Virgin Earth (25 page)

As they came into Portsmouth, through the cold sea mist of October, sailing in with the tide, uncertain of their welcome in the Protestant city in the staunchly Protestant country after trying for a marriage which would have brought the proud Tudor independence to an abrupt end, they saw a light blaze on the quayside; a bonfire had been lit. Then another, then another, in a string of light along the city walls. Then there was the boom of a cannon salute which echoed across the harbor, and then another, and the scream of loudly blown trumpets, and the sound of people cheering. Buckingham smiled to himself, slapped his prince on the back and went below to put the diamond studs in his hat.

“He did it, he brought the prince safe home,” John said to Elizabeth when the news of the triumphant entry of the two young men into London reached New Hall. “There was dancing on the streets and roasted oxen at every corner. They are calling him a greater statesman than England has ever seen. They are calling him the savior of his country. Shall we go into Chelmsford tonight and see the merrymaking?”

He did not mean to crow but he heard the joy in his own voice. It was not that Buckingham had proved himself to be a statesman or a diplomat. But at least he was lucky, and in this new court, luck and beauty would do everything.

The face that Elizabeth turned to him was pinched and cold. “He took the prince into danger in the first place,” she said unforgivingly. “Danger of his body and deadly danger to his mortal soul. And the prince only escaped from marrying a disciple of the Devil by being forsworn. He gave his word of honor to a noble princess. He courted her and promised to marry her. But now he has broken his promise. I shan’t go dancing because your lord took the prince into danger and then made him a jilt to bring him safe home. It was vanity and folly to go in the first place. I won’t drink to his safe return.”

John quietly put on his coat and hat and let himself out of the door. “I think I’ll go then,” he said mildly. “Don’t wake for me.”

1624

“He’s home,” J announced without enthusiasm.

John was standing on the mount he had created in the duke’s new lake, checking the line of the winding path to the top. Below him, the men hired to plant the trees were digging and setting in apple, cherry, pear and plum alternately up the circling slope. Small stakes supported each tree against the constant easterly winds which were John’s bugbear in this Essex garden. Bigger posts were set in the ground, tied tautly with twine, one to another, to guide the espaliered branches to reach out, one tree to another, so they would make unbroken lines of blossom in spring, and unbroken lines of fruit in autumn. J’s task was to check that each tree was placed to its best advantage with the outstretched branches lying conveniently along the twine, and tied in so they could not stray and be wayward. John was following with a sharp knife to cut off any twigs which were growing out of the smooth line of the interlaced trees. It was one of John’s most favorite tasks: a delicate marriage of wildness and artifice, an imposition of order upon unruliness which in the end looked as if it had grown ordered and well-ruled out of simple good nature. A garden as God might have left it, an Eden without disorder or weeds.

“God be praised!” John said, straightening up from his pruning. “Did he ask for me? Is he coming out into the garden?”

J shook his head. “He’s sick,” he said. “Very sick.”

John felt his breath suddenly stop as if he too were ill. A sudden pulse of dread went through his body at the thought of his master’s frailty. He suddenly remembered Cecil, dying in bluebell time. “Sick?” he asked. “Not the plague?”

J shrugged. “A great quarrel with the king, and he took to his bed.”

“He is pretending to be ill?” John asked.

“I think not. The duchess is running all around their apartments and the kitchen is making possets. They want some herbs for medicine.”

“Good God, why did you not tell me at once?” John ran down the path, slithering on the muddy track, and flung himself into the rowing boat moored at the delicate ornamental jetty. He grabbed at the oars and labored clumsily across the lake, splashing himself with water and cursing his own slowness. He got to the shore, beached the boat and ran through the shallows and up toward the house.

He went straightaway toward the great hall, his boots making wet prints on the floor. “Where is the apothecary? What does he need?”

The man gestured him toward the duke’s private quarters, up the beautiful staircase which had cost him such a fortune. John went up the stairs at a run. The duke’s apartments were in uproar, the doors wide open, the duke sprawled neglected on his bed, still in his riding boots. Dozens of men and women were running in and out with coals for his fire and fresh straw for the floor, warming pans, cooling drinks, someone opening the windows, someone closing the shutters. Amid it all was Kate, the young duchess, weeping helplessly in a chair, and half a dozen apothecaries quarreling over the bed.

