Virgin Earth (46 page)

“What?” John said suddenly, interrupting Jane’s reading.

“He is to take another campaign to Rhé,” she repeated.

Elizabeth glanced at her husband. “You will never go! Not again, John. Not again, to there! Not even if he summons you.”

He jumped up from his chair and turned away from the circle of firelight and candlelight. She could see his hands, his whole body was trembling, but he spoke steadily. “If he summons me I will have to go.”

“It will be the death of you!” Elizabeth exclaimed passionately. “You cannot be so lucky every time!”

“It will be the death of thousands,” he said darkly. “Whether we take the island or lose it, it will be the death of thousands. I cannot face that place again. That tiny island is like a graveyard… I cannot bear it!”

Abruptly he turned back to Jane. “Does your father say why any man would want to go back there? What the duke is hoping for?”

She was pale, looking from John to Elizabeth. She thought she had never seen him in such distress before. It was as if he feared being press-ganged into Hell. “I will read you the rest of the letter,” she replied, smoothing it on her lap.

“…the duke is to take another campaign to Rhé to wipe out the disgrace of failure and to show the French that we mean to be masters. No men are volunteering, but the press-gangs are making the streets unsafe for everyone except for those actually dying of the plague. Everyone else is taken up and sent to Portsmouth and they are cursing the duke’s name.
These are hard times for us all. I pray that your husband and your father-in-law are spared the duke’s demands. I have today lost my apprentice boy George, whom I loved like a son. He will never survive a campaign; he has a weak chest and coughs all the winter long. Why take a lad of sixteen who will be dead before they reach their destination? Why take a boy who only knows about cotton, linen and silk?
I am going to Portsmouth myself to see if I can find him and bring him back but your mother says, rightly, that we must tell his parents that he is as good as dead and pray for his immortal soul.
It is a bitter thing that a country which could be at peace is constantly at war, and that a country which could be prosperous is never well-fed.
I am sorry to send you such bad news, my blessings on you all, Josiah Hurte.”

“I will go in your stead,” J said steadily. “When he sends for you.”

“He may not send…,” Elizabeth suggested.

“He always sends for my father when it is work that needs a trustworthy man,” J said swiftly. “When it is dangerous or difficult, when he needs a man who loves him above everything else. A man to do work that no one else would do.”

John shot him a look.

“It’s true,” J maintained. “And he will send for you again.”

“You cannot go,” Elizabeth breathed. “The mission is bound to fail again and you will risk your life for nothing.”

“My John can’t go,” Jane said suddenly. She made a small betraying movement, her hand to her belly. “I need him here.” She flushed. “We need him here. He is to be a father.”

“Oh, my dear!” Elizabeth stretched across the fire and held Jane’s hands in her own. “I am so glad! What a blessing.”

The two women remained clasped for a moment, and Elizabeth closed her eyes in a swift silent prayer. John watched them with a weary sense of exclusion from the world of small joys. “I am glad for you,” he said levelly. “And Jane is right, J cannot go with a baby on the way. If he sends for me, it will have to be me.”

The little family was silent for a moment. “Perhaps he will not send for you?” Jane asked.

John shook his head. “I think he will. And I have promised to go whenever he calls me.”

“To your death?” J demanded passionately.

John raised a weary face to his son. “Those were the very words of my oath,” he said slowly.

Summer 1628

The message came in the middle of June, one of the best months of the year for a gardener. John had started his day’s work in the rose garden, dead-heading the blowsy blooms and tossing the petals into a basket for the still room. They would be dried and used in pomanders, or for scattering in the linen cupboards to scent the duke’s sheets. Or they might be claimed by the cooks and candied to decorate the duke’s sweetmeats. Everything in the garden, from drowsily humming bees to falling rosy pale petals, was the duke’s and grew for his pleasure. Except he was not here to see them.

