Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘What is it? Have you found a swelling?’ she demanded, naming the greatest fear.

  ‘I’m bleeding,’ Frances said.

  Hester saw at once that the fever had broken but the young woman was white and drained, and her nightdress was stained a deep cherry red.

  ‘My baby,’ Frances whispered.

  Hester twisted a strip of sheet and held it against the flow. ‘Lie quietly,’ she said urgently. ‘I’ll send John for the midwife, you may be all right.’

  Frances lay back obediently, but shook her head. ‘I can feel it gone,’ she said.

  Hester, a childless woman, felt herself adrift in a tragedy that she had never experienced. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Frances said, in a little voice which Hester recognised from the lonely little girl she had first met. ‘Yes. My baby’s gone.’

  At seven in the morning Hester went wearily downstairs with a pile of cloths for burning and some sheets to wash, and found Alexander Norman and John alert and silent at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said slowly. ‘I forgot the time, I forgot that you would be waiting and worried.’

  John took the bundle from her and Alexander took her hand. ‘What’s happened?’ John demanded.

  ‘The fever has broken and she has no swellings,’ Hester said. ‘But she has lost the baby.’ She looked at Alexander. ‘I am sorry, Alexander. I would have sent for the midwife but she was sure that it was too late. It was all over in a moment.’

  He turned and looked up the stairs. ‘Can I go to her?’

  Hester nodded. ‘I’m sure it’s not the plague, but don’t wake her, and don’t stay long.’

  He went up the stairs so quietly that the treads did not squeak. John dropped the laundry on the floor and enfolded his wife in his arms. ‘You haven’t slept at all,’ he said gently. ‘Come. I’ll give you a glass of wine and then you must go to bed. Alexander can look after her now, or me, or Cook.’

  She let him draw her into the parlour, seat her in a chair and press a glass of sweet wine into her hand. She took a sip and some of the colour came back into her cheeks. She had never looked more plain than now, when she was strained and weary. John had never loved her better.

  ‘You cared for her very tenderly,’ he said. ‘No mother could have done better.’

  She smiled at that. ‘I could not love her more if I had given birth to her myself,’ she said. ‘And I have long thought that she has two mothers: Jane in heaven and me on earth.’

  He took the chair beside her and he drew her on to his knee. Hester wound her arms around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder and for the first time allowed herself to weep for the baby that was lost.

  ‘There will be other babies,’ John said, stroking her hair. ‘We will have dozens of grandchildren, from Frances, from Johnnie.’

  ‘But this one is lost,’ Hester said. ‘And if it had been a boy she was going to call him John.’

  Summer 1646

  Frances stayed at the Ark for all of the summer, promising Alexander that she would not return to his house in the City until the cold autumn weather had frozen out the plague. But they were not parted for many nights. The fighting was over and there was little demand for barrels for gunpowder. Many evenings Alexander took a boat from the Tower running with the incoming tide up the river to Lambeth, and then strode down the lane to the Ark to see his wife sitting on the front wall, waiting for him as if she were still a little girl.

  It was a bad year for sickness, as everyone had predicted, and the town was full of soothsayers and prophesiers and men and women who were prepared to stand up and give witness on street corners that while the king was with the Scots, who had taken him away to Newcastle, the nation could not be at peace. The king must come to London and explain himself, the king must come before the widows and fatherless children and beg their pardons, the king must come before Parliament and agree how to live in peace with them. What the king should not do was to continue debating, sending arguments to Parliament in favour of himself, discussing theology with the covenanting Scots and generally enjoying his life as blithely and as happily as if the country had not battled for years and got nowhere.

  ‘He can’t be happy.’ John disagreed with Johnnie, who brought back this news from Lambeth market. ‘He can’t be happy without the queen and without the court.’

  ‘He only has to wait and Montrose will rescue him!’ Johnnie declared. ‘The Scots are his enemy, he has played a clever game by going to them. They shield him from his enemies, the English Parliament, and all the time he is waiting for Montrose. Montrose will fight his way across the Highlands for the king.’

