Virgin Earth

  ‘I need advice.’

  There was an unhelpful silence.

  ‘Suckahanna turns from me and says not one word to me.’

  Attone nodded.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to make it better between us?’

  Attone bent down and raised the trap from the water. The delicate withy-work was bending in the current; he straightened a twig and then carefully bedded it in with pebbles before he answered. He took his time, the whole process took nearly half an hour.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Will she take me back as a husband if I serve her without complaint? Perhaps in Coltayough? In the warm time?’

  Attone thought for a moment, his eyes still on his fish trap, and then shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘At Nepinough?’

  Again the dismissive shake of the head.

  ‘Will she ever forgive me for coming home without blood on my hands?’

  Attone turned from the river and looked John squarely in the face. The relief of being seen, of gaining a response, was so great that John wanted to fling his arms around his former friend. Just that one look was an affirmation that he was a man still; that he could be seen and acknowledged.

  ‘Never, I should think,’ Attone said.

  Tradescant drew breath. ‘What have I done that is so bad?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  Dumbly, Tradescant shook his head.

  ‘You’ve shamed her. She stood for you before all the People and said you were a man worthy to be tested. You were tested and you passed and she chose you as her man, before all the People. Now they all look at her and say what a fool that woman is to choose a man who bends like a willow, who is neither white nor brown, who is neither English nor Powhatan, who is neither hunter nor gardener, who is neither Eagle nor John.’

  ‘Will she never forgive me?’

  ‘How can she? Will she ever not feel the shame?’

  ‘If we were to go away –’

  Attone laughed a brief bitter laugh. ‘Where? D’you think she’d live in Jamestown? D’you think they’d not take her out and hang her or worse? D’you think she’d live with you in that house and send tobacco down the river and pack up your plants for you, and be a wife like the other one, the one you left behind in England? Or d’you think to take her to England and watch her die in exile, as Pocahontas did?’

  John shook his head, he felt as bewildered as a scolded child. ‘I’ve been a fool,’ he said.

  For a moment Attone softened. He dropped his hand on John’s shoulder. ‘These are foolish times,’ he said. ‘I think at the end of it all, when the Great Hare runs through the world all alone again, we will all seem fools.’

  ‘Can the People survive?’ John asked in a low whisper.

  Attone shook his head.

  January 1645, England

  Johnnie was in the garden at first light, looking for flowers for his sister’s wedding bouquet. The frost was as thick on the ground as snow, his boots crunched as he walked across the frozen grass. The sun was bright and hard and the air smelled sharp and exciting: of leaf-mould, of coldness, of the earth waiting for sunshine. Johnnie had a powerful sense of being young and alive and that his life, as the only Tradescant heir, was about to begin.

  He wanted to give Frances something beautiful. If she had married in springtime she would have carried a bouquet of flowers from the chestnut tree, their grandfather’s pride. If she had married in summer he would have cut the stems and snapped the thorns off a hundred roses. But she had chosen the very heart of the winter and Johnnie feared he could give her nothing from his grandfather’s garden but the shiny hardness of evergreen leaves.

  Hester, seeing him bare-headed and wearing nothing warm, swung open her bedroom window, hearing the hinge crack against the frost. ‘Johnnie! What are you doing?’

  He turned and waved. ‘I’m picking her a bouquet!’

  ‘There’s nothing to be had!’

  Johnnie shook his head and went on down the garden. Hester watched him go, the lithe little figure with the determined set to his shoulders: Johnnie Tradescant. Then she turned back into the house to wake Frances for her wedding day.

  Frances, bathed, dressed, perfumed and wearing a new gown, came downstairs in a shimmering cloud of palest blue silk. She wore her hair down to her shoulders, curled in ringlets, a tiny scrap of lace for a cap on the back of her head. Her gown, rich pale silk embroidered all over with pale blue patterns, hushed and whispered on the flagstones of the hall. Her wide collar was of the finest Valenciennes lace; the future Mrs Norman could import the very best from France. It matched the deep lace edging of her sleeves, crisp and sweet-smelling with starch. The dress was cut low, the cream of Frances’s warm skin contrasting with the coolness of the white lace.

