Virgin Earth (51 page)

“You will be bringing up a young family here,” John said to J. “It’s time you had some room to yourselves. And we need a good-sized room, a handsome room, for the rarities.”

“But Venetian windows…,” J expostulated.

John laid a finger to his nose. “This is to be my rarities room,” he said. “We’ll store them here in a beautiful room and show them to people who come to see them. We’ll charge them sixpence each to enter, and they can stay as long as they like and look around at the things.”

J was uncomprehending. “What things?”

“The two wagons of Buckingham’s rarities,” John explained precisely. “What did you think to do with them?”

“I thought we would sell them,” J confessed, a little shamefaced. “And keep the money.”

John shook his head. “We keep them,” he said. “They will be the making of us. Rare plants in the garden, rare and beautiful things in the house. It is our ark with rare and lovely things. And every day the ships come in with more things ordered by my lord duke. We shall buy them on our own account and set them in our room.”

“And we charge people for looking?”

“Why not?”

“It just seems so odd. I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”

“My lord duke kept his cabinet of curiosities for his friends to look at and enjoy. And the Earl Cecil before him.”

“He didn’t charge them sixpence a time!”

“No, but we will open our doors to ordinary people. To anyone who wishes to come and see. Not friends of ours, or even people with letters of introduction. Just anyone who is curious about wonderful and peculiar things. We let them come!”

“But how would they know of it?”

“We will speak of it everywhere. We’ll make a catalogue so people can read of all the things we have on show.”

“D’you think people would come?”

John nodded. “In Leiden and Paris the universities have great collections and they show them to the students, and to anyone who applies to see them. Why not here?”

“Because we are not a university!”

John shrugged. “We have a collection which is equal to my lord Cecil’s, and many men admired that. We make a beautiful room with the big things hanging from the ceiling and displayed on the walls and the small things bedded in little drawers in big cabinets. Seeds and shells, clothing and goods, toys and ingenious things. I’m sure we can do it, J. And it will mean that we are earning money in the autumn and winter when the garden work is less.”

J nodded but then remembered the cost of the panes of glass. “But Venetian windows are not necessary…”

“We need good light if we are to show rarities,” John said firmly. “This is not some little petty fusty cabinet. This is the first rarities show in the country; it will be one of the first things to see in London. A grand room with the things laid out handsomely. People will not come to see them at all if they are not housed in a proud and handsome manner. Venetian windows and waxed floors! And sixpence a head!”

J deferred to his father’s judgment, and only muttered about grand schemes and a duke’s tastes over his dinner that night, but the two men clashed again when J, trundling a sapling in a barrow around the wall of the new wing, glanced up and saw the stonemason fixing in place a handsome coat of arms.

“What are you doing?” he yelled upward.

The stonemason glanced down and pulled his cap to J. “Handsome, isn’t it?”

J dumped the sapling and ran to the orchard, where John was at the top of a fruit-picker’s ladder, pruning out the dead wood on an old pear tree. “D’you think this can be a Spanish pear?” John asked. “I brought one back for my Sir Robert from the Lowlands. Could they have gotten hold of one and planted it here?”

“Never mind that now,” J said. “The stonemason is putting up a coat of arms on our house!”

John hung his saw on a protruding branch and turned his attention to his son. J, looking up at his father comfortably leaning against the trunk, thought that they had reversed their roles and that John was like a feckless laughing boy scrumping fruit up a tree and he was like the worried older man.

“I know,” John said with a gleam. “Do us credit, I thought.”

“You knew?” J demanded. “You knew he had some ridiculous coat of arms drawn up for us?”

“I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” John said easily. “I drew them myself. I rather like it. Leaves as background, and then the shield laid across it with three fleurs-de-lys, and then a helmet on top with a little crown and fleur-de-lys on that.”

“But what will the College of Heralds say?”

John shrugged. “Who cares what they say?”

“We
will care when they fine us, and make us take it down, and humiliate us before our new neighbors.”

John shook his head. “We’ll get away with it,” he said confidently.

“But we’re not gentry! We’re gardeners.”

