Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

J turned away and put his hand on the rough bark of the apple tree to steady himself. “If you knew how it hurts me even to think of another woman, you would not say that,” he said. “It is the cruelest, most unkind thing you could say. There will never be a woman in her place. Never.”

John put his hand out once more, and then let it drop back. “I will not say it again,” he said gently. “I miss her too.” He paused. “I don’t believe there is another woman who could take her place,” he acknowledged. “She was a rarity. I have only ever seen one of her.” It was his greatest praise.

They could not find the passage money; the Ark was a sinking ship. Then J thought that he could put the idea of sending him into the queen’s mind. He briefly mentioned it when she stopped beside him in the queen’s court one day as he was tying back the creepers against the wall.

“You would think of leaving my garden? Of leaving my service?” she asked.

J dropped to his knee. “Never,” he said. “I was thinking of the wealth that Raleigh and Drake brought back for Queen Elizabeth. I was thinking that I would like to bring back treasures for you.”

Her ready vanity was stimulated at once. “Why, you would be my knight errant!” she exclaimed. “Gardener Tradescant on a quest for his queen.”

“Yes,” J agreed, hating himself for the play-acting even as he let the masque sweep on.

“And there must be gold and silver somewhere there,” she said. “The Spanish got enough from it, as our Sweet Lord knows. If you could bring back some precious stones it would help His Majesty. It is a wonder to me how much it costs to buy a few pictures and to keep the court.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty,” J said to the earth beneath his knee.

“You will bring me back pearls!” she exclaimed. “Won’t you? Or emeralds?”

“I will do all that I can,” he said cautiously. “But I will certainly bring you back rare and beautiful plants and flowers.”

“I shall ask the king to give you a letter patent,” she promised. “He will do it at once.”

Such was the erratic detail of the Stuart court management that there could be riots and rebellions about the collection of ship money up and down the country, and proud men accused of treason and flung into jail alongside criminals and beggars, and the king scarcely aware of it. But the queen was excited about Tradescant the young gardener visiting Virginia, and she told the king, and that became the business of the day.

“You must bring back some fine p… plants,” the king said pleasantly to J. “Flowers and trees and shells, I hear they have precious sh… shells. I shall give you a letter of authority. Anything you see that would profit me, or the k… kingdom, you must have, free of charge, and bring it back. I shall give you a patent to collect. My loyal subjects in the new world will help you.”

J knew that a good proportion of the king’s loyal subjects had fled to the Americas determined never again to live directly under such a ruler, and paid their dues to England only with the most irritated reluctance.

“You must come back with r… rarities too,” the king said. “And see if you can bring Indian corn to grow here.”

“I will, Your Majesty.”

The king gestured and one of his yeomen stepped forward. “A p… patent to collect in Virginia,” the king said, his lips hardly moving. The yeoman, new at his work, had not yet learned that the king hated giving orders. Half of his servants’ work was guessing what he required. “Have it written up. To Mr. T… Tradescant.”

J bowed. “I am obliged to Your Majesty.”

Charles extended his hand for J to kiss. “You are indeed,” he said.

J took ship in the Brave Heart, sailing out of Greenwich, and John came down to the quay to see him off. They ate a last meal together in the Three Choughs while J’s bags were taken on board the ship bobbing at the quayside below the window.

“Make sure you carry enough water to keep any plants in the earth damp all the way home,” John reminded him. “At sea in a storm, even the rain is salty.”

J smiled. “I’ve unpacked enough dying plants to know how to care for them.”

“Get seeds if you can. They travel much better than young plants. Seeds and roots are the best. Make sure you crate them up so they stay dark and dry.”

J nodded and gave his father a glance which warned him that there was nothing more that he could teach his son.

“I want it to go well for you,” John explained. “And there are treasures to be gathered there, I know it.”

J looked out of the little window at the ship at the quayside. “All my childhood I seemed to be watching you sail; it’s odd that it’s my turn now.”

