Virgin Earth (23 page)

The steward took in Tradescant’s steadiness. “Aye,” he said more quietly. “But the rents are already spent, signed away or promised. They are not free for deductions.”

There was a brief silence. “What am I to do then?” John asked pleasantly. “Shall I return to his lordship and tell him it cannot be done?”

“Would you do that?” the man enquired.

John smiled. “Surely. What else could I do?”

“You don’t fear taking bad news to a new master, the greatest master in the land?”

“I have worked for a great man before,” John said. “And, good news or bad, I found the best way was to tell him simply what was amiss. If a man is fool enough to punish his messengers he’ll never get his messages.”

The steward cracked a laugh and held out his hand. “I am William Ward. And I am glad to meet you, Mr. Tradescant.”

John took the handshake. “Have you been in his lordship’s service for long?” he asked.

The steward nodded. “Yes.”

“And are his affairs in a bad way?”

“He is the wealthiest man in the land,” William Ward stated. “Newly married to an heiress and with the king’s own fortune at his disposal.”

“Then—?”

“And the most spendthrift. And the wildest. D’you know how he did his courting?”

John glanced at the closed door behind them and shook his head.

“He caught the lady’s fancy — not surprising—”

John thought of that smile and the way the man threw back his head when he laughed. “Not surprising,” he agreed.

“But when he went to her father, the man declined. Again, not surprising.”

John thought of the rumors that Buckingham was the king’s man in ways that a sensible man did not question. “I don’t know,” he said stoutly.

“Not surprising to those of us who have seen the king on his visits here,” the steward said bluntly. “So what does my lord do?”

Tradescant shook his head. “I have been away, and in Canterbury, we don’t hear gossip. I rarely listen to it, anyway.”

The steward laughed shortly. “Well, hear this. Buckingham invites Lady Kate to his mother’s house for dinner and when the dinner is ended they don’t let her call for her carriage. They don’t let her go home! Buckingham’s mother herself keeps the girl overnight. So her reputation is ruined and her father is glad to get her wed at any price, takes the duke’s offer and has to pay handsomely for the privilege of having his daughter dishonored into the bargain.”

Tradescant’s jaw dropped open. “He did this?”

William Ward nodded.

“To a lady?”

“Aye. Now you get some idea of what he can do and what he is allowed. And now you get some idea of his rashness.”

Tradescant took a couple of swift steps and looked out of the window. Almost at once his sense of anxiety at this new post, at this madly impulsive young master, deserted him. He could see the site of what would be his kitchen garden, and he had it in mind to build a hollow wall, the first of its kind in England, and to heat the inside of it like a chimney. It might warm the fruit trees growing against the wall and make them come early into bud. He shook his head at the promising site and returned to the problem of his new master’s wildness.

“And is his new wife unhappy?” he asked.

William Ward looked at him for one incredulous moment and then burst into laughter. “You’ve seen my lord. D’you think a new wife would be unhappy?”

John shrugged. “Who knows what a woman wants?”

“She wants rough wooing and passionate bedding and she has had both from our lord. She wants to know that he loves her above everything else and there is no other woman in the land who can say that her husband risked everything to have her.”

“And the king?” Tradescant asked, going to the key of all things.

Ward smiled. “The king keeps the two of them as lesser men keep lovebirds in a cage, for the pleasure of seeing their happiness. And in any case, when he wants Buckingham all to himself he has only to crook his finger and our lord goes. His wife knows that he must go, and she smiles and bids him farewell.”

The steward fell silent. John looked out again at the parkland that stretched to the horizon. This was flat country; he thought the winds in winter would be cruel. “So,” he said slowly. “I have a new lord who is a spendthrift, and wild, a breaker of hearts and no respecter of persons.”

The steward nodded. “And any one of us would lay down our lives for him.”

Surprised, John looked up. The steward was smiling.

“Yes,” he said. “There isn’t a man on the estate who wouldn’t go hungry to keep him in his silks and satin. You’ll see. Now go and buy your trees. Every time you agree a price, make sure that you note down the tenant’s name and the price of his trees. And tell them that I — I and not they — will calculate the difference in the rents and discount the rents next quarter day. Bring me the list when you have done.”

