Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

The king had wept and asked for forgiveness after a long bitter quarrel. He had tolerated Buckingham’s marriage, indeed he loved Kate, and he was even amused by Buckingham’s notorious affairs with every pretty woman at court, but he could not bear to feel that his son the prince had supplanted him in Buckingham’s affections. Tearfully he accused them of conspiring against him and that Prince Charles – never the favored son – had stolen from his father his love, his only love.

He publicly called Prince Charles a changeling and wished that his brother, the handsome and godly Prince Henry, had never died. He publicly called Buckingham a heartbreaker and a false son to him. He called him a traitor and wept the easy tears of an old man, and swore that no one loved him.

It took all Buckingham’s charm to talk the king into a more reasonable frame of mind, and all his patience to tolerate the moist kisses on his face and his mouth. It took all his ready humor and his genuine joy of life to seek to make the elderly king happy again, and the court happy with him. A sick man, newly up from his bed, Buckingham danced with Kate before the king, and sat at his side and listened to his rambling complaints about the Spanish alliance and the Spanish threat, and never showed so much as a flicker of weariness or sickness.

Buckingham waited until the royal carriage was out of sight before he put his hat back on his head and turned away toward the stone steps to the knot garden. Already it was as Tradescant had promised it would be. Each delicately shaped bed was filled with plants of a single uniform color, edged with dark green box and entwined in an unending pattern with another. Buckingham walked around them, feeling his anxiety melt away at the sight of the twisting patterns, at the perfection of the planting.

It was a joy he had not known before Tradescant had made this place for him. He had seen gardens as part of the furniture of a great house, something a great man must have. But Tradescant had made him see things with a plantsman’s eye. Now he walked around and around the little twisting paths of the knot garden with a sense of renewed pleasure and a feeling of liberty. The little hedges destroyed the sense of perspective; when he looked across them from one end of the knot garden to the other they seemed as if they enclosed acres of land, one field after another. They were a little parable of wealth. They looked like great fields, great acres, and yet they were encompassed within a few hundred yards.

“A thing of beauty,” Buckingham murmured softly to himself. “I should thank him for it. Thank him for making it for me, and then for training my eye to see it.”

He walked down from the formal garden toward the lake. There were the lilies that Tradescant had promised him, and waving in the slight breeze were the golden buttercups and flag irises. A little pier jutted out into the water and the still reflection of the lake showed another pier reflected darkly beneath it. At the very end of it, looking down into the water, was John Tradescant himself, watching a boy drop baskets of osier roots into the deep mud.

When he heard Buckingham approach he pulled off his hat and nudged the boy with his foot. The boy dropped to his knees. Buckingham waved him away.

“Will you row me?” he asked Tradescant.

“Of course, my lord,” John replied. He took in at once the dark shadows under the eyes, the pallor of Buckingham’s skin. He looked like an angel carved in purest marble with sooty fingerprints on its face.

John pulled in the little boat by its dripping rope and held it steady while the duke climbed in and leaned back against the cushions.

“I am weary,” he said shortly.

John cast off, sat down, and bent over the oars without speaking. He rowed his master first toward the island where the mount had been thrown up, just as they had first planned. He rowed slowly around it. Whitethorn and roses tumbled down to the water’s edge and the blossoms nodded at themselves in the still water. A few ducks came quacking out of hiding but Buckingham did not stir at the noise.

“Do you remember Robert Cecil?” he asked idly. “In your thoughts, or in your prayers?”

“Yes,” Tradescant said, surprised. “Daily.”

“I met a man the other day who said that the first time he went to Theobalds Palace they could not find Sir Robert anywhere and in the end they found him in the potting shed with you, eating bread and cheese.”

Tradescant gave a short laugh. “He used to like to watch me work.”

“He was a great man, a great servant of state,” Buckingham said. “No one ever thought the less of him because he served first one monarch and then her heir.”

John nodded, leaned forward on his oars and rowed.

“But me…” Buckingham broke off. “What d’you hear, John? Men despise me, don’t they? Because I came from nowhere and nothing and because I won my place at court because I was a pretty boy?”

He expected his servant to deny it.

“I’m afraid that’s what they do say,” John confirmed.

