Virgin Earth (43 page)

He looked away, over his garden. Was it on the island? Did his faith fall sick like the soldiers who had to sleep on the wet ground? Or did it drown in the sea where the causeway was treacherous and they lost the last standard? Or did it bleed to death on the voyage home when the injured men cried out so loud that he heard them, even over the noise of the creaking ship? Was it always a chain that had linked John to his lord, the lord to the king and the king to God, and the loss of one meant the loss of all? Or had he forgotten his faith just as he had forgotten everything, even the gillyflower and the wormwood plants, because he had fallen deep into love and deep into joy and made a god of another man?

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Perhaps God has lost me.”

Elizabeth bowed her head and made a quick silent prayer that she might have guidance as to how she might help him.

“You are right, and you have been right all along,” he said at last. “We are ruled by a fool who is in the hands of a knave. I have seen men die for the folly of those two, for all my life: in the plague in London, in the villages up and down the land where people are driven out of their homes and out of their gardens for the landlords to make sheep runs, and on that cursed island where we set a siege with less food in our stores than the besieged, where we marched with ploughboys and criminals, where we had scaling ladders which were yards too short, and where the commander was playing at soldiers, and the king forgot to reinforce us.”

His bitterness was like an explosion in that quiet garden, even worse than his blasphemy. She had thought she would never hear such words from him, who had been Cecil’s man, who had served the old queen. This was a stranger to her — a bitter man carrying the scars of fatal betrayal, who finally spoke treason aloud.

“John—”

He bared his teeth in a hard smile at her surprise. “You should be pleased,” he said cruelly. “You warned me enough. Now see: I have heeded your teachings and lost my faith in my lord, in my king and in my God. Wasn’t that what you wanted?”

Dumbly she shook her head.

“Didn’t you warn me and warn me that he was a sodomite and a puppet master? Didn’t you beg me to leave his service on the very day we came here? Didn’t you give me a long spoon to sup with the Devil when I started keeping his secrets safe?”

Her hands were over her mouth; her shocked eyes looked at him in silence.

John hawked and spat like a soldier, as if the taste of bile was too bitter for him.

Without thinking, Elizabeth scuffed dirt over the spittle. “John,” she whispered. “I never meant that you should lose your faith. I meant only to caution you—”

“I am cautioned now,” he said. “I am checked. I am stopped short.”

There was a silence. Somewhere in the fine woods of the duke’s estate the pigeons were cooing, warmly, easily. John looked up at the sky and saw a flock of rooks heading for home in the tall trees.

“What shall we do?” Elizabeth asked, as if she were in a wilderness with wreckage all around them.

He looked around, at the fine house and the garden, as if they gave him no pleasure at all. “I am his servant,” he said slowly. “He has paid me all he is going to pay me; he told me that. He will use me as he wishes. When he needs me — I am to be there. I am the duke’s man; I have sworn a solemn oath to be his man till death.”

She took a sharp breath at that. “An oath?”

“He asked it of me and I gave it,” John said grimly. “I gave him everything he asked and I swore a solemn oath that I am his man. I will have to learn to live with that. I am a servant; I am lower than a servant, for he has commanded me to be his dog and I have licked his foot.”

“You think he is a fool and a betrayer and you have sworn to be his man?” she asked incredulously.

“Just so.”

They were silent for long moments. She thought that some dark compact must have taken place between her husband and the master he now hated. She did not dare to think what one had done, what one had submitted to. Whatever had taken place it had sent John home as a broken man.

“Do you hate him?” she whispered.

The look he gave her was that of a man carrying a mortal wound deep in his belly. “No,” he said softly. “I love him still. But I know that he is no good. That’s worse than hatred for me. To know that I have given my word and my love to a man who is no good.”

She took his hands in hers and felt how cold they were, as if his heart were beating slowly, painfully. “Can’t you escape him?”

He shook his head. “I am his, in every way that there is, until death.”

