Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

On Christmas night the two men sat either side of the fire drinking mulled wine and cracking nuts. Frances, allowed to sit up late for the occasion, was between them, seated on a footstool, gazing unblinkingly into the flames, sipping hot milk as slowly as she dared to prolong the moment.

“D’you think Mama wishes she was here?” she asked her grandfather. John looked quickly over to J in time to catch his grimace of pain.

“I am sure she does. But she is happy with the angels in heaven,” he said.

“D’you think she looks down on us and sees that I am being a good girl?”

“Yes,” John said gruffly.

“D’you think she would do a miracle, a little miracle, if I asked her?”

“What miracle d’you want, Frances?” John asked.

“I want the king to understand that he should make me Father’s apprentice,” Frances said, putting her hand on John’s knee and looking earnestly up at him. “I thought Mama could do a small miracle and open the king’s eyes to me. To my solid worth.”

John patted her hand. “You can always do your apprenticeship here,” he said. “You don’t have to serve a master to be a great gardener. You don’t need the king’s recognition. I shall teach you the skills you need here, myself. I am aware of your solid worth, Frances.”

“And I can garden here after you are gone? So that there is always a Tradescant’s Ark at Lambeth?”

John dropped his hand on her warm head and held it there, like a blessing. “A hundred years from now there will be a little bit of a Tradescant in every garden in England,” he predicted. “The plants we have grown are already in bloom in every garden in the country. I’ve never sought for greater fame than that and I have been blessed with seeing it. But I should like to think of you gardening here after I am gone. Frances Tradescant, the gardener.”

The courier did not even enter the house at Lambeth. He stood in the hall on a February morning with the dirt of the roads still thick on his boots, and he brought the two precious tulip pots out from under his cloak.

“What’s this?” John asked, astounded.

J, coming in from the garden, his fingers blue with cold, heard the fear in his father’s voice and ran quickly up the hall, tracking mud on the polished wooden floor.

“Your bulbs, returned,” the man said shortly.

There was a stunned silence.

“Returned?”

“The market has crashed,” the man said. “The Bourse has closed down the trade in tulips. Men are hanging themselves in their rich houses and throwing their children into the canals to drown. The mania for tulips is over and everyone in Holland is ruined.”

John went white and staggered back. He fell into a chair. “Henrik Van Meer?”

“Dead. By his own hand. His wife gone to relatives in France as a pauper with an apron full of tulip bulbs.”

J put his hand on his father’s shoulder. He had a sickly sense of his own fault for never speaking strongly against this passion for mingling plants and money. Now plants and money had split apart.

“You warned me,” John said softly to his son, his face shocked.

“Not well enough,” J replied bitterly. “I spoke as quiet as a child when I should have shouted like a man.”

“Could you get nothing for them?” John asked. “My Semper Augustus? I would take five hundred for each. I would take four.”

“Nothing,” the man said precisely. “People are cursing their very name. They are worthless. They are less than worthless because people do not even want to see them. They blame them for everything. They are saying that they will never grow tulips again in Holland. That they hate the very sight of them.”

“This is madness,” John said, struggling to smile. “These are the finest flowers that were ever grown. They cannot turn against them, just because the market has gone sour. There is nothing like a tulip-”

“They never saw them as flowers,” the courier explained patiently. “They saw them as wealth. And while everyone ran mad for them they were wealth itself. But the moment that people don’t want them, they are nothing more than bulbs which grow pretty flowers. I felt a fool carrying these around with me. I felt as foolish as if I were a madman carrying turnips and saying they were treasure.”

He dumped the two pots on the floor. “I’m sorry to bring you such bad news. But you should think yourself lucky that you have only two. The men who bought a dozen at the height of their fame are lying in the canals singing to the fish.”

He turned and went out, closing the door behind him. J and his father did not move. The beautiful tulip pots gleamed mockingly, reflected in the shine of the waxed floorboards.

“Are we ruined?” J demanded.

“Please God, no.”

“Will we lose the house?”

“We have things we can sell. We can part with some of the rarities. We can trade and stay afloat.”

“We are at the very edge of bankruptcy.”