  ‘How do I look?’ Frances asked, knowing that she was beautiful.

  ‘Awful ugly,’ Johnnie said with a smile, invoking the nursery insult. He whipped out a posy from behind his back. ‘I picked you these. But you don’t have to carry them if you don’t like ’em.’

  Frances took the posy from him without any word of gratitude or thanks and looked carefully at it. Hester was reminded that they were children and grandchildren of perhaps the finest gardeners the world had ever known. Neither of them exclaimed over the gift of a plant, they always carefully looked, carefully assessed.

  He had cut her fronds of yew, the needles as soft as wool, the green so dark as to be almost black, starred with deep pink berries and smelling hauntingly of winter and Christmas. He had picked her mistletoe from the clumps on the old trees in the orchard and woven the light green wings of leaves around the darker yew so the white berries looked like drops of pearls against the needles. He had found some tiny buds of early snowdrops and woven them into a chain which linked leaves, needles and buds altogether, and he had twisted it around with the lace-like twigs of a rambling rose starred with pink hips.

  ‘Thank you,’ Frances said.

  ‘But I have this for your hair,’ Johnnie said with simple pride. From the table behind him he produced a spray of primroses, and their sweet, clear smell filled the hall.

  ‘How ever did you get primroses?’ Frances asked.

  ‘Potted them up as soon as you said you’d marry him,’ Johnnie said proudly. ‘I wasn’t going to let you catch me out with a winter wedding. We are the Tradescants, after all.’

  Frances laid down her green bouquet and took the pot of primroses to the mirror in the rarities room. Her high heels sounded hollow on the floorboards; only the big things were left in the room, with a collection of lesser pieces which could be sacrificed to save the others. The room was rich enough to fool a looting soldier into thinking that he had seen all the treasures. Hester kept the key to the ice-house door on a chain round her neck and the ivy was growing thickly over the hinges.

  Frances picked the flowers, nipping the soft stems with her fingernails, and tucked them behind her ears and into her ringlets.

  ‘Pretty?’ she asked, turning to her brother.

  ‘Well enough,’ he said, concealing his pride as he took her hand and tucked it under his arm.

  They married at Little St Bartholomew’s Church, Old Fish Street, in the City with Hester as one witness and Alexander’s friend Thomas Streeter as the other. They dined that night at Alexander’s house opposite the Tower of London and raised a glass to the father of the bride.

  ‘I wonder where he is tonight?’ Mr Streeter asked thoughtlessly. Alexander glanced quickly at Hester’s stricken face.

  ‘I don’t mind, as long as he’s safe,’ she said.

  It was hard for Hester to leave Frances. She had cared for her since she had been a fair-headed, sad little girl of nine years old, overwhelmed by the responsibility of looking after her brother, missing her mother every night and every day. She had been too proud to ask for help; she would always have all of the Tradescant stubbornness. She had been too independent to ask for love; but Hester would treasure
all her life the memory of the way that Frances had stepped sideways, without glancing up, until she could lean against her stepmother’s comforting hip and feel a protective hand rest gently on her shoulder.

  ‘I shall miss you,’ Hester whispered as she took her leave in the cramped hall of Alexander’s house the next day.

  ‘Oh, Mother –’ Frances said, and dived into her embrace. ‘But I shall come to the Ark often, and you will come and see us. Won’t she, Alexander?’

  Alexander Norman, looking years younger as if sheer joy had smoothed the lines from his face, beamed at Hester and said: ‘You can come and live with us, if you like. I should think myself a Pasha of Turkey with two such beauties in the house.’

