Virgin Earth (19 page)

Tradescant nodded. “And white, red and black currants, much bigger than our fruit, and roses — in one place I saw more than five acres of wild roses like a cinnamon rose. Hellebores, angelica, geranium, saxifrage, sorrel as tall as my son John at home — and a new sort of pink—” John broke off for a moment, thinking how pleased his lord would have been to hear that he had found a new sort of pink. “A new pink,” he said quietly. “With very fair jagged leaves.”

“These are treasures,” Sir Dudley said.

“And there are plants which could yield medicines,” Tradescant told him. “A fruit like an amber strawberry which prevents scurvy, and I was told of a tree which grows at the Volga River which they call God’s tree. It sounds like fennel but they say it will cure many sicknesses. You might see it, my lord. You might take a cutting if you see it.”

“Come with me, John,” Sir Dudley replied. “Come and take your own cuttings. You’ve been here such a little time and found such novelties. Come with me to Moscow and you can collect your plants all the way.”

For a moment he thought the man would say yes. John’s face lit up at the prospect of the adventure and the thought of the riches he would see.

Then he shook his head and laughed at his own eagerness. “I’m like a girl running after a fair,” he said. “I can think of nothing I would like more. But I have to go home. Lord Wootton expects me, and my wife and son.”

“His lordship comes first?”

John was recalled to his duty. “My lord must come before everything. Even my own desires.”

Sir Dudley dropped an arm carelessly around John’s shoulders, and they strolled together to his waiting horses. “I am sorry for it,” he said. “There’s no man I would rather have beside me, all the way to China.”

John nodded to hide his emotion. “I wish I could, my lord.” He looked down the wagon train of the strong Tartar horses, tacked up with deep traveling saddles.

“All the way to China, you say?”

“Think what you would find—” Sir Dudley whispered temptingly.

John shook his head but his hand was on the stirrup leather. “I cannot,” he said.

Sir Dudley smiled at him. “Then safe homeward journey,” he said. “And if I find anything very rare or strange I will cut it and send it to you, and I will make a note of where I found it so that you can make the journey yourself one day. For you are a traveler, John, not a stay-at-home. I can see it in your eyes.”

John grinned, shaking his head, and made himself release his grip on the stirrup, and made himself step back from Sir Dudley’s horse. He forced himself to watch, and not run after, as the whole cavalcade of them turned from the quayside to set off on the track toward Moscow and the East.

“Godspeed,” John called. “And good fortune at the court of the Russian king.”

“God send you safe home,” Sir Dudley replied. “And when I get home you can name me as your friend, Tradescant. I shall not forget your care of me when I was sick.”

John watched them till the dust from the last of the train was gone, till the dust had blown across the gray sky, until the sound of the harness bells and the beat of the hooves was silent.

That night they rocked at anchor, and on the next tide they loaded the last of their goods and cast off with Tradescant’s cuttings in boxes on the deck and his trees loosely lashed to the mast, and his heart in his seaboots.

Elizabeth was watering the chestnut tree in its great box on the morning that John returned. The earth in the rest of the garden was dry and parched. It had been a bad year for the harvest, wet in the early months and scorching in July. The wheat crop had failed and the barley was little better. There would be hunger in the cities and in the poorer villages the price of flour would rise beyond the pockets of the poor. But through sun or rain the little chestnut sapling had thrived. Elizabeth had made it a little shelter of thatched straw to keep off the strongest sun, and watered it without fail on the dry days.

“Now there’s a pretty sight!” John said, coming up behind her.

Elizabeth jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to see him. “Praise God,” she said steadily, and paused for a moment, her eyes closed, to give thanks.

John, impatient with her piety, pulled her close to him and held her tight.

“Are you safe?” she asked. “Was it a good voyage? Are you well?”

“Safe and well and with boxes full of treasures.”

Elizabeth knew her husband too well to imagine that he was talking of Russian gold. “What did you find?”

“A Muscovy rose — bigger and sweeter than any I have seen before. A cherry tree with wood you can weave like a willow, which roots by bending its twigs into the ground, like a willow. Some new pinks with jagged leaves. I could have loaded the whole boat with white hellebores which grew so thick on one island that you could see nothing else, a new purple cranesbill, a great sorrel plant—” He broke off. “A cart is following me. And I bought some rarities too for Lord Wootton’s collection: Russian boots and strange shoes for walking on the snow and rare stockings.”

