Virgin Earth (32 page)

Cecil’s long training stood John in good stead through that day. Buckingham was trying to raise the money to equip a mighty Protestant army to attack Spain and to free Charles’s sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and her husband and restore them to their rightful throne. There was no money in the royal treasury. The English Parliament would vote no more to a king who had done so little to bring in the reforms they had demanded. It was left to Buckingham to raise the funds. And he had nothing to offer as security but the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland and any related valuables that the moneylenders might require.

John stood with his back to the door, watching his master charming the powerful money men of Amsterdam. The scene looked like one of the new oil paintings that King Charles kept buying. The room was in half-darkness, windows shrouded with thick embroidered curtains. The table was lit only by a couple of candles behind an engraved shade which threw strange cabalistic patterns on the walls. There were three men on one side of the table and Buckingham on the other. One man was a solid burgher, a father of the city and a cautious man. To him Buckingham deferred with a charming youthful respect, and as the meeting went on John watched the big man slowly unbend, like a horse on the towpath bending its neck to be patted. Next to him was a Jewish financier, his eyes as dark as Buckingham’s own, his hair as black and lustrous as the duke’s. He wore a little cap on the back of his head and a long dark suit in plain material. The Low Countries was a place that prided itself on its tolerance; John thought that Buckingham would not have sat on equal terms with a Jew at any other table in Europe.

The duke was uneasy with the financier. He could not find the right tone to tempt him. The man was guarded, his long face giving away nothing. He spoke little and when he did, it was in French with an accent which John could not identify. He treated Buckingham with deference, but it seemed as if there was a secret inner judgment that he was keeping hidden. John was as superstitious and fearful of the Jews as any Englishman. He feared this man in particular.

The third man was from some strand of nobility who would have access to a vast fortune if these other two approved. He was slim and young and richly dressed, and he had no aptitude for the carefully written calculations of profit and interest on the small pieces of paper which the other two men were exchanging. He leaned back in his chair and gazed idly around him. Every now and then he and Buckingham would exchange a smile as if to agree that they two were men of the world and these vulgar details were beneath them.

“We have to consider the issue of the security of the jewels,” the burgher said. “They will be lodged here.”

Buckingham shook his head. “They cannot be taken from London,” he said. “But you shall have your own man in London to guard them, if you wish. And a sealed letter from King Charles himself to acknowledge your right.”

The burgher looked uneasy. “But if we should need to collect them?”

“If His Majesty cannot repay the loan?” Buckingham smiled. “Ah, forgive me, the king will repay. He will not fail. When Prince Frederick and Princess Elizabeth are back on their thrones then the wealth of Bohemia will repay all the debts incurred in the campaign to restore them.”

“And if the campaign fails?” the Jew asked quietly.

Buckingham checked for a moment. “It will not,” he replied.

There was a brief silence. The Jew waited for his answer.

“If it should fail then his Majesty will repay according to the schedule of repayments as you propose,” Buckingham said smoothly. “We are speaking of the King of England, my lords. He is hardly likely to run off to the Americas.”

The nobleman laughed at the joke and Buckingham shot him a swift smile. The Jew did not laugh.

“But how should we collect if, by some error, His Majesty were to default?” the burgher asked politely.

Buckingham shrugged as if such a thing were beyond the stretch of any imagination. “Oh. I can hardly think — well — we will follow the line of fairy tales. If the campaign fails and the Prince and Princess of Bohemia do not repay you themselves, and then if the King of England does not repay you then I, the Duke of Buckingham, will myself deliver to you the Crown Jewels of England. Will that satisfy you, gentlemen?”

John looked from one face to another. It satisfied the nobleman, who could not imagine that Buckingham could say one thing and do another. He was no obstacle. The burgher was wavering, half-convinced, half-fearful. The Jew was inscrutable. His dark serious face could not be read. He might be inwardly approving; he might have damned this project from the first moment. John could not tell.

“And you would put that in writing?”

“Signed in blood if you wish,” Buckingham said carelessly, the glancing reference to the popular play a half-insult to all Jewish moneylenders. “I have promised my master the King of England that he shall have the funds to raise an army to restore his sister to her throne. It is a task which we should all do as good Protestants and good Christians. It is a task which most becomes me as His Majesty’s most faithful servant.”

