Virgin Earth

  ‘And what of you?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I am finished with him,’ John said. ‘I am finished with his service. I went back into his service to please my father and because I longed to work on the great gardens which are in his gift, and besides, when I was a young man there was almost nowhere else to work but for the king or the court. But I will die in his service if I go on. I am a gardener and he would not give me leave to go and garden. He has to have everyone in the masque, everyone has to carry a standard or a spear. He will never cease with this until we are all dead, or all defeated, or all persuaded that he is the Lord’s Anointed and can do no wrong.’

  Hester quickly looked towards the kitchen door, but it was safely closed and all the household was still asleep.

  ‘I saw my father go out to certain death in the service of the Duke of Buckingham, and I saw him ride home, spared only by the death of his master,’ John continued. ‘I saw his eyes on that day. He never recovered from the death of the Duke. He was never his own man again. The loss of the Duke lay like a shadow over our family, and my father was torn between relief that he had survived and grief that the Duke was dead.

  ‘I swore then that I would never be like that, I swore I would never pledge myself to follow a man until death, and I meant it. I will never be a servant like that. Not even for the king. Especially not for this king, who cannot reward service and never says that he has had enough. He will not stop until every one of his servants is lying dead before him, and then he will expect a miracle from God himself to raise up more foot soldiers for his insatiable theatre. I will have no more of it. I can bear no more of it.’

  ‘You won’t join with Parliament?’ Hester asked, aghast. ‘Oh, John, you won’t fight against the king?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not a turncoat. I won’t fight against him. I’ve eaten his bread and he has called me his friend. I’ve seen him weep and I’ve kissed his hand. I won’t betray him. But I won’t play that part in this damned mockery.’

  ‘Will you stay here, quiet at home with us?’ she asked. She had a low sinking feeling in the pit of her belly. She knew that he would not.

  ‘How can I?’ he demanded of her. ‘People know who I am. They will ask me who I serve. I won’t deny him – I’m not a Judas. And he will send for me.’ He nodded. ‘Sooner or later he will realise that I am not at court and he will send for me again.’

  ‘Then what shall we do?’

  ‘We’ll go to Virginia,’ John said with decision. ‘All of us. We’ll take ship as soon as we can get a passage. We’ll take what we can carry and leave the rest. Leave the house and the garden and even the rarities. We’ll get out of this country and leave it to tear itself to pieces. I won’t see it. I won’t be here. I can’t bear it.’

  Hester sat very still and measured the despair in her husband’s voice against her love for him, and her love for their home.

  ‘Will you have a glass of ale?’ she asked.

  He lifted his gaze from the fire, as if he suddenly remembered where he was. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And then let’s go to bed. I have wanted you in my bed for night after long night, Hester. I have missed you, and thought of you here, missing me. I have wanted you and cursed the miles that were between us. And in the morning I shall see my children and we’ll tell them that we are leaving.’

  ‘You have wanted me?’ she asked, very low.

  He put his hand out and turned her face up to him, one gentle finger under her chin. ‘Knowing that you are here has kept me going through one dark night after another,’ he said. ‘Knowing that you are here and that I have someone to come home to. Knowing that you will open your bed to me, and open your arms to me, and that whatever is going wrong all around me, I have somewhere that I can call my home.’

  She could have moved forwards, she could have kneeled before him as he sat in his chair, he would have drawn her to him and on to his lap and he would have kissed her, as he had never yet kissed her, and they could have gone to bed as he wanted to do, and as she had wanted to do from the moment she had first seen him.

  But Hester caught hold of her determination, forced herself to wait, and drew back from him, drew back and sat on her seat on the other side of the fireplace.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Not so fast, husband. I cannot leave here.’

  For a moment John did not hear her. He was so conscious of the fall of her nightgown, and of her dark hair only half-hidden by her cap, of the play of the firelight on her neck and the glimpse of her shoulder. ‘What?’

