The man did not hesitate. ‘I have orders to take a thousand English pounds.’
J choked but John nodded. ‘Do your orders permit you to take some now and some when the bulb has bloomed? Any buyer would want to see the flower.’
‘I can take eight hundred now and a note of hand to be redeemed in May.’
J drew close to his father. ‘We cannot. We cannot lay our hands on such a sum.’
‘We’ll borrow,’ John said softly. ‘It’s half the price we’d have to pay in Amsterdam.’
‘But we’re not in Amsterdam,’ J argued urgently. ‘We don’t speculate in bulbs.’
But John was glowing with excitement, his eyes alight. ‘Think what the king will pay for a Semper!’ he said. ‘If it makes two bulbs instead of the one, think what profit we will make. We’ll take it back to Amsterdam and sell it, and we’ll make a fortune and our name as bulb growers. To sell a Semper grown in England on the Bourse itself!’
‘I don’t believe this,’ J muttered to himself. ‘We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel to meet the new tax, we missed two months of visitors in the summer because of the plague, and now we are staking eight years’ wages on one bulb?’
John turned to the man. ‘Here’s my hand on it,’ he said grandly. ‘I shall have the money for you tomorrow. Come back at noon.’
For the rest of the day the Tradescants, father and son, called in their debts all around the city, then moved on to favours owed them, and went frankly to the great men in the trading houses and borrowed money, offering the bulb as security and finally selling shares in it outright. Their name was so good and the desire to cash in on the Dutch speculation was so strong that they could have borrowed money against the bulb’s profits twice over. The hysteria in Holland had spread to the whole of Europe. Everyone wanted shares in tulips, the market for which had been rising for years and was rising in great leaps every day. John did not have to struggle to find shareholders in his bulb, he could have sold it outright by midday. By the time they met back at the Ark at dusk they had covered the loan.
John was triumphant. ‘I could have sold it over and over!’ he crowed. ‘This will make our fortune. I shall buy us a knighthood with this profit, J. Your son will be Sir Johnny on the wealth that we have made today!’
He broke off, seeing J’s solemn face and the heaviness of his eyelids. ‘Is it just that you have no zest for anything?’ John asked his son tenderly.
The young man’s face was bleak. ‘She has not been in her grave a year and we are speculating and gambling.’
‘We are trading,’ John said. ‘Jane had no objection to honest trade. She was a merchant’s daughter. She knew the value of profit. Her own father has taken a share in this venture.’
‘I think she would have called it gambling,’ J said. ‘But you are right – I have no zest for anything. It is the heaviness of my heart which makes me think this too great a risk for us, I suppose. Nothing more than that.’
‘Nothing more than that!’ John clapped his son on the back. ‘The profit from it will make your heart light,’ he promised.
They kept the bulb in the orangery, warm in the pale spring sunshine as it poured through the windows, but shaded from the midday sun so the leaves should not scorch. Every morning John watered it himself with tepid water spiced with his own mixture of stewed nettles and horse dung. The bulb put out fresh green leaves and then finally, from its secret heart, the pointed precious snout of a flower.
The whole household held its breath. Frances was in and out of the orangery every day watching for the green of the flower to blush into colour. John never passed the door without glancing in. Only J remained wrapped in his own darkness. He could not see the orangery as a place where their fortune was slowly blooming, he could not forget that Jane had lain there, and it seemed to him that nothing good could come out of that room, in the wake of her small lead-heavy coffin.
‘It’s white! It’s red and white!’ Frances exploded into her grandfather’s bedroom one morning while he was dressing.
‘The tulip?’
‘Yes! Yes! It’s red and white!’
‘A Semper Augustus!’ he crowed and, still half-dressed, grabbed her hand and ran down the stairs with her. At the door to the orangery they stopped, afraid to run towards the plant as if the very pounding of their feet on the bare boards could shake the colour from the petals.
