Virgin Earth (55 page)

John thought how he still touched his lord in his mind, almost every morning and every night, and how he had thought that perhaps the king too reached out over death to his friend. But now he saw that the king had a greater comfort, for every night and every morning he could glance at that assured smiling face and feel the warmth of those eyes, and if he wished he could touch the frame of the picture, or even brush a kiss upon the painted cheek.

The portrait was new in the chamber, along with the rich curtains and the thick Turkey rugs on the floor. The king’s most precious goods traveled with him everywhere he went. And the king’s most precious thing was the portrait which hung, wherever he slept, at his bedside where he could see it before closing his eyes at night and on waking in the morning.

Charles came silently into his bedchamber from his private adjoining room and hesitated when he saw John looking up at the portrait. Something in the tilt of the man’s head and the steadiness of his look reminded the king that John too had lost a man who had been at the very center of his world.

“Y… you are looking at my p… portrait of the… duke.”

John turned, saw the king and dropped to his knees, flinching a little as his bad knee hit the floor.

The king did not command him to rise. “Your l… late master.” His voice still held traces of the paralyzing stammer he had suffered from as a child. Only with his intimates could he speak without hesitation; only with two people, the duke and now his wife, had he ever been fluent.

“You m… must miss him,” the king went on. It sounded more like an order than an offer of sympathy.

John looked up and saw the king’s face. Grief had changed him; he looked older and more tired, and his brown hair was thinning.

His eyes were heavily lidded, as if he were weary of what he saw, as if he no longer expected to see what he wanted.

“I grieve for him still,” John said honestly. “Every day.”

“You l… loved him?”

“With all my heart,” John replied.

“And he l… loved you?”

John looked up at his king. There was passion behind the question. Even after his death Buckingham could still inspire jealousy. John, the older man, smiled wryly. “He loved me a little,” he said. “When I served him especially well. But one smile from him was worth a piece of gold from another.”

There was a silence. Charles nodded as if the statement was of little consequence and turned away to the window and looked out into the king’s court below.

“H… Her Majesty will tell you wh… what she wants done,” he said. “But I sh… should like one court planted with r… roses. Rose petals for throwing in masques.”

John nodded. A man who could turn from the death of his friend to the need of rose petals for masques would be a difficult master to love.

The king looked round, his eyebrow raised.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” John said from his place on the floor. He wondered what his master Sir Robert Cecil, who had scolded a greater monarch than this one, would have thought of a king who confided his grief in a gardener but left him kneeling on an arthritic leg.

There was a rustle of silk and high heels tapping.

“Ah! My gardener!” said the voice of the queen.

John, already low, tried to bow from a kneeling position and felt himself to be ridiculous. He glanced up. She was a short plump woman, beringed, curled, painted and patched with a low-cut gown which would have incurred Elizabeth’s censure, and a powerful scent of incense around her skirts which would have inspired outrage in the Ark at Lambeth. She gave him a bright dark-eyed smile and extended her small hand. John kissed it.

“Get up! Get up!” she commanded. “I want you to walk me all around the garden so that I can see what we must do!”

The flood of words came so quickly after her husband’s halting speech, and her accent was so strong, that John could not immediately understand what she said.

“Your Majesty?” He glanced toward the king for help. Charles made a brief dismissive gesture with his hand, which clearly indicated that John should go, so he bowed low once again, and backed from the room. To his surprise, the queen came with him. John pressed himself back against the wall as a footman flung open the door.

“This way! Come on!” the queen said, and ran prettily down the stairs and out into the summer sunshine of the king’s privy garden.

“I want this garden full of scented flowers,” she told him. “The king’s windows look out over it; I want the scents to blow up to him.”

John nodded, taking in the grand sweep of the walls around the court. The south-facing walls would provide extra warmth; the walls to the east would provide shelter. “I could grow almost anything here,” he said.