They sat in silence for long moments, Elizabeth chafing his hands as if he were cold from sickness and she had to warm him. She thought that there was nothing that she could say which would take that dark painful look from his face. The sun was setting slowly in the deep red of autumn and a cool wind began to blow.

“The chestnut tree flowered this summer,” she said inconsequently. “As you left, d’you remember you asked me to look to it, for you?”

He did not raise his gaze from his boots. “The sweet chestnuts?”

“No. Your sapling. The one you gave me. The chestnut from Turkey. It bore a strange beautiful blossom, like huge pine cones, a white blossom of many flowers with tiny scarlet freckles inside them, and smelling sweet.”

“Eh? My sapling flowered? At last?”

“As you left. And it is setting seed,” she said. “You will have nuts off it this year, John. You can see the seed cases already. They are very strange, I had forgotten how strange. They are fat and fleshy and with a few thick spikes. But they are holding to the tree and swelling with the ripeness of the nut inside.”

He straightened up and looked at her. “Are you sure?”

“I think so,” she said with loving cunning. “But you had better see for yourself; you know there is no one who has your skill with trees.”

“Perhaps I should take a look.” He got to his feet and winced as his boots rubbed his sore feet, but he stepped out down the garden path to where his tree was kept in its great carrying case at the bottom of the garden near the kitchen garden wall.

“I wish we had named it for you,” she said, suddenly struck by how little they owned, now that he was a vassal and had lost everything. “I wish we had called them ‘Tradescantia’ when Lord Cecil first gave them to you to grow. You were the first to grow them; you had the right.”

John shrugged his shoulders as if it did not matter what they were named as long as they grew tall and strong. “The name does not matter. Rights do not matter. But to grow a new tree, to put a new tree into the gardens of England — now that is to live forever.”

J did not come home till dusk and he did not know his father was returned until he came in through the front door and saw the Portsmouth-bought walking boots side by side inside the doorway. He hesitated, but it was too late. John, sitting at the well-worn table, had already seen him.

J was dressed in a suit of gray broadcloth, white linen bands at his throat, plain without lace. On his head was a tall plain black hat, unadorned by feather or badge. Over his shoulder was his warm coat of black.

John, who had bathed and changed into his russet suit with a rich lace collar, rose slowly from the table.

“You’re dressed very plain,” he said cautiously.

Elizabeth heard the front door slam and came slowly from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

J measured his father and spoke steadily. “I believe that finery is a waste of a man’s money and an abomination in the sight of the Lord.”

John wheeled around and looked accusingly at Elizabeth. She met his gaze without flinching. “You’ve turned him into a Puritan at last,” he said. “I suppose he preaches and bears witness and can fall down in a faint if required?”

“I can speak for myself,” J said. “And it was not my mother’s decision, but my own.”

“Decision!” John scoffed. “What can a boy of eighteen decide?”

J flinched. “I am a man,” he said. “I am nineteen now. I earn a man’s wage, I do a man’s work and I give a man’s whole duty to my God.”

For a moment they thought John would roar out his temper. J braced himself for the blast of anger, but to his surprise none came. The older man’s shoulders dropped and he turned and fell heavily in his chair. “And how long will you draw a wage here, looking like that?” he asked. “When the king comes to visit? When Archbishop Laud comes to visit? Do you think they want to see a sectary in their garden?”

J’s head went up. “I don’t fear them.”

“Yes, I daresay you are longing for martyrdom, to be burned at the stake for your beliefs, but this is not a burning king. He will merely turn away from you and Buckingham will dismiss you. And where will you work then?”

“For a nobleman who shares my faith,” J said simply. “The country is full of men who believe in worshipping our God in simplicity and in truth, who have turned against the waste and sin of the court.”

“Do I have to spell it out?” John shouted. “They will turn you off and no one will employ you!”

“Husband—”

“What?”

“You told me yourself that your faith in the king and the duke has been shaken,” Elizabeth said gently. “J is trying to find his own way.”

“What way?” John demanded. “There is no other way.”

