Virgin Earth (63 page)

“You must bring back some fine p… plants,” the king said pleasantly to J. “Flowers and trees and shells, I hear they have precious sh… shells. I shall give you a letter of authority. Anything you see that would profit me, or the k… kingdom, you must have, free of charge, and bring it back. I shall give you a patent to collect. My loyal subjects in the new world will help you.”

J knew that a good proportion of the king’s loyal subjects had fled to the Americas determined never again to live directly under such a ruler, and paid their dues to England only with the most irritated reluctance.

“You must come back with r… rarities too,” the king said. “And see if you can bring Indian corn to grow here.”

“I will, Your Majesty.”

The king gestured and one of his yeomen stepped forward. “A p… patent to collect in Virginia,” the king said, his lips hardly moving. The yeoman, new at his work, had not yet learned that the king hated giving orders. Half of his servants’ work was guessing what he required. “Have it written up. To Mr. T… Tradescant.”

J bowed. “I am obliged to Your Majesty.”

Charles extended his hand for J to kiss. “You are indeed,” he said.

December 1637

J took ship in the
Brave Heart,
sailing out of Greenwich, and John came down to the quay to see him off. They ate a last meal together in the Three Choughs while J’s bags were taken on board the ship bobbing at the quayside below the window.

“Make sure you carry enough water to keep any plants in the earth damp all the way home,” John reminded him. “At sea in a storm, even the rain is salty.”

J smiled. “I’ve unpacked enough dying plants to know how to care for them.”

“Get seeds if you can. They travel much better than young plants. Seeds and roots are the best. Make sure you crate them up so they stay dark and dry.”

J nodded and gave his father a glance which warned him that there was nothing more that he could teach his son.

“I want it to go well for you,” John explained. “And there are treasures to be gathered there, I know it.”

J looked out of the little window at the ship at the quayside. “All my childhood I seemed to be watching you sail; it’s odd that it’s my turn now.”

“It’s right that it is your turn now,” John said generously. “I don’t even envy you. My back aches and my knees are stiff; my voyaging days are over. This winter was hard on me, cold weather, sorrow, ill-health and worry altogether. I shall limp from my fireside to my gardens until you return.”

“Write me news of the children,” J said. “That they keep their health.”

“The plague must be less this year,” John said. “It took so many last year. There must be better times coming. I shall keep the children away from the city.”

“They still grieve for their mother.”

“They will learn to feel it less,” John predicted. “Frances is already caring for Baby John, and sometimes he forgets and calls her Mama.”

“I know,” J said. “I should be pleased that he has stopped crying for her; but I can’t bear to hear it.”

John drained his tankard and put it down on the table. “Come on. Let’s get you aboard, and you shall leave this country and your grief together.”

The two men went down the narrow stairs and out to the quayside. “That house is riddled with passages like a rabbit warren,” John remarked. “When the press-gang comes in the front, there are men scattering out of houses up and down the street through a thousand doorways. I saw it when my duke was pressing men for the war against the French.”

J looked toward his ship. The tide was on the turn and she was pulling at the ropes as if testing their strength. He turned and his father took him awkwardly into his arms.

“God bless you,” John said gently.

J had a sudden superstitious dread that he would not see his father again. The loss of his mother and then his wife had shaken his confidence. “Don’t work too hard,” he urged him. “Leave it to me to repair our fortunes. I shall bring back barrels full of plants in time for the spring. I swear it.” He gazed into his father’s face. The old man looked as he had always, dark-eyed, weather-beaten, hardy as a clump of heather.

“God bless,” J whispered and then went up the gangplank of the ship.

John sat on a barrel on the quayside, stretching his tired legs before him, and waited for the ship to sail. He watched them run the gangplank aboard and then throw the mooring ropes. The little barges came out and took her in tow out to the middle of the river, and then John heard the faint shouted order and saw the lovely sight of the sails being flung open to the wind.

