wine. At the top of the hill there was a round lovers’ seat, with a fountain plashing in the middle. Tradescant swung his cape down for his master to sit, and the earl nodded for John to sit beside him, as an equal.

The two men looked out across the palace gardens spread below them like a tapestry map. “Those woods!” the earl mourned. “The trees we have planted.”

“The bluebells underneath them in springtime,” John reminded him.

“The orchards, my peach-tree wall!”

“And the courts!” Tradescant nodded at the smooth grass laid out in every courtyard of the rambling palace. “There isn’t grass like that anywhere else in the kingdom. Not a weed in it, and the mowing team trained to go to half an inch.”

“I don’t see any mud in the knot garden,” Robert Cecil remarked, looking at the garden as it was meant to be viewed – from on high.

“There isn’t any now,” John said with rare impatience. “Because I’ve been washing the stones in freezing water all morning.”

“I shall be sorry to lose the hunting,” the earl said.

“I shan’t miss the deer eating my young shoots in spring.”

The earl shook his head. “You know they say that this is the fairest garden in England? And the greatest palace? That there never was and never will be a palace and garden to match it?”

John nodded. “I know.”

“I couldn’t keep it,” the earl said. “It’s his revenge on my father for the execution of his mother, you know. He wanted to take my own father’s house, his pride and his joy. What could I say? I hedged and twisted and turned and showed him other men’s houses. It’s my own fault. We built it too grand and too beautiful, my father and I. It was bound to draw out envy.”

John shrugged. “It is all the king’s,” he said simply. “The whole country. And each of us is nothing more than his steward. If he wants anything, we have to give it.”

The earl threw him a curious sideways glance. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

John nodded, his face open and guileless. “He is the king under God. I would no more refuse him than I would skip my prayers.”

“Please God he always has subjects as loyal as you.”

“Amen.”

“Leave washing the stones now and start preparing the plants for moving, and dig up those damned bulbs.” The earl got to his feet with a grunt of discomfort. “My bones ache in this cold weather.”

“I’ll leave the bulbs,” John replied.

The earl raised an eyebrow.

“You’ve given him the house and the grounds,” John said. “I can be generous too. Let the king have these tulips in spring and I shall go myself to the Lowlands to buy you a fine crop for Hatfield, as we planned. We can make a new garden at Hatfield; we don’t have to scrump from here.”

“A lordly gesture from a gardener?” Cecil asked, smiling.

“I have my grander moments,” John said.

Hatfield House in Hertfordshire had been the home and the prison of the young Elizabeth during the dangerous years of her half sister’s rule, when she had been a studious girl with a deep fear of the executioner’s axe. It had been Robert Cecil’s father who had come to her in the garden to tell her that she was now queen.

“I’ll keep the tree she was sitting under,” Robert Cecil said to Tradescant as they surveyed the quagmire the workmen had made in the building of the huge new house. “But I’m damned if I’ll do anything with that poky little hall. It can’t have been impressive even when it was new-built. I’m not surprised the queen was in the garden. Nowhere else to sit.”