Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

He saw first a coat, rendered uniformly black by waterlogging, then Johnnie’s white shirt and then his pale, pale face, his open dark eyes, and the swirl and eddy of his fair hair.

“Stop,” John said hoarsely.

At once the lad halted.

The boat rocked, the current of movement which had washed Johnnie up to the surface slipped away and his face sunk out of sight again. For a moment John thought that he could order the world to stop, right there; just as he could command the gardener’s lad and then nothing that must follow would need to take place. He could say “stop” and there would be no drowned child, no heartbreak, no end to the Tradescant line, no silence where Johnnie should have been singing, no terrible gulf where the young man should have been.

John waited for a long moment, trying to understand the reality and then the awful yawning enormity of his loss. The first step in his grief was the realization that he could not measure it. His loss was too great for him to imagine.

The lad holding the rope stood like a statue, a dragonfly whirred noisily over the surface of the water and settled for a moment.

“Go on then,” John whispered as if this were not his work but he was obeying someone else. “All right. Go on.”

The lad put his weight on the rope and once again the boat glided toward the landing stage, towing its dreadful freight behind it. At the landing stage when it stopped with a bump, John said gently, “Tie it fast,” and waited until the lad had done as he was told.

“Take the pole,” John said, proffering it, and when the lad had gripped one end of it, John stepped from the boat into the waist-deep water, felt his way along to the other end and gathered the body of his only son into his arms.

“Step aside and wait,” he said softly to the stable lad. The boy dragged his horrified stare from the waterlogged body and then obediently fled to the shelter of the apple tree where the wasps were feeding drunkenly on fallen fruit.

John waded for the shore, the weight of Johnnie making him stagger as they got clear of the water. He fell to his knees and cradled the white face in his arms and looked down into the sightless eyes and the pale lips.

“My Johnnie,” he whispered. “My boy.”

They sat together for a long time before John remembered that Hester would be waiting in painful anxiety and that there was much work for him to do.

He laid out the body and draped his jacket over his son’s face.

“Watch by him,” he said simply to the stable lad. “I’ll come back with the cart.”

Slowly he walked along the grassy ride and then turned up the main avenue to the house. He could see Hester pacing on the terrace, but when she saw him and took in the slump of his shoulders and his wet clothing, and his missing jacket, she froze very still.

John walked toward her, his face numb, his voice lost, then he cleared his throat and said quietly, conversationally, “I found him. He’s drowned. I’m fetching the cart now.”

She nodded, as calm as he, and Mary Ashmole, watching the two of them, thought them completely insensible, thought that they could not have loved their son at all to be so indifferent to his death.

“I thought so,” Hester said gently. “I knew as soon as I saw the boat, just as you did. I’ll ready the parlor for him.” She paused. “No. He should lie in the rarities room. He was the most precious thing this house ever had.”

John nodded and went with that strange, slow plod round to the stables where, for a fancy, he did not harness the workhorse, but he took Caesar out of his stable and put him between the shafts of the cart to bring his master home.

They buried him beside his grandfather and his mother at St. Mary’s, Lambeth. The new vicar was kind enough not to ask how a fit young man came to drown while boating on his own lake. It was assumed that Johnnie had been drunk, or had hit his head as he fell from the boat. Only John knew that the boat had not been overturned but had been floating peacefully with the oars shipped. Only John knew that his son’s pockets had been filled with broken pieces of flowerpots. Only Hester knew that Johnnie had believed that there was no place for the king’s gardeners in England anymore. But they neither of them told the other these insights. They both thought that the other had pain enough.

They could not easily recover. No family can ever fully recover from the loss of a child, and this was a child who had survived infancy during plague years, a childhood during the king’s wars, two dangerous battles, and then died when the country was at peace. For a little while they were like lost people, they greeted each other at mealtimes and they went to church together, past the beautifully carved tombstone for John’s father and the little crosses which marked Johnnie’s and his mother’s graves, and they spoke hardly at all.

