Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

No gardens, J noted at once. But everywhere, in every patch of ground, at every corner, even lining the roadside, were tall ungainly plants with leaves broad and flat like those of tulips, flopping over.

“What plant is that?” J asked a man who was pushing up the gangplank to greet a newcomer.

He hardly glanced over his shoulder. “Tobacco, of course,” he said. “You’ll learn to recognize it soon enough.”

J nodded. He had seen the plant before, but he had not thought they would grow it to the exclusion of everything else, in the very streets of their new city.

He took his bag and made his way down the gangplank to the crowded quayside.

“Is there an inn here?”

“A dozen,” a woman replied, “but only if you have gold or tobacco to pay.”

“I can pay,” J said steadily. “I come with a warrant from the king of England.”

She looked away as if she were not much impressed with his patent. “Then you had best tell the governor,” she said, nodding toward the man’s broad back, “if he’ll stoop to speak with you.”

J hefted his bag onto his other shoulder and stepped up toward the man. “Sir John?” he asked. “Let me introduce myself. I am John Tradescant the younger, gardener to the king. He has commanded me to make a collection of rare plants, and rarities of all sorts. Here is his letter.” He bowed and produced the patent marked with the royal seal.

Sir John did not take it. He merely nodded his head in reply. “What’s your title?”

“Esquire,” J said, still uncomfortable with the lie which claimed his right to be a gentleman when he was in truth nothing more than the son of a working man and the grandson of a laborer.

The governor turned and extended his hand. J shook the proffered two fingers. “Call tomorrow,” the governor said. “I have to collect my letters and some bills of purchase from the captain here. Call tomorrow and I shall be at leisure to receive you.”

“Then I’ll find a bed at an inn,” J said uncertainly.

The governor had already turned his back. “Do that. Or the people are extraordinarily hospitable.”

J waited in case he would offer anything more; but he moved away and there was nothing for J to do but pick up his other bulkier bag, which had been slung down on the quayside, and trudge up the hill, past the bulging walls of the fort, toward the little town.

He found the first inn by the haunting smell of stale ale. As he paused in the doorway there was a loud baying noise of a big dog and a shrill shout commanding it to be silent. J tapped lightly on the door and stepped in.

It was dark inside; the air was thick with smoke, almost unbreathable for a stranger. J’s eyes stung and he felt his breath catch.

“Good day,” a woman said abruptly from the back of the room. J blinked tears from his eyes and saw her better: a woman of about fifty with the leathery skin and hard eyes of a survivor. She wore rough wooden clogs on her feet, a homespun skirt kilted up out of the way, a shirt that had once belonged to a man twice her size and a shawl tied tightly around her shoulders.

“I’m new come from London,” J said. “I want a room for the night.”

“You can’t have one to yourself – you’re not at Whitehall now.”

“No,” J said politely. “Might I share a room?”

“You’ll share a bed and like it!”

“Very well,” J said. “And something to eat? And drink?”

She nodded. “Paying in gold? Or tobacco?”

“Where would I get tobacco?” J demanded, his irritation finally breaking through. “I landed five minutes ago.”

She smiled, as if she were pleased to see him rise to the bait. “How would I know?” she demanded. “Maybe you’d had the sense to ask in London how we do things over here. Maybe you’d had the sense to buy some on the quayside, seeing as every planter in the colony was selling there today. Maybe you’re a returning planter coming back to your rich fields. How would I know?”

“I’m not a planter, and I was not advised to bring tobacco to Virginia,” J said. “But I am hungry and thirsty and weary. I should like a wash too. When will my dinner be ready?”

The woman abandoned her teasing of him abruptly. “You can wash under the pump in the yard,” she said. “Don’t drink the water – it’s only a shallow well and it’s foul. You’ll sleep in the attic along with the rest of us. You’ll share a pallet bed with my son or with whoever next comes through the door. Dinner will be ready as soon as it’s cooked, which will be the quicker if I can get on now.”

She turned her back to him and stirred something in a pot hanging over the fireplace. Then she moved to a barrel in the corner and drew him a mug of ale.

“Here,” she said. “Four mugs for a penny. I’ll keep the tally.”

