Virgin Earth (24 page)

“What?” John opened his eyes again and blinked.

“We should leave now.”

“What are you saying? We’ve only just gotten here.”

She came back beside him, took his hand in hers and pressed it to her lips and then held it to her heart, like a pledge. He could feel her heartbeat, steady and reassuring, as her earnest face looked into his. “John, this duke is not a good man. I have spoken with the people of the house and half of them worship him and will hear nothing against him, and the other half say that he is a sinner of dreadful vices. There is no balance in this household. There is no steadiness. This is a whirlwind of worldly desires and we have strayed into the very heart of it.”

John wanted to speak but she gently pressed his hand and he let her finish.

“I did not want to leave Canterbury but you prevailed and it was my duty to obey you,” she said softly. “But please now, husband, hear this. We can go to any household in the world that you choose as long as we do not stay here. I will pack our goods and our clothes and go tomorrow, wherever you say, as long as we do not stay here. I will follow you overseas even, Virginia even, as long as we do not stay here.”

John waited until she was silent; then he spoke cautiously, feeling his way. “I never thought to hear you speak so. Why do you dislike him so much? As a man? As my master?”

She shrugged and looked toward the fire, where the flames were leaping over the wood and casting a flickering light on her face. “I don’t know him as a man, and it’s too early to say how he will be as your master. All I have seen of him is worldly show. The diamonds in his hat, the horses in his coach. What man in England has ever had a coach before? No one but the old queen and King James, and now this man has one, with rare horses to go before it. All I have seen of him would make me suspect that he is not a true Christian. And all that I have heard of him, and all that I know of him, tells me that he is very deep in sin.” She dropped her voice. “Have you not thought that he may even be in league with the devil himself?”

John tried to laugh but Elizabeth’s sincerity was too much for him. “Oh, Elizabeth!”

“Where did he come from?”

“Not from hell! From Leicestershire!”

She frowned at the flippancy of his tone. “The son of a servant and a mere knight of the shires,” she said. “Look at his rise, John. D’you think a man can get such fortune honestly?”

“He has enjoyed the favor of the king,” John insisted. “He was a cup-bearer and then a groom of the bedchamber and the favorite of many great men. They helped him to the post of Master of the Horse and he has brought the king such horses as no prince ever had before. Of course he enjoys great favor; he has earned it. He brought the king an Arab horse, the only one in England. The finest horse that ever was seen in England.”

She shook her head. “So they make him Lord High Admiral — for trading in a horse?”

“Elizabeth—” John said warningly.

“Bear with me,” she said swiftly. “Hear me out, this once.”

He nodded. “But I will not hear treason.”

“I will speak nothing but the truth.”

They looked at each other for a moment and she saw in the sliding away of his glance that he knew that the truth was treasonous. That you could speak the truth about Buckingham and the truth was that the king was mad for the man and unfit to rule through his madness. That Buckingham was higher than his ability, higher than any single man’s ability could ever take him, because the king was mad to please him.

“What hold is it that he has over the king?” she asked, her voice very low.

“The king loves him,” Tradescant said firmly. “And he is his faithful servant.”

“He calls himself the king’s dog,” she said, naming the unthinkable.

“In play. The king calls him Steenie after St. Stephen — he admires his beauty, Elizabeth. Nothing wrong with that.”

“He calls himself his dog and there are those who say that the king mounts him like a dog mounts a bitch.”

“Silence!” Tradescant leaped to his feet and away from his wife. “That you should speak such words, Elizabeth! At your own hearthside! That you should listen to such things! Bawdy talk! Dirty tavern talk! And repeat them to me! What would your father say if he heard his daughter speaking of such things like a whore!”

She did not even flinch from her father’s name. “I say what must be said, what must be clear between the two of us. And God knows that my heart is pure though my mouth is filled with filth.”

“A pure heart and a dirty mouth?” Tradescant exclaimed.

“Better than a sweet mouth and dirty heart,” she retorted. He checked; they were both thinking of Buckingham and the sweetness of his singing voice.

“Finish what you have to say,” John said sullenly. “Finish this, Elizabeth.”

