Virgin Earth

  ‘But still the king,’ Johnnie persisted.

  John nodded, resigned. ‘Still the king.’

  ‘If he sent for you, would you go?’

  ‘If he sent for me, I would have to go. I would be bound by honour and duty to go if he sent for me by name.’

  ‘Would you take me?’

  John hesitated for a moment. ‘It’s a burden I’d rather not lay on you, my son. If he does not have command of the gardens of the royal palaces then there is no need for you to call him master.’

  Johnnie’s conviction blazed out of his brown eyes. ‘But I long to call him master,’ he said. ‘If I had been there when he raised his standard I would never have left his side. I’m so afraid it will be all over before I can go into his service, and I’ll have missed it all.’

  John gave a gruff bark of laughter. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I can see you would fear missing it all.’

  That night John put his head around the door of Hester’s bedroom to see his wife, kneeling at the foot of her bed. He waited in silence till she rose to her feet and noticed him, standing in the doorway.

  ‘I came to ask if I might sleep here.’

  She got into bed and held up the covers to him, grave-faced. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I am your wife.’

  John pulled the nightcap off his head and came into the room.

  ‘I don’t want you to have me in your bed as part of your duty,’ he said carefully.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I would want there to be warmth and tenderness between us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want you to forgive me for going away and leaving you alone and unprotected, and for being with another woman.’

  She hesitated. ‘Did you leave her of your own free will?’

  John could not find a simple answer. ‘She saved my life,’ he said. ‘I was starving in the forest and she took me to the Powhatan and they accepted me for her sake.’

  Hester nodded. ‘Did you leave her of your own free will? Did you choose to leave her and come home to me?’

  ‘Yes,’ John said. ‘Yes.’ The baldness of the lie dropped like a stone into the pool of candlelight by the bed.

  John got into bed beside Hester and took her hand. It was white-skinned after Suckahanna’s bronze, calloused by the work she had done for him in his house and in his garden. The backs of her hands were scratched, she had been tying back the climbing roses. John took her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one.

  With a sense of relief he felt desire slowly rising up. At least he would be able to do the physical act, even if his heart were not wholly present. He turned the palm of her hand over and planted a kiss in the middle.

  Hester put her hand on his shoulder and stroked the short hair at the nape of his neck.

  ‘Do you love her still?’

  He stole a quick glance at Hester’s face. She was intent, serious. She did not look enraged as she had every right to be. He risked telling her the truth. ‘Not as I love you; but it is true. I do love her.’

  ‘You have never loved me,’ she said steadily. ‘You married me as an act of convenience and sometimes I think you have felt gratitude or affection towards me. But it was not a marriage for love and I never pretended that it was.’

  Her honesty alarmed him. ‘Hester …’

  ‘I don’t want us to pretend,’ she said. ‘I would rather know the truth than live in a world of pretence.’

  ‘Do you want me to leave you?’

  ‘No!’ she said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean that at all.’

  ‘But you said …’

  She drew a breath. ‘I said that you married me for your convenience, to care for your children and to guard the rarities and the garden. But I married you because I needed a place to live, and a name, and also –’ She smiled at him, a friendly, shy smile. ‘I was in love with you, John. From the moment that you came home and I walked down the stairs and saw you.’

  He put his hand under her chin and turned her face to him. Her cheeks were pink with embarrassment but she met his eyes steadily with her direct, dark gaze.

  ‘And you forgive me?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘Since you came home to me – of course.’

  ‘And you love me still?’

  ‘Of course. Why should I change?’

  ‘Because I have wronged you.’

  ‘Are you home to stay?’ she asked with her usual practical directness.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Then I forgive you.’

  He paused for a moment. ‘Do you think we could start from the beginning again?’ he asked. ‘With your love for me and me learning to love you?’

  Her colour deepened and he saw the little white bow at the neck of her nightgown trembling as her breath came faster. ‘Do you think you could learn to love me?’

  John released her hands, put his lips against her throat and then gently untied the fluttering bow. ‘I know I could,’ he said; knowing at least that he hoped he might.

  At the end of April, Alexander Norman sent a note to the Ark.

  I write in haste to send you urgent news. The king has ridden off from Oxford and left the court there. No-one knows where he is bound but this must mean the end of the war. He has no more than a dozen gentlemen with him. He must be fleeing to join the queen in France. Thank God at last it is over.

  John took the note through to Hester and laid it down before her where she was working on the household accounts at the drawing desk in the bay of the Venetian windows in the rarities room.

  ‘So it is all over for him at last,’ he said.

  She glanced quickly up at him. ‘You must be glad that it has finished. Just think of getting the country back to normal.’

  ‘Normal!’ he exclaimed. ‘Who will be king if he is in exile? How will the country be run?’

  ‘By Parliament!’ she said impatiently. ‘I thought that was what they were fighting for!’

  ‘I can’t help but think of him, without the queen, riding out, knowing he has lost everything.’

  ‘Many other people have lost everything,’ Hester observed grimly. ‘And their sons and brothers and husbands too. Another two years of this and Johnnie would have gone. He’s been wild to die in the king’s service ever since the war started.’

