Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“Where is Frances?” Jane asked. “With J?”

“J is sleeping like a dead man in the parlor,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “He sat down at the table to bring the planting records up to date, and his head fell into the inkpot and he was gone. I’ve wrapped him with a rug and left him. Frances is with John.”

“Does John know how to care for her? Will you watch him?”

“John has his own methods,” Elizabeth said. “But I will watch him.”

She glanced from the bedroom window and saw John and his granddaughter, but did not think she would point them out to Jane. John had strapped the baby to his back in an outlandish savage fashion that he must have seen on one of his voyages. She was wrapped in a fold of blanket against his back with two ends of the blanket knotted around his chest and two around his belly. With the baby held warm and snug against his homespun coat John was walking through the garden and down toward the orchard to see that his chestnut saplings were all surviving the frost.

Elizabeth watched for a moment, and curbed her desire to hurry out and take the child from him. The baby was not crying, John’s rolling limp was soothing to her, and as he walked he was singing a low muttered song: “Tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding…,” a nonsense song. Frances, soothed by the gentle pressure of his warm back, lulled by the weak winter sunlight, and enjoying the irregular motion of his walk, slept and woke and slept again as John went down to the end of his orchard to check his fruit trees, and came back again.

They could not yet afford a heated wall as he had built at New Hall. But John had curtained his trees with sacking and stuffed straw gently inside the bags, hoping to keep the frost from them and to warm them a little. He used the same technique on tender new saplings, especially those that came from the Mediterranean or from Africa and probably had never felt a frost. New plants from the Americas he thought might be a little more hardy, but anything small he planted in a new row of special beds near the house where the raised timber borders kept the soil a little warmer, and where he had great domes of glass, usually used for ripening melons, to keep the cold winds off them and to retain the weak heat of the winter sun.

Despite the duke’s death the plants and the rarities still came in on the ships, and most days a sailor would make his way down the Lambeth Road to tap on John Tradescant’s back door and offer him some little curiosity or treasure. The duke might be collecting no more, but now the ships’ captains sent goods home addressed to John Tradescant, The Ark, Lambeth, certain that when they got home Mr. Tradescant or his son would offer them a fair price for whatever they had found, and that they might enjoy the pleasure of boasting that their find was the center of the Tradescants’ increasingly famous exhibition. Sometimes the goods were enormous: the skeleton jaw of a whale, or a monstrous unnamed bone. Sometimes they were tiny: a carving of a house inside a walnut. They could be stone or hide, wood or ivory, fashioned by a craftsman or thrown up by nature; the Tradescant collection was gloriously eclectic. Who cared how a thing was made or what it was? If it was rare and exotic it was of interest, it had a place somewhere in the cabinets in the great room with the great windows.

John paused in his walk and looked back at his house with pleasure. He had thought he might attempt to glaze the terrace and keep his most delicate plants there during the winter, but his pleasure in the look of his house, and his joy at sitting out on the terrace and looking out over his orchard on sunny days, was too great. “It’s a fine house,” he said over his shoulder to the sleeping baby. “A fine home for a growing family, and when you have a brace of brothers and a sister, you shall all play on the grass court before the house and I shall buy a new field for you to keep a donkey.”

John’s view of the house at Lambeth as an ark which would keep the family afloat during troubled times was proved before Frances was more than two months old. The king’s steady resentment against the House of Commons, which had traduced Buckingham and tried to impeach him, flared up again to dangerous heights at their open delight at the duke’s death. The king blamed Sir John Eliot, radical leader in the House, for the assassination of Buckingham and ordered the assassin, Felton, to be tortured till he revealed the conspiracy. Only the lawyers, standing against an angry king, preserved Felton from agony and he went to the gallows swearing that he had acted only for the love of his country, and alone.

Eliot, sensing that the mood of the country was with him, pressed his advantage in the newly called House of Commons in January, refusing to pay the king one penny of his dues until the House had debated the incendiary motion that the king on earth must give way to the king of heaven – a clear call for Puritans to withstand the earthly power of the increasingly papist Charles and his High Church bishops.