At midday John went around to the front of the house to see the young limes, planted in the long, gently curving double avenue. He had a thought that they might grow better-shaped if their lower branches were pruned, and he had a small axe and a saw for the purpose, and a lad coming behind with a ladder. But before he had done more than whistle to the lad to set the ladder before the first tree, he heard hoofbeats.

John turned, raised his hand to shield his eyes and saw, like a dream, like a long-awaited vision, the single rider still a mile off, his lathered horse going from gray to black as it passed from brilliant sunlight into deep green shadow down the drive. John stepped out from the shade of the trees on to the broad sunny road, waiting in the hot light for the messenger, knowing that it would be his summons, knowing that he must obey. He felt for a moment that it was Death himself, with his scythe over his shoulder, riding between the trees with the drunken bees buzzing wildly and the leaves dripping with nectar and pollen.

John felt a darkness within himself as if the shade of the limes had cast a deep green into his very blood, and a coldness which he thought must be fear. He had never known fear before in this bleak premonitory way. He understood now, for the first time, why the pressed men had whispered to him as he went through the ranks: “Ask him to send us home, Mr. Tradescant, ask him to turn back.” Now he felt as slavish as they, as unmanned as they.

The rider came slowly toward him and Tradescant put up his hand for the letter as if he were warding off a blow from a knife.

“How did you know it was for you?” the messenger asked, sliding from his horse’s back and loosening the girth.

“I have been waiting for it since I heard he was returning to Rhé,” John said.

“Then you will be the only willing recruit,” the man said cheerfully. “There were riots outside his house when the sailors heard he was taking them back there. His carriage is stoned every time he takes it out. They are saying that the expedition is cursed and that it will fall into a whirlpool which stretches down to Hell itself. They drink to his death in the ale houses; they pray for his downfall in the chapels.”

“That’s enough,” John said roughly. “Go and take your horse to the stable. I won’t hear the duke traduced on his own land by his own servant.”

The man shrugged and twitched the reins over his horse’s head. “I’ve left his service. I am on my way to my own home.”

“You have work to go to?”

“No,” he said. “But I’d rather beg from door to door than go with the duke to the Island of Rue. I’m not a fool. I know how it will be commanded, and how it will be paid, and what the risks will be.”

John nodded, his face betraying nothing. Then he turned away and walked from the avenue, across the grass lawn to the lake. He made his way down the pretty little path to the landing stage opposite the boathouse where Buckingham used to row out on summer evenings, sometimes with his wife Kate in the stern, sometimes alone with a rod and line. John sat on the landing stage and looked across the water. The yellow flag irises were in flower as he had promised his master they would be; the fountain they had designed together played into the warm silent air of the afternoon. The water lilies he had planted bobbed gently as the wind breathed across the smooth surface of the lake, their buds just splitting to show cream and white petals. The ducks had had a second brood of ducklings and they came and quacked around him, hoping for corn. John held the letter in his hand, looking at the heavy seal on the fold of the thick cream notepaper. For a moment he did not break it, he did not shatter the impress of Buckingham’s ring; for a moment he sat in the sunshine and thought what he would be feeling if this was a letter from a master who loved him, from a man who loved as an equal. How it would be for him now, if Buckingham was his lover as well as his lord.

John thought that if they were lovers still his heart would leap at the sight of the sealed note; he would be happy at being ordered to his lord’s side; he would go glad-hearted, wherever he was ordered. If they were lovers he would go with his lord to the Isle of Rue, to that bleak island, to that certain death, with a sort of mad joy, that a love as encompassing and wild as theirs could only end in death and that there would be something erotic and powerful about it ending in a battle and the two of them side by side as comrades.

John rubbed his hand across his eyes. No point in dreaming like a lovesick maid and gazing out across the water. This would not be a love letter; these would be orders that must be obeyed whatever his private feelings. He tore the fold of the paper and opened the letter.