Buckingham sat bolt upright and the boat rocked. “You say so to my face?”

John nodded.

“No man in England has dared so much! I could have your tongue slit for impertinence!” Buckingham exclaimed.

John’s oars did not break in their gentle rhythm. He smiled at his master, a slow affectionate smile. “You spoke of Sir Robert,” he said. “I never lied to him either. If you ask me a question I will answer it, sir. I’m not impertinent, and I’m not a gossip. If you tell me a secret I will keep it to myself. If you ask me for news I will tell you.”

“Did Sir Robert confide in you?” Buckingham asked curiously.

John nodded. “When you make a garden for a man you learn what sort of man he is,” he explained. “You spend time together, you watch things grow and change together. We worked on Theobalds together and then we moved and made Hatfield together, Sir Robert and me, from nothing. And we talked, as men do, when they walk in a garden together.”

“And what sort of man am I?” Buckingham asked. “You’ve worked for a king’s adviser before now. You worked for Cecil and you work for me. What d’you think of me? What d’you think of me, compared with him?”

Tradescant leaned forward and pulled gently on the oars, and the boat slid smoothly through the water. “I think you are still very young,” he said gently. “And impatient, as a young man is impatient. I think you are ambitious – and no one can tell how high you will rise or how long you will stay at the height of your power. I think that you may have won your place at court on your beauty but you have kept it by your wit. And since you are both beautiful and witty you will keep it still.”

Buckingham laughed and leaned back on the cushions again. “Both beautiful and witty!” he exclaimed.

John looked at the tumbled dark hair and the long dark lashes sweeping the smooth cheeks. “Yes,” he said simply. “You are my lord, and I never thought to find a lord that I could follow heart and soul ever again.”

“Do you love me as you loved Lord Cecil?” Buckingham asked him, suddenly alert, with a sly searching look from under his eyelashes.

John, innocent in his heart, smiled at his master. “Yes.”

“I shall keep you by me, as he kept you by him,” Buckingham said, planning their future. “And men will see that if you can love me, as you loved him, then I cannot be less than him. They will make the comparison and think of me as another Cecil.”

“Maybe,” Tradescant replied. “Or maybe they will think I am a man with a sense to garden in only the best gardens. It would be a man overproud of his sight to boast that he could see into men’s hearts, my lord. You’d do better to follow your own counsel than wonder how it might look to others – in my view.”

John was working late. The duke had ordered a watercourse to flow from one terrace to another and it was his fancy that in each terrace there should be a different breed of fish, in descending orders of colors, so that the gold – the king of fish – should only swim in the topmost pool near the house. The garden around it was to be all gold too, and it was to face the royal rooms that King James used on his visits. Tradescant had sent out messages to every ship in the Royal Navy commanding them to bring him the seeds or roots of any yellow or gold flowers they saw anywhere in the world. The Duke of Buckingham ordered the highest admirals in the Navy to go ashore and look at flowers that John Tradescant might have his pick of yellow flower seeds.

It was a pretty idea and it would have been a delightful compliment to His Majesty, except Tradescant’s goldfish were as elusive as swallows in winter. Whatever he did to the watercourse they slipped away downstream and mingled with the others: silver fish on one level, rainbow trout at the next, and dappled carp on the fourth level, who ate them.

Tradescant had tried nets, but they got tangled up and drowned themselves; he had tried building little dams of stones, but the water became sluggish and did not pitter-patter from one level to another as it should. Worse, when the water was still or slow it turned green and murky, and he could not see the fish at all.

His next idea was to build a little fence of small pieces of window glass through which the water could flow and the fish could not swim. It was a prodigally expensive solution – to use precious glass for such a fancy. Tradescant scowled and placed the small panes – each one carefully rounded at the corners so as not to cut the fish – in a line, with only a small gap for the water to flow between each. When he finished he stood up.

His feet ached with standing in the cold water, and his back was stiff with stooping. His fingers were numb with cold – it was still only March and there were frosts at night. He rubbed his hands briskly on the homespun of his breeches. His fingertips were blue. He could hardly see his work in the failing light but he could hear the musical splashing of the water flowing down to the next pool on the next terrace. As he watched a goldfish approached the fence of glass, nosed at it, and turned back and swam toward the center of the pond.