Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“John Lambert is there?” Hester asked when Frances brought a news-sheet and read the report of the siege.

“Yes,” Frances said, and looked at her mother.

“What times these are: that John Lambert should be in one army and my boy in another,” Hester said very softly.

There was another royalist army raised at Kingston upon Thames, commanded by Lord Holland, supported by the Duke of Buckingham, the son of the Tradescants’ old master. John had scowled at the mention of his name and stamped out to lay sandbags at the front door of the Ark. The road to Lambeth was completely under water and the little stream before the house had burst its banks and was spreading over the road and into the Tradescants’ orchard. John was fearful that the River Thames itself would flood and bring saltwater to contaminate his land on the north side of the road, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

The new royalist army mustered only a few men. Little more than five hundred turned out in the wet and marched first to London and then to Reigate Castle, and then turned in a retreat which quickly became a rout through the villages north of London to defeat at Surbiton. The Earl of Holland was captured by the Parliamentary army and sent to London. Parliament decreed that he would be beheaded for treason to his country. The Duke of Buckingham slipped away to safety in Holland.

“He would,” Tradescant said sourly.

Suddenly, royal fever seemed to have passed as abruptly as it had raged. There was no further uprising in England. It would all depend on the Scots: whether they could get to Colchester in time to relieve the town, whether they would march all the way south and into the very city of London itself.

The royalists besieged in Colchester, their rations running low and any hope for relief now gone, asked for safe passage for women and children, opened the sally port door and sent them out to the Parliamentary army. To their horror the women were stripped and beaten, and sent back to the fort. England had never seen such savagery in fighting. The rules of warfare had been suspended. Men who would have been chivalrous to a defeated enemy six years ago were now in a killing frenzy of rage that war should have broken out again. There were rumors that when the besieged came out of Colchester, as soon they must, they would be cut down where they stood. There would be no quarter, there would be no prisoners. There would not even be trials for treason. When the men lay down their arms the Parliament cavalry would ride over them.

Hester said nothing when John told her this news, she did not weep, she did not whisper Johnnie’s name. She looked out of the window and said only: “When is it ever going to stop raining?”

John went out into the garden and left her watching the drops run down the panes.

They were glad of the rain in Colchester. It was their only drinking water. For meat they had to eat their horses, then dogs, cats, rats, anything they could catch. There was no flour for bread, there were no fruit or vegetables left in the town. Men started to sicken, everyone went hungry.

Hester put a piece of sacking around her shoulders and splashed out into the garden to look at the rain-soaked lettuce, onions, peppers, beans, peas and herbs in their carefully tended beds. “He’s never gone hungry,” she said softly to herself. “Brought up beside our garden he might have lacked meat once in a while, but he’s always had fruit and vegetables. He’s never wanted for anything before.”

Hester was hoping that the Scots would march south quickly and relieve Colchester as their first objective. They swept over the border looking like a conquering force and reached Preston Moor, just a mile north of Preston, without anyone standing against them. But there they were met by the Parliament army commanded by Cromwell himself with John Lambert at his side, commanding the cavalry. When Hester heard that it was John Lambert against the only men who could rescue her son, she put her head in her hands at the kitchen table and stayed very still for a long while, as if she were asleep.

When the news reached Colchester of the Scots’ defeat there was no hope left for them. The garrison surrendered to a harsh and unforgiving victor. The war was over, the king defeated once more; and the Tradescants had nothing to do but to wait and see if Johnnie would come home, or if he would be among the many hundreds who would never come home again.

Hester left her place at the Venetian window and put a chair and a table at the front door, which overlooked the road from Lambeth. She put her sewing basket on the table and appeared, to any casual passerby, as if she were sitting at her work and enjoying the September sunshine after the wet summer days. Only John and Frances knew that the shirt she held in her lap was no further forward by the end of September than it had been on the black day that Colchester surrendered.

A carter brought him home, a man who had visited the Ark in his boyhood and remembered it as a palace of treasures, and had a fondness for the Tradescant name. Johnnie, pale, jolted by the rough roads, terribly thin, and with a dark, ill-healing scar from his hipbone to his rib, lay in the back on a heap of sacks.