“There is going back to the Bible and seeking a way through prayer,” J said earnestly. “There is the beauty of hard work, and turning away from show and masques and waste. There is sharing the land, every man to have his own piece of ground to grow his own food so that none go hungry. There is opening up the enclosed sheep runs and the enclosed parks so that everyone can share in the wealth which God has given.”

“Opening parks?”

“Yes, even like this one,” J said earnestly. “Why should my lord duke have the Great Park of five hundred acres and the Little Park of three hundred? Why should he own the common road, and the green before the gate? Why does he need an avenue of a mile of lime trees? Why should he enclose good fields, productive fields, and then plant a few pretty trees and grass and use it for walking and riding? What folly to take good farming land and plant it with shrubs and call it a wilderness when children are dying for lack of food in Chorley, and people are driven out of their cottages because their plots of land have been taken away from them?”

“Because he is the duke,” John said steadily.

“He deserves to own half of the county?”

“It is his own, given to him by the king, who owns the whole country.”

“And what did the duke do for the king to earn such wealth?”

John had a sudden vivid recollection of the rocking cabin and the swaying light and Buckingham rearing above him, and the wound like a swordthrust which was the extreme of pleasure and pain all at once.

J waited for a reply.

“Don’t,” John said shortly. “Don’t torment me, J. It is bad enough that you should come into my house looking like a hedgerow lecturer. Don’t torment me about the duke and the king and the rights and the wrongs of it. I have been close to death, my life hanging on whether the king would remember his friend on a barren island far away, or not. And then he did not. I have no stomach for an argument with you.”

“Then I may wear what I choose, and pray as I choose?”

John nodded wearily. “Wear what you will.”

There was a silence as J absorbed the extent of his victory. Tradescant turned his back on him and returned to his seat at the table. J stepped out of his mud-caked working boots and came into the room in his socks.

“I am thinking of taking a wife,” he announced quietly. “And leaving the duke’s service. I want to go to Virginia and start again, in a country where there are no lords and no kings, and no archbishops. I want to be there where they are planting an Eden.”

He had thought his father defeated, and was pressing his advantage while he had it. But John raised his head and looked hard at his son. “Think again,” he counseled him.

They ate dinner in awkward silence and then J put on his hat and went out into the darkness, carrying only a small lantern to light his way.

“Where’s he going?” John asked Elizabeth.

“To evening prayers, at the big house,” she said.

“They have prayer meetings on my lord’s doorstep?”

“Why not?”

“Because the king has ruled how the church services are to be arranged,” John said firmly. “And they are to be done by a certified vicar in church on Sunday.”

“But Buckingham’s own mother is a papist,” Elizabeth pointed out. “And the queen herself.
They
do not obey the king and the archbishop. And they do far worse than simple men reading their Bible and praying in their own language to God.”

“You cannot compare Her Majesty with simple men, with J!”

She turned her calm face to him. “I can, and I do,” she said. “Except that my son is a godly young man who prays twice a day and lives soberly and cleanly while the queen…”

“Not another word!” Tradescant interrupted her.

She shook her head. “I was only going to say that the queen’s conscience is her own concern. I know that my son takes nothing but what is his own, bows to no graven idols, avoids priests and their wickedness and says nothing against the king.”

John said nothing. It was undeniable that the queen did all of these things. It was undeniable that the queen was a wilful papist who had sworn that she hated her husband and hated his country, and would neither speak the language nor smile at the people.

“Whatever his conscience, J has taken the duke’s wage,” John pointed out. “He is his man while he draws that wage. The duke, right or wrong.”

Elizabeth got up from the table and stacked the dinner platters for washing. “No,” she said gently. “He works for the duke until he can find himself another, better master. Then he can leave him, he can leave without a moment’s regret. He has sworn no loyalty, he has given no promise. He does not belong to the duke until he is released by death. He does not follow the duke, right or wrong.”

She looked across at John. The candle on the table showed the heaviness around his eyes, and the determination in her face. “It is only you who are so bound,” she said. “By your own love for him. And by an oath of your own making. Not J. You have bound yourself, John; but my son, thank God, is free.”