  John nodded and turned to leave the room. ‘I just think of him,’ he said. ‘Riding out on his own. I hope to God he has someone with him who knows the way to Dover.’

  ‘Newark!’ John exclaimed and looked at Alexander Norman in complete disbelief. ‘What the devil is he doing in Newark? I thought he was going to France!’

  ‘He rode around,’ Alexander said. ‘You have to admire the style of it. He came within an hour’s ride of London and apparently thought of riding in to test the mood of the people.’

  John gasped in horror.

  ‘And then he rode to King’s Lynn, and then on northwards to Newark.’

  ‘What the devil is he doing?’

  ‘I think he didn’t know what to do,’ Alexander said. ‘I think he was riding and hoping that something would happen, a stroke of luck, the arrival of a French army or the Irish army or a sudden change of heart in Parliament. I think he was just spinning out the time before he surrendered.’

  John shook his head. ‘To the Scots?’ he said somberly.

  Alexander nodded. ‘To the Scots army at Newark.’

  ‘Does he think that they will treat him better than his own people?’ John demanded. ‘Does he think so little of Englishmen that he goes to the Scots who were the first to speak against bishops and the prayer book? Has he forgotten that his own father came south and never went back to Scotland willingly again? His own father said: “no bishops, no king”? And the Scots have never had bishops.’

  Frances, sitting by the fireside in the parlour of the Lambeth house sewing a little nightdress, lifted her head at her father’s distress. ‘If we can only have peace now.’

  ‘But what will they do with him?’ John as
ked. ‘They’ve been his enemies since the start of this. They must hand him over to Parliament at once, and then he is no better off than if he had come direct to London.’

  ‘He must be hoping that he can play them off against the English army and Parliament. If he is there in person, offering them the chance to conquer England, who can say which way they would go? They could fall in behind him and march on England with him as their figurehead. That must be his fondest dream.’ Alexander ticked off the options on his fingers. ‘Or they can set him up in Edinburgh as their king and not ours. Or they can help him get abroad and pretend they had nothing to do with it, so they don’t have his imprisonment on their hands.’

  ‘Or they can hold him as a pawn in their own game,’ John exclaimed. ‘Who is advising him? Who ever could have advised him to stroll around the kingdom and then go to the Scots in the end? What fools does he have at his side? Why is there no-one there thinking of his safety?’

  ‘I think he is trusting to luck,’ Alexander said. ‘And still, even now, who knows which way the luck will run?’

  When Alexander went back to the City he left Frances at her father’s house. The warmer weather had brought the plague into London again and there was talk of it being the worst for many years. The poorer people had gone without fuel and proper food through the hard winter, and when the warm plague winds blew they had no strength to fight the infection. Within months the plague carts were going up and down the narrow streets all night and the white crosses were appearing on door after door. Alexander could do nothing to protect himself but stay in his house and work in his yard, and ban his apprentices from going out as much as possible. But he would not expose Frances to infection.

  John found he was absurdly overanxious about his daughter. She looked so like her mother as she grew rounder and her face took on a glow as her pregnancy progressed. He did not want to speak of Jane to his second wife, and he did not want the shadow of her death to hang over the house. He took to spending long hours in the garden, not coming in until the slow early summer dusk, and he found that while he was digging, weeding, and transplanting the Virginian seedlings he was turning over in his mind the different sorts of love a man can have: for his work, for the girl he married for love, for the children she bore him, for the woman he married for convenience, and for the woman he loved hopelessly, helplessly, completely.

  He even acknowledged at last his love for the king, the foolish, selfish, intractable master who had so persistently known less and understood less than his servants. John had thought all the loves were threads which pulled him one way and another and would be, as Attone had warned him, a rope to trip him up. But as he walked back to his house past the tulip beds, and saw the shape of their cupped petals against the greater darkness of night, he thought that perhaps the threads could be the warp and woof that wove into the fabric of his life, and made him what he was, a man who had loved very deeply in different ways; and that the different loves were not a betrayal, but a richness.

  He was pinching out the buds on the cherry trees in the orchard one day in June when he saw Johnnie come flying out of the kitchen door, and rush to the stable. A moment later he was pulling the saddle horse out of the stall and jumping on her back, bare-back, and trotting out of the yard.

  ‘What is it?’ John shouted. He slid down the ladder and ran towards the house. ‘Is it Frances?’

  He ran into the kitchen and found the cook boiling a pan of water. ‘Is it Frances?’ he demanded.

  ‘She’s taken ill,’ the cook said. ‘Mrs Tradescant has put her to bed and sent Johnnie for the apothecary. Pray to God that it’s not the plague.’

  ‘Amen,’ John said and in the same breath: ‘Damn you for speaking such fears.’ He strode from the kitchen and ran up the stairs in his gardening boots, shedding mud on the polished wood treads. ‘Hester? Hester?’

  She came out of Frances’s room and he saw at once from her face that his daughter was gravely ill. ‘What is it?’ he demanded. ‘Not –’ He lowered his voice. ‘Not the plague?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She grew very hot and said she would like to rest, then she just fainted clean away.’

