Someone shouted a curse from the quayside and Buckingham turned his bright smile towards them as if it were a hurrah.
‘He could,’ he agreed levelly. ‘He could.’
‘There! Look! cried John. ‘A coach, my lord! They have sent a coach for you!’
Buckingham turned quickly and squinted down the quayside into the bright autumn sunshine. For a heart-stopping moment they could not see the livery of the coach. It could have been a royal warrant to arrest him. But then Buckingham’s laugh rang out.
‘By God, it is the royal coach! I am to be met with honour!’
It was unmistakable. Buckingham himself had introduced the fashion for six-horse carriages into England and only he and the king used them. Two postillions in royal livery jogged on the two leading pairs of horses, the coachman sat in scarlet and gold on the box, a footman beside him, and two liveried footmen clung to the rear. The horses had plumes of scarlet in their bridles, their hooves rang on the cobbles. The king’s flags were on the four corners of the coach. The royal herald was inside.
Buckingham ran like a boy to the head of the gangplank to see this bright guarantee of his continuing wealth and power trotting towards him. Behind it came another coach with a crest on the door, and another. Behind that came another coach, and a marching band playing whistles and drums. Two heralds carried Buckingham’s flag. The coach stopped at the gangplank and they let down the steps for the royal herald. Behind him from the second coach came Kate, Buckingham’s wife, and his redoubtable mother the Papist countess.
Buckingham strode to the head of the gangplank to greet them, his head tilted, his smile quizzical. John followed, a pace behind him. The herald marched up the gangplank and dropped to his knee.
‘My lord duke, you are welcome home,’ the man said. ‘The king sends you greetings and bids you to come to him at once. The court is at Whitehall. And he bids me give you this.’
He produced a purse. Buckingham, with a slight smile, opened it. A bracelet heavy with enormous diamonds spilled out into his cupped hands. ‘This is a pretty gift,’ he said equably.
‘I have private messages for you, from His Majesty,’ the herald added. ‘And he bids you use his coach for your journey to him.’
Buckingham nodded as if he had never expected anything less. The herald got to his feet and stood to one side. Buckingham stepped down the gangplank to where his wife was waiting beside his coach. John bowed to the herald and followed his master. Kate Villiers was in her husband’s arms, her little hands clutching his broad shoulders.
‘You are ill?’ Kate whispered passionately. ‘You look so pale!’
He shook his head and spoke over her head to his mother. ‘Things are indeed prosperous?’
She nodded in grim triumph. ‘He is waiting for you in London, desperate to see you. We have orders to bring the Favourite straight to him.’
‘I am the Favourite still?’
Her hard face was bright with triumph. ‘He says that no-one shall call it a defeat. He says that you could have lost the men and the ships and the standards a hundred times over as long as you are safe. He says he cares nothing for four thousand lives as long as the most precious one comes safe home.’
Buckingham laughed aloud. ‘I am safe then?’
‘We are all safe,’ his mother said. ‘Come to the city. Captain Mason has put his house at your disposal. There is a barber waiting for you, the tailor has a new suit of clothes, and the king has sent you gloves and a cape.’
Tradescant drew a little closer to his lord. There was a press of fashionable people pouring out of the coaches and gathering all around him. Someone had pressed a glass in Buckingham’s hand and they were drinking to his safe return. The women’s necks and shoulders were bare to the cold morning air, they were painted as for a masque at court. The men were teetering on high heels, laughing and pressing close to Buckingham. Someone elbowed John in the side and he was pushed to the edge of the crowd. A party was starting, here on the quayside, beside the tattered bulk of the Triumph despite the resentful stares of the poor people, drowning out the sobbing of women whose husbands would never come home.
‘Tell us all about it!’ someone cried. ‘Tell us about the landing! They say that the French cavalry just vanished!’
Buckingham laughed and disclaimed, his beautiful wife pressed close to his side, his arm around her waist. ‘I am grieved to my heart that we came home without accomplishing what we intended,’ he said modestly.
