Virgin Earth (65 page)

When they halted outside the house she had to help him over the little bridge and into the house, and as soon as she was in the door she was giving orders for his comfort as if she were mistress already.

The servants obeyed her willingly — lighting a fire in John’s room, bringing a chair for him to sit in, bringing him a glass of hot wine. She knelt before him, her cloak still tied around her neck, her muff pushed to one side, and rubbed his cold hands until they lost their blueness and tingled.

“Thank you,” John said. “I feel a fool, bringing you here and then needing your help.”

Hester rose to her feet with a slight smile which made little of her care of him, and set him at his ease. “It’s nothing,” she said easily.

She was a woman who could set a house to rights in moments. In a very short time she had clean sheets on John’s bed, and a bowl of hot soup and a loaf of white wheaten bread sent up to him so that he could dine in his bedroom. Then she turned her attention to the children and sat with them in the kitchen while they ate their supper.

She heard them say grace after the meal, both heads bowed obediently over their hands. Baby John still had the golden silky curls of infancy falling over his white lace collar. Frances’s brown sleek hair was hidden under her white cap. Hester had to stop herself from reaching out and gathering the two of them onto her lap.

“The mistress used to say prayers every morning and evening,” the cook volunteered from the fireside. “D’you remember, Frances?”

The girl nodded and looked away.

“Would you like us to pray, as your mother used to pray?” Hester asked her gently.

Again Frances nodded wordlessly, turning her head away so that no one could see the pain in her face. Hester put her hands together and closed her eyes and prayed, from the prayer book issued by Cranmer, as if there were no other way to address your maker. Hester had never been inside a church where prayers were spoken from the heart; she would have thought such behavior unsettling, perhaps illegal. She said the words the archbishop had ruled, and prayed by rote.

And Frances, slowly, without turning her head or indicating in any way that she wanted an embrace, stepped backward, toward Hester, closer and closer and then finally leaned back against her, still not looking around. Gently, carefully, Hester dropped her hands from where they were clasped in prayer and rested one hand on Frances’s thin shoulder, and then the other on Johnny’s silky curls. Johnny was comfortable under the caress and leaned at once toward her, but she felt the little girl’s shoulder tense for a moment, and then relax as if the child were relinquishing a burden which she had been carrying alone. While the others said “Amen” out loud to the familiar prayer, Hester added a private silent wish that she might take these children who belonged to another woman, and bring them up as their mother would have wanted, and that in time they would come to love her.

She did not move away when the prayers ceased but stood still, her hand on each child. Johnny turned his little round face up to her and lifted up his arms, mutely asking to be picked up. She stooped and lifted him and settled him on her hip, and felt the deep satisfaction of a child’s weight at her side and his arms around her neck. Still without looking, and with no word of appeal, the girl Frances turned toward Hester and Hester folded her into the crook of her arm and pressed the sad little face into her apron.

John recovered after a few days at home, and was soon setting seeds in pots and sending Frances out in the frosty garden to gather up, without fail, every single one of the last chestnuts as they fell from the trees down the avenue.

The nuts were so precious that the household linen was spread beneath the wide branches of the trees from autumn to springtime to ensure that not a single prickly casing or warm brown nut was lost in the grass. Hester mentioned the risk of staining or tearing the sheets, but John said firmly that one nut was worth a dozen sheets and that the garden must always come before the house.

He took Hester on long cold walks down to the bottom of the orchard, showed her every single tree and named it for her. In the blustery wet days of March he stayed in the orangery before a potting table with a barrel of sieved earth at his side and taught Hester how to set seeds. He showed her the tender plants which lived in the orangery from autumn to spring to protect them from winter frosts, and he showed her the winter jobs: the cleaning of the big tub planters, the washing of the pots and airing them, ready for the fever of spring planting. One lad spent all the winter sieving earth for the seed beds and for the pots. Another brewed up a fearful barrel of water fortified with horse and cow manure and a nettle soup of John’s own devising, which would be sprinkled on every precious seedling.

They passed a quiet few weeks. A sailor, fresh into port, had a sealed parcel of seeds for John and a letter from Virginia.