  ‘I have the Ark to see to,’ Hester affirmed. ‘But I expect you on a visit often. And when there is plague in the city …’

  ‘I shall send her to you at once,’ Alexander reassured her. ‘Never fear. And I shall write you what news there is.’

  After that, there was nothing to do but to let her go. Hester held on a moment longer than was necessary, and when Frances stepped back into the encircling arm of her husband Hester felt a pain in her whole body as if something slowly and deeply was peeling away from her. She smiled at once. ‘God bless you,’ she said, as if the pain was not gripping her inside. ‘Be happy.’

  She turned from the pretty hall and stepped out into the street. The Tower of London threw a shadow over the street in the morning and the chill struck Hester as she gathered her cape around her. In a second Johnnie was at her side, offering his arm like a cavalier, and Hester managed to step briskly out towards the river and the boat to take them home.

  ‘That was well done,’ Johnnie said stoutly, keeping his face turned away from her.

  ‘Very well,’ Hester replied, rubbing her gloved hand against her cheeks. ‘A plague on this cold wind, it’s making my eyes water.’

  ‘Mine too,’ Johnnie said.

  April 1645, England

  Hester felt that the Ark, Tradescant’s Ark, was adrift in the spring of 1645. The promise that she had made to John Tradescant – to care for his grandchildren and his rarities – seemed to be slipping away from her; though she had always thought that whatever else slipped away, that promise at least could hold firm.

  But Frances was a woman, with a house and a new life of her own, and Johnnie was growing and would be off to war within four, perhaps five, years. Every young man in England knew that he would see fighting before he was old, and Johnnie, even precious Johnnie, could be no exception. The rarities were well-hidden and she could only hope that neither the cold nor the damp would spoil them. The ice house was safely locked and bolted, and Joseph had planted a cherry tree, one of Tradescant’s great black cherry trees, before it. The sapling had taken well and was spreading its boughs as if it would deny that there had ever been a door there at all. The springing leaves blurred the outline of the wall, and when the blossom came there would be nothing to see but bobbing flowers.

  ‘We’ll have to cut that tree down when we want to get the door open and the treasures out,’ Joseph observed to Hester in a quiet voice as she was walking around the garden.

  ‘The way things are going, we’ll never be safe to have them out,’ she replied, and went on.

  The garden was looking as lovely as it did every spring, as if war was not the nation’s chief occupation, as if hunger and plague were not a certainty in the coming summer. The daffodils were bobbing in the orchard and in the tulip beds the spears of buds were thickening and blushing with light stripes of colour. If in the autumn there was anyone left alive who cared to buy tulips there would be a fortune in the rich earth of the Tradescant garden.

  But nobody was buying, they were not taking money at the door of the rarities room, they were not selling plants. The Ark was slowly sinking under debt. Joseph was working for half-wages and his keep, the lads had left, run away to war, the maids had been dismissed and only Cook stayed on and shared the work of the house with Hester.

  The trees were in their first green leaves, Hester could almost smell their freshness in the air. The grass was growing long; as soon as the daffodils had died back then Joseph would scythe it and rake the clippings away. The branches in the orchards were bobbing with their twigs bursting into leaf and the buds thickening with the promise of flowers to come. It should have been a joyous place; but Hester walked among the fertility and over-brimming life of it like a woman chilled to the bone and weary nearly to death.

  She walked to the end of the garden and looked out across the pond. It was years since she had brought Johnnie here to feed the ducks, years since they had sat in the little waterlogged boat and he had rowed her backwards and forwards and told her that he would undoubtedly be a great sailor as his grandfather had been – chasing pirates in the Mediterranean, sailing to the very icy doors of Russia. And now she was the wife of another travelling Tradescant and she thought that this would be the year that she would have to find the courage to face the fact that John was never coming home.

  Since he had left she had received only one letter, to say that he was leaving Jamestown and going to build his house further up the river and that she should not expect to hear from him again for some time. Then she had received a consignment of Indian rarities and a couple of barrels of plants, badly packed, and badly shipped, which told her that it was not John who had seen them loaded on board. Since then – nothing. And now there was news of an Indian uprising and Jamestown attacked, and all the planters all along the river scalped and skinned and butchered.

