She nestled a little closer. ‘And we’ll bide at home,’ she said firmly.
John rested his cheek against her warm cap. ‘When we’re old,’ he promised, disarmingly.
The very next day the earl himself came down to visit the Tradescants in their new cottage. Elizabeth was flustered and overawed by the grandness of the pony carriage with one footman driving, and another hanging on the back. She came to the gate and curtseyed and stammered her thanks. But John opened the gate and went out to stand at the carriage door as to an intimate friend.
‘Are you ill?’ he asked Cecil quietly.
Cecil’s face was yellow and the lines of pain were deeper than ever. ‘No worse than usual,’ he replied.
‘Is it your bones?’
‘My belly this time,’ he said. ‘I am sick as a dog, John. But I can’t stop work yet. I have a plan to reform the king’s finances despite himself. If I can get him to agree then I can sell the whole scheme to Parliament, and hand over to them the farming of benefits in return for a proper wage for the king.’
John blinked. ‘You want the king to be paid by Parliament? To be its servant?’
Cecil nodded. ‘Better than this endless haggling, year after year, when they demand that he change his favourites and he demands more money. Anything is better than that. You have to be a king rich in charm to survive holding out an annual begging bowl, and this king is not as the old queen.’
‘Can you not rest and come back to it later?’ John asked urgently.
The heavy-lidded eyes looked at him. ‘Setting up as apothecary, John?’
‘Can you not rest?’
Cecil flinched as he stretched out his hand to his man, and John saw that even that small gesture cost him pain. He took the hand as gently as he would hold Baby J’s while he slept. Unconsciously, he put his other hand on top of it and felt how cool were the fingers and how sluggish the pulse.
‘Do I look so sick?’
John hesitated.
There was a gleam of a smile on Cecil’s face. ‘Come, John,’ he said in a half-whisper. ‘You always prided yourself on telling me the truth, don’t turn courtier now.’
‘You do look very very sick,’ John said, his voice very low.
‘Sick to death?’
John snatched a quick glance at his master’s heavy-lidded eyes and saw that he wanted a true answer to his question.
‘I have no skills, my lord, but I would think so.’
Cecil frowned slightly and John tightened his grip on the thin cold hand.
‘I’ve so much more to do,’ the Secretary of State said.
‘Look to yourself first,’ John urged him, and then heard himself whisper, ‘please, my lord. Look to yourself first.’
Cecil leaned forward and laid his cheek against John’s warm face. ‘Ah, John,’ he said softly. ‘I wish I had some of your strength.’
‘I wish to God I could give it to you,’ John whispered.
‘Drive with me,’ the earl commanded. ‘Drive round with me and tell me what is planted and how it will be, even though neither of us will be here to see it. Tell me how it will be in a hundred years when we will both be dead and gone. Hale or sick, John, this garden will outlive us both.’
Tradescant clambered into the carriage and sat beside his master, one arm along the back of the seat as if he would protect him from the jolting movement. Elizabeth, forgotten at the gate of her new house, watched them both go.
‘You have made me a velvet setting for my jewel,’ Cecil said with quiet pleasure as the carriage moved slowly down the avenue of new-planted trees. ‘We have done well together, John, for a pair of youngsters learning our trades.’
May 1612
Cecil was dying in the great curtained bed in the master chamber of his new fine house. Outside his door, the household staff pretended to go about their work in a hushed silence, hoping to hear the muttered colloquy of the doctors. Some wanted to send him to Bath to take the waters – his last chance of health. Some were for leaving him in his bed to rest. Sometimes, when his door opened, the servants could hear the harsh labouring of his breath and see him propped up on the rich embroidered pillows, the brightness of their spring colours a mockery of his yellowing skin.
John Tradescant, weeping like a woman, was deep digging in the vegetable garden, digging without much purpose, in a frenzy of activity as if his energy and effort could put heart in the earth, could put the heart back into his master.