  He glanced superstitiously at the closed door. ‘Move her into our room,’ he said.

  ‘She’s in her own room, I don’t want to trouble her and move her,’ Hester said uncomprehendingly.

  He shifted from one foot to another, fearful of even saying the words. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Her mother took the plague in that room, it was our bedroom. She made me move her from there to the orangery and there she died. Please don’t let Frances be in that room.’

  Hester stepped towards him and took his dirty hands in her cool fingers. ‘John, these are old fears,’ she said. ‘This is Frances, not Jane. This is a fever, not the plague. She is a strong young woman and I will nurse her as well as I can. I won’t move her when she is comfortable in her own bed, and who better to watch over her from heaven than her own mother?’

  He hesitated for a moment. ‘Does she need anything?’

  Hester thought quickly for a task to keep John occupied and to give him a sense of purpose. ‘I need herbs,’ she said. ‘Feverfew and chamomile, and sweet cicely against infection. Can you pick them for me?’

  He nodded and went quickly towards the stairs.

  ‘And write a note and send it to Alexander,’ Hester said. ‘Don’t worry him too much, just tell him she has a fever, and she would like to see him, if he can come.’

  John paused, obedient as a frightened boy. ‘Herbs or letter first?’ he asked.

  ‘Letter,’ she said. ‘Then the herbs, and then why don’t you pot her up a couple of tulips? She’d like to see them.’

  ‘I’ll bring her up the Semper,’ John said, promising the best of them all. ‘The Semper Augustus.’

  Alexander came up the river at dawn the next day and had the boat set him down on the bank as near to the Ark as he could get. John saw him from the window in the stable yard, taking off his cape and his waistcoat and even his trousers and leaving them in the stable. He shouted for Joseph to work the pump, stripped off his shirt and washed under the stream of icy water before rubbing himself briskly dry with a sheet and pattering to the kitchen door all but naked.

  Cook let out a delighted little scream of shock but Alexander Norman paid no attention to her and walked past her to the hall.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said briefly to John. ‘But there is a lot of sickness in the City and I wanted to take no risk of bringing it to you here. Are you free of it in Lambeth?’

  ‘Half a dozen dead in the village this week,’ John said grimly. ‘I thank you for taking care. You can borrow a shirt and breeches of mine.’

  ‘Is she better?’ Alexander asked.

  John shook his head. ‘The fever grew worse overnight and Hester says she is still hot.’

  ‘But it isn’t …?’ Alexander could not bring himself to name the plague.

  ‘Hester says not.’

  The two men looked into each other’s anxious faces and for the first time since his return to England John knew the pleasure of finding a man who could understand what he was feeling. His own worry was graven deep into Alexander’s face. They both looked as if they had spent the night praying. He reached out his arms and Alexander gripped him tightly.

  ‘Please God it is not …’

  ‘Please God,’ John replied.

  ‘She is so precious to me …’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘I sent her away from the City the moment I thought there was a risk …’

  ‘It’s in Lambeth anyway. There is nowhere you could be sure that she would be safe.’

  ‘But not her …’

  ‘I feel so fearful,’ John said very low. ‘I think of her mother and her prettiness – and Frances is so like her – and I think that perhaps there is a weakness?’

  Alexander shook his head. ‘There’s no way of tracing where it comes from or who takes it,’ he said. ?
??That’s the very devil of it. You just don’t know. Is everyone else well? Johnnie? Hester?’

  ‘We’re all well,’ John said. ‘And God knows we would all willingly take it for her.’

  Alexander bowed his head for a moment. ‘D’you forgive me for marrying her?’ he asked irrelevantly.

  John gave a short laugh. ‘For everything she has ever done or ever can do, if only she will be well again,’ he said. ‘I knew I loved her but I never knew that the very thought of losing her would be like my own death to me.’

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘They’re both hanging on,’ John said. ‘Hester says that they are both hanging on.’

  There was nothing for the two men to do. A couple of times there was a knock at the door and John went to admit a visitor to the rarities room and one to walk around the garden; but the rest of the time he and Alexander sat in silence in the parlour, either side of the cold fireplace, straining to hear footsteps upstairs, waiting for news. Johnnie took up a position on the top of the stairs outside Frances’s room carving at a twig with his pocket knife. All the day, he sat like a little choirboy at a vigil, listening to the gentle murmur of talk and the irregular sigh of Frances’s breath.

  There was little Hester could do, though she never left Frances’s bedside. She sponged her forehead with vinegar and lavender water, she changed the sheets when they grew wet with sweat, she held her hand and spoke to her quietly and reassuringly when Frances tossed in fever-coloured nightmares, and she held her shoulders so that the young woman could sip a drink of cool well water.

  But when Frances dropped back on her pillows and lay still, and the flush died away from her cheeks and her skin grew waxy and pale, there was nothing Hester could do but sit at the head of the bed and pray that her stepdaughter would live.

  Hester watched all the night at the bedside and at three in the morning her head drooped and she slept. She was wakened only a few minutes later by a movement in the bed and she heard Frances say, ‘Oh Hester!’ in a tone of such sorrow that she was awake and on her feet as her eyes opened.