Virgin Earth (45 page)

John nodded, uncertain how to answer, but his host slapped the side of his head with a broad palm. “Again!” he cried. “And promised Jane I would not. Not another word, Mr. Tradescant. So take a glass of wine with me?”

“Willingly.”

Dinner was a respectable affair preceded by a lengthy grace, but Mrs. Hurte laid a good table and her husband was generous with small ale and had a good wine. J sat beside Jane and spent the meal regarding her with a steady admiring gaze. John watched his son with a wry amusement.

The Hurtes were a pleasant straightforward couple. Mrs. Hurte presided over the puddings at her end of the table and Josiah Hurte carved the beef at his end. Between them sat their guests and Jane, and two apprentices.

“We dine in the old way,” Mr. Hurte confirmed, seeing John looking down the table. “I believe a man who takes an apprentice boy should bring him up as his own. He should feed his body as well as his mind.”

John nodded. “I have only ever had my son work for me,” he said. “My other gardeners are hired by my master.”

“Is the duke at New Hall now?” Mrs. Hurte asked.

Even in this quiet parlor the mention of his name hurt John like a twinge of pain from an unhealed wound.

“No, he is at court,” he said shortly. J directed a glance of unspoken appeal at him and Jane looked anxious.

“They are having great revelry this Christmas, now that the duke is safely returned,” Mrs. Hurte observed.

“I daresay,” said John.

“Shall you see him at Whitehall before you return to New Hall?”

“No,” John said. He had a pain now, as sharp as indigestion, under his ribs. He pushed his plate away, sated with grief. “I may not go to him unless he sends for me.”

He realized that the young woman, Jane Hurte, was looking at him and her face was full of sympathy, as if she understood a little of what he was feeling. “It must be a hard task to serve a great lord,” she said gently. “He must come and go like a planet in the sky and all you can do is watch and wait for him to come again.”

Her father bent his head and said softly: “I pray that we may all serve a greater master. Amen.”

But Jane did not take her eyes from John and her smile was steady.

“It is hard.” His voice was full of pain, even in his own ears. “But I have made my choice and I must serve him.”

“Keep us all in service to the Lord our God,” Josiah Hurte prayed again, and this time Jane Hurte, still watching John’s strained face, said: “Amen.”

The two young people were allowed out to walk together. Jane had some deliveries which had to be made, and J was to go with her to help with the basket. John thought that the sight of J carrying the basket as if it were made of glass and holding Jane by the arm as if she were a posy of flowers, mincing down the London street, was one he would never forget.

One of the apprentices walked behind them, bearing a stout stick.

“She has to be accompanied now,” Mrs. Hurte said. “There are so many beggars and many of them sickly. She cannot go out alone anymore.”

“J will take care of her,” John said reassuringly. “See how he holds her arm! And see him with that basket!”

“He’s a taking young man,” Josiah Hurte remarked pleasantly. “We like him.”

“He’s very much in love with your daughter,” John said. “Are you in favor of a match?”

The mercer hesitated. “Would he remain in the service of the duke?”

“I have some rented fields, and some land I bought on the advice of my old master, the earl. I have the fee for a Whitehall granary—”

“You are a garneter?” Josiah interrupted, surprised.

John had the grace to look embarrassed. “It is a sinecure. I don’t do the work but I have the pay for doing it.”

Josiah nodded. His daughter’s future father-in-law was benefiting from the very system he condemned: places and work given to men who knew nothing about the trade, who had no intention of learning, who subcontracted the task and kept the inflated pay.

“But our main work is in the duke’s gardens,” John continued smoothly. “The planning and planting of his gardens and the collection in his cabinet of rarities. J has served his apprenticeship under me and will follow me into the place at my death.”

“I would be unhappy at Jane joining the duke’s household,” the man said frankly. “His reputation is bad.”

“With women?” Tradescant shook his head. “My lord duke can have the pick of every lady at court. He does not trouble his servants.” He felt the pain beneath his ribs as he spoke. “He is a man very well loved. He does not need to buy his pleasure from his servants.”

“Could she practice her religion in your house, as she wishes?”

