He would have held her but she turned on him with a face of such fury that he recoiled. ‘Get away from me!’ she screamed at him. ‘D’you think I want to give it to you? D’you think I want to tear down this house which has been the joy of my life to build up?’
‘No …’ John stammered. ‘But Jane, I love you, I want to hold you …’
‘If I survive,’ she promised, her face softening, ‘then we will spend weeks in each other’s arms. I swear it, John. I love you. But if I die you are not even to touch me. You are to order them to bolt down the coffin and not even to look at me.’
‘I can’t bear it!’ he cried suddenly. ‘This can’t happen to us!’
Jane opened the door and called down the stairs. ‘Sally! Make up a bed for me in the orangery, and put all my clothes in there.’
‘If I take it, I will join you,’ John said. ‘And we will be together then.’
She turned her determined face to him. ‘You will not take it,’ she said passionately. ‘You will live to care for Baby John, and for Frances, and for the trees and the gardens. Even if I die there is still Baby John to carry your name, and the trees and the gardens.’
‘Jane –’ It was a low cry, like a hurt animal’s.
She did not soften for a moment. ‘Keep my children from me,’ she ordered harshly. ‘If you love me at all. Keep them from me.’
And she turned, gathered up all the clothes she had brought from the city, went down the stairs into the new-built orangery, lay down on the pallet bed which the maid had thrown on the floor, and looked up to where the warm summer moonlight poured in the little window in the wooden wall, and wondered if she would die.
On the fourth day Jane found swollen lumps under her arms, and she could not remember where she was. She had a lucid interval at midday and when John came to speak to her from the doorway, behind the wall of candleflame, she told him to put a lock on the door so that she could not come out looking for Baby John, when she was out of her mind with the fever.
On the fifth day a message came from her mother to say that one of the apprentices had taken the plague and that Jane should burn everything she had worn or brought from her visit. They sent back the messenger with the news that the warning came too late, that already there was a white cross on the front door, and a warden standing outside to make sure that no-one left the house to spread the plague in Lambeth. All the goods and groceries, and even the new rarities, were left on the little bridge which led from the road to the house, and all the money was left in a bowl of vinegar, to wash the coins clean. No-one would go near the Tradescants’ door until they were all recovered or dead. The parish wardens were legally bound to make sure that any plague victims were isolated in their houses until they were proven to be dead or proven to be clean, and no-one – not even the Tradescants with their fine business and their royal connections – could escape the ruling.
On the sixth day of her illness Jane did not tap on the door to have it unlocked in the morning. When John opened it and looked in, she was lying on the bed, her hair tumbled all over her pillow, her face thin and ghastly. When she saw him peering in she tried to smile, but her lips were too cracked and sore from fever.
‘Pray for me,’ she said. ‘And don’t take the plague, John. Keep Baby John safe. Is he still well?’
‘He’s well,’ John said. He did not tell her that her little son was crying and crying for her.
‘And Frances?’
‘No signs of it.’
‘And you, and Father?’
‘No-one in the house seems to have it. But they have it in Lambeth. We’re not the only house with a white cross on the door. It’s going to be a bad year, this year.’
‘Did I bring it?’ she asked painfully. ‘Did I bring the plague to Lambeth? Did it follow me over the river?’
‘It was here before you came home,’ he reassured her. ‘Don’t blame yourself for it. Someone had it and tried to conceal it. It has been here for weeks and no-one knew.’
‘God help them,’ she whispered. ‘God help me. Bury me deep, John. And pray for my soul.’
Impulsively, he stepped over the candles and came into the room. At once she reared up in her bed. ‘Do you want me to die in despair?’ she demanded.
He checked and walked backwards, as if she were the queen herself. ‘I want to hold you,’ he said pitifully. ‘I want to hold you, Jane, I want to hold you to my heart.’
