Virgin Earth (10 page)

“Why did you not?” she asked softly.

He cleared his throat to hide his embarrassment. “I cannot write very fair,” he said awkwardly. “That is to say, I cannot write at all. I can read a bit, I can reckon very swiftly, but I cannot write. And anyway… I should not know what to say.”

She turned to him; but in his embarrassment, he did not see her. He was digging the heel of his riding boot into the corner of her little square of hen-scratched dust.

“What would you have said, if you had written?” she asked and her voice was very soft and tempting. It was a voice which a man would turn to and rest upon. John resisted the temptation to spin on his heel, snatch her up and bury his face in her neck.

“I would have said I was sorry,” he confessed gruffly. “Sorry to have been ill-tempered on our wedding night, and sorry that I had to leave you that very morning. When I was angry with them for making a noise I had thought that we would have the next day in peace, and that anything troublesome could be mended then. I had thought to wake early in the morning and love you then. But then the message came and I went up to London and there was no way of telling you that I was sorry.”

Hesitantly she stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I am sorry too,” she said simply. “I thought these things were easier for men. I thought that you were doing just exactly what you wished. I thought that you had not bedded me because…” her voice became choked and she ended in a thin whisper “…because you have an aversion to me, and that you went back to Theobalds to avoid me.”

John spun around and snatched his wife to his heart. “I do not!” He felt her whole frame convulse with a deep sob. “I do not have an aversion!”

She was warm in his arms and her skin was soft. He kissed her face and her wet eyelids, and her smooth sweet neck and the dimples of her collarbone at the neck of her gown, and suddenly he felt desire sweep over him as easy and as natural as a spring rainstorm across a field of grass. He scooped her up and carried her into the house and kicked the door shut behind him, and he laid her down on the hearthrug before the little spinster’s fire where she had sat, alone and lonely, for so many evenings, and loved her until it grew dark outside and only the firelight illuminated their enfolded bodies.

“I do
not
have an aversion to you,” he said.

At suppertime they rose from the floor, chilled and uncomfortable. “I have some bread and cheese and a broth,” Elizabeth said.

“Whatever you have in the larder will do for me,” John replied. “I’ll fetch some wood for the fire.”

“I’ll run up the road to my mother’s house and borrow a jug of beef stock,” she said, pulling her gray gown on over her head. She turned her back to him and offered him the ties on her white apron. “I’ll only be a moment.”

“Give them my good wishes,” John said. “I’ll call up and see them tomorrow.”

“We could go up to the house for supper,” she suggested. “They would be glad to see you tonight.”

“I have other plans for tonight,” John said with a meaning smile. Elizabeth felt herself warm through with the intensity of her blush. “Oh.” She recovered herself. “I’ll get the beef stock then.”

John nodded and listened to her quick step down the brick path and out into the main street. He stacked the fireplace with a liberal supply of logs and then went out through the backyard to the little field to see to his horse. When he came back Elizabeth was stirring a pot hung on a chain from the spit, and there was bread and new cheese on the table and two jugs of small ale.

“I brought my book,” she said carefully. “I thought you might like us to look at it, together.”

“What book?”

“My lesson book,” she said. “My father taught me to read and write and I did my writing in this book. It has clean pages in it still. I thought, if you wished, I might teach you.”

For a moment John was going to rebuff her; the idea of a wife teaching her husband anything was contrary to the laws of nature and of God; but she looked very sweet and very young. Her hair was tumbled and her cap was slightly askew. Lying on his cape on the floor of the little cottage she had been tender and ready to be pleased, and at the end, openly passionate. He found he did not feel much like supporting the laws of God and nature; instead he found that he was rather disposed to oblige her. Besides, it would be good to know how to read and write.

“D’you know how to write in French?” he asked. “And Latin words?”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you want to learn French?”

“I can speak French, and a bit of Italian, and enough German to see that my lord is not cheated when I am buying plants for him from a sea captain. And I know some plant names in Latin. But I never learned to write any of it down.”

Her face was illuminated with her smile. “I can teach you.”