“And you are safe, and you were well?”

John sat down on the garden bench and drew Elizabeth onto his lap. “Safe as a summer garden, and I was well all the time, not even seasick. And now tell me your news,” he said. “Is J well?”

“Praise the Lord, yes.”

“And all your family? No plague in Kent?”

Elizabeth dipped her head in that familiar gesture which meant that she was swiftly praying. “None, thank God. Is there sickness in London?”

“I passed swiftly through to avoid the risk.”

“And are you home now, John? Home for good?”

She saw his roguish smile but she did not respond to it. “John?” she repeated gravely.

“There is a ship which I will take passage on, but it does not go for a year or two,” he assured her. “An expedition to the Mediterranean against the pirates, and I may have a place on a supply pinnace!”

She did not return his smile.

“Think of what I might find!” John said persuasively. “Think of what they grow in those hot places and what I might bring back. I should make my fortune for sure!”

Elizabeth folded her underlip.

“It will not be for a year or so,” he said placatingly. “And it is all uncertain as yet.”

“You will always travel whenever you can,” Elizabeth replied bitterly. “A man your age should be staying home. I thought we would settle here, away from the courts of great lords; I thought you would be happy here.”

“I am happy here, and it is not ever that I want to leave you…” John protested as she got up from his lap and went to one side, gently stroking the leaf of the chestnut. “But I have to obey, Elizabeth — if my lord says I am to go, I have to go. And I must seek plants if I have the chance of them. It is to the glory of God to show men the wealth He has given us, Elizabeth. And a trip to the Mediterranean could bring back great things. Flowers and trees, but also herbs. Maybe a cure for the plague? That would be godly work!”

She did not smile at his overt appeal to her piety. “It would be godly work to stay home and serve your lord at home,” she said firmly. “And you are getting old, John. You should not be sailing out at your age. You are not a seaman, you are a gardener. You should be at home in your garden.”

Gently he drew her back to him. “Don’t be angry with me,” he said softly. “I have only just got home. Smile for me, Lizzie, and see: I have brought you a present.”

From deep in the pocket of his coat he brought a small pine cone. “A new tree,” he said. “A beautiful fir tree. Will you nurse it up for me, Elizabeth? And keep it as well as you have kept our chestnut? I love you as much now as I did when I gave you the chestnut.”

Elizabeth took it but her face remained grave. “John, you are nearing fifty years old,” she said. “It is time for you to stay home.”

He kissed the warm nape of her neck, slightly salt beneath his lips. Elizabeth sighed a little at the pleasure of his touch, and sat still. In the apple tree above their heads a wood pigeon cooed seductively.

“The next voyage shall be my last,” he promised. “I will go to the Mediterranean on the
Mercury
and then I shall come home with orange trees and olive trees and all manner of spices and grow them quietly in my garden with you.”

When J learned that his father was to go to the Mediterranean he insisted that he go too, but John refused. J went quite pale with anger. “I am old enough to come with you now,” J insisted.

“I want you to continue at school,” John said.

“What’s the use of that!” J exclaimed passionately. “You never went to school!”

“And I felt the lack of it,” John pointed out. “I want you to read and write in Latin as well as English. I want you to be brought up as a gentleman.”

“I won’t need that; I shall be a planter in Virginia. Captain Argall said that the last thing the new plantation needs is gentlemen. He said the plantation needs hardworking men, not scholars.”

Elizabeth looked up at the mention of Argall’s name and compressed her lips.

“He may be right,” John said. “But I was counting on you to help me with my business, before you leave for Virginia.”

J, who was in full flight, checked at that. “Help you?”

“All the plants these days are given new names, Latin names. When the King of France’s gardeners, the Robins, write to me and send me cuttings, they send them with their Latin names. I was hoping you would learn to read and write Latin so you could help me.”

“I shall work with you?”

“Of course,” John said simply. “What else?”

J hesitated. “So you’ll stay home and teach me?”