“Quiet!” Tradescant shouted, too angry at the sight of such chaos for his usual politeness. He took a couple of footmen, spun them around and pushed them out of the room. He closed the door on them and then pointed to the maids who were sweeping the floor and the men who were stacking logs on the fire. “You! Out.”

The room slowly emptied of complaining servants, and Tradescant turned his attention to the apothecaries. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked.

The six men, all bitter rivals, burst into noisy argument. Kate, hunched in her chair, wailed like a child.

Tradescant opened the door. “Her Grace’s ladies!” he shouted. They came at the run. “Take Her Grace to her own chamber,” he said gently. “Now.”

“I want to be here!” Kate cried.

Tradescant took her arm and half-lifted her from the room. “Let me see that he is comfortable and you can come when he is ready to receive you,” he suggested.

She fought against him. “I want to be with my lord!”

“You wouldn’t want him to see you weeping,” John said softly. “With your nose all red, and your eyes puffed up so plain.”

The appeal to her vanity struck her at once. She ran out of the room and John closed the door on her and rounded on the apothecaries. “Which of you is the oldest?” he demanded.

One man stepped forward. “I,” he said, thinking that the prize was to be awarded to seniority.

“And which the youngest?”

A young man, barely thirty, stepped forward. “I am.”

“The two of you get out,” Tradescant ordered brutally. “The other four of you agree on a treatment in whispers, at once.”

He opened the door and the two dismissed men hesitated, caught one fulminating look and stepped outside. “Wait there,” Tradescant said. “If these can’t agree you’ll be employed in their place.”

He shut the door on them and went back to the bed. The duke was as white as marble; he looked like a statue carved from ice. The only color about him was his dark eyelashes sweeping his cheeks and the blue shadows, the color of violets in springtime, under his eyes.

The eyelids fluttered and he looked up at John. “Splendidly done,” he said softly, his throat hoarse. “I just want to sleep.”

“Well enough,” Tradescant said. “Now that I know.” He pointed to the apothecaries. “You three — out of the room.” He pointed to the other. “And you watch the duke’s sleep and guard him from noise and interruption.”

Buckingham made a little gesture with his thin hand. “Don’t you leave me, John.”

John bowed, and swept all the men from the room. “Consult among yourselves and make whatever he needs,” he said firmly. “I shall watch his sleep.”

“He needs cupping,” one of them said.

“No cupping.”

“Or leeches?”

John shook his head. “He’s to sleep and not be tortured.”

“What d’you know? You’re nothing but a gardener.”

John gave the apothecaries a hard unfriendly smile. “I wager I lose fewer plants than you do patients,” he said accurately. “And I keep them well by letting them rest when they need rest, and feeding them when they are hungry. I don’t cup them and leech them, I care for them. And that is what I shall do for my duke until he orders it otherwise.”

Then he shut the door in their faces and stood at the foot of his master’s bed, and waited for him to have his fill of sleep.

Tradescant could guard his master against the household. But when the king heard that the Favorite had been sick and near to death, he sent word that he would come at once, and the whole court with him.

Buckingham, still pale but only a little stronger, was sitting in the bay window which overlooked John’s new knot garden, John standing at his side, when they brought the message from the king.

“I’m back in favor then,” Buckingham said idly. “I thought I was finished for this reign.”

“But you brought Prince Charles safe home,” Tradescant protested. “What more did His Majesty want?”

Buckingham slid a sly sideways smile at his gardener and sniffed at the spray of snowdrops which Tradescant had brought him. “A little less rather than more,” he said. “He envied me the triumphant entry into London. He thought I was setting up to be king myself. He thought I wanted Kit Villiers to marry the Elector Frederick’s daughter and ally myself to the Stuarts.” He laughed shortly. “As though I would put Kit over myself,” he said scornfully. “And then he looks from me to the prince and back again and he fears my influence over the heir. And he’s jealous as an old woman. He cannot bear to see us make merry when he is old and aching and longing for his bed. He cannot bear to think that we are merry without him when he has withdrawn. He has given me everything I ask and now he is jealous that I am wealthy and courted. Jealous that I am the richest man in the kingdom with the most beautiful house.” He broke off and tossed his head.