  ‘Johnnie has a new hero,’ Hester told her husband with a smile. She was checking the purchases off the back of the wagon and Cook was taking them into the kitchen. ‘He was all for Prince Rupert but now it is Montrose.’

  ‘They say no-one will ever catch him, that he runs around the Highlands like a deer,’ Johnnie said. ‘The Covenanters will never catch him, he’s too quick and too clever. He knows all the passes through the mountains, when they wait for him at one place he melts away over the hills and then attacks them in another.’

  ‘It always sounds so easy when it is told like a ballad,’ John said soberly. ‘But real battles are not so quick. And real defeats can make a man sick to the heart.’

  Johnnie shook his head and would not be persuaded then; but later in the summer he tasted a little of the bitterness of defeat. He spent the day of 25 June at the little lake, rowing his boat around in aimless circles. The king’s town of Oxford had surrendered and Prince Rupert – the darling of the court, the hope of the royalists, the most dashing, the most glamorous, the most beautiful general that the war had seen – was sent out of the country into exile and would never be allowed to return.

  Hester went down to the lake at dusk to find Johnnie. It was getting cold and the frogs were croaking in the reeds at the side of the pond and the bats dipping like night-time swifts to snatch the insects which still danced over the grey waters. She could just see the little rowboat with the oars shipped and Johnnie curled up in the stern, with his long legs trailing over the side of the boat and the heels of his boots dipping in the water and making circular ripples like rising fish.

  ‘Come in,’ she called, her voice gentle across the still water. ‘Come in, Johnnie. The war is over and that’s a thing to be glad for, not a matter of grief.’

  The little huddled figure in the boat did not move.

  John came down the path and stood beside Hester.

  ‘He won’t come in,’ she said.

  John took her hand. ‘He will.’

  She resisted him as he tried to draw her away. ‘He has adored Prince Rupert for years. He cried the night that Rupert lost Bristol.’

  ‘He’ll get hungry,’ John said. ‘There is loyalty and love and there is a thirteen-year-old boy’s belly. He’ll come in.’ He raised his voice. ‘We have some strawberries for dinner tonight. And Cook has made marchpane pastry to go with them. Have we got some cream too?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Hester said clearly. ‘And a rib of beef with Yorkshire pudding and roasted potatoes and the allspick lettuce.’

  There was a small movement from the becalmed boat.

  John tucked Hester’s arm firmly under his elbow and drew her away from the bank of the pond.

  ‘I don’t like to leave him,’ she whispered.

  John chuckled. ‘If he’s not in by the time dinner is on the table you can send me to swim out to him,’ he said. ‘It’s a pledge.’

  John could make light of Johnnie’s despondency at the news of Prince Rupert’s exile, but the thought of the king in the hands of the Scots at Newcastle haunted him too. In July there was news of an English mission to try to persuade the king to come to agreement with Parliament, and all the time the king was being worked on to sign a treaty with the Scots.

  ‘If he cannot agree with either the English or the Scots, what will become o
f him?’ John asked Hester. ‘He has to give up either his right to the army and come home to England, or give up his religion and join the Scots. But he can’t just wait and do nothing.’

  Hester said nothing. She thought the king was perfectly capable of waiting and doing nothing while the queen campaigned for him in France, Montrose risked his life and his men in the Highlands and Ormonde tried to fight his way through a maze of the king’s own self-betraying plotting in Ireland. ‘If the Irish were to come over and join with Montrose and fight for the king –’ she suggested.

  John flashed her a quick, irritated look. ‘Papists and Scotsmen?’ he asked. ‘Fighting for a Protestant king? An Irish army? The alliance would last half a day and the country would never forgive him.’

  ‘If he is a Protestant king,’ Hester said carefully.

  John dropped his head into his hands. ‘No-one knows what he believes any more, nor what he stands for. How could it have come to this?’

  ‘And what do you believe?’ Hester asked him. ‘You were always against the court, and against Papacy?’