John raised his hand to his son as the ship caught the wind, slewed a little in the current, corrected her course, and then slipped away downriver, ploughing through the busy traffic of outbound boats and cross-river wherries, fishermen and rowing boats.

From his place at the railing, J saw the figure of his father grow smaller and smaller as the quay itself shrank and became part of a larger view, an outcrop of stone against the green of the Kent hills behind it; then as they were farther and farther out, the dock was nothing but a darker line on the blur of the shadowy land.

“Good-bye,” he said quietly. “God bless.” It seemed to him that he was leaving not just his father and his children and the memories of his wife and mother, but that he was leaving his own childhood and his long apprenticeship, and going to a new life which he could make his own.

Spring 1638

John did not neglect the garden at Oatlands while J was away. He had planted a new consignment of daffodils in the autumn and that spring he was in the king’s court every day, watching the green spears break through the soil. For the queen he had planted tulips in great china bowls, and forced them to bloom early. They might be worth a fraction of their original value but John would not throw good bulbs on the midden because they had once been worth a fortune and were now sold for shillings. He had bought them for love of their color and shape and he loved them still. He put them in the orangery by the windows for the light and kept them warm. Their Majesties were due at the palace in late February and John wanted the bulbs in flower for their private apartments.

He was lucky; the royal party were delayed at Richmond and did not come to Oatlands until early March, and the tulip buds were fat and green and striped with the promise of color when they arrived.

They were accompanied by a troop of new designers and decorators. It was the queen’s desire that her apartments should be remodeled and repainted. “What colors shall I have on the walls?” she asked John. “Here is Monsieur de Critz, who will paint me cherubs or angels or saints, or whatever I will.”

John looked at the tulips on her table, which were slowly going a deep glossy red. “Scarlet,” he said.

She rounded on him, spitting with anger. “D’you think to insult me?” she demanded.

He realized at once that she was smarting from the bawdy songs they were shouting in the streets of London about the two scarlet whores — the Pope and the Queen of England, who was shamefully in his toils.

“No!” John stammered. “No! I was looking at your flowers!”

She turned and caught sight of the tulips. “Oh.” Her charm had quite deserted her. “Well, anyway. Cream and pink and blue, the ascension of Mary,” she said shortly to the painter, and left the room.

The painter raised a cautious eyebrow at John.

“I’d best have a care,” John said.

“Both she and the king are quick-tempered these days,” the man said in a quiet undertone. “The news from the country gets worse every day. It is not always easy, serving at court.”

John nodded and extended his hand. “Good to see you again, Monsieur de Critz.”

“It’s been a long time,” the man said. “I last saw you years ago, when I was commissioned by my lord Cecil.”

“I remember,” John said. “You did the portrait of my lord which was made into a mosaic for the fireplace at Hatfield.”

They heard the queen’s voice raised in temper in the inner room.

“I’m off to my garden,” John said hastily.

“Will you show me around before you go? I am halfway to being lost here.”

John nodded and led the way from the rooms. “These are the queen’s apartments; the king’s rooms match them but lie the opposite side. Down below is the king’s court. On the other side, the queen’s.”

The painter looked down from the window to where John’s intricate knot garden was green and white and yellow. The outside border was the bright green of fresh growing bay, clipped tight and neat, and inside the square, as the queen had first commissioned, was a love-knot made of bay with H M and C monograms at each corner made with the brilliant iridescent blue of violets and the bright white-gold of the new daffodils.

“If they had been a month later, it would all have had to be redug with pansies,” John said.

“Did you design it?” John de Critz asked, impressed.

“My son designed it,” John told him. “But we both worked on the planting scheme. It is harder with Their Majesties than with a lord who is at home most of the time. When they come on a visit they expect it to be perfect, but you never know when the visit will be. We have to grow everything in pots or nursery beds, and only put the plants in when we know they are coming. We can’t wait to let the plants grow fine and strong in the beds and succeed each other. Their Majesties need it perfect at each visit.”

“You are a painter yourself,” the man remarked. “What patterns and color! This is even better than Hatfield.”

