He did not answer her but walked with that same bent-headed trudge round to the stable yard. Hester and Mary heard him shout for the lad and they waited in absolute silence as the two of them walked back down the avenue. John was carrying a long pole, his pruning hook. The lad was carrying a net which they usually used for securing pots in the cart, and a coil of rope.
Mary Ashmole reached out and took Hester’s icy hand. ‘Be brave, my dear,’ she said inadequately.
John marched to the lake as if he were about to undertake a disagreeable but essential garden chore, like hedging or ditching. The garden lad stole one swift glance at his stern profile and said nothing.
John walked to the edge of the landing stage and stretched out with the pruning hook. The blade just reached the painter as it trailed in the water and on the second try he could draw it in towards him.
‘Wait here,’ he said to the lad, and stepped into the boat. He rowed out towards the middle of the lake and then shipped the oars and peered downwards. Gently, with meticulous care, he reversed the pruning hook and lowered it into the water, probing with the handle. When he found nothing he rowed one stroke to the side and repeated the whole process in a widening circle.
The lad, who had been gripped by the horror of this task, found that he was getting bored and started to fidget, but nothing could break John’s intense concentration. He was not thinking of what he might find. He was not even thinking of what he was doing. He just completed each circle and then went a little wider as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise, like a Papist telling her beads, as if it had to be done to ward off some evil. As if it were meaningless in itself, but should be done as a prevention.
Again and again he rowed another stroke and then probed gently into the dark water. In the back of his mind was a thought of how Johnnie was probably already home after a night’s roistering in the City, or a message would soon come from his sister’s house saying that he had decided to make a sudden visit, or he would reappear with an old comrade from the defeated Worcester army. There were so many other explanations more likely than this one that John worked the water of the lake without allowing himself to think what he was doing, divorced from worry, almost enjoying the paddle with the oars and the movement of the wet-handled pole in the water.
When he felt something under the gentle probe of the pole he had a moment of mild regret that now he had to interrupt himself, that now he had a different task to do. Gently, with infinite care, he probed again and felt the object roll and move.
‘Bundle of rags,’ he whispered to himself, trying to guess at the dimension and weight. ‘Hidden household goods,’ he assured himself.
He turned to look for the stable lad. ‘Throw me the rope,’ he said, his voice steady and unshaken.
The lad, who had slumped on the landing stage, got to his feet and inexpertly tried to throw the rope to John. The first attempt fell in the water and splashed John, and the second attempt slapped him with a wet coil.
‘Dolt,’ John said and enjoyed the normality of the incompetence of the lad. ‘Fool.’
He fastened the rope to the ring at the front of the boat. ‘When I give the word, you gently pull me in,’ he ordered.
The lad nodded, and took a grip on the line.
John pulled the pole out of the water and brought up the pruning hook. He took his leather gauntlet from the big pocket of his coat and pulled it over the sharp blade. Then he plunged the pole back into the water with the shielded hook first. It snagged against the object, lost its grip, and then caught.
‘Now,’ John called to the lad. ‘But steady.’
The lad was so afraid of doing wrong that he started to pull too lightly. For a moment nothing happened at all, then the little boat started to glide back to the landing stage and John felt the weight of the drowned object on the end of his pole. Gently, smoothly, the boat bobbed towards the landing stage, John gripping the pole and waiting to see the object revealed in the shallow water.
He saw first a coat, rendered uniformly black by waterlogging, then Johnnie’s white shirt and then his pale, pale face, his open dark eyes, and the swirl and eddy of his fair hair.
‘Stop,’ John said hoarsely.
At once the lad halted.
The boat rocked, the current of movement which had washed Johnnie up to the surface slipped away and his face sunk out of sight again. For a moment John thought that he could order the world to stop, right there; just as he could command the gardener’s lad and then nothing that must follow would need to take place. He could say ‘stop’ and there would be no drowned child, no heartbreak, no end to the Tradescant line, no silence where Johnnie should have been singing, no terrible gulf where the young man should have been.
John waited for a long moment, trying to understand the reality and then the awful yawning enormity of his loss. The first step in his grief was the realisation that he could not measure it. His loss was too great for him to imagine.
The lad holding the rope stood like a statue, a dragonfly whirred noisily over the surface of the water and settled for a moment.
‘Go on then,’ John whispered as if this were not his work but he was obeying someone else. ‘All right. Go on.’
The lad put his weight on the rope and once again the boat glided towards the landing stage, towing its dreadful freight behind it. At the landing stage when it stopped with a bump, John said gently, ‘Tie it fast,’ and waited until the lad had done as he was told.
‘Take the pole,’ John said, proffering it, and when the lad had gripped one end of it, John stepped from the boat into the waist-deep water, felt his way along to the other end and gathered the body of his only son into his arms.
‘Step aside and wait,’ he said softly to the stable lad. The boy dragged his horrified stare from the waterlogged body and then obediently fled to the shelter of the apple tree where the wasps were feeding drunkenly on fallen fruit.