The three men nodded.

“Shall I leave you to consult for a while?” Buckingham offered. “I must warn you, out of courtesy, that my time is a little limited. There are other gentlemen who would extend this loan to the king and think it an honor to so do. But I promised you I would see you first.”

“Of course,” the burgher said awkwardly. “And we thank you. Perhaps you would like a glass of wine?”

He drew back one of the thick hangings and showed a small door beyond. It opened into a walled courtyard. In a giant pot against the wall grew an apricot tree, at its feet the folded leaves of some tulips now past their prime. John saw at once that they had been Lack tulips, beautifully white and veined with scarlet. There were a couple of chairs and a table in the shade of the tree, and a flagon of wine with a small plate of biscuits.

“Please,” the burgher said. “Enjoy this. And ring for anything further you need. We will delay you only a moment.”

He bowed and went back into the room. Buckingham threw himself into the chair and watched John pour the wine and hand him a glass.

“What d’you think?” he asked quietly.

“It’s possible,” John said in the same undertone. “Do you have other men to borrow from?”

“No,” Buckingham said. “D’you think they know that?”

“No,” John said. “There is so much wealth flying around this city that they cannot be sure of it. The nobleman is in your pocket but I doubt the other two.”

Buckingham nodded and sipped his wine. “That’s good,” he said with approval. “Alicante.”

“What do we do if they say no?”

Buckingham tipped his beautiful face up to the sun and closed his eyes as if he did not have a care in the world. “Go home with the whole of the king’s foreign policy in ruins,” he said. “Tell the king that his sister is thrown out of her kingdom and insulted and that he can do nothing. Tell the king that unless he agrees with Parliament he will be a pauper on his own throne, and that his chief minister was a better Master of Horse than he is a diplomat.”

“You got him the French princess,” John observed.

Buckingham half-opened his eyes and John saw the glint of his look under the thick eyelashes. “Let’s hope to God she pleases him. I don’t guarantee it.”

The door behind John opened and he whirled around. It was the Jew in the doorway, his head held low. “I am sorry, masters,” he said quietly. “We cannot oblige you. The capital is more than we can afford without holding the security ourselves.”

Buckingham jumped to his feet in one of his sudden rages, about to shout at the man. John threw himself forward and got both hands on his master’s shoulders as if he were rearranging his cape.

“Steady,” he whispered.

He felt the shoulders straighten under his grip. Buckingham lifted his head. “I am sorry you could not oblige me,” he said. “I will tell the king of your reluctance and my disappointment.”

The Jew’s head bowed lower.

Buckingham turned on his heel and John dived before him to open the door so his smooth disdainful stride from the courtyard was not checked. They arrived out in the street by a side door and hesitated.

“What now?” Tradescant asked.

“We try another,” Buckingham said. “And then another. And then we go and buy some bulbs, for I think that is all we’re going to get out of this damned damned city.”

Buckingham was right. John was back at New Hall by the end of May, preceded by wagonloads of plants, sacks of tulip bulbs and with six of the most precious bulbs — each costing a purse of gold — hidden deep inside his waistcoat.

His first act was to go to the rarities room of New Hall and to summon J to meet him there with six large porcelain pots and a basket of soil.

J came into the room and found the six bulbs laid out on a table. His father was, with infinite care, cutting slightly into the base of each bulb in the hope that it would encourage them to divide, and make new bulbs.

“What are they?” J asked reverently, holding a wicker basket of sieved warm weed-free earth, watching his father’s meticulous care. “Are they the Semper Augustus?”

His father shook his head. “I had a king’s ransom to spend and yet I could not afford it,” he said. “No one bought the Semper. I was at the Bourse every day and the price was so high that no one would buy, and the merchant kept his nerve and would not drop the price. Next season he will offer them again at double the price, and all the year he will be praying that no one has grown a new tulip which supplants the Semper and leaves him with a pair of fine flowers which are out of fashion.”

“Could that happen?” J was horrified.

