Virgin Earth

by Philippa Gregory

John thought that perhaps others had believed like him: that a king in his health simply could not die. That something would intervene, that God himself must prevent such an act. That even now, time might run backwards and the king be found alive. That John might wake up one morning to find the king in his palace and the queen demanding some absurd planting scheme. It was almost impossible to accept that no-one would ever see him again. The chapbooks, the balladeers, the portraitists all fostered the illusion of the king’s surviving presence. There were more pictures of King Charles and stories about him than there had ever been during his life. He was better beloved than he had ever been when he had been idle and foolish and misjudging. Every error he had made had been washed away by the simple fact of his death, and the name he had given to himself: the Martyr King.

  Then came the reports of miracles worked by his relics. People were cured of fits or sickness or rashes like the pox by the touch of a handkerchief which had been dipped in his blood. The pocket knives made from his melted-down statue would heal wounds if laid against them, would protect a baby from violent death if used to cut the cord. A sick lion in the Tower zoo had been comforted by the scent of his blood on a rag. Every day there was a new story about the saint, the people’s saint. Every day his presence in the country grew stronger.

  No-one was wholly unmoved; but Johnnie, still weak from his injury and defeat at Colchester, was struck very hard. He spent day after day in the boat on the little lake, lying wrapped in his cloak, his long legs folded over the stern and the heels of his boots dipping in the water while the boat drifted around nudging one bank and then another, and Johnnie stared up at the cold sky, saying nothing.

  Hester went down to fetch him for his midday dinner and found him rowing slowly to the little landing stage to come in.

  ‘Oh Johnnie,’ she said. ‘You have your whole life before you, there’s no need to take it so hard. You did what you could, you kept faith with him, you ran away to serve him and you were as brave as any of his cavaliers.’

  He looked at her with his dark Tradescant eyes and she saw the passionate loyalty of his grandfather without the security of his grandfather’s settled world. ‘I don’t know how we can live without a king,’ he said simply. ‘It’s not just him. It’s the place he held. I can’t believe that we won’t see him again. His palaces are still there, his gardens. I can’t believe that he is not there too.’

  ‘You should get back to work,’ Hester said, grasping at straws. ‘Your father needs help.’

  ‘We are gardeners to the king,’ Johnnie said simply. ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘There’s the trading business for Sir Henry in Barbados.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll never be a trader. I’m a gardener through and through. I’d never be anything else.’

  ‘The rarities.’

  ‘I’ll come and help if you wish it, Mother,’ he said obediently. ‘But they’re not the same, are they? Since we packed and unpacked them again. It’s not grandfather’s room any more, it’s not the room we showed the king. We have most of the things and it should be the same. But it feels different, doesn’t it? As if by packing them and hiding them away, and then unpacking them, and then hiding them again, somehow spoiled it. And people don’t come as they used to. It’s as if everything is changed and no-one knows yet how.’

  Hester put her hand on his arm. ‘I just mean you should stop brooding and return to work. There is a time to mourn and you do yourself no favours if you exceed it.’

  He nodded. ‘I will,’ he promised. ‘If you wish it.’ He hesitated as if he could not find the words for his feeling. ‘I never thought that I could feel so low.’

  The three of them were at dinner when there was a knock at the door. Hester turned her head and they listened to the cook stamping irritably along the hall to open it. There was the noise of a mild disagreement. ‘It’ll be a sailor with something to sell,’ Hester said.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Johnnie said, pushing back his chair. ‘You finish your dinner.’

  ‘Call me before you agree a price,’ John warned him.

  Johnnie scowled at his father’s lack of trust; and went out of the door.

  They heard him shout an oath, and then they heard the noise of his running footsteps down the hall, and the door to the terrace slam as he set off down the garden.

  ‘Good God, what now?’ John sprang to his feet and went to the front door. Hester paused by the window to see Johnnie, head down, running blindly towards the lake. She hesitated, and followed her husband.