John came stiffly down his ladder and took J by the shoulder, turning him to see the house.

“What’s that?”

“Our house.”

“A good-sized house, new wing, Venetian windows, right?”

“Yes.”

John turned his son southward again. “And what’s that?”

“The orchard.”

“How big?

“Only two acres.”

“But beyond it?”

“All right, another twenty acres… but Father…”

“We’re landowners,” John said. “We’re not gardeners any more. We’re landowners with duties and obligations and a large family business to run… and a crest of arms.”

“They’ll make us take it down,” J warned.

Tradescant waved a dismissive hand and climbed slowly back up his ladder. “Not they. Not when they see who’s coming to the Ark.”

J hesitated. “Why? Who is coming?”

“Everyone who is anyone,” John said grandly. “And all their country cousins. When your baby is born he will grow up to be knighted, I don’t doubt it. Sir John Tradescant… sounds very well, doesn’t it? Sir John.”

“I might call him Josiah, after his other grandfather, a respected city tradesman who knows his place and is proud of it,” J said mutinously, and had the pleasure of seeing a flicker of doubt cross his father’s face.

“Nonsense!” John said. “Sir John Tradescant of Lambeth.”

December 1628

In the end, he was not Sir John Tradescant of Lambeth, nor plain John, nor even Josiah. She was Frances, and she came at four o’clock on a dark dreary December morning while J and his father drank brandy downstairs and the women and the women servants wailed and scolded and ran about upstairs until the men finally heard that tiny indignant cry.

J put down his glass with a crack and ran to the foot of the stairs. His mother was standing at the top, beaming. “A girl,” she announced. “A lovely dark-headed girl.”

J ran up the stairs and into Jane’s bedroom.

“And Jane?” Tradescant asked, thinking of the birth of J and the dreadful pain Elizabeth had suffered, and then the news that there would be no more babies.

“She is well, thank God,” Elizabeth said. “Resting now.”

Husband and wife met each other’s gaze with a steady faithful smile. “Our grandchild,” John said wonderingly. “I thought I’d set my heart on a boy, but now it comes to it I am just glad that it is a girl and born sound and whole.”

“Maybe a boy next time,” Elizabeth said.

John nodded. “There will be a next time?”

She smiled. “I don’t think this is the last time that you and J will be drinking brandy together while we women do all the work.”

“Well, amen to that. I’ll send the stable boy with a message to Josiah and Mrs. Hurte. They’ll want to know at once.”

“Tell them to come and stay for as long as they like,” Elizabeth said. “I can make up a bed for them in the third bedroom.”

John grinned at Elizabeth’s casual use of the words “third bedroom” as if they had never had a house with fewer than a dozen rooms. “They could bring all their congregation as well,” he said. “Now we live so grand.”

Elizabeth flapped her apron at him. “Go and send your message. I have work to do.”

“God be with you, wife,” John said lovingly from the foot of the stairs. “And give Jane my blessing. Has she named the child?”

“She wants to call her Frances.”

John went out of the front door to the veranda. The cold night air was crisp and sharp, and the stars were like pinheads against a deep blue silk sky. The moon was down and it was too dark to see more than the weathered boards of the veranda and the spiky stalks of the fruit trees. John had planted his chestnut sapling and its first rooted cutting as a pair before the house and, two by two, a dozen cuttings from them to make a little avenue of chestnut running the length of the orchard. Their bare branches were as thin as whips against the arching cold sky.

John exhaled and his breath was a brandy-tinged cloud before his face. He thought briefly of other nights when he had watched and waited. Nights on board ship when the only sound had been the creaking and shifting of the timbers, nights when he had been on watch for icebergs in the perilous cold seas around Russia or when he had swung dizzily to and fro in the crow’s nest and looked for pirate ships in the darkness of the Mediterranean waters. He thought of keeping watch in the cold wet fogs of the Ile de Rhé, and of the one, two, three nights, when he had lain naked beside his lord and watched over his precious sleep.

“Sleep well now, my lord,” he said into the silent darkness.