“I have no sense of smell,” John explained. “My son prizes flowers for their scent, and loves working with herbs for their perfume. But, since I can smell nothing, I love bright colors and shapes.”

The two men turned from the window and John led the way down to the great hall where the king and the household would dine, and then out into the court before the hall.

“Do you sleep in the hall?” John asked.

“My niece is with me; we have rooms in the old wing,” the man replied.

“Does she always accompany you?” John asked, surprised. The aristocratic members of the court might confine themselves to platonic love or to delicate trysts, but the rest of the royal household could be a rough place for a young woman when the fanciful romantic behavior of the royal parade had passed by.

“Her father died of the plague and her mother cannot support her,” the man said. “And, to tell you the truth, she has a fine eye and can work as well as any draftsman. I often let her draw for me and block the designs out on paper, and then I transfer them to the walls.”

“I will see you both at dinner then,” John said. The spring sun-shine was warm on his face and he could hear the birds singing. “I must get out and see how they are digging in the kitchen garden.”

De Critz raised his hand and went back into the palace to start his drawings for the queen.

John joined de Critz at the dinner table at midday in the great hall. At the top table were the king and queen and the favored courtiers of the day, with hundreds of rich and elaborate dishes laid before them. The queen held out her white hands for her lady-in-waiting to pull off, one at a time, each of the priceless rings, and pour a stream of warm clean water over her fingertips and then dab them with a napkin of the finest damask.

John noted, with no sign of disapproval showing in his face, that seated on one side of the queen was her confessor, and beside the king was the French ambassador. Grace was said in a quiet mutter in Latin by the queen’s confessor and it was undoubtedly a Roman Catholic grace. There was no sign at all that this was a Protestant court in a Protestant country.

There was no sign, either, of the royal family. Their portrait was there, right enough, all five children as lovely as angels under the painter’s tactful depiction. But the real children were never at their parents’ dinner table. The queen prided herself on the passion of her maternal feelings, but tended to exercise them on her real children only occasionally, and mainly when she was being watched in public.

A young woman in her mid-twenties, dressed simply but elegantly in subdued colors, walked briskly into the hall, bowed low to the top table and dropped a slight curtsey to her uncle.

“This is my niece, Hester Pooks,” John de Critz said. “John Tradescant, the king’s gardener.”

She did not bob a curtsey to John but looked him straight in the face with a smile and held out her hand for a brief firm handshake. “I am glad to meet you,” she said. “I have been walking round and round the gardens and I think I have never seen anything more lovely.”

It was the quickest route to John’s heart. He pulled out a chair for her and helped her to a piece of bread from the platter, and meat from the serving bowl which was before them. He told her about the making and improving of the Oatlands gardens, about the new breeds of tulips just blushing into colors, about the deep digging in the kitchen garden and the enormous asparagus bed.

“I made some sketches of the fruit trees in bud and those little daffodils beneath them,” she said. “I’ve never seen an orchard so pretty.”

“I should like to see your sketches,” John said.

“The grass is like a tapestry or a painting,” she remarked. “The true flowery mead. You can hardly see the green for flowers.”

“Now that’s just what I intended,” John said, his enthusiasm growing. “It has to be balanced all the time, and mown at the right time so that you don’t cut the flowers before they are seeded, and you have to pull the plants which are running away and drowning the rest… but I am so glad you saw it. It is supposed to look artless, and that is the hardest thing to get right!”

“So now I have a drawing based on a garden, which is based on a tapestry, which will have been based on a drawing.”

“And perhaps at the very back of it all, there was a garden.”

She looked at him with quick comprehension in her dark eyes. “The first garden? Of Eden? Do you see that as a flowery mead? I have always thought of it as a French garden, with beautiful walks.”

“Certainly there must have been an orchard.” John had an enjoyable sense of intellectual freedom, being allowed to speculate about the Bible, which, at home, had to be accepted as a revealed truth and read with uncritical devotion. “There must have been at least two apple trees.”