Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

He turned to her. “You can’t stop me. I’m going to fight for the king.”

“You’re a child.”

“I’m nearly fifteen, old enough to fight.”

It was that spark that fired the charge. Hester sprung on him and seized him by his shirt collar and marched him, like a schoolboy, down the garden path, past the glorious rosebeds where waves of perfume billowed in their wake, to the orchard where John was up a ladder disbudding apple trees.

“The king needs fools!” Hester exclaimed. “A fools’ army for a fool of a king.”

“I will go!” Johnnie proclaimed, struggling out from her grip. “I will not be under your command. I’m a man, I shall play a man’s part.”

Hester thrust him at his father. “He’s fourteen,” she announced baldly. “Says he’s a man. I can’t rule him anymore. You will have to decide. Is he to go to serve the king or not?”

John stepped slowly off the lower rungs of the ladder and looked at his son. “What’s this?”

Johnnie did not look away but faced his father like a young stag facing the leader of the herd. “I want to do my duty,” he said. “I want to serve the king.”

“The king is not served by riots and uproar and Englishmen killing each other in the streets of Maidstone and Canterbury,” John said slowly.

“If that is what it takes-”

John shook his head. “Making peace in a kingdom is done by ceaseless work, ceaseless working toward agreement,” he said. “Haven’t you lived your childhood through a war and seen that at the end there is nothing agreed, nothing is any further forward?”

“I want to do my duty!”

John put his hand on the bough of the apple tree as if he would draw strength from it. “Your duty is to your God and to your father and mother,” he said.

“You don’t even believe in God,” Johnnie shot back. “You don’t believe in anything. You have not done your duty by me as a father – you left us for years. You’re the king’s man but you don’t fight for him, you’re in the pay of Parliament and you joke about being a Parliament gardener. You’re a Virginia planter but you stay at home in Lambeth. I won’t be told my duty by you!”

Hester started forward to protect her stepson against the blow that must come, and then forced herself to pause, and hold back. John did not strike Johnnie but froze, his hand tightened on the bough of the apple tree until the knuckles went pale.

“I am sorry you think so low of me,” John said quietly. “And what you say is true. I lost my faith in God when your mother died and I could not even hold her for fear of spreading the infection to you. I have tried to show my respect to others’ faith. But the heart went out of me. I did leave you and Frances and your stepmother at a time when I should have stayed and protected you – but I thought the king would draw me into fighting and never let me go. And I was right to fear that – he has drawn the whole four kingdoms of men into fighting and he has never let them go. I have my headright in Virginia but I could not keep it without killing people that I have every reason to love and respect. It was a war between countrymen there too.”

Johnnie was about to speak, Hester knowing him so well, knew that he was fighting not to break down in tears and pitch into his father’s arms. He held himself very still, rigid as a soldier under fire.

“But I do have a right to speak,” John said. “Because I know things that you don’t. Because I have thought of things in all this time. I have struggled with one loyalty against another, with one love against another. You might think that I am weak, but this is how my life has come to me. It is not a simple life of simple loyalties. I am not like my father. He found master after master that he could love and follow with a loyal heart. He loved Sir Robert Cecil, and then the Duke of Buckingham, and then the king. He never questioned that they were the master and he the man. But it’s not been like that for me. And it won’t be like that for you. The world has changed, Johnnie. It’s not enough to cite duty anymore and go marching off to the rattle of a recruiting drum. You have to think for yourself, you have to pick your own path.”

There was a long silence in the orchard. Somewhere in the high leaves of one of the trees a blackbird started to sing.

“I beg your pardon for speaking as I did,” Johnnie said stiffly. “And I ask your permission as your dutiful son. I want to go and serve the king. That’s my path. I have considered it for myself. I want to fight for my king.”

John shot a look at Hester as if to ask if she could see a way out. One look was enough. Hester’s face was tragic, both hands gripped under the shield of her apron.

“God bless you and keep you then,” John said slowly. “And come back home the minute you have a doubt, Johnnie. You are the only Tradescant heir, and very dear to us.”