The exquisite rounded perfect petals had blushed into colour in the dawn light, though they were still tightly closed together. They were clearly a deep blood-coloured crimson slashed like a silk doublet with white.
‘I have made my fortune,’ John said simply, looking at the miracle-flower on its slender wax-green stem. ‘This day I have made my fortune, Baby John will be a baronet, and none of us will ever work for another man again.’
They showed it in the rarities room, of course, as the most valuable tulip in the world. When the courier came for the rest of his money they had borrowed only two-thirds of it. The rest they had taken from visitors, flocking to see the priceless tulip.
When the queen at Oatlands heard of it she said she would buy it as it stood, in the pot, and J was about to name a figure which would cover their purchase price and give them a Christian profit of two per cent. But John was there to forestall him.
‘When the bulb is lifted, Your Majesty, we will be honoured to give it to you,’ he said grandly.
She beamed, she loved presents. John pulled J away before he could argue. ‘Trust me, J. We will plant up one of the bulblets for her and still have the mother bulb. And she will reward us later for our generosity. Don’t fear. She knows as well as I how these matters are gracefully done.’
They watched the flower open in its glorious blaze of colour and then become full-blown. ‘Can’t we keep the petals?’ Frances asked.
‘You can have the petals,’ John said. ‘Perhaps they will keep in sugar and sand in one of the rarities cases.’
Then in November, leaving it as late as possible to give the bulb the greatest chance to grow well, John, watched by J and Frances, tipped the pot and waited for their new wealth to spill out into his hands.
The priceless bulb had not one, not two, but three bulblets growing around the mother plant. ‘Praise God,’ John said devoutly.
With infinite care he took a sharp knife and cut them gently away from the mother bulb and placed them in their own little pots. ‘Four where there was one before,’ he said to J. ‘How can you call it usury when it is the richness of God himself who doubles and quadruples our wealth for us?’
One pot was assigned to the queen. John would keep one. And the remaining two he would send back to Holland in triumph, to Amsterdam in February in bulb-buying time, to make them the richest gardeners the world had ever known, to make them as rich as nabobs.
December 1636
They had a quiet Christmastide at the Ark that year. Jane had always been the one to decorate the house with holly and ivy and hang a kissing bunch of mistletoe over the front door. Neither J nor his father had the heart for it. They bought the children their presents for the twelve days of Christmas, gingerbread, candied fruit, a new gown for Frances and a book, beautifully engraved, for Johnny, but there was a terrible sense of going through the motions of present-giving and celebration. There was a dreadful hollowness at the heart of it where before there had been the unthinking spontaneity of joy.
On Christmas night the two men sat either side of the fire drinking mulled wine and cracking nuts. Frances, allowed to sit up late for the occasion, was between them, seated on a footstool, gazing unblinkingly into the flames, sipping hot milk as slowly as she dared to prolong the moment.
‘D’you think Mama wishes she was here?’ she asked her grandfather. John looked quickly over to J in time to catch his grimace of pain.
‘I am sure she does. But she is happy with the angels in heaven,’ he said.
‘D’you think she looks down on us and sees that I am being a good girl?’
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‘Yes,’ John said gruffly.
‘D’you think she would do a miracle, a little miracle, if I asked her?’
‘What miracle d’you want, Frances?’ John asked.
‘I want the king to understand that he should make me Father’s apprentice,’ Frances said, putting her hand on John’s knee and looking earnestly up at him. ‘I thought Mama could do a small miracle and open the king’s eyes to me. To my solid worth.’
John patted her hand. ‘You can always do your apprenticeship here,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to serve a master to be a great gardener. You don’t need the king’s recognition. I shall teach you the skills you need here, myself. I am aware of your solid worth, Frances.’
‘And I can garden here after you are gone? So that there is always a Tradescant’s Ark at Lambeth?’