“It’s right that it is your turn now,” John said generously. “I don’t even envy you. My back aches and my knees are stiff; my voyaging days are over. This winter was hard on me, cold weather, sorrow, ill-health and worry altogether. I shall limp from my fireside to my gardens until you return.”

“Write me news of the children,” J said. “That they keep their health.”

“The plague must be less this year,” John said. “It took so many last year. There must be better times coming. I shall keep the children away from the city.”

“They still grieve for their mother.”

“They will learn to feel it less,” John predicted. “Frances is already caring for Baby John, and sometimes he forgets and calls her Mama.”

“I know,” J said. “I should be pleased that he has stopped crying for her; but I can’t bear to hear it.”

John drained his tankard and put it down on the table. “Come on. Let’s get you aboard, and you shall leave this country and your grief together.”

The two men went down the narrow stairs and out to the quayside. “That house is riddled with passages like a rabbit warren,” John remarked. “When the press-gang comes in the front, there are men scattering out of houses up and down the street through a thousand doorways. I saw it when my duke was pressing men for the war against the French.”

J looked toward his ship. The tide was on the turn and she was pulling at the ropes as if testing their strength. He turned and his father took him awkwardly into his arms.

“God bless you,” John said gently.

J had a sudden superstitious dread that he would not see his father again. The loss of his mother and then his wife had shaken his confidence. “Don’t work too hard,” he urged him. “Leave it to me to repair our fortunes. I shall bring back barrels full of plants in time for the spring. I swear it.” He gazed into his father’s face. The old man looked as he had always, dark-eyed, weather-beaten, hardy as a clump of heather.

“God bless,” J whispered and then went up the gangplank of the ship.

John sat on a barrel on the quayside, stretching his tired legs before him, and waited for the ship to sail. He watched them run the gangplank aboard and then throw the mooring ropes. The little barges came out and took her in tow out to the middle of the river, and then John heard the faint shouted order and saw the lovely sight of the sails being flung open to the wind.

John raised his hand to his son as the ship caught the wind, slewed a little in the current, corrected her course, and then slipped away downriver, ploughing through the busy traffic of outbound boats and cross-river wherries, fishermen and rowing boats.

From his place at the railing, J saw the figure of his father grow smaller and smaller as the quay itself shrank and became part of a larger view, an outcrop of stone against the green of the Kent hills behind it; then as they were farther and farther out, the dock was nothing but a darker line on the blur of the shadowy land.

“Good-bye,” he said quietly. “God bless.” It seemed to him that he was leaving not just his father and his children and the memories of his wife and mother, but that he was leaving his own childhood and his long apprenticeship, and going to a new life which he could make his own.

John did not neglect the garden at Oatlands while J was away. He had planted a new consignment of daffodils in the autumn and that spring he was in the king’s court every day, watching the green spears break through the soil. For the queen he had planted tulips in great china bowls, and forced them to bloom early. They might be worth a fraction of their original value but John would not throw good bulbs on the midden because they had once been worth a fortune and were now sold for shillings. He had bought them for love of their color and shape and he loved them still. He put them in the orangery by the windows for the light and kept them warm. Their Majesties were due at the palace in late February and John wanted the bulbs in flower for their private apartments.

He was lucky; the royal party were delayed at Richmond and did not come to Oatlands until early March, and the tulip buds were fat and green and striped with the promise of color when they arrived.

They were accompanied by a troop of new designers and decorators. It was the queen’s desire that her apartments should be remodeled and repainted. “What colors shall I have on the walls?” she asked John. “Here is Monsieur de Critz, who will paint me cherubs or angels or saints, or whatever I will.”

John looked at the tulips on her table, which were slowly going a deep glossy red. “Scarlet,” he said.

She rounded on him, spitting with anger. “D’you think to insult me?” she demanded.

He realized at once that she was smarting from the bawdy songs they were shouting in the streets of London about the two scarlet whores – the Pope and the Queen of England, who was shamefully in his toils.

“No!” John stammered. “No! I was looking at your flowers!”