“He says he will be home by April,” John read. “He says he is writing this before going out into the woods for a week. He has an Indian guide who leads him around and shows him plants and brings him safe in.” He paused and looked into the embers of the fire. “I wish he would come home,” he said fretfully. “I am impatient for him to be here and everything settled.”

“He will come in good time,” Hester said soothingly. There was a single disloyal thought in her head that they were managing very well without him, John busy and contented, the museum taking a small but steady flow of money and the children taught by her every morning and kissed good night by her every night.

“He should be already on his way,” John said. “This letter is eight weeks old. He may be at sea now.”

“God keep him safe,” Hester said, glancing out of the window at the dark March skies.

“Amen,” John said.

Toward the end of the month John fell ill again. He ached in every bone and complained of the cold. But he was adamant that nothing ailed him, he was well enough. “Just tired,” he said, smiling at Hester. “Just old bones.” She did not press him to rise from his bed, nor to eat. She thought he looked as if he had reached the end of a long and arduous road.

“I think I should write a letter for J,” he announced quietly one morning as she sat at the foot of his bed, sewing an apron for Frances.

At once she put her sewing to one side. “He will not get it if he left the colony as he planned. He should be at sea now.”

“Not a letter to send. A letter for him to read here. If I am not here to speak to him.”

She nodded gravely; she did not rush to reassure him. “Are you feeling worse?”

“I am feeling old,” he said gently. “I don’t imagine that I will live forever, and I want to make sure that it is all settled here. Will you write it for me?”

She hesitated. “If you wish. Or I could send for a clerk to write it. It might be better if it were not written by me.”

He nodded. “You are a sensible woman, Hester. That’s sound advice. Get a clerk for me from Lambeth and I will dictate my letter to J and finish my will.”

“Of course,” she said and went quietly from the room. At the doorway she paused. “I hope you will make it clear to your son that he is not bound to have me. Your son will have to make his own decision when he comes home. I am not part of his inheritance.”

There was a small gleam of mischief in John’s pale face. “It never occurred to me,” he said unconvincingly. He took a difficult breath. “But it shall be as you wish. Send for a clerk from Lambeth, and also send for the executors of my will. I want to leave everything straight.”

The clerk came and the executors with him — Elizabeth’s brother, Alexander Norman, and William Ward, Buckingham’s steward, who had served with John all those years ago.

“I shall be your executor with the greatest of pleasure,” Alexander assured him, taking a seat at the bedside. “But I expect that you shall be mine. This is just a winter rheum. We’ll see you in the garden again this spring.”

John managed a weary smile, leaning back against his pillows. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m a good age now.”

Alexander Norman glanced over the will and set his name to it. He reached toward John and shook his hand. “God keep you, John Tradescant,” he said quietly.

The Duke of Buckingham’s old steward, William Ward, stepped forward, and signed the will which the clerk showed him. He took John’s hand. “I shall pray for you,” he said quietly. “You shall be in my prayers every day, along with our lord.”

John turned his head at that. “D’you pray for him still?”

The steward nodded. “Of course,” he said gently. “They can say what they like about him but we who were in his service remember a master to worship, don’t we, John? He wasn’t a tyrant to us. He paid us freely, he gave us gifts, he laughed at mistakes and he would flare into a rage and then it was all forgotten. They spoke ill of him then and they speak worse of him now; but those of us who knew him have never served a better master.”

John nodded. “I loved him,” he whispered.

The steward nodded. “When you get to heaven you will see him there,” he said with simple faith. “Outshining the angels.”

The will was signed and sealed and posted with the clerk, the executors in agreement, but Hester thought that John would not go until he could see his tulips one last time. There is no gardener in the world who does not worship spring like a pagan. Every day John would take a seat at the window of his bedroom and peer outward and down to try to see the tiny spears of green springtime bulbs piercing the cold earth.

Every day Frances came to his room with her hands filled with new buds. “Look, Grandfather, the lenten lilies are out, and the little white daffodils.”