At midday he abruptly left his vegetable bed and marched determinedly through the three courts on the west of the house, up the allee, past the mount where the paths were rimmed with yellow primroses, out into the woodland side of the garden. The ground was a sea of blue as if the whole wood was deep in flood. John kneeled and picked bluebells with steady concentration and did not stop until he had an armful. Then he went to the house, careless of the mud dropping off his boots, up the stairs where his likeness in wood still stepped blithely out of the newel post, up to the master bedroom. A housemaid stopped him at the door to the anteroom. He would not be allowed further in.
‘Take these, and show them to him,’ he said.
She hesitated. Flowers in the house were for strewing on the floor, or for a posy to wear at the belt or hatband. ‘What would he want with them?’ she demanded. ‘What would a dying man want with bluebells?’
‘He’d like to see them,’ John urged her. ‘I know he would. He likes bluebells.’
‘I’ll have to give them to Thomas,’ she said. ‘I’m not allowed in, anyway.’
‘Then give them to Thomas,’ John pressed her. ‘What harm can it do? And I know it would please him.’
She was stubborn. ‘I don’t see why.’
John gestured helplessly. ‘Because when a man is going into darkness it helps him to know that he leaves some light behind!’ he exclaimed. ‘Because when a man is facing his own winter it is good to know that there will still be springs and summers. Because he is dying … and when he sees the bluebells he will know that I am still here, outside, and that I picked him some flowers. He will know that I am still here, just outside, digging in his garden. He will know that I am here, still digging for him.’
The look she turned on him was pure incomprehension. ‘But Mr Tradescant! Why should that help him?’
John grabbed her in his frustration and pushed her towards the anteroom. ‘A man would understand,’ he growled. ‘Women are too flighty. A man would understand that he will be comforted to know that I am still out there. That even when he is gone, his garden will still be there. That his mulberry tree will flower this year, that his chestnut saplings are growing straight, that the new velvet double anemone is thriving, that his bluebells are blowing under the trees of his woods. Go! And get those bluebells into his hands, or I shall have words to say to you!’
He thrust her with such force that she went at a little run to Thomas, who was standing outside the bedroom door, waiting for the orders from his master that never came.
‘Mr Tradescant wants these taken in to his lordship,’ she said, thrusting her armful of blossoms at him. Their slim whippy green stems oozed sap like the very juice of life. She wiped her hand on her apron. ‘He says they’re important.’
Thomas hesitated at the eccentric request.
‘D’you know what he said? He said that women are too flighty to understand,’ she sniffed resentfully. ‘Impertinence!’
Thomas’s sense of male importance was immediately stimulated. He took the flowers from her, turned at once to open the door and crept inside.
A doctor was at the foot of the bed, another at the window, and an old woman, part nurse, part layer-out, was at the fireside where a small fire of scented pine cones was crackling, pouring heat into the stuffy room.
Thomas came quietly forward. ‘Beg pardon,’ he said hoarsely. ‘But his lordship’s gardener insisted he had these.’
The doctor turned irritably. ‘What? What? Oh, nonsense! Nonsense!’
‘Not
hing but folly and superstition,’ said the doctor from the window. ‘And likely to spread noxious fumes.’
Thomas stood his ground. ‘It was Mr Tradescant, sir. His Grace’s favourite. And he insisted, the maid said.’
Cecil turned his head a little. The dispute was instantly silenced. Cecil crooked a finger at Thomas.
The doctor waved him forward. ‘Quick. He wants them. But it won’t make a groat of difference.’
Awkwardly, Thomas stepped up to the bed. The aquiline face of the most powerful man in England was etched in sandstone and grooved by pain. He turned his dark eyes sightlessly towards the manservant. Thomas thrust the bluebells into the slack hands. They spilled on to the rich coverlet of the bed, blotting out the scarlet embroidery and the gold thread with blue, blue, nothing but sky blue.
‘From John Tradescant,’ Thomas said.