Hester heard the rumble of the wheels and glanced up from her idle hands holding the unsewn shirt and then dropped her work, overturned her chair and flew out of the front door and into the road.

“Johnnie!” she exclaimed as she peered over the tailboard.

He managed a little smile. “Mother.”

“Drive around to the back,” Hester ordered the driver, her months of passive silence quite forgotten. She jumped up onto the step of the cart, her eyes fixed on her stepson, and held on as they jolted over the little bridge, went past the terrace of the house and into the stable yard. John, picking apples, looked toward the house and saw the cart turning into the yard with his wife clinging like an urchin to the tailgate. He leaped down from the ladder and walked toward the house. He did not run. He feared too much what might greet him.

The carter and Hester had Johnnie on his feet, walking slowly toward the kitchen door, an arm around each of them. Cook flung open the door and Hester guided them through to the parlor and seated Johnnie in his father’s chair at the fireside.

He had gone very white, his lips pale in his pale face. Hester snapped over her shoulder, “Fetch the brandy,” and Cook ran to obey her. John came in, treading mud onto the polished wooden parlor floor.

“Son?”

Johnnie looked up at his father and something in that glance, something vulnerable and unjustly hurt, reminded John so powerfully of Jane, his lost wife, that his pity for his son and his old grief for her hit him like a renewed blow. He dropped to his knees and took his son’s hands.

“You’re safe now,” he said. “Safe home. Are you hurt much?”

“I got a pike in my side,” Johnnie whispered. “It hurt a lot and bled a lot. But it’s healing now.”

Hester held the glass of brandy to his lips and Johnnie sipped.

“We’ll have you in bed in a moment,” she promised him. “And a proper dinner for you.” She smoothed his long fair hair from his forehead. “My boy,” she said tenderly. “My poor boy.”

Cook returned. “His bed is ready for him, sheets warmed.”

The carter and Hester stepped forward to help him but John put them back. “I can manage,” he said huskily, and took his son in his arms.

The boy weighed little more than he did when he was only ten years old. Tradescant scowled at the lightness of the body and went toward the stairs. Hester ran ahead and opened the bedroom door, turned down the sheets.

“I’m lousy,” Johnnie protested. “And covered with fleas.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Hester said, slipping off his boots and stripping down his breeches.

He gave a little whimper of pain as she pulled up his shirt and she saw that the dirty linen had stuck to the raw wound.

“We’ll soon have you well again,” she said.

Both her husband and her son heard the old determination in Hester’s voice. “We’ll soon have you well again.”

King Charles blithely celebrated his forty-eighth birthday at Newport and entertained the Parliamentary negotiators who had been sent from London to make a new peace with a king who had broken every agreement they had made before. This time he was more accommodating than ever; but would not, swore that he could not, allow the sale of the bishops’ lands and palaces. The bishops could not be abolished, their position must be maintained. The most he would agree was to rule without them for three years, the promise he had already given to the Scots. But Parliament was firmer than the Scots. It would settle for nothing less than the complete abolition of all the bishops and the freeing of their wealth and lands.

Alexander Norman and Frances, visiting the Ark in November, found Johnnie sitting at the fireside wrapped in a fine warm gown with his father and mother beside him, discussing the fate of the king.

“Any news?” John asked his son-in-law.

“The Levelers are rising in strength in the army,” Alexander replied. “And they demand that there be no king ever again and that Parliament be elected every three years by every man with a stake in the country.”

“What does that mean for the king?” John asked.

Alexander shook his head. “If they gain control of Parliament then it must mean that he is sent abroad. There can be no place for him.”

“Perhaps he will agree,” Hester suggested, one eye on her son. “Perhaps the king and Parliament can agree at Newport.”

“He must agree,” Alexander replied. “He must see that he has to agree. He has fought two wars against his own people, and lost them both. He tried the greatest gamble he could play – he brought the Scots in against his own countrymen. And he has lost. He must now agree.”