“I say to you that his mother who was born a serving maid is now a countess, and is said by many to be a witch—”

John gasped, but she went on.

“A witch. And others say that she is a papist, a heretic, who would have been burned at the stake only a few years ago. I say to you that he is a man who has earned his place by sodomy under the king, and by pandering for the king, who won his wife by kidnap and by rape, who has seduced the king and seduced the prince. Who has been a sodomite with a man and with his son. For all I know he is leagued with the devil himself. Certain, he is deep, deep in sin. And I ask you, John, I beg you, John, to let us go now. To let us leave him now. He has gone to Spain, to the enemy of our country, so he is a traitor even to the king who sins with him. So let us go, John. Let you and me and J get away from here to somewhere where the air is not rank as sulphur with sin and debauchery.”

There was a long silence.

“You are intemperate,” John said weakly.

She shook her head. “Never mind about that. What’s your answer?”

“I have been paid for the full quarter—”

“We can find a way to repay your wages if we leave now.”

He paused for a moment, thinking of what she had said. Then slowly he rose and shook his head. He put his hand on the chimney breast, almost as if he needed to steady himself as he went against his wife’s declared wish, and his own sense, his own deep and hidden sense, that she was right.

“We stay,” he said. “I have given him my promise that I will make him a fine garden. I will not go back on my word. Even if all that you say were true, I would not go back on my word. All I will do for him is garden; there can be no sin in that for us. We stay, Elizabeth, until the garden is finished and then we will leave.”

She stood beside him, looking up into his face, and John saw her face alter, as if he had failed some great test and she would never fully trust him again.

“I beg you,” she said and her voice shook a little, “by everything that I hold sacred, which is everything that this new lord of yours denies, to turn aside from him and walk in the paths of righteousness.”

John shrugged irritably at her scriptural tone. “It’s not like that. I have agreed to make a garden for my lord and we will stay until I have completed it. When it is done we can leave, as I have said.”

He went from the room and she heard him close their bedroom door and the floorboards creak as he undressed to get into their bed.

“It is like that for me,” she said quietly to the dying fire, as if she were swearing a solemn oath. “You have turned aside from the paths of righteousness, husband, and I can walk by your side no more.”

John waited for news of his master but there was silence for the first two, three days. Then news of the escapade of the young prince and the young duke began to leak out. They were incompetent conspirators and, indeed, such incompetent travelers that it was a wonder they were not stopped at Dover as John had hoped. But Villiers threw silver around their journey, and ordered the ships out of Dover harbor on his authority as Lord High Admiral, and soon the court and the old king heard that the boys had been entertained in Paris, ridden halfway across France and finally reached Madrid.

The king saw the whole business as a handsome piece of the knight errantry, like the court masques when the handsome hero wins the fairest lady and then they dance. But the rumor that came back to England, even to the King’s Arms at Chelmsford where John had taken to drinking in the evening, alert for gossip, was that matters were more difficult. The weeks went by and the young men did not come home with a princess for a bride. Instead they sent demands for money and more money.

The king grew fretful, missing the duke, even missing his usually neglected son. The court was robbed of life when Villiers was not there to arrange amusements, the hunting, the masquing, the scandals. John, lingering in the steward’s room, found the courage to ask him outright if he thought their master would hold his place if he did not come home soon, and saw his own worry reflected in William Ward’s eyes.

“They will introduce the king to another man every day that our lord is away,” Mr. Ward said quietly. “And the king does not like demands for money. He will hold it against our lord. He will resent it.” He paused for a moment. “You knew the prince when he was a boy; is he faithful-hearted?”

John thought of the lame boy who stammered on his plea that his handsome brother should wait for him, and was always left behind. The sickly boy who was never anyone’s favorite while his older brother was the heir. He nodded. “Once he gives his love he clings,” he said simply. “If he loves our duke as he loved his brother, then he worships him.”

William Ward nodded. “Then maybe our lord is playing a wiser game than we realize. He may be breaking the heart of the father but there will be another king when the father is gone.”