The light sweet scent of the bluebells poured like fresh water into the room, drowning the smell of fear and sickness. Their colour shone like a blue flame in the dark chamber. The great lord looked down on the scattered flowers and inhaled their cold fresh perfume. They seemed to come from a world a hundred miles away from the overheated bed chamber, a clean spring world outside. He turned his head to the little window and his crumpled face stretched into a small smile. Though the casement was opened only the smallest crack, he could hear the thud of a spade into the flower bed beneath his window, loud as a faithful heartbeat, as John Tradescant and his master set about their different tasks: digging and dying.
October 1612
When they buried the earl, after dragging him to Bath for the cure and then back home again, there was still a place for John Tradescant at Hatfield House. But the heart had gone out of the garden for John. He kept looking around for Cecil, wanting to show him one of the grand new sights of the garden, expected to see him picking mulberries in summer and limping down the dark shade of the newly growing pleached allee. He kept wanting to consult him, he kept wanting to exchange that swift conspiratorial smile of triumph: that a plant had grown, that a rarity had taken root, that seeds had struck.
When he took a mug of small ale and a loaf of bread to his potting shed he kept expecting to see his lord there before him, lounging against the bench, be-ringed fingers dabbling in the soft sifted earth, taking a rest from letter writing, from plotting, from the sleight of hand of foreign policy, seeking John to share a bit of dinner together, a companion who needed no lies, no courting, seated on a barrel of bulbs to watch John transplanting seedlings.
‘I am sorry, my lord,’ John said to the new earl, Cecil’s son, finding his old master’s title sluggish on his lips. ‘I cannot settle here without your father. I was in his service too long to make a change.’
‘You will miss the garden, I expect,’ the new Lord Cecil remarked. But he did not know, as his father had known, the intense joy of making a garden where before there had been nothing but meadow.
‘I will,’ John said. Robert Cecil’s favourite flowers, the pinks, were in full bloom. The chestnut saplings which they had bought as glossy nuts a full five years ago were leggy and strong and putting out green palmate leaves like beggars’ hands. The cherry-tree walk was a maze of ordered blossom and the tulips were ablaze in the new flower beds.
‘I can’t garden here without him,’ he said simply to Elizabeth that night.
‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘It’s the same garden.’
‘It’s not.’ He shook his head. ‘It was his garden. I chose things that would delight his eyes. I thought of his tastes when I planned the walks. When I had something new and rare I considered where it would flourish, but also where would he be certain to see it? Every time I planted a seedling I had two thoughts – the angle of the sun shining on it, and my lord’s gaze.’
She frowned at the sound of blasphemy. ‘He was only a man.’
‘I know, and I loved him as a man. I loved him because he was a man and more mortal and frail than many others. He would lean on me when his back pained him –’ Tradescant broke off. ‘I liked him leaning on me,’ he said, conscious that he could not explain the mixture of elation and pity that he felt all at once when the greatest man in England after the king would confide his pain and take help.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together on hasty words and kept her jealousy to herself. She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and reminded herself that the lord he had loved was dead and buried and a good wife should show some sympathy. ‘You sound as if you have lost a brother, not a lord.’
He nodded. ‘A lord is like a brother, like a father, even like a wife. I think of his needs all the time, I guard his interests. And I cannot be happy here without him.’
Elizabeth did not want to understand. ‘But you have me, and Baby J.’
John gave her a sad little smile. ‘And I will never love another woman or another child more than I love the two of you … but a man’s love for his lord is another thing. It comes from the head as well as the heart. Loving a woman keeps you at home, it is a private pleasure. Loving a great lord takes you into the wider world, it is a matter of pride.’
‘You make it sound as if we are not enough,’ she said resentfully.
He shook his head, despairing of ever making her understand. ‘No, no, Elizabeth. It doesn’t matter. You are enough.’
She was not convinced. ‘Will you seek another lord? Another master?’
The expression that passed swiftly across his face was deeper than mourning; it was desolation. ‘I will never see his like again.’