  She thought she must learn to stop looking for John, learn to stop waiting for him. She thought she would wait till the summer and then, if there was still no news, find a way to tell Johnnie, who was sometimes still her little boy, and sometimes now a young man, that his father was not coming home, and that he was the only Gardener Tradescant left.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a voice behind her said politely. ‘I am looking for John Tradescant.’

  ‘He’s not here,’ Hester said wearily and turned around. ‘I am his wife. Can I help you?’

  The man before her was one of the handsomest she had ever seen in her life. He swept off his hat to her and the plumes brushed the ground as he bowed, one long brown suede boot stretched forwards. He was dressed in grey – a sober enough colour which might indicate he was a Parliament man and one of the dreary Presbyterian sort at that; but his thick, curly head of hair, his rich lace collar, and that laughing confidence in his smile, was that of a cavalier.

  Hester’s first response was to smile in reply, he was not a man that any woman would find easy to resist. But then she remembered the times they lived in and she glanced towards the house as if she feared a guard of soldiery at his call and a warrant for arrest in his pocket.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked again.

  ‘I’m looking for tulips,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows that John Tradescant’s is the only garden worth visiting in England, and also these are troubled times to go flower hunting in the Low Countries.’

  ‘We have tulips,’ Hester said gravely, not taking advantage of the conversational opening to deplore the badness of the times. ‘Was it a special variety you wanted?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What do you have?’

  Hester smiled. The verbal fencing was a typical approach to naming a plant which had, in its heyday, cost the value of a house. ‘We have everything,’ she said with the simple arrogance of a professional at the very top of her profession. ‘You had much better tell me simply what you want. We only ever charge a fair price, Mr –?’

  He stepped back slightly as if to re-assess her, as if his view of a plain woman plainly dressed had hidden the strength of her character, and her pride. ‘I’m John Lambert,’ he said. ‘And last year I grew half a dozen tulips at my home, and this year I must have more. I simply must. Do you know what I mean, Mrs Tradescant? Or are they nothing more than a crop to you, like wheat to a farmer?’

  ‘They’re not my p
assion,’ Hester said. ‘But nobody could live in this household and not come to love tulips. They are one of the finest flowers.’

  ‘None finer,’ he said quickly.

  ‘Roses?’

  He hesitated. ‘But the thing about tulips is the shortness of the season, and the way you can buy them in the bulb and hold the bulb in your hand and know that inside it is a thing of such beauty. And you know that if you care for it you will see that thing of beauty, whereas a rose – a rose grows itself.’

  Hester laughed. ‘If you were a working gardener, Mr Lambert, you would value plants that grow themselves. But let me show you our tulip beds.’

  She led the way back through the garden and then paused. The path ran alongside the wall which kept the west wind off the plants. Along the wall, espaliered in regular lines, were apple and pear trees; the south wall was lined with the peaches and apricots. They were Tradescant walls: a double skin of brick with three fireplaces set one on top of each other and a flue running from each fire along the length of the wall to keep the bricks at a steady warmth by night and day. But Hester had not been able to afford the charcoal for the fires for two seasons.

  Hester saw Mr Lambert take in the neat planning and the solidity of the building, and the immaculate pruning of the branches, and felt her familiar stir of pride. Then he turned to the garden beds and she heard his sharp intake of breath.

  There was bed after bed of tulips. They grew at least twenty of each specimen, and they had more than a hundred different varieties. Each new variety was labelled with a lead spike stuck in the ground at the head of the row and on each spike, in Johnnie’s meticulous printing, was the name of each variety. Behind each label, like a row of well-drilled infantry, grew the tulips, with their leaves clasped close to their stalks and their growing heads like multi-coloured soldiers shouldering their pikes.