He thought he would carry with him always this inner life which was like grief, but which was not quite grief, which was like love, but which was not quite love, which was like homesickness, but which was not a longing for home. Now that Buckingham was dead and his goods had bought the Tradescants their ark, John felt as if all the struggle of his love for his lord was resolved. He could love him without sin, he could love him without shame. The death of his lord had been the only way out, for John, for Buckingham himself. He might grieve for it but he did not blame himself for failing to give that one word of warning. And Elizabeth was true to her promise and the duke’s name was in her prayers every Sunday.

John sometimes wondered if the other man who had loved Buckingham, the King of England, felt like this; and if for him too, in the round of his court and daily pleasure and other loves and interests — birth like tonight, deaths and marriages — there was always a gap in the procession, always a face missing, that beautiful wilful angel face. And if he felt also that the world was a safer place, a calmer place, but a grayer place, without George Villiers.

John touched that face in his mind, as the king might lay his finger on the lips of a portrait as he passed it; and then he went round to the stable and rattled the door till the stable lad came tumbling down the stairs, and sent him to the Hurtes’ house in London.

Frances set the house by the ears, as a new baby always does. She cried and would not settle at night, and J saw dawn after dawn from the big Venetian windows as he walked her round and round the big room which housed the rarities. Held in his arms, rocked by his continual steady pacing, was the only way she would settle, and the great rarities room was the only place in the house where Jane was not wakened by the distant sound of her cries.

“Sleep,” J would say to his wife as the wail from the crib warned them of another restless night. “I will walk her,” and he would wrap the tiny thing in a warm blanket, throw his father’s soldiering cape over his nightshirt and take her downstairs to walk and walk her around the echoing moonlit room, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for three, until she quieted and slept and he could creep back into his bedroom and lay her, as tender as a seedling, back in her little crib.

Jane did not have enough milk and Elizabeth said there was nothing for it but for her to stay in bed, eat as much as she could bear, and rest, rest, rest. “You must think and worry no more than a milch cow,” she insisted when her daughter-in-law protested. “Or else it will be a wet nurse for Frances.”

In the face of such a threat Jane fell back against the pillows and closed her eyes. “I shall bring you some chicken broth at noon,” Elizabeth said. “Sleep now.”

“Where is Frances?” Jane asked. “With J?”

“J is sleeping like a dead man in the parlor,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “He sat down at the table to bring the planting records up to date, and his head fell into the inkpot and he was gone. I’ve wrapped him with a rug and left him. Frances is with John.”

“Does John know how to care for her? Will you watch him?”

“John has his own methods,” Elizabeth said. “But I will watch him.”

She glanced from the bedroom window and saw John and his granddaughter, but did not think she would point them out to Jane. John had strapped the baby to his back in an outlandish savage fashion that he must have seen on one of his voyages. She was wrapped in a fold of blanket against his back with two ends of the blanket knotted around his chest and two around his belly. With the baby held warm and snug against his homespun coat John was walking through the garden and down toward the orchard to see that his chestnut saplings were all surviving the frost.

Elizabeth watched for a moment, and curbed her desire to hurry out and take the child from him. The baby was not crying, John’s rolling limp was soothing to her, and as he walked he was singing a low muttered song: “Tumelty tumelty tumelty pudding…,” a nonsense song. Frances, soothed by the gentle pressure of his warm back, lulled by the weak winter sunlight, and enjoying the irregular motion of his walk, slept and woke and slept again as John went down to the end of his orchard to check his fruit trees, and came back again.

They could not yet afford a heated wall as he had built at New Hall. But John had curtained his trees with sacking and stuffed straw gently inside the bags, hoping to keep the frost from them and to warm them a little. He used the same technique on tender new saplings, especially those that came from the Mediterranean or from Africa and probably had never felt a frost. New plants from the Americas he thought might be a little more hardy, but anything small he planted in a new row of special beds near the house where the raised timber borders kept the soil a little warmer, and where he had great domes of glass, usually used for ripening melons, to keep the cold winds off them and to retain the weak heat of the winter sun.