  A bewildered man was at the front door. ‘I offered him this for sale,’ he said, showing a dirty piece of black cloth. ‘I thought it was the sort of thing you would like for your collection. But he jumped back as if it were poison and fled from me. What ails the lad?’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Hester said shortly. ‘What is it?’

  The man suddenly gleamed with enthusiasm. ‘A piece of pall from the scaffolding of the Martyr King, Mrs Tradescant. And if you like it you can have it and a pen-knife cast from the metal of his statue. And I may be able to find you a scrape of earth soaked with his sacred blood. All very reasonable considering the rarity of it and the price you will be able to charge for those coming to see it.’

  Hester instinctively recoiled in distaste. She looked to John. His eyebrows were knotted in thought.

  ‘We don’t take such things,’ he said slowly. ‘We buy rarities, not relics.’

  ‘You have Henry VIII’s hunting gloves,’ the man pointed out. ‘And Queen Anne’s nightgown. Why not this? Especially as you could make your fortune with it.’

  John took a swift turn away from the doorstep and down the hall. The man was right, anything to do with the king would be a goldmine for the Ark, and they were barely making enough money to pay the cook’s and Joseph’s wages.

  He turned back to the front door. ‘I thank you, but no. We will not exhibit the king’s remains.’

  Hester found that her shoulders had been hunched while she waited for her husband’s decision. ‘But please do bring us any other rare things you have,’ she said pleasantly, and went to shut the door.

  The man thrust his foot out and stopped the closing door. ‘I was certain you would give me a good price for this,’ he said. ‘There are other collectors who would pay handsomely. I was doing you the favour of coming to you first.’

  ‘I thank you for that,’ John said shortly. ‘But we won’t take anything that remains of the king.’ He hesitated. ‘He visited here himself,’ he said, as if it would make the decision clear. ‘It would not seem right to show pieces of him.’

  The man shrugged, took his foot from the door and left. Hester closed the door and turned back to look at John.

  ‘That was well done,’ she said.

  ‘D’you think we’d ever have got Johnnie to work in the room with the king’s own blood in a jar?’ John asked irritably and went out to the garden, leaving his dinner untouched on the table.

  Johnnie’s gloom did not lift as Hester had hoped that it might even when the warmer weather came. In March, when John was planting seeds of nasturtium, sweet pea, and his Virginian amaracock in pots of sieved earth in the orangery, Parliament declared that there would never more be a king or a queen set over the English people. Kingship was abolished forever in England. Johnnie came into the warm room with a small box in his hand, looking grave.

  ‘What have you there?’ John asked warily.

  ‘The king’s seeds,’ Johnnie said softly. ‘That he gave you to plant at Wimbledon.’

  ‘Ah, the melon seeds. D’you know, I’d forgotten all about them.’

  A swift, burning glance from Johnnie showed that he had not forgotten, and that he thought the less of his father for his absence of mind. ‘It’s one of the last orders he must have given,’ Johnnie said softly, in awe. ‘And he sent for you by name, just to ask you to plant them for him. It’s like he wanted you to have a task, a quest, to remember him by.’

  ‘Just melons.’<
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  ‘He sent for you, he saved the seeds from his own dinner plate, and asked you to do it. He took the seeds from his own dinner, and he gave them to you.’

  John hesitated, dismayed at the tone of worship in Johnnie’s voice. The scepticism which everyone in the country had shared when Charles the Cheat was lying and backsliding from his agreements had quite vanished at the man’s death when he became Charles the Martyr. John granted grudgingly that Charles had done better than anyone could have imagined in making the throne once more a sacred place; for here was Johnnie, who by rights should be disillusioned after a hopeless siege and a bad injury, with his eyes blazing at the thought of the dead king.

  John put his hand on his son’s shoulder and felt the strong sinew and bone. He did not see how he could explain to Johnnie that the whim of a man accustomed all his life to command should not be read as significant. Charles the Last had a fancy to pretend that he might live to eat the melons which would be planted at Wimbledon in the spring, and it was no trouble to him that a servant should go all the way from Windsor to Lambeth and back again to fetch John, and that John should go all the way from Lambeth to Windsor and then home again to enact that fancy.