That silenced her for a moment, as she saw the depth of his loss.
‘But what about us?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to lose this house, John, and J is happy here. We have put down roots here just as the plants in the garden have done. You said you would plant the chestnut here this spring and that we would sit under its branches when we are an old married couple.’
He nodded. ‘I know. I’m forsworn. That’s what I promised you. But I can’t bear it here without him, Elizabeth. I have tried and I cannot. Can you release me from my promise that we should stay here, and let us make another home? Back in Kent?’
‘Kent? What d’you mean? Where?’
‘Lord Wootton wants a gardener at Canterbury and asked me if I would go. He has the secret of growing melons which I should be glad to learn, his gardener has always teased me that only Lord Wootton in all of England can grow melons.’
Elizabeth tutted with irritation. ‘Forget the melons for a moment if you please. What about a house? What about your wages?’
‘He’ll pay me well,’ John said. ‘Sixty pounds where my lord paid me fifty. And we will have a house, the head gardener’s house. J can go to the King’s School in Canterbury. That’ll be a fine thing for him.’
‘Canterbury,’ Elizabeth said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never lived in a market town. There’d be much society.’
‘We could start there at once. He asked me on the death of my lord and I said I would tell him within the quarter.’
‘And will you not love Lord Wootton as you loved the earl?’ Elizabeth asked, thinking it would be an advantage.
John shook his head. ‘There will never be another lord for me like that one.’
‘Let’s go, then,’ she said with her typical sudden decisiveness. ‘And we can plant the chestnut sapling in Canterbury instead of Hatfield.’
November 1612
John was working in Lord Wootton’s garden, hands among cold clods of earth, when he heard the bell tolling. On and on it went, a funeral bell. Then he heard the rumble of cannon fire. He stood up, brushed the mud on his breeches, and reached for his coat where it was hooked over his spade.
‘Something’s happened,’ he said shortly to the garden lad who was working beside him.
‘Shall I run into town and bring you the news?’ the boy asked eagerly.
‘No,’ John said firmly. ‘You shall stay and work here while I run into town and find out the news. And if you are not here when I get ba
ck it will be the worst for you.’
‘Yes, Mr Tradescant,’ the boy said sulkily.
The bell was ever more insistent.
‘What does it mean?’
‘I’ll find out,’ John said and strode out of the garden towards the cathedral.
People were gathered in gossiping circles all the way down the road but John went on until he reached the cathedral steps and saw a face he recognised – the headmaster of the school.
‘Doctor Phillips,’ he exclaimed. ‘What are they ringing for?’
The man turned at the sound of his name and John saw, with a shock, that the man’s face was wet with tears.
‘Good God! What is it? It’s not an invasion? Not Spain?’
‘It’s Prince Henry,’ the man said simply. ‘Our blessed prince. We have lost him.’
For a moment John could not take in the words. ‘Prince Henry?’
‘Dead.’
John shook his head. ‘But he’s so strong, he’s always so well –’
‘Dead of fever.’
John’s hand went to his forehead to cross himself, in the old superstitious forbidden sign. He caught his hand back and said instead: ‘Poor boy, God save us, poor boy.’
‘I forgot, you would have seen him often.’
‘Not often,’ John said, his habitual caution asserting itself.
‘He was a blessed prince, was he not? Handsome and learned and godly?’
John thought of Prince Henry’s handsome tyrannical disposition, of his casual cruelty to his dark little brother, of his easy love of his sister Elizabeth, of his royal confidence, some would say arrogance. ‘He was a boy born to rule,’ John said cleverly.
‘God save Prince Charles,’ Doctor Phillips said stoutly.
John realised that the little eleven-year-old lame boy who ran after his brother and could never get nor keep his father’s attention would now be the next king – if he lived.
‘God save him indeed,’ he repeated.
‘And if we lose him,’ Doctor Phillips said in an undertone, ‘then it’s another woman on the throne, the Princess Elizabeth, and God knows what danger that would bring us now.’
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