“It was the king’s mother’s garden,” the queen said. It was evident from the slight movement of her head that she did not think much of her predecessor’s taste for low-growing herbs and knot gardens made of colored gravel. “I want roses against the walls and lilies everywhere. Those are my flowers, in my crest. I want this garden filled with roses and lilies to remind the king of me whenever he looks from his window.”

John bowed slightly. “Any preference as to colors?” he asked. “I can get some very handsome red and white roses, Rosamund roses. I have them growing at my garden in Lambeth.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, falling over the words in her haste. Even after five years in the country she still spoke English as if it was a strange and ugly foreign language. “And in the center bed I want a knot with our initials entwined. C and H M. Can you do that?”

John nodded. “Of course…”

She suddenly stiffened. “Of course, Your Highness,” she corrected him abruptly.

“I beg your pardon,” John said smoothly. “I was so interested in what Your Highness was saying that I forgot my manners. Of course, Your Highness.”

At once she smiled at him and gave him her hand to kiss. John bowed low and pressed his lips gently to the little fingers. His sense that he had served steadier, more intelligent and more noble masters did not show on his face.

“It is to be a garden which expresses Love,” she said. “The highest love there can be below the heavens. The love that there is between a man and his wife, and higher than that: between a king and a queen.”

“Of course, Your Majesty,” John said. “I could plant you some symbolic flowers around the roses. White violets for innocence, and periwinkle for constancy, and daisies.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “And one corner in blue as a tribute to Our Lady.” She turned her dark eyes on him. “Are you of the true faith, Tradescant?”

John thought briefly of Elizabeth in her gray Quaker-like gown, the staunch Baptist faith of his daughter-in-law and his promise to J that his conscience would not be offended by this work. He kept his face perfectly steady. “I attend the church of my fathers, Your Majesty,” he said. “I’m a simple gardener; I don’t think much of things other than plants and rarities.”

“You should think of your immortal soul,” she commanded. “And the church of your fathers is the church of Rome. I am always telling the king this!”

Tradescant bowed, thinking that she had just said enough to get both of them hanged if the king applied the laws of the land — which he manifestly only did when it suited him.

“And I shall want flowers for my chapel, for my private chapel,” she said. “Blue and white for Our Lady.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.”

“And for my private rooms, and strewing herbs, and the king wishes you to maintain and replant the physic garden and look at the herb garden.”

Tradescant bowed again.

“I want the house to be like a palace in a fairy tale,” she said, changing at once from the evangelical Roman Catholic into the flirtatious queen. “Like a bower for a fairy-tale Princess. I want people all over the country, all over Europe, to hear of it as a fairy-tale garden, a perfect garden. Have you heard of the Platonic ideal?”

John felt a sense of weariness he had never before known while talking about a garden. He had a sudden sympathy for the king, who had lost the easy male companionship of Buckingham and had no one to turn to but this vain woman.

The queen was laughing. “I suppose not!” she cried. “It does not matter, Gardener Tradescant. It is an idea which we make much of at court, in our masques and poetry and plays. I will just tell you that it is an idea that there is a perfect form of everything — of a woman, of a man, of a marriage, of a garden, of a rose, and the king and I want to attain that ideal.”

John glanced at her to see if she was speaking seriously. He thought of how the duke would have roared with laughter at the pedantry, at the pretentiousness. He would have slapped John on the back and called him Gardener Tradescant forever after.

“Think of it,” she said, her voice as sweet as syrup. “A perfect garden as a shell for a perfect palace for a perfect king and queen.”

“In a perfect country?” John asked incautiously.

She smiled. She had no sense that there might be anything behind his question but spellbound admiration. “Oh, yes,” she said. “How could it be otherwise when it is ruled by my husband, and by me?”

Summer 1631

John had thought he would enjoy some time away from his home — never in his life before had he been so settled and he feared that the domestic life of Lambeth would be too narrow for him. But he found that he missed the daily changing business of the Ark, the midsummer flowering of the garden and, more than anything else, the rapid changing of Frances, who grew, in the summer of 1631, from a rosebud-mouthed, lisping toddler to a little girl of rare determination.