There were immediate cries of disagreement. ‘But you were ill-supplied! And what could any commander do with such men? They are fools, every one of them!’
John looked away. There was one woman clinging to the handrail of the gangplank, looking up at the deck of the empty ship. He went towards her, his place at the fringe of the crowd instantly taken by a pretty woman, her face bright with desire.
‘What is it, mistress?’
She turned a face to him which was hollowed by long hunger, and sightless with grief. ‘My husband … I am waiting for my husband. Will he come on another ship?’
‘What was his name?’
‘Thomas Blackson. He’s a ploughman, but they took him for a soldier. He’d never held a gun before.’
John remembered Thomas Blackson because the man had offered to keep his plants watered while John was on a mission for his master. He was a big man, as patient and hardworking as the oxen he had driven. John had last seen him before the citadel of St Martin. He had been ordered up a ladder to attack the defenders at the top of the wall. He had gone obediently up the ladder, which was five feet short of the top. The French had leaned over the wall and shot downwards at a ridiculously easy target: the big man at the top of the ladder, stalled, just five feet below them.
‘I am sorry, mistress, he is dead.’
Her white face went whiter still. ‘He can’t be,’ she said. ‘I am expecting his baby. I promised him a son.’
‘I am sorry,’ John repeated.
‘Perhaps he will come on another ship.’
John shook his head. ‘No.’
‘He would not leave me,’ she said, trying to persuade him. ‘He would never leave me. He would not have gone in the first place but they pressed him and took him against his will. They promised me that the duke was sailing with them, and that the duke would care for his men.’
John felt a deep weariness spread through him. ‘I saw him fall,’ he said. ‘He died a hero. But he died, mistress.’
She moved away from him as if his news made him distasteful, as if she would refuse to listen to such a liar. ‘I shall wait,’ she said. ‘He’ll come in on another ship. He won’t fail me. Not my Thomas. He was never late for a single meeting, not through our courtship. He’s never even late home for his dinner. He won’t fail me now.’
John glanced back. The court party were getting into their coaches. There was a breakfast laid at Captain Mason’s house and fine wines and food waiting. Someone hurled an empty bottle into the sea. John turned from the woman and hurried to Buckingham’s side as he stepped into his coach.
‘My lord?’
‘Oh! John.’
‘Where is Captain Mason’s house?’
Kate laid hold of her husband’s coat and pulled him into the coach.
‘Up from the cathedral,’ Buckingham said. ‘But you needn’t come, Tradescant. You can go home.’
‘I thought I would be with you …’
Buckingham smiled his merry smile. ‘See how well I am greeted!’ He dropped into his seat, his arm around his wife. ‘I don’t need your service, John. You can go home to New Hall.’
‘My lord, I …’ John broke off. The old countess looked sharply at him, he was afraid of her black stare. ‘You said I should stay with you this day,’ he reminded his master.
Buckingham laughed again. ‘Yes, but thank God I don’t need your care. The king is my friend, my wife is at my side, my mother guards the interests of my family. Go home, John! I shall see you at New Hall wh
en I come.’
He nodded to the footman and the man shut the door.
‘But when shall I see you?’ John called as the carriage started to move. The footman jostled past him and swung up on the back of the carriage. John wished that he too might at least ride at the back of the carriage, or run behind, or lie like a dog on the floor at their feet. ‘When shall I see you again?’
‘When I come!’ Buckingham cried. He waved his hand as John dropped back from the window. ‘I thank you for your care of me, John. I won’t forget it.’
The lead horse slipped on the cobbles and the carriage checked for a moment. John seized his chance and sprang to the window again. ‘But I thought I was to stay with you! At your shoulder! … As you said … my lord … as you said!’
Buckingham’s wife was pressed to his side, her fine silk gown crushed in his hold. She peeped up at her husband in a laughing complaint at John’s persistence.
‘I have given you leave,’ Buckingham said firmly. ‘Don’t be importunate, John. Go to New Hall. Don’t offend me by asking for more.’