She would spread them on the coverlet wrapped around his knees, both of them careless of the sticky juice from the cut stems. “A feast,” John said, his eyes on them. “And they smell?”

“Like heaven,” Frances replied ecstatically. “Yellow, they smell like sunshine and lemons and honey.”

John chuckled. “Tulips coming?”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said. “They’re still in bud.”

The old man smiled at her. “I should have learned patience by now, my Frances,” he said gently, his breath coming short. “But don’t forget to look tomorrow.”

Hester thought that John’s stubborn will would not let him die in early spring. He wanted to see his tulips before he died; he wanted to see the blossom on his cherry trees. She thought his soul could not leave his weary body until he had some warm summer flowers in his arms once more. As the cold winds died down and the light at the window of his bedroom grew brighter and warmer, his breath slowly slipped away, but still he hung on — waiting for the summer, waiting for the return of his son.

At the end of March he turned his head to her as she sat at his bedside. “Tell the gardener to send me in some flowers,” he said softly. He was breathless. “Everything we have. I may not be able to wait for them to bloom. Tell him to pot me up some tulips. I want to see them. They must be nearly showing by now.”

Hester nodded and went out to find the gardener. He was weeding in the seed beds, preparing them for the great rush of planting out which would come when the danger of night frosts was over.

“He wants his tulips,” she told him. “You’re to pot them up and take them in. And cut some daffodils, armfuls of them. But I want us to do more for him. What are the best plants he has made? The rarest, most special plants? Can we not put them all in a pot and take them in so that he can see them from his bed?”

The gardener smiled at her ignorance. “It’d be a big pot.”

“Several pots then,” Hester persisted. “What are his other plants?”

The gardener’s gesture took in the whole garden, and the orchards beyond. “This is not a man who gardens in pots,” he said grandly. “There’s his orchard: d’you know how many cherry trees alone? Forty! And some of his fruit trees were never grown before, like the diapered plum he got from Malta.

“And he found wonderful trees for the park or garden. See those beauties so fresh and green with those pale needles? He grew them from seed. They are Archangel larches, from Russia itself. He brought the pine cones back and managed to make them grow.”

“They’re dead,” Hester objected, looking at the spiky yellowing needles clinging to the brown twigs.

The gardener smiled at her and took one of the swooping bare branches. There was a tiny rosette of green needles at the tip of the rusty brown branches.

“In the autumn they turn as golden as a beech tree and shed their needles like yellow rain. Come the spring they burst out, all fresh and green like grass. He reared them from seed and now look at the height of them!

“In the orchards he grows the service tree, and his favorites are the great horse chestnuts. Look at that avenue down the garden! And every one of them flowers like a rose and makes leaves like a fan. It’s the greatest tree that has ever been seen, and he grew the first from a nut. On the lawn before the house? That’s an Asian plane. And nobody can say how big it will grow because nobody has ever seen one before.”

Hester looked down the avenue at the arching swooping branches. “I didn’t know,” she said. “He showed me all around the garden and the orchard but he never told me they were all his own, discovered by him and grown here in Lambeth for the very first time. He only told me they were rare and beautiful.”

“And there’s the herbs and vegetables,” the gardener reminded her. “He’s got seven sorts of garlic alone, a red lettuce which can make seventeen ounces of good leaves, allspick lavender, Jamaican pepper. His flowers come from all over the world, and we send them all over the country. Spiderwort — he gave his name to it. Tradescant’s spiderwort, a three-petaled flower the color of the sky. On a wet day it closes up so you think it’s dead; on a sunny day it is as blue as your gown. A flower to lift your heart, grow for you anywhere. Mountain valerian, lady’s smock, large-flowered gentians, silver knapweed, dozens of geraniums, ranunculus — a flower like a springtime rose, anemones from Paris, five different types of rock rose, dozens of different clematis, the moon trefoil, the shrubby germander, erigeron — as pretty as daisies but as light and airy as snowdrops, his great rose daffodil with hundreds of petals. In the tulip beds alone we have a fortune. D’you know how many varieties? Fifty! And a Semper Augustus among them. The finest tulip ever grown!”