“I shall go on this trip to the Mediterranean,” John stipulated. “Destroy Algiers, defeat the corsairs, collect all the Mediterranean plants and come home. And after that I shall stay home and we shall garden together.”

J nodded, accepting the compromise. Elizabeth found that she had been gripping her hands tightly together under the cover of her apron, and released her grasp. “Tradescant and son,” John said, pleased.

“Tradescant and son,” J replied.

“Of Canterbury,” Elizabeth added, and saw her husband smile.

Spring 1620

“They say that Algiers is a town which cannot be taken,” Elizabeth said to John on the quayside, refusing to be optimistic even at this last moment.

“You are too doubting,” John said mildly. “Algiers can be defeated; no town is invincible. And the pirates who use it as their base must be stopped. They cruise in the English Channel, even up the Thames. The king himself says that they must be taught a lesson.”

“But why should it be you that goes?” she demanded.

“To go plant-hunting in the meantime,” John replied mildly. “Captain Pett said he was shorthanded for officers and he would take me. I told him that I would want the ship’s boat to call on shore wherever we could. It’s a bargain on both sides.”

“You won’t take part in any battles?” Elizabeth pressed him.

“I shall do my duty,” John said firmly. “I shall do whatever Captain Pett commands.”

Elizabeth curbed her anger and put her arms around her husband’s broadening middle. “You’re not a young man anymore,” she reminded him gently.

“For shame,” John said. “When my wife is a girl still.”

She smiled at that but he could not divert her. “I wanted you to stay home with us.”

He shook his head and gently kissed the warm top of her white cap. “I know, my love, but I have to go when there is a chance for me like this one. Be generous and send me away with a smile.”

She looked up at his face and he saw that she was closer to tears than to smiles. “I hate it when you go,” she repeated passionately.

John kissed her on the mouth, on the forehead as he had first done when they were betrothed, and then again on the lips. “Forgive me,” he said. “And give me your blessing. I have to go now.”

“God bless you,” she said reluctantly. “And bring you safe home to me.”

“Amen,” he replied, and before she could say more he had slipped out of her arms and run up the gangplank to the pinnace
Mercury.

She did not wait to see his ship sail this time. She had good reason to hurry home. J would be back from school in the afternoon and she had planned to take a lift on the Canterbury wagon which went from Gravesend at midday. But in truth she did not wait because she was angry and resentful, and because she did not want to stand on the quayside like a lovelorn girl to wave her husband good-bye. She could not help but think that it was an infidelity to her and to his promise to stay home and dig his garden. She could not help but think the less of him that he could not resist the temptation of adventure.

John, looking down from the deck at the small indomitable figure walking stiff-backed away from the quayside, knew some of what was in her mind and could not help but admire her. He knew also that she would have been a happier wife coupled with another man, one who stayed at home and only heard travelers’ tales in the village inn. And that he too would have been a happier man married to a woman who could wave good-bye and greet him home with a broad smile and not cling to him on leaving, nor greet him resentfully on his return. But it was not a love match between John and Elizabeth and it never had been. What love they had found, and what love they had made, had been a benefit which neither they, nor their fathers who had wisely made the match, could have predicted. It was a marriage which was primarily designed to resolve some debts. It was a marriage designed to place Elizabeth’s dowry in the hands of a man who could make use of it, and place John’s skills at the disposal of a woman who would know how to manage a house that should grow in size and splendor with every move. The old men had chosen well. John was richer every year with his wages and with his burgeoning trade in rare plants. Elizabeth managed the Canterbury house as she had managed the new house at Hatfield, as she had managed the cottage at Meopham — with confidence and honesty. She had managed the vicarage and farmhouse for Gertrude; she could cope with bigger houses than her marriage had yet brought her.

But their fathers never provided for temperament and desire and jealousy. And the marriage they made never had room for such emotions either. As John watched Elizabeth walk away from the quay and as the
Mercury
slipped its moorings and the barges took it in tow, he knew that she would have to come to terms with the disappointments of the marriage as well as its benefits. He knew that she would have to recognize that her husband was a venturer, an adventurer. And that when he came home she would have to know that he was a man who could not resist the chance of traveling overseas. And that when the chance came for him — he would always go.