Tradescant skidded to a halt on the cobbles and stood watching the coach rock away down the quayside. The other coaches followed behind the royal coach like some great promenade. Tradescant had to step back to make room for them; and then they were all gone, the trotting horses, the laughing courtiers, the brightness of the liveries, of the courtiers’ clothes, and the dock was left to greyness and mourning once more.
Tradescant stood until the last of them was gone. He could hardly believe the words he had heard his master use to him. When he had been pleading for a place at his side, Buckingham had answered him as if he had been begging for money. Buckingham had slipped, like some beautiful bird, from John’s keeping to another’s. And John might as well whistle to a free bird to come back to its cage as ask the duke to come back to him. John was held and bound by an obsessional desire, by a passionate love and by a sacred oath. He had sworn to love his lord until death. But only now did he realise that Buckingham had sworn nothing.
Tradescant went slowly up the gangplank, to his cabin. Someone had stolen his walking boots and his warm cape on the voyage when he had been too seldom there. He would have to replace them in Portsmouth, where such things were overpriced. He pulled out his pack and started to put his things together. The movement of the ship, rocking at anchor in the harbour, felt half-dead to John after the five-month expedition on rolling seas. The crew had melted away as soon as the officers had gone, there was no sound but the creaking of hard-worked timbers. His cabin showed his neglect of it. These last few days he had spent all his time with Buckingham, and his pallet bed was damp. Even his plants had been forgotten, the earth in the little pots was dry. John fetched a jug of water and dribbled it in, feeling that he must have lost his senses completely that he should have carried his plants through so much and then forgotten to water them for the last three days of the voyage.
He thought that this was how a woman must feel when she has given her love and given her trust and found that her lover was light-hearted and fickle and negligent all along. She feels as if he has taken something precious, a rare seedling, and let it fall. She feels injured – Tradescant felt pain like a wound – but she also feels a fool. Tradescant felt humbled lower than ever in his life before. Being an apprentice gardener was a low station in life but you could be proud of your work and see where it might take you. But being a nobleman’s lover was the work of a fool. Buckingham had used him, had taken him for consolation, to keep his fears at bay, to support his courage and confidence. Now he had his mother and Kate and the king and the court and all his wealth and joy. And all Tradescant had was a new gillyflower, wilting, a large wormwood plant in dry soil, a pain in his backside which was abuse, and a pain in his belly which was grief.
Grimly he picked up his pack, ducked his head to avoid the low beam of his cabin doorway, and climbed the companionway to the waist of the ship. He trudged down the gangplank. No-one was on board to bid him goodbye, no-one was on the quayside waiting to greet him. The white-faced widow started up as she heard a footstep on the gangplank, but then dropped back. Tradescant went past her without a word of comfort. He had no comfort to give. He turned his face away from the sea and trudged, uncomfortable in his shoes on the cobbles, towards the city.
A man fell in beside him. ‘Did you speak to him about my promotion?’
It was Felton again. ‘I am sorry,’ said John. ‘I forgot.’
But the man was not angry this time. ‘Then he must have seen sense himself,’ he said joyfully. ‘Those who call him a fool will have me to reckon with. He has promised me my captaincy. I shall retire a captain and that is worth something to a poor man, Mr Tradescant.’
‘I am glad of it,’ John said heavily.
‘I shall never fight again,’ Felton declared. ‘It was a bad campaign, badly planned, badly led, cruelly hard. There were times when I wept like a baby. I thought we would never get off that accursed island.’
John nodded.
‘He will never do it again, will he?’ Felton asked. ‘The French can fight their own battles now. They don’t need the pain of Englishmen. We should be as we were with the old queen – defenders of our own shores and our own counties. Safe behind our own sea. What are the French and their worries to me?’
‘I feel that too,’ John said. They had reached the end of the quay. He turned and held out his hand to Felton. ‘God be with you, Felton.’
‘And with you, Mr Tradescant. Now we are home, maybe the duke will think of the people at home. There’s much poverty. It is pitiful to see the children in my village. They have neither school nor play, and the common land has been enclosed so they have neither milk nor meat nor honey. And bread itself is scarce.’