“I’m sure you will,” J said under his breath and went out into the yard to wash.

She need not have warned him not to drink the water. It came out of the pump in a brown brackish spout, stinking horribly. Still, it was better than seawater, and J stripped and washed all over, and then pulled on his breeches and sat himself down on a pile of sawn wood and shaved himself, feeling his skin with his fingertips to guide his razor.

The ground still heaved uneasily under his feet, as if he were on board ship. But he knew that his father had felt the same when they had made landfall at Rhé or in Russia after his long voyage across the North Sea. He had told him that it was the same after any long voyage. For a moment J thought of his father at home, and the two children. For a moment he had the sweetest of illusions that Jane was there too, caring for them, awaiting his return. It seemed so much more likely that she would be there, waiting for him, than that she should be dead and he never see her again. The moment was so strong that he had to remind himself of the orangery and the pallet bed, and her white-faced determination that she should die alone rather than pass the plague to him and to her children. The thought of it made him sick to the stomach with grief, and he dropped his head in his hands as the cool Virginia twilight wrapped him in darkness, and he knew that he had sailed to the new world, to the new land, but brought his three-year-old grief all that long way with him.

J opened his eyes and saw, instead of the whitewashed walls and ceiling of his Lambeth home, a thatched roof, close to his face. Beneath him, wooden boards, not even a straw mattress; a pace away, a young man on a pallet bed, still deep in sleep. He took in, slowly, the watery smell of something cooking, the discomfort of the hard floor, and the irritating itch of a fresh fleabite. He sat up cautiously, his head swimming. The solid wooden floor of the loft heaved under his gaze with the illusion of movement.

“You can stir yourselves or it’ll be cold!” came a shout from the woman who kept the lodging house. In one fluid movement the lad, her son, was up and out of bed and down the ladder to the kitchen below. J pulled on his boots, brushed down his breeches, shrugged his waistcoat over his grubby shirt, and followed him.

The woman was spooning a pale yellow mixture from the pot, suspended over a miserly fire, into four wooden bowls. She slapped them onto the table and bowed her head over her calloused hands for a brief grace. Another man who had stayed the night sleeping on the floor beside the fire drew up his stool, took out his own spoon and ate with relish.

“What is it?” J asked cautiously.

“Porridge made with Indian corn,” she replied.

“You’ll have to get used to it,” the man said. “Indian corn is almost all we eat.”

J smiled. “I wasn’t expecting milk and honey.”

“There’s many that do,” the woman said shortly. “And many that die still hoping.”

There was a short silence.

“You here prospecting?” the man asked.

“No,” J said. “I’m a gardener, a plant collector. I’ve come to collect plants. Authorized by King Charles himself.” He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should tell them about the great garden in Lambeth and his father’s reputation as the greatest gardener that had ever been, adviser to the Duke of Buckingham, gardener to the king and queen, one of the greatest collectors of rarities in the world. He looked at the woman’s enfolded, bitter face and thought that he would not.

The man nodded. “Will you see the king when you get home? If you get home,” he added.

J nodded and took a spoon of the porridge. It was bland, the corn boiled to the consistency of paste. “Yes. I work for him in his garden at Oatlands Palace,” he said.

“Well, tell him that we can’t do with this governor,” the man said bluntly. “Tell him that we won’t do with him, and that’s a fact. We’ve got enough worries to deal with here without having a fat fool set over us from England. We need a general assembly with a voice for every planter. We need a guarantee of our rights.”

“You’d be imprisoned if you spoke like that in England,” J pointed out mildly.

“That’s why I’m not in England,” the man said shortly. “And I don’t expect to live as if I were. Which is more than can be said for the governor, who expects to live like a lord with servants in a land where men and women have come to be free.”

“I’m not his adviser,” J said. “I speak to the king – when I ever see him – about plants and his garden.”

The man nodded. “So who does advise him now?”

J thought for a moment. It all seemed a long way away and of little interest in this new country. “The queen,” he said. “And Archbishop Laud.”

The man made a grimace and turned his head to spit but then checked the movement when he saw the woman glare. “Beg pardon. So he hasn’t called a parliament?”

J shook his head. “He hopes to rule without one.”

“I heard he was halfway to being a Papist.”