The meetings of the philosophers and scientists which had made the Ark the center of intellectual life were broken up and moved elsewhere. John found he could not concentrate on any argument for more than a few moments, and anyway everything seemed meaningless.

Even the uproar which greeted the end of the long Parliament and Cromwell’s sudden decision to make a parliament of saints, nominated good men of recognized opinions and sanctity, who would bring about the changes which the country so badly needed, failed to raise John from his passive dreaming.

Lord Lambert came to order new tulips in the spring and told John that a new day was dawning for England where there would be the right of every man to vote for his parliament, the legal system would be reformed to make it more just, the poor would be supported and no more landlords would be allowed to enclose the commons and drive squatters and poor people onto the streets. He broke off in the middle of his explanation and said: “Forgive me, Mr. Tradescant. Are you ill?”

“I have lost my son,” John said quietly. “And nothing matters to me anymore. Not even the new Parliament.”

Lord Lambert was stunned for a moment. “Johnnie? I did not know! What happened?”

“He drowned in our little lake,” John said, speaking the words for what seemed like the thousandth time. “It was the night you came to dinner.”

Lambert checked. “When he was so distressed that I had bought Wimbledon?”

John nodded. “It was that night.”

John Lambert looked stricken. “Not because of what he said! He didn’t drown because of that?”

John shook his head. “Because he knew his cause was lost. If it had not been that night it would have been another. He couldn’t see a way to live in the world that Cromwell and you and I have made. He wanted to be a king’s gardener, he could not hear that kings are no good. Johnnie couldn’t see it. And I failed to teach him.” John paused for a moment at the pointlessness of regrets. “I have always been a man of few certainties. So when my son was convinced of a mistake I couldn’t correct him. He put his faith in the most foolish prince, the son of a most foolish king. And I couldn’t tell him that when you are in the service of a king one of the first things you learn is to not take him too seriously, not to love him too dearly. Johnnie was too close to the king’s service, and yet not close enough to see it for what it was.”

He glanced at Lambert. The general was listening intently. He managed a little smile. “These are private griefs,” he said. “I don’t mean to burden you with them, my lord. Do look around the garden, and anything you desire you can order. Joseph will take the order, my wife is not in the house today.”

“Will you tell her how sorry I am?” Lambert asked, going toward the door to the garden. “Tell her I am deeply, deeply sorry for your loss. He was a fine young man. He deserved a better cause.”

“He was, wasn’t he?” John said, his expression lightening for a moment.

Lambert nodded and went quietly out to the garden to look around at the avenue of horse chestnuts and the beds of exquisite tulips and wondered if they would ever give John any joy ever again, now there was no Tradescant to follow him in the garden.

The new Parliament was short-lived. Its program of social justice was too radical for the temper of many of the men of influence whose chief hopes of reform had been for a fat slice of the king’s wealth and power, and had never gone as far as the soldiers of the army who had fought for an end to greed and tyranny and who truly thought that a new world could be born out of their battles.

When Cromwell saw that he had tried a parliament of selected good men who would have imposed justice on a country too sluggish to become saintly, and then tried a parliament chosen by the voters which could not rise above self-interest, something of the joy went out of him. He took the title of Lord Protector and took the burden of power in a mood of frustration and disappointment and never again thought that he might see the new Jerusalem in London.

“I don’t know what the fighting was for if we merely exchanged a king for a Lord Protector,” John said wearily to Hester as they sat at dinner.

“No,” she said quietly.

They sat in the silence which was a constant presence at their table now; it was as if without Johnnie to plan for, there was no business to discuss. The takings at the door were good, the order books were filled. But Hester had withdrawn from much of the business and had lost interest in the garden. She never complained, but she felt as if she had been struggling too hard for too long and that, as it turned out, it had all been for nothing.

“I have been thinking about Virginia,” John said tentatively. “Bertram Hobert, my old friend from over there, came to see me today.”