Virgin Earth (47 page)

“We will go to our deaths like herded cattle,” John said quietly to himself as he watched them pull the great traveling coach from the stables and start to polish the gilded ornaments on the corners of the roof. “Like the milch cows which low as they are pushed on board. I am bound by my oath that I will be his until death, and I see now that this was what he meant. He will never have finished with me, nor with any in his company, until we are all dead.”

He turned away, his knee aching as he walked on the uneven cobbles of the stable yard, and went round to the pleasure gardens to find J, his son, who would now inherit all that he had, and would have to become head of the little family, for John was going to the war again and knew this time that he would not come back.

The pleasure garden had been laid out with fountains and waterworks designed by the engineer Cornelius van Drebbel. J had ordered the drying and cleaning of an enormous round marble bowl at the foot of a cascade, and was splashing round inside the bowl checking that it was perfectly clean before he let the water flow back in. In the heat of the day it was a pleasant job, and J was a man young enough to take pleasure in playing about with a cascade of water and calling it work. At the side of the fountain, in the shade, was a hogshead tub squirming with carp waiting to be returned to the water. J looked up when he heard his father’s step on the white gravel and as soon as he saw his father’s face he climbed out of the marble bowl and came toward him, shaking his thick black hair like a spaniel coming out of a river.

“Bad news, Father?”

John nodded. “I am to go to Rhé.”

J held out his hand for the letter and John hesitated only for a moment before passing it to him. J read it swiftly and thrust it back.

“Carriage!” he cried scathingly. “Best diamonds! He has learned nothing.”

“It is his way,” John said. “He has the grand manner and he rides out the storms.”

“Can we say you are sick?” J asked.

John shook his head.

“I will go in your place; I mean it.”

“Your place is here,” John said. “You have a child on the way, perhaps an heir for us, someone to grow the chestnut trees on.” The two men smiled at each other, and then John was grave again. “You’re well provided for, there’s our own land, and the fee from the Whitehall granary. There’s our own cabinet of curiosities; I know they are nothing much yet but you could raise a few pounds on them if you’re ever in need, and with the training you have had under me at Lord Wootton’s garden and here, you could work anywhere in Europe.”

“I won’t stay with the duke,” J said. “I won’t stay here. I shall go to Virginia where there is neither a duke nor a king.”

“Yes,” Tradescant said. “But, of course, he may not come back from Rhé, either.”

“He came home last time without a scratch on him and was greeted in triumph,” J said resentfully.

“Don’t make an enemy of him.”

“He has taken my father away from me for years,” J said. “And now he wants to take you to your death. How do you think I feel?”

John shook his head. “Feel as you like. But don’t make an enemy of him. If you go against him, you go against the king and that is treason and mortal danger.”

“He is too great for me to challenge; I know that. He is too great altogether. There is not a man in England who does not hate and fear him, and now we are to go to war under him again when we know he does not know how to command, he cannot organize supplies, he cannot order an attack, he does not know how the business should be done. How should he know? He was a country squire’s son and got his place by his skill in dancing and talking… and sodomy.”

John flinched. “Enough, J. Enough.”

“I wish to God we had never come here,” the younger man said passionately.

John looked back down the years to the moment that he first saw Buckingham as green as a sapling in the dark allée at New Hall. “We wanted the best gardens in the country. We had to come here.”

The two men were silent.

“Will you tell Mother?” J asked eventually.

“I’ll tell her now,” John said. “She’ll be grieved. You will keep her to live with you and provide for her well when I am gone, J.”

“Of course,” J said.

Elizabeth packed John’s clothes in silence, including his winter boots and warm cloaks and blankets.

“I probably won’t need those; we will be back before autumn,” John said, trying to be cheerful.

She was folding his clothes and putting them into a big leather sack. “He will never sail on time,” she said. “He never does. Nothing will be ready on time and you will be sailing out into the autumn storms, and setting siege as winter comes. You will need your warm cloak, and Jane’s father has sent me a bolt of oilskin to wrap your clothes in and try to keep them dry.”