‘Maybe he will.’
The two men shook hands, but still Felton lingered. ‘If I were the duke and could advise the king, I would tell him to stop the enclosing of land and free it for the people,’ he said. ‘So that every man can have his strip for vegetables or to keep a pig. Like it used to be. If I were advising the king, I would tell him that before he moves the communion table rightwise or sidewise or anywise in the church he should feed the people. We need bread before a mouthful of communion wine.’
John nodded, but he knew, as Felton could not know, that the king never saw the beggars in the streets, never saw the hungry children. He went in his carriage from great country seat to hunting lodge. He went on his royal barge from one riverside palace to another. And besides, the permission granted to a landlord to enclose common land brought revenue into the royal coffers, while a refusal would benefit only the poor and leave the king as short of cash as ever.
‘He is a merciful king?’ Felton queried. ‘And Buckingham is a great duke, a good man, is he not?’
‘Oh, yes,’ John said. The pain in his belly seemed to have stretched out to his fingers and his toes, he felt numb in his legs and shoulders. If he did not start to walk home soon, he thought he would lie down on the cobbles and die. ‘Excuse me, I must go, my wife will be waiting for me.’
‘I must go too!’ Felton cried, remembering. ‘I have a wife waiting for me, thank God. I shall tell her to call me captain!’
He hefted his pack and strode off whistling. John looked down at his shoes and put one in front of the other, as if he had just learned to walk. At each step he thought he could hear Buckingham laugh and say: ‘I have given you leave. Don’t be importunate, John. Go to New Hall. Don’t offend me by asking for more.’
He had not thought how he would get to New Hall. He had been on such a crest of desire and happiness that he had thought he and the duke would ride side by side, the two of them together. Or perhaps they would have used the duke’s coach and horses and rocked along the badly made roads, and laughed when they had to stop for a loose wheel, or walked shoulder to shoulder up a hill to spare the horses.
But now he was trudging alone in stiff new walking boots. He had some money in his pocket, he
could buy or hire a horse, or he could take a ride with any carter. But as the sun came slowly up – an English sun, he thought with a sudden pang of recognition – he found that he wanted to walk, walk like a poor man, walk slowly along the rutted road which led away from the port to London. He wanted to look at the changing blushing colours of the trees and the berries in the hedgerow and the grass seeds bobbing in the wind. He felt as if he had been in exile for a dozen years, he had dreamed of lanes like this, of a sun as warm and mild as this one, while they had been trapped on that island waiting for reinforcement, waiting for a decisive battle, waiting for victory, for glory.
At midday he knocked on the door of a small wayside farmhouse and asked if he could buy some dinner. The farmer’s wife gave him a trencher of bread and cheese and a flagon of ale to drink. Her hands were ingrained with dirt and there was dirt under her fingernails and in the thorn scratches.
‘You’re a gardener,’ Tradescant guessed.
She rubbed her hand on her apron. ‘I struggle with it,’ she said in the broad accent of Hampshire. ‘But ’tis like a forest, like the forest of the Sleeping Beauty. When I rest it grows up to my very windows. I was clearing my strawberry bed and I find a plant growing thorns. A strawberry with thorns! The whole garden would grow weeds and thorns if it could.’
‘A thorny strawberry?’ John demanded. He pushed aside the flask of ale. The pain was still deep in his body but he could not deny a small squirm of curiosity. ‘You have a thorny strawberry? May I see it?’
‘Why, what use is it?’ she asked. ‘It grows a green fruit, it is no good for eating nor bottling.’
‘It is a curiosity,’ he said, and found he was smiling, the muscles on his cheeks relaxing from their scowl. ‘I am a great one for curiosities, I would be glad if you would show it to me. Out of your kindness. And I would pay you …’
‘You can have it for nothing,’ she said. ‘But you must fetch it yourself. I threw it with the other weeds on the midden. It’ll take a deal of sorting through.’
Earthly Joys Page 33