Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“That’s what I want,” she said.

At midnight Jane grew feverish and tossed on the pillow and cried out against heretics and popery and the Devil and the queen. At three in the morning she grew quiet and he could see her shivering, and yet he could not go in and put a shawl around her shoulders. At four she grew quiet and at peace, and at five she suddenly said, as simply as a child: “Good night, my dear,” and fell asleep.

When dawn came and the sun rose warm on the apple blossoms at six, she did not wake.

There was a brief unhappy argument about how Jane was to be buried. The parish authorities, responsible for the impossible task of trying to contain the plague, sent an order that the cart would come for her at midnight and her body was to be loaded on it by her family, who must then lock themselves indoors for another week until they were proved to be free of the disease.

“I won’t do it,” J said briefly to his father. “I won’t send her into the plague pit in a sack of hessian. They can order all they like. They’re not going to come in the house to fetch her; they’re too afraid for their own skins.”

John hesitated, thinking to argue.

“I won’t,” J said fiercely. “She’s to be buried with honor.”

John spoke to the church warden, who kept a careful distance on the other side of the little bridge that spanned the roadside ditch. The man was reluctant, but John was persuasive. A small heavy purse was tossed from one side to the other and the next day a lead-lined coffin was delivered to the bridge. A week later, when the Tradescant family and servants were thought to be safe to go out again, the funeral was planned. Jane’s cause of death would not be entered as plague but as the more neutral word “fever,” and she would be buried, as J insisted, in the family plot.

The Hurtes came to Lambeth from the city, with their own midwife to lay her out. She was an ancient woman, her face pocked with the scars of old plague sores. She said that she had taken the disease when she was a girl and had survived it, that the Lord of Hosts had saved her for the godly work of laying out the wealthy dead and nursing the few survivors.

“But why should He save you and not Jane?” J asked simply, and left her to the task of putting Jane in her special lead-lined coffin.

The Hurtes had wanted to take her to be buried in the graveyard near their chapel in the city but J forced himself to argue with them, and see that his wish was carried out. Jane should be buried at St. Mary’s, Lambeth, where her children would go past her grave twice every Sunday. J felt as though he were wading through a thick sea of distress and that if he paused for a moment the waves of grief would wash into his face and drown him completely.

In the end the funeral was an ornate affair with half of Lambeth turning out to honor the young Mrs. Tradescant’s passing. J, deep in unhappiness, begrudged everyone else’s grief as if only he could know what it was to love Jane Tradescant and then to lose her; but it comforted John. “She was very well-loved,” he said. “She lived so quietly that I never knew she was so well-loved.”

Mrs. Hurte took J to one side when the funeral was over and offered to take the two children back with them to the city.

“No,” he replied.

“You cannot care for them here,” she argued.

“I can,” J replied. Even his voice was different: taut and colorless. “My father and I can care for them here; I will find a good woman to be a housekeeper for us all.”

“But I should be like a mother to them,” Mrs. Hurte said.

John shook his head. “Baby John will stay here with me,” he said. “And Frances could not bear to live anywhere but here. She loves her grandfather; she is never out of his sight. And she loves the garden and orchard. She would pine to death in the city.”

Mrs. Hurte would have argued but J’s pale tight face prohibited any further talk. “I will expect you for her memorial service in our chapel. We can pray for guidance, then.”

He helped her onto the box seat beside the driver. “I won’t come,” he said. “She made me swear not to go into the city in the plague months. She was desperate that we would not bring it to the children. I promised her I would care for them here and if the plague comes any closer I would take them to Oatlands.”

“You won’t come to see her father preach her memorial sermon?” Mrs. Hurte exclaimed, scandalized. “But surely it would be such a comfort for you!”

John looked up at her on the wagon seat above him and his face was a white mask of pain. It was useless to tell this woman that his belief in God had gone in an instant, gone the moment he saw Jane throwing open the bedroom window, breathing the air and trying to rid the room of the imaginary smell of honeysuckle. “Nothing will comfort me,” he said blankly. “Nothing will ever comfort me again.”