  John shrugged wearily. ‘I didn’t go to Virginia just because I had no stomach for killing Englishmen,’ he said. ‘I went because I was torn. I served the king, and my father served the king or his servants all his life. I can’t just turn away and pretend that I don’t care for his safety. I do care. But he’s in the wrong and has been in the wrong since –’ He broke off. ‘Since he marched his soldiers into the House of Commons,’ he said. ‘No, before. Since he allowed the government of this country to be run by that madman, Buckingham. Since he took a Papist wife and thus ran the risk of Papist children. From the moment that he set his heart on having a kingdom run as a tyranny and would not listen to his advisors.’

  Hester waited.

  ‘I want the kingdom free of his tyranny, I have always wanted that. But I don’t need the kingdom free of him. Or his son. Does that make any sense at all?’

  Hester nodded and then turned to a more pressing topic for her. ‘Shall we unpack the rarities?’

  John gave a short laugh. ‘D’you think we are at peace? With the king held by the Scots at Newcastle and refusing to agree with his own Parliament?’

  ‘I don’t think we’re at peace,’ she said equably. ‘But if we could show the rarities and summon people to the garden to see the Virginian plants we might make some money this summer. And we are in debt, John. This war has been hard on everyone and we are taking no more than a few shillings each month.’

  He rose from the chair. ‘Let’s go and have a look at that tree,’ he said.

  They stood before the great black cherry tree. It had not liked the situation before the ice-house door and there had been few blossoms in spring and now only a few buttons of green berries which might, in time, ripen and swell.

  ‘I can’t bear to chop it down,’ John said. ‘It has grown to a good size even if it is not bearing much of a crop.’

  ‘Can you move it?’ Hester asked. Her gaze went beyond the tree, to the doorway of the ice house where the ivy and the honeysuckle were planted. No-one could have spotted its outline unless they were looking for it. She liked the thought of the garden plants helping to hide the rarities. There was some unity in the Ark if they all worked together to save the precious things.

  ‘My father had a way of moving even big trees,’ John said thoughtfully. ‘But it takes time. We’ll have to be patient. It will be a couple of months at the earliest.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Hester said. ‘I am ashamed of the rarities room as it is, I want the treasures back inside.’ She did not tell John that while the king was held by the Scots she had no fears for the safety of the treasures or of the family. Hester had great faith in Scottish efficiency, and in the dour Covenanters’ immunity to Stuart charm. If the Scots were holding the king, even if they took him far away to Edinburgh, then Hester felt safe.

  Hester remembered the moving of the cherry tree as an event which coincided with the death of the hopes of the runaway king. Both processes happened in slow stages. John dug a trench around his father’s cherry tree and watered it every morning and night. The news from Newcastle was that the king would agree to nothing: neither the proposals from England, nor those from his hosts the Scots.

  With the help of Joseph and Johnnie pulling the trunk slowly first one way and then the other, John dug underneath the tree and gently shovelled earth away from all but the greatest roots. A Scottish cleric who had wrestled with the king’s conscience for two months went home to Edinburgh and died, they said, of a broken heart, blaming himself that the most stubborn man in England could not be brought to see where his own interests lay.

  John watered the tree richly with his father’s mixture of stinging-nettle soup, dung, and water, three times a day. They heard that the queen herself wrote to the king and begged him to make an agreement with the Scots, so that he might be king of Scotland at least.

  John pruned the tree, carefully cutting away the branches which would sap the tree’s strength. The Scots Covenanters, debating with their royal prisoner, privately declared among themselves that he was mad, he must have been mad to come to them without an army, without power, without allies, and then imagine that they would fight a war for him, on his terms, against their co-religionists for nothing more than his thanks.

  Johnnie and Joseph, with John and Alexander on the other side, gently thrust poles from one side of the crater around the tree to the other until it was supported, and then John went down into the mudfilled ditch and freed the last of the roots. The longest, strongest root he pulled gently from the mud and then cursed when it broke and he fell back into the slurry with a bump.