  ‘I cannot leave here,’ she said steadily. ‘This is my home.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said abruptly. ‘I have made up my mind. I have to go. I cannot stay here, I will be torn apart by the two of them – king and Parliament. Parliament will have me out entrenching and drilling for their defence, and the king will summon me to court. I cannot be faithless to them both. I cannot watch the king ride into war as if it were a masqued ball. I cannot stay in England and see him die!’

  ‘And I cannot leave.’ She spoke steadfastly, as if nothing would ever move her.

  ‘You are my wife,’ John reminded her.

  She bowed her head.

  ‘You owe me absolute obedience,’ he said. ‘I am your master before God.’

  ‘As the king is yours,’ she said gently. ‘Isn’t that what this war is all about?’

  He hesitated. ‘I thought you wanted to be my wife?’

  ‘I do. I agreed to be your wife, and to rear your children, and to care for the rarities and the garden and the Ark. How can I do these things in Virginia?’

  ‘You can care for me and the children.’

  Hester shook her head. ‘I won’t take the children there. You know yourself how dangerous it is there. There are wild Indians, and hunger, dreadful disease. I won’t take the children into danger.’ She paused for a moment. ‘And I won’t leave here.’

  ‘This is my home,’ John reminded her. ‘And I am prepared to leave it.’

  ‘It is my home too.’

  They locked gazes like enemies. John remembered his first impression of her as a plain-faced managing woman who had been put in his house without his consent. ‘Hester, I am going to Virginia,’ he said coldly. ‘And it is my wish that you come with me and the children.’

  Her straight gaze never wavered. ‘I am sorry,’ she said evenly. ‘I cannot do that. I will not take the children into danger and I have no wish to leave my home. If you go then I will keep everything safe for your return, and I will welcome you when you return.’

  ‘My father …’ he started.

  ‘Your father trusted me with the care of this house and with the care of the children while you were away,’ she said. ‘I promised him on his deathbed that I would keep it all safe: plants, rarities, and children. I will not leave this house for any wandering battalion to take it over and to chop down his trees for firewood. I won’t leave his chestnut avenue for them to spoil. I won’t leave it unprotected for any vagrants to steal the fruit or pick the flowers. I won’t leave the rarities stored in a warehouse with no idea of when I can return. And I will not take Jane’s children to a country far away where I know they cling to survival against all the odds.’

  ‘Jane’s children!’ he shouted. ‘Jane was my wife! They are my children! She is nothing to you! They are nothing to you!’

  John saw her flinch as if he had slapped her face. But it did not shake her steadiness. ‘You are wrong,’ she said simply. ‘I have long thought of myself as caring for Jane’s children and trying to care for them as she would wish. And sometimes I think that she looks down from heaven and sees them, growing strong and beautiful, and that she is happy for them. But they are my children too, I have loved them without fail for four years and I will not take them from their home because you have decided to leave your master and leave your country and leave your home.’

  ‘I’m not faithless!’ he said, stung.

  Hester gave him a long, level loo
k. ‘You and your father are the king’s gardeners,’ she said. ‘You are in his service.’

  ‘He doesn’t own my soul!’ John shouted. ‘I am his servant, not his slave! I can withdraw my service. I can work for myself, I can leave. I have just left.’

  She nodded. ‘Then a man has a right to choose where he lives and who he calls master?’

  ‘Yes,’ John said firmly.

  ‘A woman too?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said begrudgingly.

  ‘Then I choose to live here, and you will not take the children without me to care for them.’

  ‘You want to stay here and face who knows what dangers?’

  ‘I shall face the dangers when they come,’ she said. ‘I am not such a fool as to think that we are safe here. We’re too near to the city – if the king brings in a Papist army we will be in the worst place. But if that happens I shall take them to Oatlands, or away into the country. We will have a warning of the dangers. I can prepare for them. And Jane’s parents will warn us and protect them, and Alexander Norman knows to the minute where the king’s army can be found, he makes the barrels for the gunpowder. My own family have refuges planned. I shall have advisors, I shall have protectors.

  ‘But in Virginia there would be no-one to keep us safe but you; and you don’t know the country, and you are not a farmer or a labourer, and I think only a farmer or a labourer can get a living there.’