He paused for a moment. “Unless I have given you a disliking for your lord and you want to go back to Canterbury?” he asked. “He is as wild as I say, he is as spendthrift as I say and he is as wealthy as I say. He has more power at his fingertips than any man in the land, and that is probably including the king.”

John had a strong sense of returning to his place at the very center of things, serving a lord who served his country, a man whose doings were the talk of every ale house in the land. “I’ll keep my place here,” he said. “There is much for me to do.”

1623

John and J worked hard all the winter, planning the gardens and pegging out lines for the knot garden, for the terraces and for the turf benches in the lord’s new orchards. Much of the work had to wait until the spring when the ground was soft enough for digging, but John had a small forest of trees waiting for the earth to warm so that they could be planted, each one labeled with its place, each with a plot reserved for it. For the workers who could neither read nor write, J had instituted a scheme of colored dots. They had to match the label on the tree marked with three red dots with the plot in the ground marked with three red dots. Or green or yellow. “This is code,” John said admiringly to J.

“It’s madness,” J said bluntly. “Everyone should be taught to read at dame school. How else can they understand their Bible? How else do their work?”

“We’re not all scholars like you,” John said mildly.

J flushed in one of his sudden attacks of bashfulness. “I’m no scholar,” he said gruffly. “I don’t pretend to be one. I’m no better than any man. But I do think that all men should be taught to read and write so that they can read their Bible and think for themselves.”

Work on the heated wall had already started to John’s design. The plot was marked out and the foundations for the perimeter wall were already dug. The whole garden was to be walled with a double skin of deep red brick, and there were to be built three equally spaced fireplaces, one above the other, where the charcoal burners could be lit and the smoke drift sideways through the wall till every brick was warm to the touch. The beds of the garden were not to be edged with box in the usual way. John wanted to raise them after a fashion never seen before. He wanted little brick walls to edge them, and the beds were to be filled with sifted earth and rotted manure. He even instituted a pile of manure from the stables, which was to be left to molder and then turned over every month. “I don’t want it all fresh and carrying the roots of weeds into my garden,” he explained to J and to the other vegetable gardeners. “I want the earth in these beds to be free of weeds and free of stones. I want this garden to have soil so rich and so soft that I could lay a strawberry plant on it and leave it to set its own roots. D’you understand?”

They grumbled behind his back but to his face they nodded and pulled their caps. John’s reputation as one of the greatest gardeners of the day had preceded him and it was an honor to work under him — raised beds, and stirred manure, hollow walls, or no.

The house was quiet after the festivities of Christmas; the duke had returned from the court in January and set up residence with Kate, his wife. His mother was to come later in the year. So Tradescant, rounding the stable yard in search of an errant weeding lad, was surprised to see an exceptionally fine horse, an Arab, being led from its stall into the yard, and the duke’s hunter prancing around on the cobbles, all tacked up and ready to go.

“Whose horse is that?” John asked a groom and received nothing more than a wink for a reply.

“Dolt,” John said shortly, picked up his hoe and went to pace out the orchard.

That afternoon, John was measuring the length of the new avenue which he planned to plant with lime trees leading from the Chelmsford road to the house when he heard hoofbeats on the drive, and there were the two horses with two strange men on their backs.

John stepped forward to challenge them. “Who are you? And what’s your business here? That’s my lord’s horse.”

“Let me pass, my John,” said one of the men in a familiar voice. The stranger leaned down from the duke’s horse and swept off his hat. Buckingham’s dark eyes looked down at John, and John heard his irrepressible chuckle.

“Fooled you,” Buckingham cried triumphantly. “Fooled you completely.”

John stared at the face of his lord, absurdly concealed by a false beard and a muffler. “Your Grace—” He glanced across at the other horseman and recognized, with a sense of shock, the young prince he had last seen sniveling at the heels of his older brother. But now the young prince was the heir, Prince Charles. “Good God! Your Highness!”

“Will we pass, d’you think?” Buckingham demanded joyously. “I am John Smith and this is my brother Thomas. Will we pass, d’you think?”