John nodded. “It is not gardening, it is speculation,” he said with distaste. “There are people dealing in tulips who have never so much as pulled a weed. And making fortunes from their work.”

J extended a respectful finger and stroked the dry firm surface of the nearest bulb. “The skin is solid, and the shape is good. They are even lovely in the bulb, aren’t they?” He bent and sniffed the firm warm skin.

“Is it clean?” John asked anxiously. “No hint of taint?”

J shook his head. “None. What sort is it?”

“This is the Duck tulip — yellow with crimson blush at the base of the petals.” John pointed to the next bulb. “This is a Lack tulip, white and thin-petaled with thin red stripes through white, and this is a French bizarre tulip, very strong-stemmed and scarlet petals with a white border. Pray God they grow for us; I have spent nearly a thousand pounds on the six of them.”

J’s hand holding the trowel trembled. “A thousand pounds? A thousand? But Father — what if they rot?” he asked, his voice a whisper. “What if they grow blind and fail to flower at all?”

John smiled grimly. “Then we seek another line of work. But what if they grow and split into new bulbs, J? Then our master has doubled his wealth in one season.”

“But we stay on the same wages,” J observed.

John nodded and put the six pots in a cool cupboard in the corner of the room. “That is how it works,” he said simply. “But there could be no objection to us taking a bulb for every two we grow for him. My master Cecil taught me that himself.”

John was popular in the great dining room of New Hall on his return. He was able to tell a rapt audience of the prettiness of the little French princess: only fifteen and tiny, dark-haired and dark-eyed. He told them of her dancing and her singing, of her complete refusal to learn English. He told them that the news in London was that when the young King Charles met her at Dover Castle, he had covered her little face with kisses, laughed at her prepared speech, and spent the night in her bed.

The ladies wanted to know what she was wearing and John struggled through a description of her clothes. He assured them that the king and queen entered London by the river in a grand barge, both dressed in green, with the guns of the Tower roaring out a salute, and that was a vivid enough picture to be told and retold by a dozen hearthsides. He did not tell them that there had been a nasty quarrel between the king and his bride of only a day when she had wanted her French companions in the carriage from Dover to London, and the king had insisted that she travel with Buckingham’s wife and his mother.

The king had said that the French attendant was not of high enough station to ride with the Queen of England; and the young queen incautiously retorted that she knew well enough that the Buckinghams had been nobodies just ten years ago. She did not yet know enough to mind her sharp tongue; she had not yet learned of the extent of the duke’s influence. As it was, she rode in her carriage with the duke’s wife and the duke’s mother for the long journey into her capital and it might be safely assumed that no promises of friendship were made on the drive.

“So did she look happy?” asked Mrs. Giddings, who worked in the New Hall laundry but had her own little farm and would kill another sheep for the Tradescants if John’s story was good enough.

John thought of the fifteen-year-old girl and her un-English formality, her court which spoke only French, and her brace of confessors who spoke Latin grace over her dinner, and warned her not to eat meat even though her new husband had just carved her a slice, since she must observe a fast day.

“As happy as a maid can be,” he said. “Laughing and chattering and singing.”

“And the duke, does he like her?”

Only Elizabeth saw the swift shadow cross her husband’s face. There had been a scandal in France, several scandals. Buckingham had told him the worst of it as they paced the deck of a little fishing boat, sailing from Rotterdam to Tilbury. The Queen of France had encouraged Buckingham further than a married woman, and one so carefully watched, should have done. He had climbed the wall into her private garden to meet her there. What took place Buckingham would not say, but everyone else in Europe was talking about it. The pair had been caught by her personal guard. Swords had been drawn and threats made. Some said that the queen had been assaulted by Buckingham; some said the queen had been seduced, and caught half-naked in his arms. The queen’s ladies said that she had been elegantly flirting or — no such thing — somewhere else all the time. There had been a whirlwind of rumor and innuendo and through it all Buckingham had sailed smiling, the handsomest man at court, the wickedest look, the most roguish smile, the irresistible charm. John had frowned when Buckingham had confessed to losing his heart to the Queen of France and thought that he should have stayed by his master and kept him from secret assignations with the most carefully guarded woman in Europe.