He went home to Lambeth at every opportunity he could, to choose his stock from his own garden, and so that he could see his granddaughter. Each time he set off back to the palace, J would loiter in the stable yard, helping to pack the wagon with the heavy earthenware pots of plants.

“D’you need me at the palace?” he would ask, and John would drop his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“I can manage without you another week,” he would say. “I’ll tell you when I need you there.”

“I’ll come then,” J would promise. “As I agreed to.”

He would watch his father swing into the seat and go, and John would chuckle to himself at the seriousness of his beloved son who had bound himself in so many contradictory ways: to his conscience, to his promise, to his father, to his wife.

By the end of the summer John had completed the designs for the work in the king’s court, had shown them to the queen and was ready to start the labor of digging over the garden and replanting it. He had a team of men ready to start but he needed J to supervise the work while he went on to the queen’s court, so that it should be designed in time for autumn planting.

“Will you come back to the palace with me this time, J?” he asked as the family were seated on the terrace one evening. J was drinking a glass of small ale; John had a small tot of rum. “There’s the physic garden which needs replanting, and now the queen has asked for a flowery mead.”

Jane looked up from her sewing, affronted. “A what?”

John smiled. “A flowery mead,” he said. “Modeled on an old tapestry, those you see with the unicorn surrounded by hunters. It’s supposed to be like a meadow, a perfect meadow, with all the flowers of the field but no stinging nettles. You plant it with wild and garden flowers and then you cut a little path around it for the pleasure of walking with wildflowers.”

“Why not walk by a meadow, then?” Jane asked.

John took another sip of rum. “This is not a woman of sense, this is the queen. She would rather that everything was fashioned to perfection. Even a wildflower meadow. It’s an old fashion in gardening; I did not think to plant one again. And although it is supposed to look wild and untouched, it takes unending work to keep it in flower and keep the weeds checked.”

“I can do it,” J said. “I’ve never worked on one before. I’d like to do it.”

John raised his glass to his son. “And you’ll have little or nothing to do with Her Majesty,” he said. “Since she first showed me the garden and told me what she wanted I have hardly seen her. She is with the king most of the day or with the courtiers. She wants the garden as the backcloth to her theater of being queen. She has no interest in planting.”

“Well enough,” J said. “For I have no interest in her.”

John had intended that J would miss the king and queen altogether, and timed the arrival of his son to the date when the court was due to have moved on. But there was the usual delay and confusion, and they were a week late in going. J, cutting the full-blown roses in the rose court and carefully shaking the petals into a broad flat basket for drying, looked up and saw that a short dark-haired woman was watching him.

He took in the wealth of jewels, the rich silk and lace of her gown and the straggle of courtiers behind her, and pulled off his hat and bowed, as low as he should go for courtesy, but no lower.

“Who are you?” she asked abruptly.

“I am John Tradescant, the younger John Tradescant, Your Highness,” J said.

“I want the white petals separated from the pink,” she told him.

“I am keeping them apart, Your Majesty,” J said.

“You may take them to the still room when they are dry,” she said.

J bowed. They were to be dried in the silk house and the woman who ran the still room did not need them. These were for the masquing, and the Master of Revels and the Wardrobe Mistress would receive them, but there was little point in arguing when a queen wished to pretend that she understood the running of her palace.

“I want a tree planted in the middle of this court,” she announced suddenly. “A large tree, and roses growing up to the roots. It is to symbolize my husband’s care of his people. An oak tree, to symbolize his power and strength, and white roses to symbolize the innocent good people, clustered all around him.”

“Roses don’t like shade, Your Majesty,” J ventured cautiously. “Unfortunately I don’t think they will thrive under an oak tree.”

“Surely you can plant some!”

“They need the sunshine, and they like the air through their branches,” J said. “They will wither and die if they are planted beneath an oak tree.”