For a moment her gaunt strained face, lit by the dozen golden candleflames, was suddenly soft and young, as it had been when she had sold him inch after inch of ribbons in the mercer’s shop and he had called again and again on one pretext after another.
‘Hold me in your heart,’ she whispered. ‘And care for my children.’
She lay back on the pillows as John stepped over the wall of candleflames and hunkered down on the threshold.
‘I shall stay here,’ he said determinedly.
‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘Have you a pomander?’
‘A pomander, and I am sitting in a sea of strewing herbs,’ John said.
‘Stay then,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to die alone. But if I am feverish and wandering and start to come to you, you must slam the door in my face and lock it.’
He looked at her through the haze of the heat of the candles, and his face was nearly as haggard as her own. ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I won’t be able to do that.’
‘Promise me,’ she demanded. ‘It’s the last thing I will ever ask of you.’
He closed his eyes for a moment, to find his resolution. ‘I promise,’ he said eventually. ‘I will not touch you, I will come no closer. But I will be here for you. Just outside the door.’
‘That’s what I want,’ she said.
At midnight Jane grew feverish and tossed on the pillow and cried out against heretics and Popery and the Devil and the queen. At three in the morning she grew quiet and he could see her shivering, and yet he could not go in and put a shawl around her shoulders. At four she grew quiet and at peace, and at five she suddenly said, as simply as a child: ‘Goodnight, my dear,’ and fell asleep.
When dawn came and the sun rose warm on the apple blossoms at six, she did not wake.
Summer 1635
There was a brief unhappy argument about how Jane was to be buried. The parish authorities, responsible for the impossible task of trying to contain the plague, sent an order that the cart would come for her at midnight and her body was to be loaded on it by her family, who must then lock themselves indoors for another week until they were proved to be free of the disease.
‘I won’t do it,’ J said briefly to his father. ‘I won’t send her into the plague pit in a sack of hessian. They can order all they like. They’re not going to come in the house to fetch her, they’re too afraid for their own skins.’
John hesitated, thinking to argue.
‘I won’t,’ J said fiercely. ‘She’s to be buried with honour.’
John spoke to the church warden, who kept a careful distance on the other side of the little bridge that spanned the roadside ditch. The man was reluctant, but John was persuasive. A small heavy purse was tossed from one side to the other and the next day a lead-lined coffin was delivered to the bridge. A week later, when the Tradescant family and servants were thought to be safe to go out again, the funeral was planned. Jane’s cause of death would not be entered as plague but as the more neutral word ‘fever’, and she would be buried, as J insisted, in the family plot.
The Hurtes came to Lambeth from the city, with their own midwife to lay her out. She was an ancient woman, her face pocked with the scars of old plague sores. She said that she had taken the disease when she was a girl and had survived it, that the Lord of Hosts had saved her for the godly work of laying out the wealthy dead and nursing the few survivors.
‘But why should He save you and not Jane?’ J asked simply, and left her to the task of putting Jane in her special lead-lined coffin.
The Hurtes h
ad wanted to take her to be buried in the graveyard near their chapel in the city but J forced himself to argue with them, and see that his wish was carried out. Jane should be buried at St Mary’s, Lambeth, where her children would go past her grave twice every Sunday. J felt as though he were wading through a thick sea of distress and that if he paused for a moment the waves of grief would wash into his face and drown him completely.
In the end the funeral was an ornate affair with half of Lambeth turning out to honour the young Mrs Tradescant’s passing. J, deep in unhappiness, begrudged everyone else’s grief as if only he could know what it was to love Jane Tradescant and then to lose her; but it comforted John. ‘She was very well-loved,’ he said. ‘She lived so quietly that I never knew she was so well-loved.’
Mrs Hurte took J to one side when the funeral was over and offered to take the two children back with them to the city.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘You cannot care for them here,’ she argued.
‘I can,’ J replied. Even his voice was different: taut and colourless. ‘My father and I can care for them here, I will find a good woman to be a housekeeper for us all.’