Slowly Johnnie dropped to one knee on the grass for his father’s blessing. Over his bent fair head John looked at Hester and saw that he had said the right thing – they had to let their son go to war.

Dearest Mother and Father,

I write this to you on the road to Colchester. I am riding with Lord Norwich and half a dozen gentlemen and a fine troop of more than a thousand strong. We were rebuffed at London – I got there as they were leaving, unluckily for me – but at least I am in a troop of horse gathering recruits as we go.

The mare is keeping up well and I am sure to feed her every night. We have to forage for our own feed which is hard to do in some of these farms that were poor enough before we arrived and are left worse. Some of the gentlemen use the farmers and laborers very hard, and this does not increase our welcome farther down the road.

The ships will supply us when we are in Colchester and an army is coming to our aid from out of East Anglia. There is no doubt that we will win.

My love to Frances and her husband. You can ask Alexander to delay his supply of barrels of gunpowder as a favor to me. I hope you are all well. Your loving and dutiful son – John

“He signs himself John, not Johnnie,” Hester observed.

“He sounds well,” John answered.

They stood, cheek to cheek in the hall, both of them reading the short letter, and then reading it again.

“She’s a good horse, she’ll keep him safe,” John said.

“He doesn’t sound very happy with the troop.”

John relinquished the letter into her hands and turned toward the garden. “How could he be? A boy who has seen so little of the world, suddenly ridden off to war?”

“Should you fetch him home?” Hester asked.

John paused, hearing the longing in her voice. “I cannot,” he said.

She would have argued but he raised his hand to check her. “Don’t reproach me, Hester, it means as much to me as it does to you to see my son enmeshed in this war. I have prayed just as hard as you that we would be at peace before he reached his manhood. I thought it was over. I was sure it was over. But I can’t fetch him home like a naughty schoolboy. He has to walk his own path.”

He looked at her and saw the blank agony on her face.

“He is my son!” she said passionately. “Joking about gunpowder.”

John paused, bleak with worry, nodded, and went out to his garden.

Frances was at the Ark for the plague months of the summer and Hester found that her stepdaughter’s company was the only one she could bear, as they waited for news of Johnnie. The war was favoring the king and she could hope that Johnnie would march into London as part of a triumphant royal army. In July the Scots confirmed in the most dramatic way that they had changed sides and were now for the king, when they crossed the border with an army of nine thousand men to fling against the battle-weary, underpaid, disillusioned forces of Parliament.

It was an appallingly wet summer. The roses in the garden filled with rain and rotted in their blooms. The strawberries and raspberries were washed into sodden pulp on their stems. Hester spent the days watching the rain pour down the great panes of Venetian glass in the rarities room, looking out at the flooded garden, at her husband splashing around ankle-deep in mud, digging ditches to drain the sodden land into the stream outside the house which was already bubbling over the little bridge and still rising.

Uncharacteristically, Hester did not throw a piece of sacking over her cap and go out to help him. She sat at the desk without books before her, without sewing in her hands. She did not even talk to the few visitors who came to see the rarities, though with the river in flood and the country at war again, they might as well have shut the Ark for all the money they took. Hester sat in silence, watching the rain, Frances in silence at her side.

The news came that the English royalist troops had come under attack on the road to Colchester and had had to rush into the town for shelter. There was a brief and terrible battle as the royalists were driven back into the town, before they got the town gates shut and the Parliamentary soldiers locked out. Hundreds of men were killed in close fighting which was bloodier and more bitter than any known in England before. The names of the hundreds of individual soldiers killed in that spiteful skirmish were lost. Hester sat watching the rain, not knowing if her stepson was alive, or facedown in the mud outside the gates of Colchester.

It was not a siege, it was a massacre-in-waiting. General Fairfax with John Lambert was commanding the Parliament army and he had ringed the city with a rampart and ditch with ten forts studding the perimeter. No one would be able to get out alive. The whole city was not just besieged, it was completely entrapped.