  John got to his feet and spoke bitterly. ‘I won’t argue with you,’ he said spitefully. ‘Because I don’t care enough to take the trouble. It doesn’t matter to me if you will come with me to Virginia as my wife or if you prefer to stay at home like a housekeeper. It is your choice. I shall go to Virginia a single man, if that is your wish.’

  She felt a pain inside her which was worse than anything she had suffered from him so far. She heard the threat of infidelity in his words but she would not let him frighten her into abandoning her home. ‘I am sorry to stand against you,’ she said steadily. ‘But I promised your father I would guard his trees and his grandchildren, and I cannot escape that promise.’

  John got to his feet and stalked to the door. ‘I am tired. I shall sleep. I don’t want to be disturbed. I am used to sleeping alone.’

  Hester bowed her head, not commenting on the fact that she was no longer invited into bed with him. ‘Take your bed,’ she said politely. ‘I shall make up the bed in the spare bedroom.’

  ‘And as soon as possible I shall take ship,’ John said. ‘Don’t doubt me, Hester. I shall leave for the new world. I am sick of this country. I am sick of this house.’ He did not say it but the words ‘and I am sick of you’ hung in the air, unspoken, between them.

  She bowed her head. ‘I shall guard the children and the trees for your return.’

  ‘And if I never come back?’

  ‘Then I shall guard them for the next John Tradescant, your son,’ she said. ‘And I shall guard them for the people of England who will want the trees and the plants when they stop making war. And then they will remember and honour the name of Tradescant, even if you are no longer here.’

  October 1642

  The luck of the Tradescants was still running John’s way. There was a ship due to leave for Virginia in October and he could get a place aboard her. Half a dozen new settlers were sailing too, loading their goods and getting ready for their new life. John was on the dock with them when someone shouted that the king had fought a battle and had triumphed, at a place called Powick Bridge.

  John joined the crowd that gathered around the trooper. He was a Parliament man and his tale of terror was growing greater with every telling.

  ‘We were serving under my Earl of Essex,’ the man said. ‘And ordered badly, no-one can deny it. We were to cut off the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, from the main army. But as we went down the lane towards them there was firing on either side of us, from the hedges. Dirty work, you couldn’t see where it was coming from. The officers shouted “Wheel about” – but none of us knew how to wheel about. Easier to say than do in the narrow lanes anyway. Some were shouting that “wheel about” meant retreat, and they tried to force their way back through the others coming forward. Those at the back still didn’t know of the danger so they were coming on. It was all confusion, d’you see?

  ‘There was a charge from the king’s devils, cavalry, riding like madmen, and we went down and around and were thrown about. It was every man for himself all the way back to our camp and the next day the Earl said we should all be trained properly, and that he would have us trained at once.

  ‘But Prince Rupert trained his men before he took them out. He told them what “wheel about” meant before he marched them into the very jaws of the enemy. Prince Rupert learned his fighting all over Europe. Prince Rupert is going to win this war for his cousin King Charles, he knows all the tricks. Prince Rupert has changed our plans completely, he has beaten us before we began.’

  Bertram Hobert, a fellow passenger with John, glanced at him. ‘Does this change your plans, Mr Tradescant?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ John said discreetly. ‘My going or staying is nothing to do with the progress of the war. I have interests in Virginia, a plantation there, some land where I have a fancy to build a house. And I made a good sum on the plants I brought back last time. Whether Parliament or the king wins, some day there will be peace and men will want to garden.’

  ‘Are you not for the king? Won’t you join him now? Now that he is on the road to victory?’

  ‘I have been in his service all my life,’ John said, hiding his resentment. ‘The time has come for me to do some travelling and gardening for myself. He does not need a gardener now, he needs soldiers, and – you heard that man – he has them.’

  Hobert nodded.

  ‘What about you?’ John asked.

