‘I had to go barefoot. I was in Virginia,’ John said shortly.
‘No wonder all your boots pinch,’ the cobbler said. ‘You have no need of boots at all.’
‘Yes he does,’ Hester remarked. ‘He’s a gentleman in England and he’ll have a pair of boots of best leather, a pair of working boots and a pair of shoes. And they’d better not pinch.’
‘I haven’t the leather,’ the man said. ‘They don’t drive the cattle to Smithfield, the tanners can’t get the hides, I can’t get the leather. You’ve been in Virginia too long if you think you can order shoes like the old days.’
Hester took the cobbler by the elbow and there was a brief exchange of words and the clink of a coin.
‘What did you offer him?’ John asked as they emerged from the dark shop into the bright March sunlight.
Hester grimaced and prepared for a quarrel. ‘You won’t like it, John, but I promised to supply the leather from your father’s rarities. It was only some leather painted with a scene of the Madonna and Child. Not very well done, and completely heretical. We would invite the troops upon us if we ever showed it. And the man is right, he can’t get leather for your shoes otherwise.’
For a moment she thought he was going to flare up at her again.
‘So am I to strut around London with Papistical images painted on my boots?’ he asked. ‘Won’t they hang me for a Jesuit in hiding?’
‘Not much of a disguise if you’re going around with the Virgin Mary on your feet,’ Hester pointed out cheerfully. ‘No, the painting is almost worn off, and he’ll use it on the inside.’
‘We are using rare treasures as household goods? What kind of stewardship is this?’
‘We are surviving,’ Hester said grimly. ‘Do you want boots that you can walk in or no?’
He paused. ‘Do you swear that nothing else of any merit is missing from the collection?’ he demanded. ‘That it is safe in hiding as you say?’
‘On my honour, and you can see it all for yourself if you cut down the tree and open the door. But John, you had best wait. It’s not safe yet. They all say the king is defeated but they have said that before. He has his wife working against us in France, and the Irish to call on, and who knows what the Pope might order if the queen promises to hand over the country to Popery? The king cannot be defeated in battle, for all that they fight and fight. Even when he is down to his last man he is not defeated. He is still the king. They cannot defeat him. He has to decide to surrender.’
John nodded and they fell into stride together for the short walk home. ‘I keep thinking. I keep wondering – perhaps I should go to him,’ he said.
She stumbled at the thought of him returning to the court and to danger. ‘Why? Why on earth would you go?’
‘I feel almost that I owe him some service,’ he said.
‘You left the country to escape serving,’ she reminded him.
He grimaced at her bluntness. ‘It wasn’t that simple,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to die for a cause I can’t believe in. I didn’t want to kill a man because like me he had half-heartedly joined, but on the other side. But if the king is ready for peace then I could serve him with a clear conscience. And I don’t like to think of him alone at Oxford, without the queen and with the prince fled to Jersey, and no-one with him.’
‘There’s a whole crowd with him,’ Hester said. ‘Drinking themselves senseless every night and shaming Oxford with their behaviour. He is in the thick of company. And if he sees you he will only remember you and ask where you have been. If he wanted you he would have sent for you by now.’
‘And has there been no word?’
She shook her head. ‘Since they wanted us to serve under the Commission of Array there has been nothing,’ she said. ‘And they risked our lives for a lost cause then. There is nothing you can do for the king unless you can persuade him to come to terms with his people. Can you do that?’
‘No.’
As soon as John’s new boots were ready he put them on, dressed in his best suit and announced his intention of formally visiting his daughter in her new home. Hester and Johnnie, also dressed in their best, went with him in the boat downriver.
‘Will he be angry?’ Johnnie asked under the noise of the oars in the water.
‘No,’ Hester said. ‘The moment he sees her she’ll have him wrapped around her finger like always.’
Johnnie chuckled. ‘Can we shoot the bridge?’ he asked.
