Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

It had started to rain, an icy, penetrating drizzle, and the clouds sat heavily on the roof of the palace. The glass had been stolen long ago from the windows, or smashed by the successive troops quartered in the palace, and the smell of damp plaster and decay seeped into the courts from the derelict building.

“Let’s go,” John said. “Everything is finished here.”

Johnnie nodded in silence and followed his father to the cart. He climbed onto the box and took the reins of the horse which should have been his war horse, to drive away from the palace which should have been the king’s. The avenue was long gone, felled for timber. They drove between pale stumps where grand trees had once shaded the road.

“That was a miserable task,” John said heartily, hoping that Johnnie would agree and that they might share the sadness and then put it behind them.

“It was burying him and his hopes all over again,” Johnnie said somberly; and then said nothing more.

Johnnie did not forget the melon bed at Wimbledon. Of the consignment he had sent north to Charles Stuart he had kept one fruit back and from it he had another batch of seeds which he insisted on planting in the Lambeth seed bed, and, when they were grown, insisted on taking to Wimbledon.

“You could grow them here now,” Hester remarked to him reasonably when she saw him loading the earthenware pots into a carrying basket. “There’s no point in taking them all that way.”

“Of course I must plant them at Wimbledon,” he said passionately. “It was his request.”

“The garden must be overgrown.”

“It’s running to seed,” he said, “and the glass has been stolen from the windows of the house. But you can see it was a lovely place, you can tell it was one of our gardens. Every now and then I come across some special flower struggling through the weeds. Father’s Virginian foxgloves, and grandfather’s chestnuts in a little avenue in one of the courts.”

“We can’t do anything about it,” she said. “We have to leave the old places behind us. Your father gardened for years at Hatfield and after he left he never went back and it was the same at New Hall. Oatlands will be nothing more than a name in a year or two, in a few years no one will even remember where it was.”

“I know that,” he said. “I just plant the melons. I don’t deny that everything is changed for the moment.”

“You don’t change,” she observed.

For a moment his melancholy lifted. He shot her a small, roguish smile as if he hardly dared to trust her with the hope that he kept hidden. “Well, everything might change back again one day, mightn’t it? And then I will be glad that I kept faith.”

Johnnie had good cause to suggest that everything could change once again. The defeat at Dunbar was not the last battle fought in Scotland, the Scots army did not flee in a rout but in a retreat; and the shaky alliance between the Kirk and the dissolute prince did not completely collapse. Instead, the prince’s stature grew and the Scots warmed to him. All through the year, reports of a continuing campaign filtered back to London telling of Cromwell, ill-supported and in a mostly hostile country, trying to gain a decisive victory. Then in midsummer the Scots army, with Charles at their head, did the unthinkable. They broke out of Scotland and crossed the border.

“Can we hide it from him?” Hester demanded urgently of John when he told her the news in the kitchen.

He shook his head. “He’s bound to hear of it sooner or later and I’d not have him think me guilty of double dealing.”

“You swore they’d not come south,” she accused. “You said Cromwell would defeat them on Scottish soil.”

John’s face was taut with worry. “It was a gamble,” he said. “And it served us well. They have to go beyond York, remember. That was the agreement.”

“Is Lambert still there?” she asked, as if that were a talisman against the king’s advance.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” John snapped and turned away from her and marched out into the garden, looking for his son.

He found him dead-heading the roses and tossing the petals into a deep carrying basket for sale in the London markets to the perfumiers or the confectioners. Frances, staying at the Ark to avoid the plague months in town, was working at the opposite end of the bed. John heard their casual chatter and paused for a moment to hold the moment in his mind: his two children doing their work, the family’s work, in such easy harmony, in the sunshine, on their own land, in a country so near to peace.

He squared his shoulders and stepped forward. “Johnnie-”

The young man looked up. “Father?”

“There’s news. I heard it in London. Charles Stuart is leading a troop over the border. Lambert is chasing after him, but it looks as if he has broken out of Scotland and is determined to invade.”

“Is he south of York?” Johnnie demanded. For a moment John thought that the young man was resonating, like a harp string tuned too tight. “Is he south of York? Can I go to him?”

“He’s headed south,” John said cautiously. “As soon as we hear from Alexander we’ll know for sure.”