Instead, he sent flowers. He sent a great boatload of flowers down the river to the city; and the chapel was a garden of the striped white and red Rosamund roses that she had loved so much. On the day of the memorial service J worked in the garden at Lambeth, pricking out seedlings and watering them with a quiet determination, as if he would deny that his wife’s soul was being prayed for that day; as if he would deny his grief itself. At midday the bell of St. Mary’s Lambeth tolled thirty-one times – one for each year of her short life – and J uncovered his head to the hot sun and listened to the slow clear sound of the bell, then he went back to his work separating the long silky stems of the seedlings and bedding them soft in the soil, as if only in the seed bed could he escape the memory of her dying, just out of his reach, and forbidding him to come any closer.

They dined as usual that night and John waited for his son to speak, but J said nothing. It was left to John to lead the prayers of the household. He did not have Jane’s easy gift for addressing the Almighty as if He were a benevolent friend of the family. Instead he read the service for Evening Prayer from the King James Bible, and when the kitchen maid was disposed to speak out and give witness he shot her a sharp discouraging look from under his gray eyebrows and she fell silent.

“Perhaps you should lead the prayers,” John remarked to J after a week of this. “I have not the knack for it.”

“I’ve nothing to say to such a God,” J said shortly, and left the room.

In January, during the most difficult time for a gardener who lives off his plants, and the most frustrating time for a man who is only happy with his hands in the loam, the Tradescant luck turned. They were offered the work of the Oxford physic garden, a wonderful compact garden lying alongside the Isis, to grow herbs for the faculty of medicine at the university.

“You go and see what is needed,” John said, watching his son’s face, which had grown leaner and harder in the long cold months of winter. “They’re paying us fifty pounds a year and we have made next to nothing on the Ark this season. Go and see what work needs doing and take it in hand, J. I cannot go to Oxford in midwinter; the cold will get into my bones.”

John had hoped that the notorious rich hospitality of the town would divert J from the deep silence of his grief. But he came back within a month saying that there was only careful planting and thorough weeding needed. Lord Danby, who had gifted the garden to Magdalen College, had ordered a wall and a gatehouse built, and protection from the winter-flooding river.

“Nothing needs doing,” J said when he was home again. “I’ll grow some extra herbs to stock it in the spring, and I’ve appointed a couple of weeding girls.”

“Pretty ones?” John asked carelessly.

J looked grim. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

In February a man came to the door bearing an earthenware pot with the tips of green bulbs showing.

“What’s this?” J asked, hiding his weariness.

“I need to see John Tradescant,” the man said eagerly. “Himself and no other.”

“I am John Tradescant the younger,” J told him, only too well aware that that would not be enough.

“Yes,” the man said. “So it’s your father I want.”

“Wait here,” J said shortly and went to find his father. John was in the rarities room, enjoying the warmth from the fire, moving from cabinet to cabinet, admiring the precious things.

“There’s a man at the door with a bulb in a pot,” J reported. “Will only speak to you. I s’pose it’s a tulip.”

John turned at the word “tulip.” “I’ll come at once.”

The man was waiting in the hall. John drew him into the front room, J following, and they closed the door.

“What d’you have for me?”

“A Semper Augustus,” the man said softly. From the depths of his pocket he produced a letter. “This attests to it.”

“D’you think we’re fools?” J demanded. “Where would you get a Semper Augustus from? How would they ever let it out of the country?”

The man looked shifty. “This attests to it,” he repeated. “A letter for you alone, signed Van Meer.”

John broke the seal and read. He nodded at J. “It does,” he said. “He swears to me that there is a bulb in that pot from the original Semper Augustus. How did it come to your hands?”

“I’m merely the courier, master,” the man said uncomfortably. “There was a bankruptcy in a house. Whose house need not concern you. The bailiffs took goods, but there was a man who did not know his job and did not spot the bulbs.” He gave a sly smile. “I heard the mistress bundled them into a crock with a string of onions. So here they are, available for sale. The bankrupt gentleman, whose name we don’t mention, wanted them offered out of Holland. He thought of you and commissioned me to bring them to you. Cash,” he added.