“Providing that she gives no offense to others,” John said. “My wife is of a Puritanical bent; her father was vicar at Meopham. And you know J shares your convictions.”

“But you do not?”

“I worship on Sundays in the Church of England,” John said. “Where the king himself prays. If it is good enough for the king it is good enough for me.”

There was a discreet pause. “I think we might differ as to the king’s judgment,” Mr. Hurte volunteered. His wife, sitting lace-making at the fireside, gave him a sharp look and clattered the bobbins together on the pillow.

“But enough of that,” he said swiftly. “You’re the duke’s man and I’ve nothing to say against that. It is my daughter’s happiness we must consider. Does J earn enough to keep a wife?”

“He draws a full wage,” John said. “And they would live with us. I will see that she does not want for anything. Will she bring a dowry?”

“Fifty pounds now, and a third share of my shop at my death,” Josiah answered. “They can have the wedding here and I will treat them.”

“Shall I tell J he can propose, then?” John asked.

Josiah smiled. “If I know my daughter, he has already done so,” he said as they shook hands.

Spring 1628

Jane Hurte and young John Tradescant were married in the city church of St. Gregory by St. Paul. The officiating priest neither wore a surplice nor did he turn his back on the congregation to prepare communion as Archbishop Laud had ordered. The communion table was placed where tradition said it should be: at the head of the aisle, close to the communicants. And the vicar stood behind it, facing them like a yeoman of the ewry laying the lord’s table, doing his work in full sight of the congregation, and not like some secret papist priest hidden behind a screen, muttering over bread and wine and incense and water, with his back turned to the people he should be serving and his hands busy doing nobody knew what.

It was a good Baptist wedding and John, watching the priest about his business, serving his God and his congregation in the sight of them both, remembered the church at Meopham and his own wedding, which had been conducted the same way, and wished that Archbishop Laud had left things as they were, and not put honest men like him and Josiah Hurte on either side of a new divide.

Josiah Hurte gave them a good wedding dinner as he had promised and both sets of parents, the apprentice boys and half a dozen friends saw the young couple into their wedding chamber and put them to bed.

John, in the bed chamber overlooking the street with Elizabeth sitting in the four-poster bed behind him, was reminded of his own wedding night. “D’you remember, Lizzie?” he asked Elizabeth. “What a misery it was?”

She nodded. “I’m glad it has been quieter for our John. And I don’t think anyone would dare make a game of Jane; she is a strong-minded young woman.”

“You won’t mind her coming into your house?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “She’s a pleasant girl, and I will enjoy having someone to talk to during the day when you and J are both out.” She turned back the cover on the bed. “Come to bed, husband; we have done a good day’s work today.”

Still he lingered at the window, looking down at the cobbled London street, empty except for a scavenging cat, silent except for the occasional call of the night watchman. “You have been a good wife to me, Elizabeth. I am sorry if I have ever grieved you.”

“And you have been a good husband to me.” She hesitated. The other love and the vow of love till death was still between them, even on this day. “Shall you call to see the duke to see if he needs any service before we go back to New Hall?”

“He’s hunting at Richmond,” John answered. “And I may not go to him until he sends for me.”

“When will he send for you again?”

“I don’t know.”

She slipped from the bed and stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. The draughts from the window were icy but John was not aware of them.

“Did you part on bad terms?” she asked. “Is that why he never sends for you now? And why you are waiting and waiting for him and why you look so pained when someone mentions his name?”

“We parted on no terms at all,” John said heavily. “He dismissed me. There are no terms between us but those of a master and his man; it was I who forgot my place and he did right to remind me. You would have thought I would have known, wouldn’t you, Elizabeth?” He shot her a brief unhappy smile. “Trained with Cecil. You would have thought that of all the men in England I would have known that you can be close to a great man, you can be in his confidence. But he is always the great man and you are always his servant.”

“You forgot that?” she asked gently.

“I was reminded quick enough,” John said quietly. The dismissal on the quayside when Buckingham had turned from him to his wife and the courtiers was still as sharply painful as when it had happened. “But he was in the right and I in the wrong. I thought I would stay with him but he did not need me. And still he does not need me now. He is busy with the king, with his wife, with his mistresses. He will not send for me until he needs an honest man, and he has no need of an honest man at court. Indeed, there is no room for an honest man at court.”