Alexander came himself in August.

“I knew you would want to know as soon as I did,” he said. The family were so anxious for news that they greeted him in the hall, as soon as he came through the door, Johnnie at the forefront. “They were marching on London but they have turned to the west. They’re probably hoping to raise recruits from Wales before they face Lambert.”

“And where is Lambert?”

“On a forced march behind them,” Alexander replied. “There is no other general in the world who could move his men at the speed he does. He’ll catch the Scots army, without a doubt. And he’ll be the one that chooses the ground.”

“Is he south of York?” Johnnie demanded.

Alexander looked past him to Hester’s anguished face. “I am sorry, Hester,” was all he said.

Johnnie sprang up the stairs, running for his campaign bundle, shouting for Joseph to tell the stable lad to get his horse ready. John turned to his wife and she buried her face against his shoulder.

“Stop him,” she whispered. “Stop him.”

John shook his head. “No power on earth can stop him,” he said. He looked at Alexander. “Can they win?”

Alexander had drawn Frances to his side. “These are the fortunes of war,” he said. “You know as well as I do that anything can happen, it can always go either way. But Cromwell and Lambert defeated this army before, and on their own ground. The northern militia will turn out now that the Scots have invaded England, and the northern men hate the Scots worse than anything else. There’ll be strong feelings against the king now that he has an army moving through England – no one has forgotten the last war. It’s one thing to mourn the death of a dead king; it’s quite another to turn the country upside down again for the claims of a live one. I think they’ll lose. But I can’t be sure. No one can be sure.”

“Who cares?” Hester said, her face still hidden, her voice agonized. “Who cares if they lose or win? Johnnie could be killed, couldn’t he? Whether they win or lose?”

John tightened his grip around her. “We’ll have to pray,” he said, and it was a sign of his own desperation. “That’s all we can do now.”

They gathered in the stable yard to see him off. He kissed his sister, he kissed his stepmother and she clung to him for a moment as if she would beg him to stay. She inhaled the scent of him, the newly washed linen which had been stored with lavender bags, the warm straw smell of his hair, the warmth of his skin, the tender stubble of his cheek, the soft apprentice mustache on his upper lip. She held him and thought of the child he had been when she had taken him into her care, and she thought of the terrible gulf in her life that would be carved out if he were lost.

“Let him go,” John said quietly from behind her.

Johnnie briskly embraced Alexander and then he turned to his father. He dropped his head and was about to kneel for his blessing. “Don’t kneel,” John said quickly, as if a patch of damp on his son’s knee mattered one way or another when the boy was going out to fight a doomed battle. He wrapped him in his arms and held him furiously tight.

“God bless you and keep you,” he whispered passionately. “And come home as soon as you feel you can. Don’t linger, Johnnie. Once the battle is done there’s no shame in riding away.”

The youth was ablaze with joy, he could not hear words of caution. He turned to his horse and he sprang up, swung his leg over and gathered in the reins. The old knowledgeable war horse, Caesar, knew the signs, he pawed the ground, arched his neck and sidled a little, eager to be off.

Hester felt her knees giving way, she put her hand into John’s arm and leaned against him.

“I’m away!” Johnnie sang out. “I’ll write! Good-bye!”

Hester folded her upper lip in a tight, admonitory grip between her teeth and raised her hand to wave.

“Good luck!” Frances called. “God bless you, Johnnie!”

They crowded to the stable-yard entrance to watch him ride out, and then followed him, under the wall with the stone-carved crest, over the little bridge, and then eastward along the road to the Lambeth horse ferry and the northern roads.

“God bless you,” John called.

The horse’s polished haunches moved powerfully. As he reached the firm going of the road, Johnnie let the animal extend into a trot and then into a broad-paced canter. He went too fast for Hester, the big horse’s pace took him too swiftly away.

“Johnnie!” she called.

But he did not hear her, and in a moment he was gone.

Then there was nothing to do but to wait. The City was alive with rumors and counterclaims of battles and routs and attacks, victory to the Prince or victory to the Model Army. John kept as much of the news from Hester as he could, and asked her to do a dozen tasks in the rarities room, in the garden, to keep her hands busy and to keep her away from the constant litany of bad news in the kitchen between the cook and Joseph. But nothing could stop her longing for her son.