  It would never have occurred to him that it might be inconvenient for a man no longer in his service and no longer paid a royal wage to be summoned once more to unpaid work. It would not have occurred to him that his behaviour was arrogant or wilful. It would not have occurred to him that by naming John as his gardener and entrusting him with the commission he would identify him as a royal servant at a time when royal servants were regarded with suspicion. He had put John to inconvenience, he might have put him in grave danger – he would simply never have thought of it. It was a whim and he was always a man who was happy that others should service his whims.

  ‘Would you like to plant them?’ John asked, seeking a way out of this dilemma.

  Johnnie’s face showed the rush of his emotion. ‘Would you let me?’

  ‘Of course. You can plant them up, if you like, and when they are ready we’ll transplant them to the melon beds.’

  ‘I want to make melon beds at Wimbledon,’ Johnnie said. ‘That’s where he wanted them to be.’

  John hesitated. ‘I don’t know what’s happening at Wimbledon,’ he said. ‘If Parliament wants me to continue working there, then of course we can make a melon bed. But I’ve heard nothing. They may sell the house.’

  ‘We have to do it,’ Johnnie said simply. ‘We cannot disobey his command, it was his last order to us.’

  John turned back to his nasturtiums and surrendered. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said. ‘When they’re ready for planting out we’ll take them to Wimbledon.’

  Slowly, life began to get back to normal. There was a gradual increase of takings at the door from visitors to the rarities room and orders in the book from the new men who now found themselves in possession of the sequestered estates of royalists who were dead or fled or living quietly in poverty. The new men, officers from Cromwell’s army and the astute politicians who had stood against the king at the right time, walked into some fine houses and gardens running to seed which might be restored to beauty.

  One by one the visitors started to come back to the Ark, to walk around the gardens and admire the blossoms on the trees and the bobbing heads of the daffodils. Dr Thomas Wharton, a man after John’s heart, came to look at the rarities and brought with him a proposal that John should set aside a part of his garden for the College of Physicians. They would pay him a fee to grow herbs and medicinal plants for them.

  ‘I appreciate it,’ John said frankly. ‘These have been lean years for us. A country at war has no interest in gardening nor in rarities.’

  ‘The country is to be run now by men whose curiosity will not be stifled,’ the doctor replied. ‘Mr Cromwell himself is a man who likes ingenious mechanisms. He has drained his farmland and uses Dutch windpumps to keep the water out, and he believes that English land could be made to yield as fruitfully as the Low Countries’, even the waste grounds.’

  ‘It’s a question of not exhausting the soil,’ John said eagerly. ‘And changing the crops around so that blights don’t take hold. We’ve always known that in gardens and vegetable plots, every convent and monastery garden moved crops from one bed to another each year; but it’s true for farmland too. It’s how to restore the goodness to the soil that is the difficulty. In Virginia too, the People never use the same field for more than three seasons.’

  ‘The planters?’

  ‘No, the Powhatan. They move their fields each season. I thought it was a mistake till I saw how their crops yielded.’

  ‘This is most interesting,’ Dr Wharton said. ‘Perhaps you would come to my house and tell me more. I meet with friends once a month to discuss inventions, and rarities, and ideas.’

  ‘I should be honoured,’ John said.

  ‘And what d’you use to make your own land fertile?’ Dr Wharton asked.

  John laughed. ‘A soup of my father’s devising,’ he said. ‘Nettles and comfrey and dung stirred up in an evil pot. And if I am disposed to make water I piss in it as well.’

  The doctor chuckled. ‘So it couldn’t be used for a hundred acres?’

  ‘But there are crops which would put the goodness back into the soil,’ John replied. ‘Comfrey or clover. You’d have to start with a little patch and harvest the seed, plant a greater and greater field every year.’