  ‘I was leaving whatever happened,’ the man said. ‘I can make no progress here. I work as hard as any man; but what the taxes don’t take, the tithes do. I wanted a country where I can see real wealth for me. I’ve seen how a man can prosper in Virginia. I’ll stay a dozen years and come back a rich man and buy a farm in Essex. What about you? Will you stay for long?’

  John thought for a moment. It was a question he and Hester had carefully skirted, in all the weeks while she packed for him and took orders in her careful script from gardeners who had heard he was going collecting again. With his boat creaking at the dockside and the wind blowing offshore, with the tide running and a sense of his freedom rising in him, John felt young and reckless again; a young man fit for a young country, full of promise.

  ‘I shall make a home there,’ he said. ‘My wife and children will stay in England and I shall be back often. But Virginia is the country for me. I shall build a house there and …’ He broke off, thinking of Suckahanna’s small, sideways smile, her tattooed nakedness which had become more erotic for him since his first innocent sight of her. He thought that by now she would be a woman, a woman fully grown, and ready for love and desire.

  ‘It’s a country where a man can grow,’ the farmer said, throwing his arms wide. ‘There’s land for the asking, and earth which has never been ploughed. There’s a new life there for me.’

  ‘And for me,’ John said.

  John welcomed the long idle days of the voyage. He became accustomed to the movement of the ship and his stomach stopped swooping with terror at the long, frightening slide into the troughs of the waves. The captain was liberal with the passengers, letting them come up on deck, almost as they wished, as long as they did not distract the crew; and John spent days leaning on the rail of the deck and looking down into the moving green muscles of the ocean. A couple of times they caught sight of a pod of whales, chasing a school of fish that stretched for more than a mile across. Once or twice they saw large white birds whose names John did not know and he asked the captain if one could be shot so that he could have it stuffed for the rarities room. The captain shook his head. He said it was unlucky to shoot a bird at sea, it would summ
on up a hurricane. John did not press the point, it seemed a long, long way from the rarities room at Lambeth, a long way from Hester, a long way from the children, and a long way from the king and his costumed play-acting wars.

  John had thought that he would use the time of the two-month voyage to make some plans, come to some decisions about his future. He had thought he would write down his own timetable: how long he would spend building a new house in Virginia, when he would send for the children, even if Hester still refused to come. But as the ship went westward, and still more westward, as he spent every evening watching the sun sink lower and lower through the clouds and then into the sea, he found he could not think or plan; all he could do was dream.

  It was not a journey, it was an escape. John’s inheritance of a business which was at the same time a duty had nearly strangled him. He had been bound by loyalty and even in the end a begrudging sympathy in service to a king whom he despised. His father’s choice of his wife had forced him into a new marriage, one he would not have chosen for himself. His burdensome work and his duty to his family conspired to close down the ways that were open to him: like untrimmed hedges overshadowing a lane. John had a sudden exhilarating sense of having vaulted a gate and starting to make his own way across fields towards the open country, where there were no paths and no lanes, and no restrictions. Somewhere he could make his own life, build his own house … even choose his own wife.

  He dreamed of her – Suckahanna – almost every night. It was as if his dreams had been locked down inside him, and only freed once he freed himself from England, from Hester, from home. Once the ropes keeping the ship at the quayside were dropped and trailed through the cold water of the Thames, John felt his desires rocking like the boat as it headed for freedom.

  He dreamed of the month they had spent in the forest together and the light shining through the leaves to dapple her bare brown skin. He dreamed of the line of her spine as she squatted before the fire, of the asymmetric tilt of her head where the hair was cut short on one side to keep the bowstring free, and black and flowing on the other. In his dreams he could taste the food she had found and cooked for them, the bitterness of the dried blueberries, the richness of the roasted lobster, the nuts, the seeds, the roots. He remembered the clean cold taste of water, an exotic drink for a man who had drunk small ale or milk for all his life. He woke in the mornings to the sudden pang of disappointment that they were still so many days out of Jamestown, and he woke aroused and embarrassed. He had the little enclosed bed with doors around the bunk all to himself but anyone sleeping outside could have heard him groan in desire in his dreams, and he was afraid that he might have said her name in his sleep.