Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“What’s going on?” Hester asked her husband quietly.

John shook his head.

“Perhaps we should just wave and go back to the plantation,” Hester suggested tactfully. “It’s maybe a private matter.”

“He’s beckoning us,” John said. “Come on.”

The Tradescants went to the foot of the steps. John Lambert smiled down at Hester with a beam that reminded her poignantly of Johnnie when he had just got his own way in an argument.

“You come at a good moment,” he said to them both. “See. Here’s the standard of my regiment. Restored to me.”

“Restored?” Hester asked, coming up the steps and dropping a little curtsy to Lady Lambert.

“Fauconberg and the rest are dismissed from their posts, and so my lads have come to restore the standard to me. We’re together again.”

“I’m glad for you,” John said. “Congratulations, Lord Lambert.”

“Major General,” Lambert said with a gleam. “And I’d rather be a major general at the head of the best regiment in the army than a lord at my fireside any day.”

Parliament was dissolved and a new Parliament came in, led by a new Council of State, in May. Among the new council was John Lambert and he gave his vote to the retirement, with pay, of Richard Cromwell, back pay to the army, the cleansing of schools and universities of ungodly ministers and the toleration for all religions except for Catholics and those who would bring the bishops back to England. The rule of the Cromwell family was over, England was a true republic again.

“He’s asked me to take care of his tulips this autumn,” John remarked to Hester as they worked companionably side by side in the Ark’s rose garden. “He thinks he will be in Whitehall all this year. It’ll be odd to work at Wimbledon again.”

“You’ll never be his gardener,” Hester said, astonished.

“No, he has his own gardeners. But I said I would lift the tulip bulbs in the autumn. He wants me to choose the colors for the orange garden, and he trusts me with his dark Violetten tulips.”

Hester smiled. “Not going into service again then, John?”

“Never again,” he said. “Not even for him. I swore I would never serve another master and then the order came from the king for my father and me, and we couldn’t disobey. Anyone else I would have refused.”

“What if Lambert were to become king?” she asked. “He’s the best-loved man in the country. There are many saying that he could be trusted to rule with a parliament. And the army follow no one but him.”

“I’d like to see a gardener on the throne,” John mused. “Think of what the palace gardens could be.”

Hester snorted with laughter. “And that’s the main consideration?”

John grinned reluctantly. “The most important, certainly.”

They heard Frances call from the house and they looked toward the terrace. She was standing with a gentleman at her side. She beckoned to John.

“Who’s that?” Hester asked uneasily. “I don’t recognize him.”

“Perhaps someone with something for sale,” John said, stepping carefully round the rosebushes, and picking up his basket filled with the sweetly scented pastel petals. He walked to the terrace and gave the basket to Frances.

“This gentleman says he has private business to discuss with you,” she said briefly.

John absorbed, as a father can do, that his daughter was deeply offended and determined not to show it.

“The gentleman declined to give his name to me,” Frances said in the same clipped tones. “I’ll take these to the stable yard, shall I?”

John smiled pacifically at her. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he said.

“The gentleman asked me to fetch him a glass of wine,” Frances continued stonily. “Can I fetch anything for you, Father?”

“No indeed,” John said. “But please ask Cook to serve the gentleman. You are far too busy, Frances.”

He earned a brief smile for that and then she was gone, her back very straight, her head very high. John turned his attention to the mystery guest who had managed, in so short a time, to mortally offend his daughter.

“I beg your pardon,” the man said. “She was so simply dressed I thought she was your housemaid.” He glanced at John’s own muddy homespun breeches, linen shirt, leather waistcoat and scratched dirty hands.

“We are gardeners,” John said gently. “It’s a dirty job. It rather calls for simple dress.”

“Of course-” the man said hastily. “I did not mean to upset Miss Tradescant.”

John nodded, not bothering to correct him.

“There are far too many women, young and old, trying to meddle in the affairs of men,” the man said in an effort to please. “You do well to keep her at home and working in her place. The country would be a better place for us all if women were restrained from thinking and bearing witness, and praying, and preaching and all the rest of it. The country will be a better place when the women are back in the kitchens again and everyone back in their proper place. I like to see a young lady dressed as plain as a kitchen maid. It shows she has proper humility.”

