Virgin Earth (42 page)

He nodded to the footman and the man shut the door.

“But when shall I see you?” John called as the carriage started to move. The footman jostled past him and swung up on the back of the carriage. John wished that he too might at least ride at the back of the carriage, or run behind, or lie like a dog on the floor at their feet. “When shall I see you again?”

“When I come!” Buckingham cried. He waved his hand as John dropped back from the window. “I thank you for your care of me, John. I won’t forget it.”

The lead horse slipped on the cobbles and the carriage checked for a moment. John seized his chance and sprang to the window again. “But I thought I was to stay with you! At your shoulder!… As you said… my lord… as you said!”

Buckingham’s wife was pressed to his side, her fine silk gown crushed in his hold. She peeped up at her husband in a laughing complaint at John’s persistence.

“I have given you leave,” Buckingham said firmly. “Don’t be importunate, John. Go to New Hall. Don’t offend me by asking for more.”

Tradescant skidded to a halt on the cobbles and stood watching the coach rock away down the quayside. The other coaches followed behind the royal coach like some great promenade. Tradescant had to step back to make room for them; and then they were all gone, the trotting horses, the laughing courtiers, the brightness of the liveries, of the courtiers’ clothes, and the dock was left to grayness and mourning once more.

Tradescant stood until the last of them was gone. He could hardly believe the words he had heard his master use to him. When he had been pleading for a place at his side, Buckingham had answered him as if he had been begging for money. Buckingham had slipped, like some beautiful bird, from John’s keeping to another’s. And John might as well whistle to a free bird to come back to its cage as ask the duke to come back to him. John was held and bound by an obsessional desire, by a passionate love and by a sacred oath. He had sworn to love his lord until death. But only now did he realize that Buckingham had sworn nothing.

Tradescant went slowly up the gangplank, to his cabin. Someone had stolen his walking boots and his warm cape on the voyage when he had been too seldom there. He would have to replace them in Portsmouth, where such things were overpriced. He pulled out his pack and started to put his things together. The movement of the ship, rocking at anchor in the harbor, felt half-dead to John after the five-month expedition on rolling seas. The crew had melted away as soon as the officers had gone; there was no sound but the creaking of hard-worked timbers. His cabin showed his neglect of it. These last few days he had spent all his time with Buckingham, and his pallet bed was damp. Even his plants had been forgotten; the earth in the little pots was dry. John fetched a jug of water and dribbled it in, feeling that he must have lost his senses completely that he should have carried his plants through so much and then forgotten to water them for the last three days of the voyage.

He thought that this was how a woman must feel when she has given her love and given her trust and found that her lover was lighthearted and fickle and negligent all along. She feels as if he has taken something precious, a rare seedling, and let it fall. She feels injured — Tradescant felt pain like a wound — but she also feels a fool. Tradescant felt humbled lower than ever in his life before. Being an apprentice gardener was a low station in life but you could be proud of your work and see where it might take you. But being a nobleman’s lover was the work of a fool. Buckingham had used him, had taken him for consolation, to keep his fears at bay, to support his courage and confidence. Now he had his mother and Kate and the king and the court and all his wealth and joy. And all Tradescant had was a new gillyflower, wilting, a large wormwood plant in dry soil, a pain in his backside which was abuse, and a pain in his belly which was grief.

Grimly he picked up his pack, ducked his head to avoid the low beam of his cabin doorway and climbed the companionway to the waist of the ship. He trudged down the gangplank. No one was on board to bid him good-bye, no one was on the quayside waiting to greet him. The white-faced widow started up as she heard a footstep on the gangplank, but then dropped back. Tradescant went past her without a word of comfort. He had no comfort to give. He turned his face away from the sea and trudged, uncomfortable in his shoes on the cobbles, toward the city.

A man fell in beside him. “Did you speak to him about my promotion?”

It was Felton again. “I am sorry,” said John. “I forgot.”

But the man was not angry this time. “Then he must have seen sense himself,” he said joyfully. “Those who call him a fool will have me to reckon with. He has promised me my captaincy. I shall retire a captain and that is worth something to a poor man, Mr. Tradescant.”