“Are you nearly ready? I have his wagons loaded and his coach is ready to go.”

“All finished.” She pulled the drawstring tight.

He held out his arms to her and she looked at him, her face very grave. “God bless you, my John,” she said.

He wrapped his arms around her and felt the familiar warmth of the band of her cap and her smooth hair against his cheek. “I am sorry for the grief I have given you,” he said, his voice choked. “Before God, Elizabeth, I have loved you dearly.”

She did not reprove his swearing, but tightened her grip around his waist.

“Look after my grandchild,” he said, and tried to make a joke: “And my chestnut trees!”

“Don’t go!” she cried suddenly. “Please, John, don’t go. You can get to London and on a ship to Virginia in a day and a night, before he even knows you have left him. Please!”

He put his hands behind his back and unfastened her fingers. “You know I cannot run away.”

He picked up his bag and went down the stairs, his tread uneven as the arthritis in his knee made him limp. She stayed where she was for a moment, and then ran after him.

Buckingham’s great carriage was drawn up outside their little cottage, but John could not ride in it without the lord’s express permission, and Buckingham had forgotten to tell John he could travel in comfort. John slung his bag in the back of the carter’s wagon and cast an experienced eye over the armed men who would ride before and after him, to guard the duke’s treasures against violent beggars, highwaymen or a mob that might rise up against the sight of his crest in any of the towns on the way.

John pulled himself up beside the carter on the wagon’s driving seat and turned to wave to Elizabeth. J and Jane stood beside her at the cottage doorway, looking out as John gave the signal for the carriage and the wagons to move.

He meant to call out, “Good-bye! God bless!,” but he felt the words stick in his throat. He meant to smile and wave his hat so that the last sight they had of him was that of a cheery smile and a man going willingly. But Elizabeth’s white face pierced him like a knife and he could only pull his hat from his head as a mark of respect for her and let the wagon pull out, and away from her.

He turned in his seat and watched them grow smaller and smaller, obscured by the dust of the luggage train, until the wagon turned the corner into the great avenue and he could see them no more. He could not even hear the bees above the rumble of wheels, and he had never smelled the heady perfume of the limes.

Buckingham was not at Portsmouth, as he had said he would be. The fleet was ready, the sailors on board; every day that he did not come the murmurings grew worse and the officers resorted to harsher and longer whippings to keep the men in order. The army melted away daily, the officers scouring the towns and the roads to the north of the city to arrest ploughboys and shepherd boys and apprentices who were running for their lives away from the ships that waited, bobbing at the harbor wall, for the commander who did not come.

John saw the duke’s coach loaded aboard but kept the purse of diamonds on a string about his neck. The cows and the hens he penned up on Southsea Common and he took himself a lodging nearby. The landlord was surly and unhelpful; he had had soldiers billeted on him for months and his bills were never paid. John paid him directly from his own money, even though he knew that Buckingham would not remember to reimburse him, and then the man served him a little better.

On July nineteenth the king came riding down to inspect the fleet. The winds were blowing off shore; the ships were straining at their ropes as if they were willing to go, even if the men aboard had sulky faces. The king looked the ships over, but this time there was no handsome dinner on board the
Triumph.
All of them, even the king himself, waited for the Lord High Admiral.

He did not come.

John thought of his wife’s prediction that they would not sail until autumn and went out to the hills beyond the city and bought a wagonload of hay for the cow.

The king left Southwick and went hunting in the New Forest. He had no objection to the fleet being delayed while Buckingham went about his business in London. Other men would have risked a charge of treason and imprisonment in the Tower as a punishment for keeping the king waiting for an hour, but it seemed that Buckingham could do nothing that would offend the king. His Majesty laughed and said that the duke was a laggard, and spent the night at Beaulieu and hunted deer. The sport was good and the weather stood fair. On board the ships the soldiers, cooped up in their quarters, sweated in the crowded heat, and many had to be carried out suffering from seasickness or worse. The crews and the soldiers ate up the provisions which had been laid aboard for the voyage, and the ships’ stewards had to go out into Hampshire and Sussex to buy more food to restock the ships. Prices went up in the local markets and the little villages could not afford bread at the rate the fleet could pay. Buckingham was cursed at a hundred hungry firesides. And still he did not come.