John nodded. “At the edge. At the edge. But only at the edge, J.” He rose from his chair and hobbled to the door that led to the terrace and the garden. He opened the door and looked out, careless of the blast of cold air which billowed down the hall and might chill the tulips in their pots.

The saplings of the chestnut trees were as gawky and awkward as colts. Their buds were thick on the slender branches. There would be the tiny palmate leaves and then the magnificent white blossoms, and then the glossy brown nuts hidden soft in their thick casing. John gazed on them as if they were a lifeline.

“We’ll never be ruined. Not while we have the trees,” he said.

But they were hard-pressed to make ends meet. All spring and summer they juggled debts, took payments on plants and sent the money out straightaway to satisfy the creditors.

“What we need,” J said one evening in autumn, as they were lifting bulbs from the bed, brushing them gently with a soft rabbit’s-tail brush and laying them in long flat crates, “is a batch of new rare garden plants that everyone will be desperate to own. A new collection that everyone will want.”

John nodded. “There are plants coming in all the time. I had a nice little flower from the West Indies this very week.”

“We need a sudden rush,” J said. “So that everyone comes and buys from us. So that everyone remembers our name. We need to make our own mania, a mania for the Tradescant plants.”

John was on his hands and knees beside his son, but he leaned back to rest for a moment. “You have an idea,” he said, looking at J.

“I thought I should go to Virginia,” J said. “Go and collect rarities by the boxful, bring them back in time for the planting season, spring next year. Hope to bring back some flowers that people will pay good money to own.”

“We’d have to find the price of your passage,” John said cautiously. “It’s a good plan. But it’s thirty pounds or so to send you out in the first place. And things are tight, J. Very tight.”

J said nothing and John looked again at his son’s bleak face. “It’s not just business, is it? It’s because you have lost Jane.”

“Yes,” J admitted honestly. “I find I cannot bear this place without her.”

“But if you went to Virginia, you would come back? You are thinking only of a visit? There are your children, and the Ark, and our gardening for the queen. And I am getting old.”

“I will come back. But I have to get away now. You don’t understand what it is like for me to sleep in her bed at night, and for her not to be there. And I can’t bear to go into that damned orangery. Every time I walk in there to see to a plant or water a tray of seedlings I think she is still lying in the corner and forbidding me to come in and hold her. She died alone like a beggar on a street corner without nursing – and there was so much that I wanted to say to her and ask her-” He broke off. “You don’t understand,” he repeated.

“I do,” John said slowly.

“No. You can’t possibly understand. When Mother died you had months of warning, and you were even able to give her some flowers at the end. You had time to say farewell. You could hold her-”

“Once I lost a love, a great love, without warning,” John said with difficulty. “And with much left unsaid. I do know what it is to dream and long for someone, and to think of their death over and over, and of the thousands of ways you could have prevented it, and the thousands of ways you should have prevented it, until you are sick of your own life, since it was not given in exchange.”

J looked into his father’s face. “I didn’t know.”

John realized that his son thought he was speaking of a woman, perhaps a lover from long ago. He did not correct him. “So I do understand,” he said.

“You will let me go?”

John rested his hand on J’s shoulder and hauled himself to his feet. He recognized again, to his continual surprise, that the stripling had grown to be a man with a shoulder as broad and strong as his own. “It’s not for me to order you,” he said. “You are a man grown and an equal partner with me. If you need to go, you must go, and my blessing will go with you. I’ll care for Frances and Baby John, and for the Ark and for Oatlands while you are away. And I will trust you to come back as soon as you can. I’m getting old, J; I need you here and your children will need you.”

J rose too but his shoulders were slumped. “I shan’t forget my duty.”

“And they will need a mother,” John ventured.

J flung his head up. “I can’t marry again,” he said flatly.

“Not for love,” John said gently. “No one is asking for that. But the children need a mother. They cannot be raised by me and by a couple of maidservants. Baby John is only just walking; he will need a mother to bring him up and teach him his manners and play with him. And you will need a wife. You’re a young man, J. There are long years ahead of you. You will need a companion and a friend for those years.”