“All right,” he said. “But you must tell no one.”

Her gaze was open and honest. “Of course not. It shall be between the two of us, as everything else will be.”

That night they made love again in the warmth and comfort of the big bed. Elizabeth, free from her fear that he did not love her, and discovering a sensuality which she had not imagined, clung to him and wrapped her arms and legs around him and sobbed for pleasure. Then they wrapped their blankets around their shoulders and sat side by side on the bed and looked out at the deep blue of the night sky and the sharp whiteness of the thousands of stars.

The village was all quiet; not one light showed. The road away from the village, north to Gravesend and London, was empty and silent, ghostly in the starlight. An owl hooted, quartering the fields on silent wings. John reached for his waistcoat folded on the chest at the foot of the bed.

“I have something I should like to give you,” he said quietly. “I think it is perhaps the most valuable thing I own. Perhaps you will think it foolish; but if you would like it, I should like to give it to you.”

His hand closed over one of the precious chestnuts. “If you do not like it I will keep it, by your leave,” he said. “It is not really mine to give away; it is entrusted to me.”

Elizabeth lay back on the pillow, her hair spread as brown and as glossy as his chestnut. “What is it?” she asked, smiling. “You sound like a child in the schoolyard.”

“It is precious to me…”

“Then it is precious to me too, whatever it may be,” she said.

He brought his clenched fist out of his waistcoat pocket and she put her hand out flat, waiting for him to open his fingers.

“There are only six of these in the country,” he said. “Perhaps only six in the whole of Europe. I have five in my keeping and, if you like, you may have the sixth.”

He dropped the heavy nut like a round smooth marble into her hand.

“What is it?”

“It is a chestnut.”

“It is too big and too round!”

“A new chestnut. The man who sold it to me told me that it grows into a great tree, like our chestnut tree, but it flowers like a rose, the color of apple blossom. And this great nut comes only one to a pod, not two nuts to a pod like ours, and the pod is not prickly like our chestnuts but waxy and green with a few sharp spines. He sold it to my lord for nine pounds down, and another eighteen pounds if it grows. And I shall give this one to you.”

Elizabeth turned the nut over in her hand. It nestled heavily in her palm, its brown glossy color dark against her callused hand.

“Shall I plant it in the garden?”

John instantly flinched, thinking of the voracious chickens. “Put it in a pot, somewhere that you can easily watch it,” he said. “In soil with some muck well stirred in. Water it from the base of the pot with a little water every day. Perhaps it will grow for you.”

“Shall you not regret giving me this precious nut, if it fails for me?”

John closed her fingers around the nut. “It is yours,” he said gently. “Do with it as you will. Perhaps you will be lucky. Perhaps together, now that we are married, we shall be lucky together.”

John stayed a full month at Meopham with his wife, and when the time came for him to go back to Theobalds a number of innovations had been made. She had a pretty little miniature knot garden outside the back door, incongruously planted with leeks, beets, carrots and onions and fenced with rooted willow twigs woven into a dwarf living fence against the marauding chickens. He could both read and write a fair-enough script; the chestnut was in a pot on the windowsill showing a pale snout above the earth; and Elizabeth was expecting their child.

Summer 1608

“The boy should be called George, for his grandfather,” Gertrude remarked. She was seated in the best chair in Elizabeth’s parlor. The wooden crib stood beside the open window, and John, leaning against the windowsill, was rocking it gently with his foot and looking down into the sleeping face of the baby. He was a dark-skinned child, with black hair as thick as John’s own. When he was awake his eyes were a deep periwinkle blue. John kept his foot nudging the crib, repressing the desire to lift his son to his face and smell again his haunting smell of spilled milk and sweet buttercream skin.

“George David, for his grandfather and godfather,” Gertrude said. She glanced sideways at John. “Unless you wish to call him Robert and see if the earl can be persuaded to take an interest in him?”

John gazed out into the garden. The little vegetable knot garden was doing well and this spring he had added another square beside it, planted with herbs for strewing, for medicines and for cooking. There was now a withy hurdle penning Elizabeth’s hens into the far end of the garden with wormwood planted around it to hide the fencing, to give them shade and to prevent fowl pest.

