Specimen after specimen he brought back to the little farmhouse and heeled in the growing plants into his nursery beds and laid the seeds in sand or rice to keep them dry. Plant after plant he brought in to add to the Lambeth collection. And as he added a new tree, the Virginian maple, or a new flower, the yellow willow herb, or a new herb, Virginian parsley, he realised that he would bring back to England an explosion of strangeness. If the country had been at peace and ready to attend to its gardens he would have been hailed as a worker of miracles, a greater plantsman and botanist even than his father.
He believed that he thought of nothing but his plants on these long expeditions when he was gone from dawn to dusk and sometimes from dawn till dawn, when he slept in the woods despite the cold winds which warned of the change of season. But somewhere in his heart and in his mind he was saying farewell: to Suckahanna the girl, whose innocence he had prized so highly, to Suckahanna the young woman he had loved, and to Suckahanna the proud, beautiful woman who had taken him into her heart and into her bed and in the end sent him away.
John said goodbye to her, and goodbye to the forest that she had loved and shared with him, and by the time the Makepeace sailed by the end of the pier and went upriver to dock at Jamestown, John had said his farewells and was ready to leave.
He had half a dozen barrels of seeds and roots packed in sand. He had two barrels of saplings planted in shallow earth and watered by hand every day. He left them on the end of the pier ready for collection and paddled the canoe upriver to Jamestown to see if this latest ship had brought him a message and the money from Hester.
He hardly expected it. It could be this ship or a later one. But it was part of John’s ritual of saying farewell to Suckahanna and making a new troth with Hester that he should be on the quayside to greet every ship, to show his trust that Hester would work as fast as she could to get the money to him. Their plan should not miscarry through his fault.
There was the usual crowd, shouting greetings and offering goods and rooms for hire. There was the usual anarchy of arrival: goods thrown on the quayside, children squealing with excitement, friends greeting each other, deals being struck. John stood up on a capstan and shouted over the heads of the crowd: ‘Anyone with a message for John Tradescant?’
No-one replied at first so he shouted again and again like a costermonger bawling out his wares. Then a white-haired man, looking frail and sick, came down the gangplank with one eye on his sea chest of belongings and lifted his head and said:
‘I!’
‘Praise God,’ John said and jumped down from his vantage point, and knew at the same time the plummet of disappointment that now there was nothing more to stay for, and he must leave Suckahanna’s land, just as he had left her.
He pushed through the crowd with a smile of greeting on his face. ‘I am John Tradescant.’
‘I am the Reverend Walter de Carey. Your wife trusted me with a letter for you.’
‘Was she well?’
The older man nodded. ‘She looked well. A woman of some courage, I should imagine.’
John thought of Hester’s stubborn determination. ‘Above rubies,’ he said shortly. He opened the letter and saw at once that she had done as he asked. He had only to go to the Virginia Company offices and claim his twenty pounds, Hester had paid the money for him to a London goldsmith and the deed attested to it.
‘I thank you,’ he said. ‘Now, is there any service I can do for you? Do you have somewhere to stay? Can I help you with your bags?’
‘If you could help me carry this sea chest,’ the man said hesitantly. ‘I had thought there would be some porters or servants …’
‘This is Virginia,’ John warned him. ‘They’re all freeholders here.’
Winter 1645, England
In October Frances and Alexander Norman came upriver to Lambeth to stay for two nights. Hester urged them to stay longer but Alexander said he dared not leave his business for too long, the war must be coming to an end, every day he was sending out new consignments of gunpowder barrels and there were rumours that Basing House had fallen to Cromwell’s army at last.
It was not that it was such a strategic point, not like Bristol – the second city of the kingdom – which Prince Rupert had lost only the month before. But it was a place which had captured people’s imagination for its stubborn adherence to the king. When Johnnie knew that Rupert was dismissed from the king’s service, Basing House became his second choice. It was to Basing House where he planned to run and enlist. Even Hester, with memories of a court which were not all of play-acting and folly but which also had moments of great beauty and glamour, longed to know that whatever else changed in the kingdom Basing House still held for King Charles.
It was owned by the Marquess of Winchester, who had renamed it Loyalty House, and locked the gates when the country around him went Parliamentarian. That defiance seemed to Hester a more glorious way to spend the war than gardening at Lambeth and selling tulips to Parliamentarians. Inigo Jones, who had known Johnnie’s grandfather and worked with him for the Duke of Buckingham, was safe behind the strong defences of his own design at Basing House, the artist Wenceslaus Hollar, a friend of the Tradescants, and dozens of others known to Hester had taken refuge there. There were rumours of twenty Jesuit priests in hiding and a giant of seven feet tall. The marchioness herself and her children were in the siege and she had refused free passage out of the besieged house but decided to stay with her lord. She had engraved every window pane of the house with the troth ‘Aimez Loyauté’ so that as long as the house stood and the panes were unbroken it would carry a record that one place at least was always unwaveringly for Charles.
‘I am as bad as Johnnie, for I long to be there,’ Hester confessed to Alexander. They were seated either side of a small fire in the parlour. In the windowseat Frances and Johnnie were playing cards for matchsticks. ‘These are the people I knew from girlhood. It feels wrong to be here in comfort while they are facing the guns.’