John wrote to his wife that perhaps the whole thing would blow over. The fleet would not sail without the Lord High Admiral, and the Lord High Admiral did not come for the whole of July. Perhaps, John thought, he was bluffing, and had never meant to sail. Perhaps he was wiser and more skillful than anyone had allowed, as cunning as Cecil. Perhaps all this preparation, all this fear, all this grief, had been to give substance to the most tremendous trick of all time — frightening the French into withdrawing from La Rochelle without a shot being fired, without the expedition even leaving port. John remembered the trickery and mischief in Buckingham’s smile, his cleverness and his wit, and thought that if any man could win a war without sending his fleet out, Buckingham was the man.

John paid his landlord for the month of August and began to wonder if he might be spared. On the hot summer mornings he awoke with such a desire to live that he could taste it on his tongue, like lust. He walked on the harbor walls and looked out to sea. He felt the light touch of linen on his sun-warmed skin and the warm air on his face and felt like a youth, faint with awareness of his own beauty, of his own health. He walked on the pebbles of the seashore, sending flocks of gray- and brown-backed dunlin scattering before him, and felt the life pulsing through his body from his boots to his fingertips. On a fine day he could see the Isle of Wight in its green loveliness, and John thought he might take a little ferryboat over to the island and hunt for new plants folded in the secret hollows of its chalk downs.

He walked inland north of the city, where there were great forests. John walked under the branches and remembered his hunt for Sir Robert Cecil’s trees and the long journeys with the heavily laden carts. Sometimes he saw red deer and roe deer; always he watched his feet for a new fern, a new flower.

He did not walk to the east — there was a foul ill-drained marsh on that side of the city, lonely with the cry of wading birds and treacherous with tracks and deceptive paths. It stank of mud and decay under the hot summer sunshine, and when the heat haze shimmered above it he could not tell where the water began and the land melted unreliably away. In the drier fields the red poppies nodded their heads. It reminded John too much of their destination. He hated the flicker of sunlight on mud and water now; it was the light of death, he thought. After he had walked once to Farlington marshes he never went that way again.

Buckingham did not come until the end of August, just as the captains and officers were talking of having to disband for the winter rather than throw bad money after good on an expedition which was clearly not going to depart. Another month and the weather would break; it could take days to get out of harbor in the autumn, and no fleet could risk being separated running before a storm. It would be too late, it was too late, surely the Lord Admiral would be bound to see that it was too late — and then he came, sunny, smiling, delightful, in his best coach from London, and took breakfast at Captain Mason’s house in the High Street, as blithe and merry as if that had not been the very house where he had washed his hands of the blood of his soldiers the last time he came back from Rhé.

The rumor that Buckingham had arrived in the city reached Tradescant as he fed the last of his hay to the cows. For a moment he shuddered as if someone had walked on his grave. It was both a premonition of death and a flicker of desire. John shook his head at his own folly, brushed down his suit of clothes, put on his hat and walked around to the High Street.

The house was crowded, the outer courtyard filled with officers waiting for news and the usual hangers-on and favor-seekers. One man put his hand on Tradescant’s sleeve as he pushed through.

“He’s come to cancel the sailing, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. I have not spoken with him.”

“The captain of the
Triumph
says that they’ll need to revictual and rewater before they sail. And there’s no money to pay the chandlers. We’ll have to delay until the spring.”

“I don’t know,” Tradescant replied. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

The man slipped away in the crowd, and Tradescant pushed farther in. A man ahead of him turned at the tap on his shoulder and Tradescant recognized him.

“Mr. Tradescant!”