  The doctor tapped him on the arm. ‘There’s your future,’ he said. ‘If the new parliament cares little for ornamental gardens, they care a great deal for the richness of the lands. If we are to keep the Levellers from turning us out of our own doors then we have to feed the people from the acres we have under the plough. The country has to be fed, the country has to find peace and prosperity. If you could write a pamphlet about how it could be done then Parliament would reward you.’ He hesitated. ‘And it would mean that you were seen to be working for the good of Parliament and the army and the people,’ he said. ‘No bad thing, now that your old master is gone.’

  John raised an eyebrow. ‘Any news of the prince?’

  ‘Charles Stuart,’ Wharton corrected him gently. ‘In France, I hear. But with Cromwell in Ireland he might try a landing. He could try a landing at any time and he would always muster an army of a couple of hundred fools. There will always be fools ready to run to a royal standard.’

  He paused to see if John disagreed that Charles would only be served by an army of fools. John took meticulous care to say nothing.

  ‘He’s called Charles Stuart now,’ Dr Wharton reminded him.

  John grinned. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’ll remember.’

  In April John Lambert strolled into the garden with a smile for Joseph, the gardener, and a low bow for Hester.

  ‘General Lambert!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought you were at Pontefract.’

  ‘I was,’ he said. ‘But my business there is done. I am to spend the next few months in London, staying at my father-in-law’s house with my family, so I have come to spend the fruits of victory. He only has a little garden so I must not be tempted by one of your great trees. Has Mr Tradescant anything new?’

  ‘Come and see,’ Hester said, and led the way out through the glass doors to the terrace and down to the garden. ‘The tulips are at their very best. We could let you have some in bud in pots. You will be missing your own at Carlton Hall.’

  ‘I might catch them at the end of their bloom. We have a later season in Yorkshire.’

  They walked together to the front of the house and Hester paused to enjoy his delight at the sight of the tulips in bloom in the big double beds before the house.

  ‘Every year I catch my breath,’ he said. ‘It’s like a sea of colour.’

  Hester smoothed her apron over her hips. ‘I know,’ she said contentedly.

  ‘And what novelties d’you have?’ John Lambert asked eagerly. ‘Anything new?’

  ‘A satin tulip, from Amsterdam,’ Hester
said, temptingly lifting up a pot. ‘Look at the shine on it.’

  He took the pot in his arms, careless of his velvet jacket and the rich lace at his throat. ‘What a beauty!’ he said. ‘The petals are like a mirror!’

  ‘And here comes my husband,’ Hester remarked, curbing her irritation that John was pushing a barrow up from the seed beds in his shirtsleeves with his hat set askew on his head.

  Lambert carefully replaced the pot on its stand.

  ‘Mr Tradescant.’

  John set down the barrow, came up the steps to the terrace, and bowed to their guest. ‘I won’t shake hands. I’m dirty.’

  ‘I’m admiring your tulips.’

  John nodded. ‘Any luck with your own? Hester told me you were going to try with the Violetten?’

  ‘I have been too much away from home to select the blooms for breeding them to a true colour. But my wife tells me they made a pretty show in shades of mauve and purple.’

  Further down the orchard Hester saw Johnnie glance up the avenue and then, when he saw that it was Lambert, pick up his watering pot and with assumed nonchalance stroll up the path under the dark sticky buds of the horse chestnut trees.

  ‘Good day to you,’ General Lambert said.

  Johnnie skidded to a halt and gave a little bow.

  ‘General Lambert is looking for something for his father-in-law’s garden in Kensington,’ Hester said to her husband. ‘I am tempting him with the new tulip.’

  ‘Isn’t it fine?’ John said. ‘It’s got a sheen on it like the coat of a bay horse. Does your father-in-law have fruit trees? And you could risk transplanting roses if we do it at once.’

  ‘I’d like some roses,’ Lambert said. ‘He has some Rosamund roses already. D’you have any in pure white?’

  ‘I have a Rosa alba,’ John said. ‘And an offshoot which I have grown from it with very thick petals.’

  ‘Scented?’

  ‘A very light scent, very sweet. And I have a Virginian rose, there’s only two of them in the whole country.’