Hester hesitated. Timorous passengers would make the ferrymen leave them on the west side of Tower Bridge and walk round to rejoin their boat at the other side. The currents around the pillars of the bridge were terrifyingly swift and when the tide was on the ebb and the river was full, boats could overturn and people could drown. It was Johnnie’s great passion to shoot the rapids and generally Hester would stay in the boat with him, her hands gripping the side, her knuckles white, and a smile firmly fixed on her face.
‘Do what?’ John asked and turned around.
‘Shoot the bridge,’ Johnnie replied. ‘Mother lets me.’
John looked in surprise at his wife. ‘You can’t enjoy it?’ he asked.
One glance at her face told him that she was terrified. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Johnnie loves it.’
John gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Then Johnnie can do it,’ he said firmly. ‘You and I will land at the Swan Stairs like Christians and Johnnie can meet us on the other side.’
‘But I like Mother coming too!’ Johnnie protested.
‘That’s as maybe,’ John said firmly. ‘But I’m home now, and you’re not going to drown my wife to keep you company. You can shoot the bridge on your own, my boy.’
The ferryman set them ashore at the steps. John put his hand under Hester’s elbow as they climbed to the top and turned to wave to Johnnie as he sat in the prow of the boat to gain full pleasure from the terrifying ride.
‘Look at his face!’ Hester exclaimed lovingly.
‘You are too indulgent to him,’ John said.
She hesitated. John was his father and the head of the household. Restoring the power to him was hard for her, just as regaining his position was for him. ‘He’s still only a boy,’ she remarked. ‘Not yet thirteen.’
‘If he was in Virginia –’ John started and then bit back the rest.
‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘But he isn’t. He’s a good boy and he has been courageous and faithful through these difficult years. If he was a planter’s son, living in the wilds, then I dare say he would be a quite different boy. But he is not. He is a boy who has had to have his childhood in the middle of a war and he has seen all of the adults around him most terribly afraid. You are right to restore the rules, John, but I won’t have him blamed for not being something he has no business to be.’
He turned and faced her but she did not drop her gaze. She stared at him fiercely as if she did not care whether he beat her or sent her home in disgrace. Not for the first time John was reminded that he had married a redoubtable woman and, despite his temper, he remembered also that she was fiercely defending his son, just as she had fiercely defended the garden and the rarities.
‘You’re right,’ he said, with the smile she loved. ‘And I will be restored to my place at the head of the household. But I won’t be a tyrant.’
She nodded at that, and when they strolled together to the other side of the bridge where the boat was waiting she slid her hand in the crook of his arm and John kept it there.
They paid the boatman and retraced their steps to the Tower. Alexander Norman’s timber yard was beside the walls of the Tower on the grounds of a former convent. His house was built alongside, one of the long, thin townhouses pressed against the narrow street. Hester had feared that Frances would be unhappy without a garden, with little more than a dozen pots in the cobbled yard at the back which was overshadowed half the day from the stacks of wood in the timber yard next door. But already the house was draped in climbing roses and honeysuckle was
growing up to the very windows, and every window had a bracket fixed outside and a square planting box nailed to the wall with a row of tulips waiting to bloom.
‘I’d have no trouble guessing which house was hers,’ John said grimly, glancing down the street at the other bare-fronted, bare-faced houses.
‘That’s nothing,’ Johnnie said with pleasure. ‘She has a herb garden out the back and an apple tree squashed against the back wall. She says she’ll prune it to keep it small enough. She says she’ll re-pot it every year and prune the roots too.’
John shook his head. ‘She needs a dwarf apple tree,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if one could graft an apple sapling on to a shrub root it might grow small …’
Hester stepped forwards and knocked on the door. At once Frances opened it. ‘Father!’ she said, and slipped down the step, threw her arms around him and laid her head against his shoulder.
John almost recoiled from her touch. In the three years he had been away she had grown from a girl to a woman of nearly eighteen years, and now, with her slight body pressed against him, he could feel the hard swelling of her baby.
He stepped back to see her and his face softened. ‘You’re so like your mother,’ he exclaimed. ‘What a beauty you’ve become, Frances.’