“Your business with me, sir?” John prompted. “I have a rose garden to see to, and petals which have to go fresh to the perfumiers.”

The man glanced around the empty terrace as if he thought they might be overheard.

“Can we talk here?”

“You can talk anything that is fit and legal,” John said shortly.

“My name is Mordaunt. I come from the king.”

John nodded, saying nothing.

“Viscount John Mordaunt,” the gentleman emphasized, as if John were likely to be swayed by a title.

John nodded again.

“There is to be a rising. The country cannot be ruled by a council of nobodies and a parliament of nothings. We have been waiting our time, and now the king has named the day.”

“I don’t want to know,” John said abruptly.

“We are counting on you to secure Lambeth for the king,” Mordaunt said earnestly. “I know where your sympathies lie. You mustn’t think that this is a little conspiracy which will get us nowhere but the Tower. This is to be a great uprising on the first day of August. And your part will be to secure Lambeth and this side of the river. You are to secure the horse ferry, and then extend downriver.”

“I don’t want to know,” John repeated. “My sympathies are with peace and order. I won’t recognize Charles Stuart until he is crowned king of England. I lost a son-” He broke off.

“Then you will want to be avenged!” Mordaunt said, as if that clinched the matter. “Your son fought for the king, did he?”

“Twice,” John said. “And twice wounded. Never paid, never thanked and never victorious. I don’t want to know about the uprising. Don’t force secrets on me. I don’t want to be in the conspiracy, big or small. Don’t tell me, and then I cannot betray you.”

Mordaunt checked suddenly as Hester came up the steps to the little wooden terrace. “Ssshh! Hush!” he hissed.

Hester glanced interrogatively at John.

“This gentleman is leaving,” John said. “I’ll show him out.”

Mordaunt hesitated. “When he of whom we were speaking comes back to London you will regret that you did not assist me,” he warned.

John nodded. “Perhaps,” he said, and showed the man through the double doors of the terrace and into the hall. Frances emerged from the kitchen and stood beside Hester as John eased their unwelcome guest toward the front door.

“When he of whom we were speaking is in his rightful place again then there will be a grave reckoning,” Mordaunt threatened. “When he is where he should be then he will want to know where you were on the day of which I have spoken.”

“If you mean Charles Stuart,” Frances’s voice rang out clearly in the hall, “then calling him ‘he of whom you were speaking’ is hardly a brilliant disguise. And if that is your idea of deep concealment then I don’t anticipate great success, on the day of which you have spoken, or any other day, actually.”

Mordaunt exchanged one angry look with her, crammed his hat on his head and flung open the front door. “When he of whom we were speaking is where he belongs again, then women, especially interfering spinsters, will be kept where they belong,” he said crossly to Frances and stormed out of the door.

Frances lifted up her skirts and ran after him to stand on the front step. “And we all know where Charles Stuart likes his women!” she shouted down the street to his rapidly retreating back. “Up against a wall!”

“Should I warn Major General Lambert?” John asked Hester as they prepared for bed that night.

“That Charles Stuart is preparing an uprising?” she asked. She twisted her hair into a loose knot and tied her cap on her head. “He must know already. There’s been nothing but promises of another royal invasion ever since Cromwell died.”

“I don’t like to be a spy,” John said uneasily. “But I don’t like being drawn in.”

Hester chuckled. “I doubt they’ll come again for help to you after what Frances said.”

John shook his head, smiling. “What a fishwife!” he said. “Whatever would Alexander have thought?”

“He knew her,” Hester said. “It would have come as no surprise to him. She was never a docile girl.”

“She’s a complete trooper,” John said. “I think you must have brought her up very badly, my wife.”

Hester gleamed at him and got into bed. “I did,” she said. “But she’s a woman who knows her own mind. Give me credit for that at least.”

In the morning John wrote a note to John Lambert and sent it to him at Whitehall.

Your lordship,

I have heard that there is to be an uprising for Charles Stuart on 1 August. I know no more than this, and I wish with all my heart that I did not know this.

John Tradescant

He received a reply brought by one of Lambert’s troopers, a man with a head like a cannon ball and a wide toothless grin.