Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

Frances and Hester lit a candle in the window the evening that Johnnie went away, and Hester would not have the shutter closed on it, to hide it from the road, nor ever let it burn out. Every morning she renewed it herself, a great wax candle, more suited for a church than for a home, every night she checked that it was burning safely and its light was showing out toward the Lambeth road where Johnnie had ridden away.

John remarked only that there was a danger of fire if the candle should fall over in a gust of wind, and after that she placed the holder in a dish of water. But nothing would persuade her not to show a light, as if the one candle could guide her boy homeward along the dark, unsafe roads.

In the first week in September Alexander Norman came upriver and marched briskly from the landing stage to the Ark. He found John alone in the physic garden.

“News,” he said shortly.

John scrambled up from the herb bed and waited.

“There was a battle on the third, the anniversary of the Dunbar defeat. Cromwell is a great one for anniversaries.”

“And?”

“Defeat. The Scots were routed and Charles Stuart has gone.”

“Dead?” John asked. “Dead at last?”

“Disappeared. There’s a price on his head and the whole country looking for him. He must be taken any day. The Scots are fled back to Scotland and the English volunteers heading for their homes. Cromwell writes that he is bringing the army home and disbanding the militia. He must think he is completely safe. We must think so.”

“A defeat,” John said.

“It means nothing for a single soldier,” Alexander said swiftly. “He could be riding home now.”

John nodded. “I’d better tell Hester before some fool blurts it out to her.”

“Where is Frances?”

“They’ll be together,” John predicted. “This summer has been a long vigil for them both.”

John gathered up his tools and the two men crossed the road. Instinctively they looked east toward Lambeth, as if they might see the big horse and the joyous young man riding back to them.

“I keep looking,” John said gruffly. “We all of us keep looking for him.”

They had no word, they could get no news. Cromwell came home but Lambert stayed in Scotland, ruling from Edinburgh, bringing the Scots gradually into line with a republican England. He sent an order for some tulips to grow in pots in his rooms and Hester, knowing herself to be taking a risk with their whole livelihood and lives, wrote him a note, slipped it in with the bulbs and handed them to his messenger.

Forgive me asking for your assistance, but one very dear to me may have been captured at Worcester. Can you tell me how I might discover what has happened to him, or where he is now?

“Shall I order more candles?” the cook asked, preparing the list for market. “Or-”

“Or what?” Hester snapped.

The suggestion that there was little point setting out the candle every night for Johnnie was too grave to be named.

“Nothing,” the cook replied.

John Lambert replied by the next courier traveling to London in a note which showed that he understood exactly who might be very dear to Hester and who might have been at Worcester.

Dear Mrs. Tradescant,

I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. The Scots cavalry were not intensely engaged in the battle and retreated in good order to Scotland. There they dispersed. He might well have gone with them till the order came to scatter and thus there is good reason to hope that he may return within the next few months. There were very few captured and he is not among them. I specifically asked for him by name. We are not holding him prisoner. There were very few killed.

I thank you for your tulips. You seem to have put in half a dozen more bulbs than I paid for. I wish I could render you greater service in return, but I will be alert for any familiar name and I will write again if I have any news.

Hester took the letter into the rarities room where the fire was kept burning against the wintry weather and plunged it deep into the heart of the red-hot logs. She very much wanted to keep the note for the little comfort she could draw from it; but she knew that she should not.

In a dark afternoon of December as Hester was closing the shutters in the rarities room and the parlor she heard a horse walking steadily up the road. She went to the window and looked out, as she always did whenever she heard a single horseman riding by the house. She looked without expectation of seeing her son, but she looked, just as she burned the candle: because he should always be looked for, because a vigil should always be kept for him.

When she saw the size and solidity of the horse, she blinked and rubbed her eyes because for a moment she thought it must be Caesar. But she had thought that she had seen Caesar so many times before that she did not start forward and cry out.