John waded for the shore, the weight of Johnnie making him stagger as they got clear of the water. He fell to his knees and cradled the white face in his arms and looked down into the sightless eyes and the pale lips.
‘My Johnnie,’ he whispered. ‘My boy.’
They sat together for a long time before John remembered that Hester would be waiting in painful anxiety and that there was much work for him to do.
He laid out the body and draped his jacket over his son’s face.
‘Watch by him,’ he said simply to the stable lad. ‘I’ll come back with the cart.’
Slowly he walked along the grassy ride and then turned up the main avenue to the house. He could see Hester pacing on the terrace but when she saw him and took in the slump of his shoulders and his wet clothing, and his missing jacket, she froze very still.
John walked towards her, his face numb, his voice lost, then he cleared his throat and said quietly, conversationally, ‘I found him. He’s drowned. I’m fetching the cart now.’
She nodded, as calm as he, and Mary Ashmole, watching the two of them, thought them completely insensible, thought that they could not have loved their son at all to be so indifferent to his death.
‘I thought so,’ Hester said gently. ‘I knew as soon as I saw the boat, just as you did. I’ll ready the parlour for him.’ She paused. ‘No. He should lie in the rarities room. He was the most precious thing this house ever had.’
John nodded and went with that strange, slow plod round to the stables where, for a fancy, he did not harness the workhorse, but he took Caesar out of his stable and put him between the shafts of the cart to bring his master home.
They buried him beside his grandfather and his mother at St Mary’s, Lambeth. The new vicar was kind enough not to ask how a fit young man came to drown while boating on his own lake. It was assumed that Johnnie had been drunk, or had hit his head as he fell from the boat. Only John knew that the boat had not been overturned but had been floating peacefully with the oars shipped. Only John knew that his son’s pockets had been filled with
broken pieces of flower pots. Only Hester knew that Johnnie had believed that there was no place for the king’s gardeners in England any more. But they neither of them told the other these insights. They both thought that the other had pain enough.
Spring 1653
They could not easily recover. No family can ever fully recover from the loss of a child, and this was a child who had survived infancy during plague years, a childhood during the king’s wars, two dangerous battles, and then died when the country was at peace. For a little while they were like lost people, they greeted each other at mealtimes and they went to church together, past the beautifully carved tombstone for John’s father and the little crosses which marked Johnnie’s and his mother’s graves, and they spoke hardly at all.
The meetings of the philosophers and scientists which had made the Ark the centre of intellectual life were broken up and moved elsewhere. John found he could not concentrate on any argument for more than a few moments, and anyway everything seemed meaningless.
Even the uproar which greeted the end of the long Parliament and Cromwell’s sudden decision to make a parliament of saints, nominated good men of recognised opinions and sanctity who would bring about the changes which the country so badly needed, failed to raise John from his passive dreaming.
Lord Lambert came to order new tulips in the spring and told John that a new day was dawning for England where there would be the right of every man to vote for his parliament, the legal system would be reformed to make it more just, the poor would be supported and no more landlords would be allowed to enclose the commons and drive squatters and poor people on to the streets. He broke off in the middle of his explanation and said: ‘Forgive me, Mr Tradescant. Are you ill?’
‘I have lost my son,’ John said quietly. ‘And nothing matters to me any more. Not even the new Parliament.’
Lord Lambert was stunned for a moment. ‘Johnnie? I did not know! What happened?’
‘He drowned in our little lake,’ John said, speaking the words for what seemed like the thousandth time. ‘It was the night you came to dinner.’
Lambert checked. ‘When he was so distressed that I had bought Wimbledon?’
John nodded. ‘It was that night.’
John Lambert looked stricken. ‘Not because of what he said! He didn’t drown because of that?’
John shook his head. ‘Because he knew his cause was lost. If it had not been that night it would have been another. He couldn’t see a way to live in the world that Cromwell and you and I have made. He wanted to be a king’s gardener, he could not hear that kings are no good. Johnnie couldn’t see it. And I failed to teach him.’ John paused for a moment at the pointlessness of regrets. ‘I have always been a man of few certainties. So when my son was convinced of a mistake I couldn’t correct him. He put his faith in the most foolish prince, the son of a most foolish king. And I couldn’t tell him that when you are in the service of a king one of the first things you learn is to not take him too seriously, not to love him too dearly. Johnnie was too close to the king’s service, and yet not close enough to see it for what it was.’
He glanced at Lambert. The general was listening intently. He managed a little smile. ‘These are private griefs,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to burden you with them, my lord. Do look around the garden, and anything you desire you can order. Joseph will take the order, my wife is not in the house today.’
‘Will you tell her how sorry I am?’ Lambert asked, going towards the door to the garden. ‘Tell her I am deeply, deeply sorry for your loss. He was a fine young man. He deserved a better cause.’
‘He was, wasn’t he?’ John said, his expression lightening for a moment.
Lambert nodded and went quietly out to the garden to look around at the avenue of horse chestnuts and the beds of exquisite tulips and wondered if they would ever give John any joy ever again, now there was no Tradescant to follow him in the garden.