John,
I shall need my best traveling coach and some suits of clothes, my hats and the new diamonds. We will need a couple of cows and some hens — order everything as I would wish.
Bring it all to me and meet me at Portsmouth; we will sail at the beginning of July without fail.
You will sail with me and be at my side, as before.
Villiers.

John read the letter once, and then read it again. It was his death warrant.

The evening was very warm. John watched the midges dancing over the still water, his legs dangling above the glassy surface of the lake like an idle boy’s. Even now he found it hard to believe that he must leave all this, and never see it again. The garden he had made, the trees he had planted, the vegetables and flowers he had introduced to New Hall — to England — all this would be taken from him, and he would die on an island half-rock and half-marsh for a cause he had never believed in, serving a master who was no good.

John’s long unthinking uncritical loyalty to his masters had been destroyed. And when John lost his faith in his master, he lost his faith in the world. If his master was not a better man, closer to the angels than his servant, then the king was not set higher again, even closer to heaven. And if the king was not divine, then he was not infallible, as John had always believed. And if the king was not infallible then all the questions that thinking men were posing, about the king’s new powers and the king’s mismanagement of affairs, were questions that John should have been asking. He should have been asking them years ago.

He felt like a fool who had neglected the chance of a great education. Cecil had been his first master and had taught him not to think of principle but of practice. If he had watched Cecil he would have seen a man who always acted in public as if the king were divine, but always plotted in private to protect him like any fallible mortal. Cecil had not been fooled by the masque of royalty; he was a man like Inigo Jones whose work was to illustrate and support it. Jones had built the staircase and a marble bathroom at New Hall; Tradescant had watched him at work. This was not a priest before the mysteries; this was a man doing a skilled job. He made a stair, he made an illusion of majesty, all the same work, all in the same day. But Tradescant, even with the example of Cecil as chief stage manager before him, had been taken in by the show and the costumes and the ingenious machinery, and had thought that he had seen gods when all that had been before him was a cunning old woman, Elizabeth; her nephew James, a lecher; and his son, Charles, a fool.

John did not feel vengeful; the habit of loving and loyalty toward his masters and beyond them to the king went too deep for that. He felt that he would have to endure the loss of faith as if it were his own fault. To lose faith in the king and his lord was very like to losing faith in God. It was gone but a man still went through the rituals of attendance, and hat-doffing and minding his tongue, so as not to spread doubt among others. John might doubt his lord and his king but no one beyond his immediate family would ever know it. He might doubt that God had ordered him to obey the commandments or had recently included a commandment to obey the king, but he would not stand up in church and deny God when the preacher recited the new prayers for the king and queen which had been added as a collect for the day. John had been raised to be a man of loyalty and duty; he could not step out of his track just because his heart was broken and his faith gone.

For the duke his lover he thought he would never feel anything but a pain where his heart should be, and ice where his blood should be, and an ache where his belly should be. He did not blame his lord for turning away from his gardener to the court. The very suggestion was a foolish one. Of course Buckingham would cleave to the court, however well he was loved by his servants. It was Tradescant who blamed himself for forgetting that the man he loved was a great man, a man of the highest degree in the land, second only to the king. It was folly to think that he would need Tradescant in the days of his glory as he had needed him in the days of the voyage home when the ghosts of the men they had left behind cried every night in the rigging.

As John gave the orders in the stable and the big house to get the carriage ready, as he rode down to Manor Farm and requisitioned two cows in milk, he knew that Buckingham had forgotten him as a lover but trusted him completely as a servant, the most faithful servant of them all who would do everything, and overlook nothing.

Buckingham believed that John was his faithful servant; and Buckingham was right. As John ordered them to pack the duke’s best clothes, and put the diamonds in a purse to wear around his own neck, he knew that he was acting the part of a faithful servant, and that he would act that part until he died. He would take the traveling coach and the clothes, the hats and the new diamonds, some cows and some hens, all the long way down the road to Portsmouth, see them loaded with the press-ganged soldiers on the
Triumph
and set sail with them to his death.