‘She’s the very picture of my Jane.’ Mrs Hurte emerged from the house and shook John and then Hester by the hand. She enveloped Johnnie in a breathtaking embrace but never stopped talking. ‘The very picture of her. Every time I see her I think she has come back to us again.’
‘Come inside,’ Frances urged. ‘You must be frozen. Did you shoot the bridge?’
‘Father wouldn’t let Mother come.’
Frances shot a brief approving look at her father. ‘Quite right. Why should Mother risk drowning because you like it?’
‘She likes it!’ Johnnie protested.
‘I swear I never said so,’ Hester remarked.
Mrs Hurte surged outwards rather than into the house, took John by the arm and drew him aside. Hester silently admired the tactical skill of her stepdaughter. This was generalship as gifted as Oliver Cromwell’s with his New Model Army. Mrs Hurte would change John’s mind in favour of the match in two sentences of complaints. Both Hester and Frances strained their ears to hear her do it.
‘You’re home too late,’ Mrs Hurte said reproachfully to John. ‘This is a bad business, and you too late to prevent it.’
‘I don’t see that it is bad,’ John remarked.
‘A man of fifty-six and a girl of seventeen?’ Mrs Hurte demanded. ‘What life can they have together?’
‘A good one.’ John gestured to the pretty house and the tracery of carefully pruned rose branches. ‘A boy of her own age could not hope to give her so much.’
‘She should have been kept at her home.’
‘In these times?’ John asked. ‘Where safer than beside the Tower?’
‘And now expecting a baby?’
‘The older the bridegroom, the sooner the better,’ John rejoined swiftly. ‘Why should you be so against it, Mother? It was a marriage for love. Your own daughter Jane had nothing less.’
She bit her lip at that. ‘Jane brought a good dowry and you two were well matched,’ she said.
‘I will see that Frances is properly dowered when peace is restored and I can sell the Virginia plants and restore the rarities to their proper place,’ John said firmly. ‘I am trading in a small way with the West Indies and I expect to see a profit on that very soon. And Frances is well-matched. Alexander is a good and faithful friend to this family and she loves him. Why should she not marry the man of her choice in these times when men and women are making their own choices every day? When this whole war has been fought for men and women to be free?’
Mrs Hurte smoothed her sombre gown. ‘I don’t know what Mr Hurte would have said.’
John smiled. ‘He would have liked the house, and the business. Cooper for the ordnance in the middle of a war? Don’t tell me that he wouldn’t have loved that! Alexander is earning twelve pounds a year and that’s before he draws his allowances! It’s a fine match for the daughter of a man who has little to sell and most of his stock in hiding.’
Hester and Frances exchanged a hidden smile, turned and went into the house.
‘That was clever,’ Hester said approvingly to her stepdaughter.
Frances gave her a most unladylike wink. ‘I know,’ she said smugly.
Spring 1646
When the soil warmed in April and the daffodils came out in the orchard and the grass started growing and the boughs of the Tradescant trees were filled with birds singing, courting and nestbuilding, John strode round the brick chip paths in his new Papist boots and learned to love his garden again. He made a special corner for his Virginian plants and watched as the dried roots put up tiny green shoots and the unpromising dry seeds sprouted in their pots and could be transplanted.
‘Will they do well here?’ Johnnie asked. ‘Is it not too cold for them?’
John leaned on his spade and shook his head. ‘Virginia is a place of far greater extremes than here,’ he said. ‘Colder by far in winter, hotter in summer, and damp as a poultice for month after month in summer. I should think they will thrive here.’
‘And what will sell the best, d’you think?’ Johnnie asked eagerly. ‘And what is the finest?’
‘This.’ John leaned forwards and touched the opening leaves of a tiny plant. ‘This little aster.’
‘Such a small thing?’
‘It’s going to be a great joy for gardeners, this one.’
‘Why?’ Johnnie asked. ‘What’s it like?’