Winter 1654
The new parliament was short-lived. Its programme of social justice was too radical for the temper of many of the men of influence whose chief hopes of reform had been for a fat slice of the king’s wealth and power, and had never gone as far as the soldiers of the army who had fought for an end to greed and tyranny and who truly thought that a new world could be born out of their battles.
When Cromwell saw that he had tried a parliament of selected good men who would have imposed justice on a country too sluggish to become saintly, and then tried a parliament chosen by the voters which could not rise above self-interest, something of the joy went out of him. He took the title of Lord Protector and took the burden of power in a mood of frustration and disappointment and never again thought that he might see the new Jerusalem in London.
‘I don’t know what the fighting was for if we merely exchanged a king for a Lord Protector,’ John said wearily to Hester as they sat at dinner.
‘No,’ she said quietly.
They sat in the silence which was a constant presence at their table now; it was as if without Johnnie to plan for, there was no business to discuss. The takings at the door were good, the order books were filled. But Hester had withdrawn from much of the business and had lost interest in the garden. She never complained, but she felt as if she had been struggling too hard for too long and that, as it turned out, it had all been for nothing.
‘I have been thinking about Virginia,’ John said tentatively. ‘Bertram Hobert, my old friend from over there, came to see me today.’
Hester raised her head. ‘Hobert who nearly died there?’
John nodded. ‘He finally brought off a good crop of tobacco and came home to sell it. By making the voyage with his wife he gets another two headrights for free and he wants to make his plantation bigger. He’s hired some labourers to take with him and he gets their headrights too. He’s full of confidence. He is going back again with the Austin family and they have spare places on their ship.’
John paused. ‘I wondered if you would like to come with me, to Virginia. You could see our land, you might be interested in that, and by travelling together we would claim another two headrights. We could sell them, or find someone to farm them for us, or you might like to build a house and settle there. Jamestown is bound to be much improved since my first visit and now –’ He broke off.
He had been about to say, ‘Now there is nothing to keep us here’ – but he did not need to say it. Hester, of all people, knew that there was nothing left in Lambeth but the rarities and the plants.
‘What about that woman, the woman you left there?’ she asked flatly.
He bowed his head. ‘I will never see her again,’ he said. It did not have the ring of a promise of a reformed man, his voice had the finality of a man who knows when something is over. ‘She will be with her people, and I will be with mine. The time of the Powhatan dealing kindly with the planters is long gone.’
Hester thought for a moment. ‘Who would keep this place safe while we are gone?’
‘Elias Ashmole would be glad enough to live here for a while,’ John pointed out. ‘He has promised to help make a catalogue of the rarities collection and he has a great interest in the garden.’
Hester made a little face. ‘What if something happens?’ she asked.
‘He could manage. He’s a worldly man, he’s managed bigger estates than this little place.’
‘Why would he be so helpful?’ she asked baldly. ‘Why serve us in such a way?’
‘He likes the rarities, he likes the garden,’ John said. ‘He can do his studies here in alchemy and astronomy. He can use my herbs for his medicines.’
‘I like his wife Mary better than I like him,’ Hester said irrelevantly. ‘And she has been very badly treated by him. She told me that he abused her and now they are separated he won’t give her any money for her keep. And it was all her money in the first place. He had nothing when he came to advise her, and now her fortune is his.’
John shook his head. ‘He’s a lawyer by training
,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised he gives nothing away. He’d make a bad enemy but he’s a good friend to us. He would guard this place for us while we were gone.’
She thought for a moment. ‘No,’ she said reluctantly. ‘He would manage well enough if nothing happened. But if there was a fire or another war or an uprising he would never care for the things as we would. Mr Ashmole would think of his own safety before the collection.’
‘We could box it all up and store it,’ John objected.
‘Not again,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear it. And even if we did, what about the garden?’
‘I do really want to go,’ John said. ‘I am so weary of this house without our boy, and I miss him in the garden. I hate the lake, I can’t go down to that end of the orchard at all, and I can’t find the energy to weed and plant and prune and pot on. In every part of the garden I come across tasks which I would give to him to do, or where he was especially skilled. Half of the plants are his plants, nursed up by him while I was away. It’s as if I meet him everywhere.’
Hester nodded. ‘That’s why I’ll stay,’ she said quietly. ‘Because I too feel that I meet him everywhere, and here I can guard the things he loved and watch the things he planted grow tall and beautiful, and it’s as if he is still here.’
John raised an eyebrow. ‘Shall I go alone? Would you want that?’
She met the little challenge. ‘Will you come back again?’
‘Yes. There’s no life for me there. But I could bring back some new rarities, there is so much more to discover.’
‘I will wait for you,’ she promised. ‘And keep the rarities and the garden safe for you.’
He bowed his head and kissed her hand as it rested on the table. ‘You will not blame me for leaving you to your grief?’
She touched his head with her other hand like a blessing. ‘I would want it,’ she said simply. ‘I should like to spend a little time alone. Perhaps I will become accustomed to being without him, if I have a little time alone.’