‘But I should be like a mother to them,’ Mrs Hurte said.
J shook his head. ‘Baby John will stay here with me,’ he said. ‘And Frances could not bear to live anywhere but here. She loves her grandfather, she is never out of his sight. And she loves the garden and orchard. She would pine to death in the city.’
Mrs Hurte would have argued but J’s pale tight face prohibited any further talk. ‘I will expect you for her memorial service in our chapel. We can pray for guidance, then.’
He helped her on to the box seat beside the driver. ‘I won’t come,’ he said. ‘She made me swear not to go into the city in the plague months. She was desperate that we would not bring it to the children. I promised her I would care for them here and if the plague comes any closer I would take them to Oatlands.’
‘You won’t come to see her father preach her memorial sermon?’ Mrs Hurte exclaimed, scandalised. ‘But surely it would be such a comfort for you!’
J looked up at her on the wagon seat above him and his face was a white mask of pain. It was useless to tell this woman that his belief in God had gone in an instant, gone the moment he saw Jane throwing open the bedroom window, breathing the air and trying to rid the room of the imaginary smell of honeysuckle. ‘Nothing will comfort me,’ he said blankly. ‘Nothing will ever comfort me again.’
Instead, he sent flowers. He sent a great boatload of flowers down the river to the city; and the chapel was a garden of the striped white and red Rosamund roses that she had loved so much. On the day of the memorial service J worked in the garden at Lambeth, pricking out seedlings and watering them with a quiet determination, as if he would deny that his wife’s soul was being prayed for that day; as if he would deny his grief itself. At midday the bell of St Mary’s Lambeth tolled thirty-one times – one for each year of her short life – and J uncovered his head to the hot sun and listened to the slow clear sound of the bell, then he went back to his work separating the long silky stems of the seedlings and bedding them soft in the soil, as if only in the seed bed could he escape the memory of her dying, just out of his reach, and forbidding him to come any closer.
They dined as usual that night and John waited for his son to speak, but J said nothing. It was left to John to lead the prayers of the household. He did not have Jane’s easy gift for addressing the Almighty as if He were a benevolent friend of the family. Instead he read the service for Evening Prayer from the King James Bible, and when the kitchen maid was disposed to speak out and give witness he shot her a sharp discouraging look from under his grey eyebrows and she fell silent.
‘Perhaps you should lead the prayers,’ John remarked to J after a week of this. ‘I have not the knack for it.’
‘I’ve nothing to say to such a God,’ J said shortly, and left the room.
1636
In January, during the most difficult time for a gardener who lives off his plants, and the most frustrating time for a man who is only happy with his hands in the loam, the Tradescant luck turned. They were offered the work of the Oxford physic garden, a wonderful compact garden lying alongside the Isis, to grow herbs for the faculty of medicine at the university.
‘You go and see what is needed,’ John said, watching his son’s face which had grown leaner and harder in the long cold months of winter. ‘They’re paying us fifty pounds a year and we have made next to nothing on the Ark this season. Go and see what work needs doing and take it in hand, J. I cannot go to Oxford in mid-winter, the cold will get into my bones.’
John had hoped that the notorious rich hospitality of the town would divert J from the deep silence of his grief. But he came back within a month saying that there was only careful planting and thorough weeding needed. Lord Danby, who had gifted the garden to Magdalen College, had ordered a wall and a gatehouse built, and protection from the winter-flooding river.
‘Nothing needs doing,’ J said when he was home again. ‘I’ll grow some extra herbs to stock it in the spring, and I’ve appointed a couple of weeding girls.’
‘Pretty ones?’ John asked carelessly.
J looked grim. ‘I didn’t notice,’ he said.
In February a man came to the door bearing an earthenware pot with the tips of green bulbs showing.
‘What’s this?’ J asked, hiding his weariness.
‘I need to see John Tradescant,’ the man said eagerly. ‘Himself and no other.’