‘They were freer to choose than you,’ Alexander said comfortingly. ‘You gave your word to John to protect the Ark. And anyway, you have played your part. When the royalist uprising came to your door you lent your horse and did the best you could.’
Hester snorted. ‘You know how willing that was!’
‘Don’t fall in love with the cause just because it is losing,’ Alexander warned her. ‘He was a reckless and foolish king before he was doomed. John went away rather than serve him, and I’ve always admired your determination to survive this war and not to join it. Just because it is coming to an end is no reason to want to enlist. It is a foolish man who loves a lost cause only because it is lost.’
Hester nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But Basing House is like a fairy story.’
‘There will be no romance ending,’ Alexander said grimly. ‘Cromwell has brought up the heavy guns. There can be no ending but defeat. No walls could stand against them forever.’
Alexander was right, and the news came through the next day, before he and Frances left. Basing House had fallen and a hundred men and women had been killed. Even the engraved window panes were not allowed to survive. Cromwell ordered the house to be destroyed and nothing was left standing.
It was only one battle in the many which now seemed to go inexorably the way of Parliament. Hester’s greatest buyer of tulips, John Lambert, was praised in all the reports for being a quick and daring cavalry commander, the Parliament horse were unstoppable. The army under Cromwell had learned their business at last and combined soldierly discipline with an absolute dedication to their cause. They believed they were freeing the country of tyranny and bringing in a new rule of law and justice. They fought as men will fight when their hearts are in the fighting, and there were few underpaid, half-hearted, badly led royal armies that could stand against them.
The king retreated to the hard-drinking, rich-living city of Oxford and the comfort of court life and amused himself as well as he could. His only recognition
of his continual defeats was to blame his generals. Prince Rupert had been dismissed for failing to hold Bristol and nothing he or his friends could say could gain him a fair hearing from the king he had served so faithfully.
It was a bitter winter, colder than any in living memory. Frances wrote to her stepmother that she had been skating on the Thames below the Tower and that if the freeze continued she would take a sledge and travel up the frozen river to visit. Hester, wrapped in John Tradescant’s old travelling cape and with a hat made from his Russian furs, went out every morning to brush the snow from the branches of the precious trees to prevent them from breaking under the weight of snow and ice, and sat every night over a fire made of fallen wood and little twigs, dined on potato soup and wondered when spring would come and if it would bring her husband home.
Winter 1646, Barbados
John’s ship took the southerly route home and revictualled and took on cargo at Barbados. John, very conscious that he was bringing home a fortune only in seeds and roots which would take an unreliable year before they could be propagated and sold, strolled on the quayside and let it be known that he was prepared to execute errands for the wealthy planters for a small consideration. While the ship was loaded with barrels of sugar and rum John walked inland, past the sugar plantations where gangs of black men and women slaves were bent over the new plants, seeding and weeding the crop while white overseers lounged on their horses with long-tongued hunting whips ready to lash out. John found his way into the woods where the fields stopped and kept his eyes open for new plants.
It was returning from one of these walks, with a couple of seedlings damp in his pocket, that John met a man riding homeward on the road.
‘I heard of you,’ the man greeted him informally. ‘You’re Tradescant, the king’s gardener, aren’t you?’
John uncovered his head and made a little bow. ‘Yes, sir. And you?’
‘Sir Henry Hants. A planter, these are my fields. I have a little garden of my own, you might like to have a look at some of my things.’
‘Indeed I would,’ John said eagerly.
‘Oh, come for dinner then,’ the man said. ‘Stay the night.’
He led the way along the lane towards a large white house, as grand as the queen’s manor at Wimbledon. John blinked at the opulence of the building, at the best wax candles set at every window so that the house twinkled like a beacon in the soft twilight, and then at the rush of black servants who came running when they heard the sound of the master’s horse.
Sir Henry dismounted and let the horse go, secure in the knowledge that two grooms would catch the reins, as he led the way indoors.
There was a terrace at the back of the house and Sir Henry led John through the gleaming hall where the white walls were laden with rich oil paintings, to where the last of the sun was shining on the terrace. A lady gestured languidly from a sofa. ‘My wife, Lady Hants,’ Sir Henry said briefly. ‘Never gets up.’
John bowed and was rewarded by a faint wave.
‘Now, let me show you my garden,’ Sir Henry said eagerly.
John had been hoping for tropical rarities and was hard put not to show his disappointment. Sir Henry had poured wealth and labour into making a classic English garden in the most unlikely of circumstances. There was a smooth lawn, as good as the king’s bowling green at Oatlands. There was a perfect knot garden with low hedges of bay enclosing white stones. John, looking a little more closely, saw that they were not stones but the most exquisite white shining shells.
‘Cowries,’ Sir Henry said gloomily. ‘Cost me a fortune. But actually easier to get than proper English gravel.’
There was a flower garden, planted exclusively with English flowers and shaded with a thatched roof suspended from stakes at each corner. ‘Sun’s too hot for them otherwise,’ Sir Henry complained. ‘And the ground’s too dry. I keep three boys watering almost constantly all day, and even then I can never grow more than a dozen daffodils every year.’