‘It stands tall, almost up to your waist, and white like a daisy against thick, dark leaves, a woody stem, and it grows in profusion. It’s a kind of shrubby starwort, like the aster from Holland. In Virginia I have seen a whole forest glade filled with them, like the whiteness of snow. And I once saw a woman plait the flowers into her black hair and I thought then it was the most beautiful little flower I had ever seen, like a brooch, like a jewel. I might name it for us, it’s just the sort of little beauty that your grandfather would have liked, and it will grow for anyone. He liked that in a plant. He always said that it was the hardy plants that gave the greatest joy.’
‘And trees?’ Johnnie prompted.
‘If it grows,’ John cautioned him. ‘This may be our finest tree from Virginia. It’s a maple tree, a Virginian maple. You can tap it for sugar, you put a cut in the trunk in springtime, when the sap starts rising, and the sap oozes a juice. You collect it and boil it down and it makes a coarse sugar. It’s a great delight, to set a little fire in the woods and boil down the syrup, all the children lick up the spills and run around with sticky faces and …’ He broke off, he couldn’t bear to tell his boy about the other – Suckahanna’s boy. ‘The leaves turn the deepest, finest scarlet in the autumn,’ he concluded.
‘And this is a trumpet vine. When I had my house I planted one at the side of my door. It grows as fast as wild honeysuckle, I should think it is up to my chimney pot by now. If it hasn’t pulled the whole house down. This I had on the other side of my doorway – the Virginian woodbine tree, like a honeysuckle. But best of all will be the tulip tree.’ John touched the saplings, which were planted against the shelter of the wall and were putting out glossy dark leaves at the tips of their branches. ‘Please God we can grow it here, it would be a fine thing to see in an English garden.’
‘Finer than our horse chestnut?’ Johnnie asked, naming the tree that would always be the Tradescant benchmark of beauty.
‘It is the only tree I have ever seen to match your grandfather’s horse chestnut. Truly, Johnnie, it is a most wonderful tree. If I can grow the tulip tree and sell it to the gardeners of England, as he grew the horse chestnut, then we will have done wonderful work, he and me.’
‘And what will there be left for me to do?’ Johnnie asked. ‘Since he went east to Russia and south to the Mediterranean and you have been west to America.
What will there be left for me?’
‘Oh,’ John said longingly. ‘So much still to see, Johnnie. You can’t imagine what a great country it is and how far the rivers run inland and how distant the mountains are and how wide the grass meadows stretch. And beyond the mountains they told me there are plains and meadows and forests and more mountains, and inland lakes of sweet water that are as big as the sea, so vast that they have storms which whip up the water into waves that crash on the shore. There will be so much for you to see when you are a man grown and ready to travel.’
‘And will you take me, if you go again?’ Johnnie asked.
Tradescant hesitated only for a moment, thinking of Attone and Suckahanna and that other, alien life. Then he looked at the bright face of his son and thought how proud he would be to show him to Attone and to say to him: ‘And this is my son.’ Johnnie was not a child of the Powhatan: a dark-eyed, brown-skinned boy of intense self-discipline and skill. But he was a child of equal beauty: an English boy, blond-headed, round-faced, and with a smile like sunlight.
‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘If I go again, I will take you too. It will be our adventure next time.’
‘We can go when the king has come to his own again,’ Johnnie said firmly.
‘Mmm.’ John was noncommittal.
‘You are for the king still?’ Johnnie pressed him. ‘I know you were away for most of the fighting but you were there when he raised his standard, and you are the king’s man, aren’t you, Father?’
John looked into the determined face of his son and dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s hard for me to say,’ he said. ‘I am the king’s man in the sense that my father was his gardener and I gardened for him too. I don’t forget that I have been in his service, or in the service of the court, for most of my life. But I never thought that he was perfect – not like some of the others, not like he would have had us think. I saw him make too many mistakes, I heard too much nonsense for that sort of faith. I thought he was a foolish man, sometimes wickedly foolish. So I don’t think him one step below God.’