‘I am John Tradescant the younger,’ J told him, only too well aware that that would not be enough.
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘So it’s your father I want.’
‘Wait here,’ J said shortly and went to find his father. John was in the rarities room, enjoying the warmth from the fire, moving from cabinet to cabinet, admiring the precious things.
‘There’s a man at the door with a bulb in a pot,’ J reported. ‘Will only speak to you. I s’pose it’s a tulip.’
John turned at the word ‘tulip’. ‘I’ll come at once.’
The man was waiting in the hall. John drew him into the front room, J following, and they closed the door.
‘What d’you have for me?’
‘A Semper Augustus,’ the man said softly. From the depths of his pocket he produced a letter. ‘This attests to it.’
‘D’you think we’re fools?’ J demanded. ‘Where would you get a Semper Augustus from? How would they ever let it out of the country?’
The man looked shifty. ‘This attests to it,’ he repeated. ‘A letter for you alone, signed Van Meer.’
John broke the seal and read. He nodded at J. ‘It does,’ he said. ‘He swears to me that there is a bulb in that pot from the original Semper Augustus. How did it come to your hands?’
‘I’m merely the courier, master,’ the man said uncomfortably. ‘There was a bankruptcy in a house. Whose house need not concern you. The bailiffs took goods, but there was a man who did not know his job and did not spot the bulbs.’ He gave a sly smile. ‘I heard the mistress bundled them into a crock with a string of onions. So here they are, available for sale. The bankrupt gentleman, whose name we don’t mention, wanted them offered out of Holland. He thought of you and commissioned me to bring them to you. Cash,’ he added.
‘We’ll pay when we see the blooms and not before,’ J said.
‘The letter certifies them,’ the man said. ‘And I have orders to give you only a day to decide and then take them elsewhere. There are other great gardeners in England, gentlemen.’
‘They are all friends of ours,’ J growled. ‘And if I think this is an onion, they will think so too.’
The man smiled. He was completely confident. ‘It is no onion. But if you spread it on your bread it will be the most expensive dinner you have ever eaten.’
‘May I take it from the pot?’ John asked.
The man flinched a little, and it was that whic
h convinced J as much as anything that the bulb was indeed the priceless Semper.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But have a care … I’d let no other man disturb it.’
John upturned the pot and tapped it hard. Earth, wiry tangled white roots and bulb slid out into his hand, scattering the soft soil on the floor. It was unquestionably a tulip bulb. John’s rough hand caressed the smooth nut-brown papery skin, admired the perfect roundness of the bulb. The shoots at the top were strong and green, the bulb was growing away. There would be good leaves and no reason not to hope for good blooms. Of course he could not tell the colour of the flower from the skin of the bulb, but the letter attested the bulb as a Semper Augustus, Van Meer was a trustworthy trader, and the story of the bankruptcy and the bailiffs coming in was a not uncommon one in Holland now, where bulbs were changing hands a dozen times in a day, and where prices were soaring again.
Best of all, there was a little bump on the side of the bulb. It could be a little mis-shape, or it could be the start of a bulblet which would grow through the summer and by autumn would be a new bulb of its own – a profit of one hundred per cent from the labour of leaving a bulb in the earth.
John showed it to J, his finger smoothing over the lump, and then carefully repotted it.
J drew him to the window bay, out of earshot of the waiting man.
‘It could be anything,’ he warned. ‘It could be one of a dozen we already grow.’
‘Yes. But the letter looks genuine, that is Van Meer’s seal, and the story is likely. If it is indeed a Semper then there is a fortune sitting in that pot, J. Did you see the lump on the side? We could double our money on the mother bulb in a year and then quadruple it with two where we once had one.’
‘Or we could grow a red tulip and we have fifty already.’
‘I think we should risk it,’ John said. ‘There’s a fortune to be gained here, J.’
John turned towards the man. ‘How much do you want for it?’