“Or we might call him James in a compliment to His Majesty,” Gertrude went on. “Though it will do him little good, I suppose. We could call him Henry Charles for the two princes. But they say Prince Charles is a sickly boy. D’you ever see him at Theobalds, John?”

She glanced up to John, who had leaned out of the window and was thoughtfully weighing a flowerpot in his hand. Poking from the moist earth was a whippy slim stem crowned with a little hand of green leaves.

“Oh! that eternal pot! Every day Elizabeth sighs over it as if it were worth its weight in gold! I told her! No twig in the world is worth that sort of attention! But I was asking you — John — d’you ever see Prince Charles at Theobalds? I heard he was sickly?”

“He’s not strong,” John replied, putting the chestnut tree gently on the windowsill. “They say he is much better since he came from Scotland. But I rarely see him. The king does not keep his family by him. When he comes hunting, he comes with only his most intimate circle.”

Gertrude leaned forward, avid for gossip. “And are they as bad as everyone says? I’ve heard that the king adores the Duke of Rochester, that he loads him with pearls, that the duke rules the king and the king rules the kingdom!”

“I wouldn’t know,” John said unhelpfully. “I’m just the gardener.”

“But you must
see
them!”

John thought of the last visit of the king. He had come without his wife Anne, who now never traveled with him. She was completely replaced by his young men. John had seen him walking in the garden with his arm around the Duke of Rochester’s waist. They had sat together in the arbor and the king had rested his head on the duke’s shoulder, like a country girl mooning over a blacksmith. When they kissed, the court turned aside and pretended to be busy about its own concerns. No one pried, no one condemned. The young Duke of Rochester was the favorite of everyone who wanted to be the favorite of the king. A whole court was formed around his handsome lithe figure. A whole morality was lightly constructed around the king’s love for him that permitted any sort of display, any sort of drunkenness.

At night the duke went openly to his bed in the king’s room. The king was said to be afraid of assassination and it soothed him to sleep with a companion, but there were loud groans of pleasure from the inner chamber and the repetitive squeaking of the royal bed.

“They go out hunting; I weed the paths,” John said unhelpfully.

“I hear the queen misses him and pines for him, and has become a papist for consolation…”

John shrugged.

“And what of the children, the royal princes and princesses?”

John looked deliberately vague. He was disinclined to gossip and in any case he had seen more than enough of the royal princes and princesses. Princess Mary was only a baby and not yet at court but Prince Henry, the heir and the darling of the whole court, was an arrogant boy whose charm could be blown away in a moment’s rage. His sister, Elizabeth, had all the Tudor temper and all the Tudor hastiness, and poor little Prince Charles, the second surplus heir, the rickety-legged runt of the litter, ran behind his stronger, older, more attractive siblings all the day, breathless with his weak chest, stammering with his tied tongue, longing for them to turn and pay him attention.

They never did. They were courted beloved spoiled children, the first children of four kingdoms, and they had no time for him. John would see them boating on the lake or riding across the park and never looking back as poor little Charles struggled to keep up.

“I scarcely see Their Highnesses,” he said.

“Oh, well!” Gertrude leaped to her feet in frustration. “Tell Elizabeth I called in to wish her well. I’m surprised she is not downstairs by now. Tell her that I said she should stir herself. And tell her that the baby should be called George David.”

“No, I don’t think so,” John said in the same quiet tone of voice.

“What?”

“I will not tell her any of that. And you shall not tell her either.”

“I beg your pardon?”

John smiled his easy smile. “Elizabeth shall stay in bed until she is well again,” he said. “We were lucky not to lose her. It was a hard birth for her, and she was hurt inside. She shall rest as long as she wants. And we won’t be calling the child George or Robert or James or Charles or Henry or David. He’ll be John, after my grandfather, and after my father, and me.”

Gertrude flounced toward the door. “It’s very dull!” she exclaimed. “You should save your name for another child. The first child should be named in such a way as to encourage a sponsor!”