John scowled at the thought of courtier’s work which was not based on skill and turning of policy, but was grounded on courtship and heartbreak and jealousy; the skills of the bordello, not of the office.

“It must have been the same for Lord Cecil?” the steward asked.

John jerked back at the thought of it. “No! Nobody loved
him
for his looks,” he said with a half-smile. “They needed him for his abilities. That was why no one could supplant him. That was why he was always safe.”

“Whereas our lord—” The steward broke off.

“What’s he doing in Madrid that takes so long?” John demanded.

“I hear that the Spanish are playing with him,” the steward said very quietly. “And all the time the feeling against the Spanish is rising in the court, in Parliament and in the streets. He’d do better to come home without the Spanish princess. If he brings her home now he’ll pay for it with his life. They’ll tear him to pieces for arranging a heretical marriage.”

“Can’t you write and tell him?” John asked. “Warn him?”

William Ward shook his head. “I don’t advise him,” he said quickly. “He treads his own path. He said the Spanish marriage was a matter of principle.”

“Principle?” John asked. And when the man nodded he turned and went from the room. “That’s very bad,” John said to himself.

Not until July, midsummer in Madrid, during the worst of the hot weather, was Prince Charles finally wearied of waiting, and Buckingham losing his nerve. At last the Spanish completed the marriage contract and Prince Charles put his name to it. He was allowed a brief visit to his bride to promise that she would be Queen of England after a proxy marriage, and that they would next meet as husband and wife at Dover. The King of Spain himself rode out of Madrid with the prince and duke to set them on their way, loaded them with presents and kissed Prince Charles farewell as a son-in-law.

“How do you think he will be received?” William Ward asked John. He had gone into the garden to seek John, who was opening the sluice gates and watching the flow of the river into the duke’s new boating lake. It was a cool sheet of water just to the side of the house. John was planting yellow flag irises in the boggy corner where he had first told Buckingham to shut out the cows. “He must have some trickery up his sleeve. He must know that if he tries to bring a Spanish bride home they will tear him to pieces?”

John looked up from the water channel and wiped his hands on his old breeches. “He can’t be such a fool,” he said anxiously. “He cannot have gotten as far as he has and still be a fool. He must know that there is a balance between king and Parliament and church and people.” He thought of Cecil; he could not help but think of Cecil in this, his successor’s household. “He cannot hold the offices he has and be a fool,” John said stoutly. “He must have some way to turn this all around.”

John did his lord a favor with such faith. Buckingham had no master plan and no plan hidden behind it. He was not a Cecil, with a conspiracy for every eventuality. Everything in his life had come easily to him, and he had thought that this would come easily too. He had thought that he could seduce the Spanish as he had seduced everyone else. But the cold formal court of Spain proved hard-hearted even to England’s heartbreaker, and his disappointment turned him against them. His letters from home from his mother and from his wife warned him that a Spanish bride would never be accepted and the man who tried to bring her to the English throne could meet with nothing but disaster. Buckingham turned like a weathercock; but Charles — who had learned early that love is always a matter of disappointment — clung to his picture of a desirable and unattainable woman. Indeed, the more unattainable she became, the more she mirrored Charles’s vision of true love and desire.

It was Buckingham’s task to lift the prince’s view from a woman who might never love him, whom he could trail behind for the rest of his days, as he had trailed behind his brother, and encourage him to think that as a prince of England he might hope for a little more.

It was not easy. Buckingham reminded him of the concessions of the marriage contract — wild promises of religious tolerance and the children of the marriage to be brought up as papists. He questioned Spanish probity, wondering if the infanta could really be constrained into marrying a heretic, or if she would not, on her wedding day, make a dive for a nunnery and leave Charles looking like a fool. The steady drip, drip, of cynicism and doubt eroded the prince’s confidence, which was, at the best of times, unsteady. By the time the two had ridden from Madrid to Santander to meet the English fleet, Buckingham and the prince were the best of friends, and Spain was their opponent. By the time they sailed into Portsmouth they were as close as brothers and Spain was not to be the new alliance, but was once again the deadliest enemy, and the marriage contract which they had worked for so fervently was a trap that they were determined to escape.