While the city seethed with rumors of the debate, there was a loud knocking at the back door of the Tradescant house, and then the cook ran into the rarities room where Jane was writing labels and rocking Frances’s cradle with her foot. J was before the hearth, stretching a rare skin on a frame for hanging.

“A message for the master, from Whitehall!” the cook exclaimed.

Jane rose to her feet and went to the window. “He’s by the seedling beds,” she said, knocking on the glass and beckoning. “Here he comes.”

John arrived, rubbing his hands on his leather breeches. “What’s to do?”

“A message,” the cook said. “And no reply waited for. From Whitehall.”

John put out his hand and looked at the seal. “William Ward,” he said briefly. “My lord’s steward.” He turned the page, broke the seal and read. J saw his father pale under the wind-worn tan of his skin.

“What is it?”

“It’s the king. He has arrested Sir John Eliot and sent him to the Tower. He has closed down Parliament. He calls the members a nest of vipers and says he will rule forever without them.” He read swiftly. “They locked the doors of the House against the king and voted tonnage and poundage illegal, and voted the king’s theology illegal.” He read a little, and then swore.

“What?” Jane asked impatiently.

“They held the Speaker down in his chair so that the resolutions could be passed before the king’s guards burst in and arrested them.”

Jane looked at once to the cradle and the sleeping baby. “What will he do?” she asked.

John shook his head. “God knows.”

J waited. “What does it mean for us?”

John shook his head again. “For us and the country? Stormy weather.”

It was not stormy weather, but a sort of peace which caught the country by surprise. The MPs dispersed in obedience to the king’s order and though they took their complaints to their homes in every corner of the kingdom, there was no popular groundswell to sweep them back to confrontation in the city. The king set to work to rule without Parliament – as he had threatened to do – and that turned out to be almost no rule at all. The silence in the Houses of Parliament meant there was no forum for debate. The vacuum of power meant that things rubbed along as they had always done. The towns and cities were run, as they had always been, by a loose alliance of magistrates, gentry and vicars, and by the powerful weight of custom and practice.

In Lambeth, Frances’s promised brother did not come, though she outgrew her baby complaints, learned to walk, learned to talk and was even given a small corner of the garden and a dozen cuttings of pinks and twenty sweet pea seeds for her to try her hand at gardening. She was indulged – as the only baby in a house of four adults is bound to be indulged; but nothing spoiled her. As she grew older she still loved the echoey airiness of the rarities room, and would still go piggyback with her grandfather down to the end of the orchard. As she grew stronger and heavier John’s limp became more and more pronounced under the extra burden of her weight and he would roll in his walk like the old sailor he sometimes claimed to be.

He had a special voice for her, a meditative nonsense-telling voice which he used for no one else. Only his seedlings in the frame and Frances were treated to his “tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding.” Elizabeth would watch him and the little girl from the window as they went hand in hand down the garden and feel at last a sense of relief that she and John, J and Jane were settled at last.

“We’ve put down some roots,” John said to her one night as he saw her smile across the dinner table. The girl laid their dinner before them – they had a girl now, and a woman cook in the kitchen and a lad in the house, as well as three gardeners. “I think we should have a motto.”

“Not a motto,” J said under his breath. “Please, no.”

“A motto,” John said firmly. “To go under the crest. You shall write it, J. You have Latin.”

“I can’t think of anything that would fit a man who was born and bred a gardener and made up his own crest, and had some fool of a mason carve it in stone for anyone to see,” J said scathingly.

John smiled, unperturbed. “Why, the king himself is the grandson of a mere Mister,” he said. “These are times for men to rise.”

“And the Duke of Buckingham was called an upstart to the end of his days,” Jane observed.

John dropped his eyes to his plate so that no one could see his sharp pang of grief.

“Even so,” J said. “I can’t think of a motto which would suit.”

They were a family which did not fit the usual tags handed out by the College of Heralds. They were on the way to being gentry, with their own house and land, and rents coming in from the fields at Hatfield, and a couple of houses newly bought at a bargain price in the city. But John and J still worked with their hands deep in the dark earth of their fields and gardens, and could tell to the nearest farthing how much a seedling had cost them in terms of labor and the price of the seed.