John dropped his hand on her warm head and held it there, like a blessing. ‘A hundred years from now there will be a little bit of a Tradescant in every garden in England,’ he predicted. ‘The plants we have grown are already in bloom in every garden in the country. I’ve never sought for greater fame than that and I have been blessed with seeing it. But I should like to think of you gardening here after I am gone. Frances Tradescant, the gardener.’
1637
The courier did not even enter the house at Lambeth. He stood in the hall on a February morning with the dirt of the roads still thick on his boots, and he brought the two precious tulip pots out from under his cloak.
‘What’s this?’ John asked, astounded.
J, coming in from the garden, his fingers blue with cold, heard the fear in his father’s voice and ran quickly up the hall, tracking mud on the polished wooden floor.
‘Your bulbs, returned,’ the man said shortly.
There was a stunned silence.
‘Returned?’
‘The market has crashed,’ the man said. ‘The Bourse has closed down the trade in tulips. Men are hanging themselves in their rich houses and throwing their children into the canals to drown. The mania for tulips is over and everyone in Holland is ruined.’
John went white and staggered back. He fell into a chair. ‘Henrik Van Meer?’
‘Dead. By his own hand. His wife gone to relatives in France as a pauper with an apron full of tulip bulbs.’
J put his hand on his father’s shoulder. He had a sickly sense of his own fault for never speaking strongly against this passion for mingling plants and money. Now plants and money had split apart.
‘You warned me,’ John said softly to his son, his face shocked.
‘Not well enough,’ J replied bitterly. ‘I spoke as quiet as a child when I should have shouted like a man.’
‘Could you get nothing for them?’ John asked. ‘My Semper Augustus? I would take five hundred for each. I would take four.’
‘Nothing,’ the man said precisely. ‘People are cursing their very name. They are worthless. They are less than worthless because people do not even want to see them. They blame them for everything. They are saying that they will never grow tulips again in Holland. That they hate the very sight of them.’
‘This is madness,’ John said, struggling to smile. ‘These are the finest flowers that were ever grown. They cannot turn against them, just because the market has gone sour. There is nothing like a tulip –’
‘They never saw them as flowers,’ the courier explained patiently. ‘They saw them as wealth. And while everyone ran mad for them they were wealth itself. But the moment that people don’t want them, they are nothing more than bulbs which grow pretty flowers. I felt a fool carrying these around with me. I felt as foolish as if I were a madman carrying turnips and saying they were treasure.’
He dumped the two pots on the floor. ‘I’m sorry to bring you such bad news. But you should think yourself lucky that you have only two. The men who bought a dozen at the height of their fame are lying in the canals singing to the fish.’
He turned and went out, closing the door behind him. J and his father did not move. The beautiful tulip pots gleamed mockingly, reflected in the shine of the waxed floorboards.
‘Are we ruined?’ J demanded.
‘Please God, no.’
‘Will we lose the house?’
‘We have things we can sell. We can part with some of the rarities. We can trade and stay afloat.’
‘We are at the very edge of bankruptcy.’
John nodded. ‘At the edge. At the edge. But only at the edge, J.’ He rose from his chair and hobbled to the door that led to the terrace and the garden. He opened the door and looked out, careless of the blast of cold air which billowed down the hall and might chill the tulips in their pots.
The saplings of the chestnut trees were as gawky and awkward as colts. Their buds were thick on the slender branches. There would be the tiny palmate leaves and then the magnificent white blossoms, and then the glossy brown nuts hidden soft in their thick casing. John gazed on them as if they were a lifeline.
‘We’ll never be ruined. Not while we have the trees,’ he said.
But they were hard-pressed to make ends meet. All spring and summer they juggled debts, took payments on plants and sent the money out straight away to satisfy the creditors.
‘What we need,’ J said one evening in autumn, as they were lifting bulbs from the bed, brushing them gently with a soft rabbit’s-tail brush, and laying them in long flat crates, ‘is a batch of new rare garden plants that everyone will be desperate to own. A new collection that everyone will want.’
John nodded. ‘There are plants coming in all the time. I had a nice little flower from the West Indies this very week.’