He came steadily closer and she realized it was indeed Caesar, and that on his back, slumped in the saddle, was Johnnie, his warm cape wrapped around him, bare-headed, finding his way home along the darkened road as much by memory as by sight.

She did not scream or cry or run; Hester had never been a woman for screaming or crying or running. She went quietly to the front door and opened it, opened the garden gate, and stepped quietly across the little bridge over the stream, into the road. Caesar pricked up his ears at the whisper of her skirt, gray against twilight, and quickened his pace. Johnnie, who had been half-asleep in the saddle, glanced up and saw the figure of a woman, waiting in the lane, as if she had waited for him at the gatepost ever since he had left.

“Mother?” His voice was a little hoarse.

“My son.”

He reined in the horse and tumbled down from the saddle. He dropped the reins and stepped toward her outstretched arms. She took his weight in the embrace as his legs buckled as he hit the ground.

“My son, my son,” she said.

He smelled different. He had gone away smelling like a well-washed boy, he came home smelling like a hard-worked man. There was a tang of woodsmoke in his hair, which was tangled and matted. His woolen cloak was heavy with grime, his boots muddy. He was thinner but hard-muscled, she could feel the strength in his shoulders and back as he held her tightly.

“Mother,” he said again.

“Praise God for you,” she whispered. “I thank God that he heard me pray and sent you home.”

She did not think she could bear to release him but after a moment more she stepped back and led him into the house. Caesar, knowing full well that he was home, walked riderless around the house into the stable yard and as Hester and Johnnie came in the front door there was an explosion of noise from the stables as the lad and John recognized the horse and came running into the house.

“He’s home!” John yelled as if he could hardly believe it.

He ran through the kitchen and into the hall and then checked at the sight of his son’s weary face and dirty clothes. Then he spread his arms to him and enfolded Johnnie in a powerful hug. “Home,” he said.

The boy was home, the country was at peace. Oliver Cromwell was ruling Parliament with such power and dominance that he might as well have been king himself. Scotland was no longer an independent kingdom but was annexed by England and General George Monck was driving roads through Highland pride and through Highland courage which might never be healed. Charles Stuart was far away in France, or the Low Countries, or wherever he might scrape a living for doing nothing but being his charming self.

The peace brought gardeners back to the orchards and flower beds, and men of inquiring minds into the rarities collection. Takings at the door grew every day, and the order book for Tradescant flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetables grew full. John’s reputation for strange, beautiful and exotic plants was established and he was gaining increasing respect for his experiments with new vegetables and fruit. He grew potatoes and Indian corn and peaches, nectarines, cherries, grapes for eating and for wine and for drying as raisins; and the scientists and philosophers who dined at the Ark would ask to try the new vegetables and fruits for their dinner.

In the autumn John Lambert came home from Scotland and visited the garden at the Ark and admired John’s new collection of cyclamen which he had in a new bed under the chestnut trees. Lambert kneeled down in the dirt of the avenue to look at them, their delicate little petals folded back like a nun’s coif. He greeted Johnnie without remarking on the scar beneath his eye, and kissed Hester’s hand without mentioning the package of tulips or the hidden note.

“I’m glad to see your boy is home” was all he said to her.

“Thank you,” she replied. “And I was glad to see you are now Lord Lambert.”

“Aren’t I grand?” he asked her with a smile, and then turned to walk around the flower beds with John.

“You gardened for the queen at Wimbledon House, did you not?” he asked when they were seated on the terrace, looking out over the chrysanthemums planted thickly in the beds before the house to give the garden some early autumn color.

“I did,” John said. “We planned it and I even planted the beds by the house, a knot garden, and a watercourse; but they had very little time there. She wanted it as a retreat, I was going to make a flowery mead down by the river, I should think it’s a hay meadow now.”

“What d’you think of the soil and the situation? There are some good plants still growing.”

“It would have been a most pretty garden,” John said. “I still have the plans for planting. Johnnie goes up there every summer.”