There was an orchard. John saw that the sun-loving fruits would do well in such a climate. ‘I can’t grow apples to taste like the ones in Kent.’
They came full circle back to the house. ‘You only plant English plants?’ John asked carefully.
‘Of course,’ the man said briskly. ‘Why would I want these damn ugly savage flowers?’
‘I have a great liking for new plants myself,’ John remarked.
‘You’re a fool,’ the man said. ‘If you lived here you would find you were longing for the sight of a proper English wood and proper English flowers again. I fight and fight and fight against this soil and against the heat to grow a proper garden.’
John nodded neutrally. ‘I see that it takes a very great deal of labour,’ he said.
His host nodded and mounted the terrace again. Without a word he put out his hand. At once the black woman presiding behind a great bowl of punch poured a glass, handed it to another woman who put it on a silver tray and bowed and presented it to Sir Henry. John was reminded of the silent, perfect service of the royal court and accepted a glass of his own with a word of thanks.
‘Don’t thank them,’ Sir Henry corrected him swiftly. ‘Don’t give one word of thanks for service in my house, if you please, sir. It has taken me years to knock some sense of obedience and decorum into them. I don’t want them thinking they’re doing me a favour by working for me.’
Dinner was a miserable affair of lavish food and the best wines but Lady Hants, half-reclining in her chair at one end of the table, said not one word for the whole of the meal, and her husband drank steadily and deeply of rum and water, becoming more gloomy and irascible with every glass.
One of the slaves among the half a dozen waiting at the table was wearing a strange headdress: a triangular plate bolted over her mouth with straps running from both sides and over her head to keep it in place, a great buckle at the back to keep it pressed tight against her mouth and a padlock to fasten the buckle. John found he could hardly drag his eyes away from the mask-like appearance of the woman, the dark, tragic eyes, and then the sharply geometric shape on the mouth.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sir Henry asked irritably. ‘Oh! Are you looking at Rebecca? She’s been stealing food, haven’t you, Becky? Tasting it as she cooks, dirty bitch. So she’ll have nothing to eat at all for a couple of days, nothing in her mouth but what I put there.’ He gave a shout of laughter and a wink to John at the sexual innuendo. ‘Are you sorry now that you tasted my soup, Becky?’
Silently the woman bowed her head.
‘Good, good,’ Sir Henry said, cheered by the sombre grief of her silence, and waved for another glass of rum and water.
A woman slave escorted John to his bedroom and stood, as still as an obedient dog, at the doorway.
‘You can go,’ John said, careful not to thank her.
‘Sir Henry say you can have me if you want,’ she said in carefully spoken English.
John was taken aback. ‘Er – I don’t –’
‘You want a man?’
‘No!’
She dropped her dark eyes, a world of despair hidden by the downsweep of her lashes. ‘You want a child?’
‘No!’
She waited. ‘What you want to do then?’ she asked wearily, dreading some demand more vile than she had faced before.
‘I want nothing!’ John exclaimed. ‘Just to sleep.’
She bowed. ‘If he ask you – you tell him I said you can have me.’
‘I’ll tell him you were very, er, generous,’ John corrected himself. ‘Obedient.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said dully. ‘I am obedient.’
In the morning Sir Henry was in a better temper. Over breakfast he asked John about his own garden and about the treasures of the Ark. ‘I could send you some things,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Things I pick up here. If you like savage things.’
‘I do,’ John said. ‘I do indeed. And if there are any plants from England that you desire I could send them out to you
. You could grow vines here very well, I would have thought.’
‘Could you take a note of credit for me and buy some carpets for me?’ Sir Henry asked. ‘I want some Turkey carpets for the hall.’
‘I should be delighted to do so,’ John said. ‘And anything else you require.’
‘We’ll start with this,’ Sir Henry said cautiously. ‘I’ll give you the note of credit and you can buy some carpets and some glass for me, and then I’ll send you a few hogsheads of sugar and you can see if you can obtain a better price for me than my normal agent. And then you can send me some more goods. Rarities are no use locked up in a cabinet, you know. They should be traded.’
John nodded. ‘I should be glad to do a little trading,’ he said. ‘My father’s rarities have to stay together in the collection we have made. But if you shoot any strange birds I should be glad of their skins and their feathers.’
‘I’ve got some trophies,’ Sir Henry said without any great interest. ‘I could sell them to you.’
‘I have no money until I am at home,’ John said awkwardly.
‘Note of credit,’ Sir Henry said equably. ‘We all do it by notes of credit all the time. Just as well there are no damned thieving Jews to redeem the notes before the sugar crop is in, eh?’
By the time John sailed he had a new shrub, a most curious and delightful plant which the islanders called the tree of life because it acted like a living thing, shrinking away when touched. He had a couple of roots of the cabbage tree, and a dozen skins and feathers including a rather fine specimen of the West Indian kingfisher which Sir Henry donated for free. ‘Just do me some decent business, when you are in England,’ he grumbled. ‘An honest agent in London is as rare as a virtuous woman. Which is to say, rare enough to put in your collection.’