“I am glad of it,” John said heavily.

“I shall never fight again,” Felton declared. “It was a bad campaign, badly planned, badly led, cruelly hard. There were times when I wept like a baby. I thought we would never get off that accursed island.”

John nodded.

“He will never do it again, will he?” Felton asked. “The French can fight their own battles now. They don’t need the pain of Englishmen. We should be as we were with the old queen — defenders of our own shores and our own counties. Safe behind our own sea. What are the French and their worries to me?”

“I feel that too,” John said. They had reached the end of the quay. He turned and held out his hand to Felton. “God be with you, Felton.”

“And with you, Mr. Tradescant. Now we are home, maybe the duke will think of the people at home. There’s much poverty. It is pitiful to see the children in my village. They have neither school nor play, and the common land has been enclosed so they have neither milk nor meat nor honey. And bread itself is scarce.”

“Maybe he will.”

The two men shook hands, but still Felton lingered. “If I were the duke and could advise the king, I would tell him to stop the enclosing of land and free it for the people,” he said. “So that every man can have his strip for vegetables or to keep a pig. Like it used to be. If I were advising the king, I would tell him that before he moves the communion table rightwise or sidewise or anywise in the church he should feed the people. We need bread before a mouthful of communion wine.”

John nodded, but he knew, as Felton could not know, that the king never saw the beggars in the streets, never saw the hungry children. He went in his carriage from great country seat to hunting lodge. He went on his royal barge from one riverside palace to another. And besides, the permission granted to a landlord to enclose common land brought revenue into the royal coffers, while a refusal would benefit only the poor and leave the king as short of cash as ever.

“He is a merciful king?” Felton queried. “And Buckingham is a great duke, a good man, is he not?”

“Oh, yes,” John said. The pain in his belly seemed to have stretched out to his fingers and his toes; he felt numb in his legs and shoulders. If he did not start to walk home soon, he thought he would lie down on the cobbles and die. “Excuse me, I must go; my wife will be waiting for me.”

“I must go too!” Felton cried, remembering. “I have a wife waiting for me, thank God. I shall tell her to call me captain!”

He hefted his pack and strode off whistling. John looked down at his shoes and put one in front of the other, as if he had just learned to walk. At each step he thought he could hear Buckingham laugh and say: “I have given you leave. Don’t be importunate, John. Go to New Hall. Don’t offend me by asking for more.”

He had not thought how he would get to New Hall. He had been on such a crest of desire and happiness that he had thought he and the duke would ride side by side, the two of them together. Or perhaps they would have used the duke’s coach and horses and rocked along the badly made roads, and laughed when they had to stop for a loose wheel, or walked shoulder to shoulder up a hill to spare the horses.

But now he was trudging alone in stiff new walking boots. He had some money in his pocket; he could buy or hire a horse, or he could take a ride with any carter. But as the sun came slowly up — an English sun, he thought with a sudden pang of recognition — he found that he wanted to walk, walk like a poor man, walk slowly along the rutted road which led away from the port to London. He wanted to look at the changing blushing colors of the trees and the berries in the hedgerow and the grass seeds bobbing in the wind. He felt as if he had been in exile for a dozen years, he had dreamed of lanes like this, of a sun as warm and mild as this one, while they had been trapped on that island waiting for reinforcement, waiting for a decisive battle, waiting for victory, for glory.

At midday he knocked on the door of a small wayside farmhouse and asked if he could buy some dinner. The farmer’s wife gave him a trencher of bread and cheese and a flagon of ale to drink. Her hands were ingrained with dirt and there was dirt under her fingernails and in the thorn scratches.

“You’re a gardener,” Tradescant guessed.

She rubbed her hand on her apron. “I struggle with it,” she said in the broad accent of Hampshire. “But ’tis like a forest, like the forest of the Sleeping Beauty. When I rest it grows up to my very windows. I was clearing my strawberry bed and I find a plant growing thorns. A strawberry with thorns! The whole garden would grow weeds and thorns if it could.”