“Oh, yes,” John said. “But what are you about, my lord? Wenching?”

Buckingham laughed aloud at that. “The finest wench in the world,” he whispered. “We’re going to Spain, John, we’re going to marry His Highness here to the infanta of Spain! What d’you think of that?”

For a moment John was too stunned to speak; then he grabbed the hunter’s bridle above the bit. “Stay!” he cried. “You can’t.”

“You order me?” Buckingham enquired politely. “You had much better take your hand off my horse, Tradescant.”

John flinched but did not let go. “Please, your Grace,” he said. “Wait. Think on this. Why are you going disguised?”

“For the adventure!” Buckingham said merrily.

“Come on, Thomas!” the prince said. “Or are you John? Am I Thomas?”

“I beg of you,” John said urgently. “You cannot go like this, my lord. You cannot take the prince like this.”

The prince’s horse pawed the ground. “Come on!” the prince said.

“Forgive me!” Tradescant looked over at him. “Your Highness has perhaps not considered. You cannot ride into France as if it were East Anglia, Your Highness. What if they hold you? What if Spain refuses to let you leave?”

“Nonsense,” Prince Charles said briefly. “Come on, Villiers.”

Buckingham’s horse moved forward and John was dragged along, not releasing his grip on the bridle. “Your Grace.” He tried again. “Does the king know of this? What if he turns against you?”

Buckingham leaned low over the horse’s neck so he could whisper to Tradescant. “Leave me go, my John. I am at work here. If I marry the prince to the infanta then I have done something which no man has ever done — make Spain our ally, make the greatest alliance in Europe and myself the greatest marriage broker who ever lived. But even if I fail, then the prince and I have ridden out like brothers and we will be brothers for the rest of our lives. Either way, my place is assured. Now let my bridle go. I have to leave.”

“Have you food and money, a change of clothes?”

Buckingham laughed. “John, my John, next time you shall pack for me. But I must go now!”

His spur touched the hunter’s side and it threw up its head and bounded forward. Prince Charles’s horse leaped after, and there was a swirl of dust in John’s face and the two of them were gone.

“Please God keep him safe, keep them safe,” Tradescant said, looking after them. His new master and the prince he had known as a lonely incompetent little boy. “Please God, stop them at Dover.”

Elizabeth saw at once that something had happened when John came home at dusk for his dinner and stared into his broth without eating. As soon as J had eaten she sent him from the room with a nod of her head, and then seated herself beside John on the settle which stood at the fireside, and put her hand on his. “What’s the matter?”

He shook his head. “I cannot tell you.” He glanced down into her worried face. “Nothing wrong with me, my dear. Nothing wrong with J, and nothing wrong with the garden. But I cannot tell you. It is a secret and not my secret. I cannot tell anybody.”

“Then it’s the duke,” she said simply. “He’s done something bad.”

John’s stricken look told her that her guess had struck home.

“What’s he done?” she pressed.

He shook his head again. “Please God, it won’t be too bad. Please God there will be a happy outcome.”

“Is he at home?”

He shook his head.

“Gone to London? Gone to the king?”

“Gone to Spain,” he whispered very low.

Elizabeth recoiled from him as if he had pinched her. “Spain?”

John gave her a swift unhappy glance and put his finger to his lips. “I cannot say more,” he said firmly.

Elizabeth rose and went to the fire, bent and stirred the poker under the glowing logs. He saw her lips moving in a silent prayer. Elizabeth was a devout woman; a trip to Spain was like a trip to the underworld to her. Spain was the heart of Catholicism, the home of the anti-Christ against whom all good Protestants must struggle and fight from birth till death. Buckingham’s choice of destination at once condemned him in her eyes. He must be a bad man if he chose to go to Spain.

John closed his eyes briefly. He could not imagine what condemnation would be released on his master if Elizabeth, and all the many hundreds, thousands, of devout men and women like Elizabeth, knew that he was planning to bring a Spanish princess home to be queen of England.

Elizabeth straightened up and hooked the poker onto the bracket at the side of the fire. “We should leave,” she announced abruptly.