  ‘That’s killed it,’ Joseph said gloomily, and John climbed out of the ditch soaked through and irritable. Then the four men gently lifted the tree out of the ground and carried it down to the bottom of the orchard where a new hole was dug and waiting. They put it in, lovingly spread out the roots, backfilled the earth, and gently pressed it down. John stood back and admired his work.

  ‘It’s crooked,’ Frances said behind him.

  John turned wrathfully on her.

  ‘Just joking,’ she said.

  With the doorway clear, Hester tied a duster over her head to keep off the cobwebs and spiders and set to pulling aside the ivy and the honeysuckle. The key still worked in the lock, the door opened with a creak on the dirty hinges. John peered inside. The little round chamber was lined with straw and piled high with chests and boxes of his father’s treasures. He caught Hester’s dirty hand and kissed it. ‘Thank you for keeping them safe,’ he said.

  Autumn 1646

  Hester, Johnnie and Joseph were lifting tulip bulbs in the garden of the Ark. They worked with their fingers in the cold soil. Even the common bulbs were too valuable to risk spearing with a fork or slicing with a spade. On the ground beside Hester were the precious porcelain bowls of the most valuable tulips, their expensive bulbs already lifted and separated, the sieved earth tipped back into the beds.

  Joseph and Johnnie filled the labelled sacks with the Flame tulip bulbs. Almost every one had spawned a second, some of them had two or three bulblets nestling beside the first. All three gardeners were smiling in pleasure. Whether the price for tulips ever recovered or stayed as low as it had been thrust by the collapse of the market, still there was something rich and exciting about the wealth which made itself in silence and secrecy under the soil.

  There was a step on the wooden floor of the terrace and Hester looked up to see John Lambert. He was looking very fine, dressed as well as always, with a deep violet feather in his hat, and a waterfall of white lace at his throat and cuffs. Hester got to her feet and felt a pang of annoyance at her dirty hands and dishevelled hair. She whipped off her hessian apron and walked towards him.

  ‘Forgive me coming unannounced,’ he said, his dark smile taking in her rising blush. ‘I am so honoured to see you working among your plants.’

  ‘I’m all dirty,’ Hester
said, stepping back from his proffered hand.

  ‘And I smell of horse,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I am on my way from my home in Yorkshire. I couldn’t resist calling in to see if my tulips were ready.’

  ‘They are.’ Hester gestured to the three bulging sacks at the corner of the terrace. ‘I was going to send them to your London home.’

  ‘I thought you might. That’s why I have come. I am on my way to Oxford and I wanted the special tulips there. I shall plant them in pots and have them in my rooms.’

  Hester nodded. ‘I am sorry you will not meet my husband,’ she said. ‘He is in London today. He has gone into trade in a small way with a West India planter and he is sending some goods out.’

  ‘I am sorry not to meet him,’ John Lambert said pleasantly. ‘But I hardly dare to delay. I am to be governor of Oxford while my health mends.’

  Hester risked a quick glance at him. ‘I had heard you were ill – I was sorry.’

  He gave her his warm, intimate smile. ‘I am well enough, and the work I set myself to do is all but done. Pray God we will have peace again, Mrs Tradescant, and in the meantime I can sit down in Oxford and make sure that the colleges get back into some kind of order, and their treasures are safe.’

  ‘These are hard times to be a guardian of beautiful things.’

  ‘Better times coming soon,’ he whispered. ‘May I take my tulips now?’

  ‘Of course. Shall you want them all at Oxford?’

  ‘Send the Flame tulips to my London house, my wife can plant them for me there. But the rare tulips and the Violetten I must have beside me.’

  ‘If you breed a true violet one then do let us know,’ Hester said, gesturing to Joseph to take the sack of labelled rare tulips out to the wagon waiting in the street beyond the garden gate. ‘We would buy one back from you.’

  ‘I shall present it to you,’ John Lambert said grandly. ‘A mark of respect to another guardian of treasure.’ He glanced down the garden and saw Johnnie. ‘And how’s the cavalry officer these days?’