“A thorny strawberry?” John demanded. He pushed aside the flask of ale. The pain was still deep in his body but he could not deny a small squirm of curiosity. “You have a thorny strawberry? May I see it?”

“Why, what use is it?” she asked. “It grows a green fruit; it is no good for eating nor bottling.”

“It is a curiosity,” he said, and found he was smiling, the muscles on his cheeks relaxing from their scowl. “I am a great one for curiosities; I would be glad if you would show it to me. Out of your kindness. And I would pay you…”

“You can have it for nothing,” she said. “But you must fetch it yourself. I threw it with the other weeds on the midden. It’ll take a deal of sorting through.”

John laughed, and then checked himself at the strangeness of the noise. He had not laughed in months. His time with his lord had been a time of passion driving out grief in the darkness. But now he was home, on English soil again, under an English sun and here was this woman with her green thorny strawberry.

“I will find it,” he promised her. “And I will see if I can grow it in my garden, and if it proves to be a curiosity, or to have some quality, then I will send you a shoot.”

She shook her head at his folly. “Are you from London?”

“Yes,” he said; he did not want to name New Hall. He did not want to be known as the Duke of Buckingham’s man.

She nodded as if that would account for it. “Here we like our strawberries red and fit to eat,” she said gently. “Do not send me a shoot; I do not want it. You can give me a penny for your dinner and for the thorny strawberry, and be on your way. In Hampshire we like our strawberries red.”

Winter 1627

Elizabeth was in the garden before their cottage at New Hall when John came in at the gate. She was cutting herbs in the cool of the evening light, and the basket on the ground before her was bobbing with the seed-heavy heads of camomile flowers. When she heard his uneven step she looked up and started to run toward him but then she suddenly checked. Something in the slowness of his pace and his bowed shoulders warned her that this was not a happy homecoming.

Slowly she came toward him, noting the new lines of pain and disappointment in his face. His limp, which he thought she did not see, was more pronounced than ever.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Husband?” she said softly. “You are welcome home.”

He looked up from the ground before him and when she met his dark eyes she recoiled. “John?” she whispered. “Oh my John, what has he done to you?”

It was the worst thing she could have said. He reared up, his face hard. “Nothing. What d’you mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing. Come and sit down.” She led him to the stone bench before the house, and felt his hand tremble in her own. “Sit,” she said tenderly. “I will get you a cup of ale, or would you like something hot?”

“Anything,” he said.

She hesitated. J was still at work, cutting back and weeding in the fruit garden, at the other side of the great house. She did not send for him yet, she feared a quarrel between father and son, and when she looked at John’s weary face she feared that his son would be the victor. John had come home an old man. She whisked into the house and brought out a mug of ale and a slice of her homemade bread. She put them on the bench beside him and said nothing while he drank. He did not eat.

“We heard that it was a defeat,” she said at last. “I was afraid that you were hurt.” She shot a sideways look at him, wondering if there were some physical injury that he was keeping from her.

“I took not a scratch,” he said simply.

The pain was in his soul, then. “And his lordship?”

There was a flash across his face, instantly hidden, like lightning on a dark night. “He is well, praise God. He is with the king who has rejoiced in his return, with his wife at his side, thank God.”

She bowed her head briefly but found she could not say “Amen.”

“And you…” she prompted him gently. “I can see that all is not well with you, John. I can see that there is no rejoicing for you.”

He met her eyes and she thought that never before in their life together had she seen him look as if the light had gone out for him.

“I will not burden you with my sorrows, Elizabeth,” he said gently. “I will mend. I am not a boy in springtime. I will mend.”

Her grave look never wavered. “Perhaps you should tell me, John. Or tell your Saviour. A hidden secret is like a hidden pain; it can only grow worse.”

He nodded as if he knew all about hidden pain now. “I shall try to pray. But I am afraid that my faith was never very strong, and I seem to have lost it.”

She would have been shocked if she had believed him. “How can you lose your faith?” she asked simply.