“Though it is true that it is better not to flaunt your wealth,” Tradescant remarked to the sky outside the bay window.

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m thinking that my old lord loved Theobalds Palace before anything else in the country and the king,
this
king, in very truth, saw it through his eyes, acknowledged its value and claimed it for himself. And here we’ve only just gotten the avenue planted.”

Buckingham cracked a laugh. “John! My John! If he wants it, he’ll have to have it! Avenue and all. Anything so long as I am back in his favor.”

John nodded. “You think he will forgive you?”

The younger man lay back on the rich cushions heaped in the window-seat and turned his face to look out at the view. John noted, with affection, the perfect profile, white against red velvet.

“What d’you think, John? If I am very pale and very quiet and very submissive, and look — so — would you forgive me?”

John tried to stare at his master unmoved, but he found he was smiling as if his master were a tender wilful maid in the first years of her beauty, at the time when a girl can do anything and be forgiven by everyone. “I suppose so,” he admitted ungraciously. “If I were a besotted old fool.”

Buckingham grinned. “I suppose so too.”

The duke waved farewell to the royal coach and the hundreds of courtiers and outriders, and watched them move slowly down the newly planted avenue. John Tradescant had done his best but the limes in the double-planted avenue were still only saplings. The duke watched the coach with the crown and the nodding feathers rumble from one thin leafy shade to another. When they grew, the trees would be a powerful symbol of the greatness of the house. And by then the prince would be on the throne, with Buckingham as his adviser, and the king, the jealous difficult bad-tempered old king, would be dead.

The king had wept and asked for forgiveness after a long bitter quarrel. He had tolerated Buckingham’s marriage, indeed he loved Kate, and he was even amused by Buckingham’s notorious affairs with every pretty woman at court, but he could not bear to feel that his son the prince had supplanted him in Buckingham’s affections. Tearfully he accused them of conspiring against him and that Prince Charles — never the favored son — had stolen from his father his love, his only love.

He publicly called Prince Charles a changeling and wished that his brother, the handsome and godly Prince Henry, had never died. He publicly called Buckingham a heartbreaker and a false son to him. He called him a traitor and wept the easy tears of an old man, and swore that no one loved him.

It took all Buckingham’s charm to talk the king into a more reasonable frame of mind, and all his patience to tolerate the moist kisses on his face and his mouth. It took all his ready humor and his genuine joy of life to seek to make the elderly king happy again, and the court happy with him. A sick man, newly up from his bed, Buckingham danced with Kate before the king, and sat at his side and listened to his rambling complaints about the Spanish alliance and the Spanish threat, and never showed so much as a flicker of weariness or sickness.

Buckingham waited until the royal carriage was out of sight before he put his hat back on his head and turned away toward the stone steps to the knot garden. Already it was as Tradescant had promised it would be. Each delicately shaped bed was filled with plants of a single uniform color, edged with dark green box and entwined in an unending pattern with another. Buckingham walked around them, feeling his anxiety melt away at the sight of the twisting patterns, at the perfection of the planting.

It was a joy he had not known before Tradescant had made this place for him. He had seen gardens as part of the furniture of a great house, something a great man must have. But Tradescant had made him see things with a plantsman’s eye. Now he walked around and around the little twisting paths of the knot garden with a sense of renewed pleasure and a feeling of liberty. The little hedges destroyed the sense of perspective; when he looked across them from one end of the knot garden to the other they seemed as if they enclosed acres of land, one field after another. They were a little parable of wealth. They looked like great fields, great acres, and yet they were encompassed within a few hundred yards.

“A thing of beauty,” Buckingham murmured softly to himself. “I should thank him for it. Thank him for making it for me, and then for training my eye to see it.”