“I am sure he will send for you soon,” she said. It was the only comfort she could think of.

He nodded. “Soon he will need a dog,” he said bitterly. “And then he will remember me.”

John was wrong; the duke did not need a dog. Spring came to New Hall but not the duke. The earth warmed and John had the grass courts scythed and seedlings planted out from the nursery beds. He ordered that the roses have their spring pruning and that the buds be pinched off the fruit trees. He set charcoal burners in the hollow wall of the fruit garden to speed the fruit for his lordship to eat when he came… but still he did not come.

The tulips that John had bought with such joy when he and his lord had been adventurers together in Europe, gambling with the crown jewels of England, flowered in their pots and Buckingham did not even see them. As soon as the precious blooms were over John set the pots outside in the dappled shade of his own garden so that he could water them daily and watch the leaves flop and droop, and pray that deep inside the soil the bulbs were growing plump and strong.

“When will we lift them?” J asked him, eyeing the dispiriting sight of the limp leaves.

“In autumn,” John said shortly. “And then we will know if we have made my lord a fortune, or if we have lost him one.”

“But either way he missed seeing the bloom,” J pointed out.

“He missed it,” John agreed. “And I missed showing it to him.”

Everyone in the town of Chelmsford, in the village of Chorley, in the kitchens at New Hall, and even the shepherds in the lambing pens spoke of nothing but the king and Parliament and the quarrel between them, the king and his wife and the quarrel between them, the quarrel between the king and the French, between the king and the Spanish, between the king and the Roman Catholics and between the king and the Puritans. Inside the enclosing walls of the duke’s park they did not dare say it, but in the ale houses of Chelmsford they had a joke which went: “Who rules the kingdom? The king! Who rules the king? The duke! Who rules the duke? The Devil!”

It would have been bad enough if it had stopped there, but the joke spread from the ale-house men to the women, who were more apt to see the work of the Devil in the gross injustice of life and took the jest too literally. From them it spread to the preachers, who knew that the Devil did his work daily, and that the richest pickings for him were around the king who could not rule his wife, nor his court, nor Parliament, nor protect his country.

They said that the duke was the most hated man in England. One of the garden lads, employed to scare crows off Tradescant’s new West Indian scarlet runner beans, boasted to another that they served a man worse-hated than the Pope. Everything was blamed on the duke: the plague which was again taking hundreds of men and women already weakened by a hungry winter, the wetness of the spring which would spoil the crops in the ground and, over and over again, the corruption of a king who surely would otherwise live in peace with his wife and strive to govern with Parliament.

The king was so desperate for money that he had called Parliament but the members, newly up from the country and determined to take a stand, had sworn that the king should have no money for any new wars without his signature on a Petition of Right. He must accept that there would be no taxes without their consent — no more illegal demands, no more royal charges — and that men who refused the whim of the king should not be sent to prison without a judge hearing their case. The king, bankrupt on his throne, was driven to assent, a grudging assent which he resisted to the last moment and regretted as soon as he had put his hand to the new contract.

Jane, on the settle at John’s fireside with her husband on a stool at her feet leaning his head against her knees, read the family her father’s letter.

“The king’s consent to the Petition of Right is seen as the start of a new era. It is hailed as a new Magna Carta which will defend the rights of innocent people against the wickedness of those who should be their betters and their guides. They are ringing the bells while I write this to celebrate the king’s agreement with Parliament at last. I wish I could say that His Majesty welcomes it as does everyone else, but he insists that it is nothing new, that there are no new freedoms, and therefore, that he is not curbed. The older men of my congregation remember that when Parliament came against Queen Elizabeth she thanked them kindly, and when she was forced to do as they wanted, she smiled as if it was her heart’s desire.
And the hot heads among my congregation are asking what will it take to teach this king to deal with his fellow men with respect?
At all events, he is to have the money he desires, and your husband’s master, the duke, is to take another campaign to Rhé…”