‘We need a sudden rush,’ J said. ‘So that everyone comes and buys from us. So that everyone remembers our name. We need to make our own mania, a mania for the Tradescant plants.’
John was on his hands and knees beside his son, but he leaned back to rest for a moment. ‘You have an idea,’ he said, looking at J.
‘I thought I should go to Virginia,’ J said. ‘Go and collect rarities by the boxful, bring them back in time for the planting season, spring next year. Hope to bring back some flowers that people will pay good money to own.’
‘We’d have to find the price of your passage,’ John said cautiously. ‘It’s a good plan. But it’s thirty pounds or so to send you out in the first place. And things are tight, J. Very tight.’
J said nothing and John looked again at his son’s bleak face. ‘It’s not just business, is it? It’s because you have lost Jane.’
‘Yes,’ J admitted honestly. ‘I find I cannot bear this place without her.’
‘But if you went to Virginia, you would come back? You are thinking only of a visit? There are your children, and the Ark, and our gardening for the queen. And I am getting old.’
‘I will come back. But I have to get away now. You don’t understand what it is like for me to sleep in her bed at night, and for her not to be there. And I can’t bear to go into that damned orangery. Every time I walk in there to see to a plant or water a tray of seedlings I think she is still lying in the corner and forbidding me to come in and hold her. She died alone like a beggar on a street corner without nursing – and there was so much that I wanted to say to her and ask her –’ He broke off. ‘You don’t understand,’ he repeated.
‘I do,’ John said slowly.
‘No. You can’t possibly understand. When Mother died you had months of warning, and you were even able to give her some flowers at the end. You had time to say farewell. You could hold her –’
‘Once I lost a love, a great love, without warning,’ John said with difficulty. ‘And with much left unsaid. I do know what it is to dream and long for someone, and to think of their death over and over, and of the thousands of ways you could have prevented it, and the thousands of ways you should have prevented it, until you are sick of your own life, since it was not given in exchange.’
J looked into his father’s face. ‘I didn’t know.’
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nbsp; John realised that his son thought he was speaking of a woman, perhaps a lover from long ago. He did not correct him. ‘So I do understand,’ he said.
‘You will let me go?’
John rested his hand on J’s shoulder and hauled himself to his feet. He recognised again, to his continual surprise, that the stripling had grown to be a man with a shoulder as broad and strong as his own. ‘It’s not for me to order you,’ he said. ‘You are a man grown and an equal partner with me. If you need to go, you must go, and my blessing will go with you. I’ll care for Frances and Baby John, and for the Ark and for Oatlands while you are away. And I will trust you to come back as soon as you can. I’m getting old, J, I need you here and your children will need you.’
J rose too but his shoulders were slumped. ‘I shan’t forget my duty.’
‘And they will need a mother,’ John ventured.
J flung his head up. ‘I can’t marry again,’ he said flatly.
‘Not for love,’ John said gently. ‘No-one is asking for that. But the children need a mother. They cannot be raised by me and by a couple of maidservants. Baby John is only just walking, he will need a mother to bring him up and teach him his manners and play with him. And you will need a wife. You’re a young man, J. There are long years ahead of you. You will need a companion and a friend for those years.’
J turned away and put his hand on the rough bark of the apple tree to steady himself. ‘If you knew how it hurts me even to think of another woman, you would not say that,’ he said. ‘It is the cruellest, most unkind thing you could say. There will never be a woman in her place. Never.’
John put his hand out once more, and then let it drop back. ‘I will not say it again,’ he said gently. ‘I miss her too.’ He paused. ‘I don’t believe there is another woman who could take her place,’ he acknowledged. ‘She was a rarity. I have only ever seen one of her.’ It was his greatest praise.
They could not find the passage money, the Ark was a sinking ship. Then J thought that he could put the idea of sending him into the queen’s mind. He briefly mentioned it when she stopped beside him in the queen’s court one day as he was tying back the creepers against the wall.