Earthly Joys

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘God keep him safe,’ Hester said, glancing out of the window at the dark March skies.

  ‘Amen,’ John said.

  Towards the end of the month John fell ill again. He ached in every bone and complained of the cold. But he was adamant that nothing ailed him, he was well enough. ‘Just tired,’ he said, smiling at Hester. ‘Just old bones.’ She did not press him to rise from his bed, nor to eat. She thought he looked as if he had reached the end of a long and arduous road.

  ‘I think I should write a letter for J,’ he announced quietly one morning as she sat at the foot of his bed, sewing an apron for Frances.

  At once she put her sewing to one side. ‘He will not get it if he left the colony as he planned. He should be at sea now.’

  ‘Not a letter to send. A letter for him to read here. If I am not here to speak to him.’

  She nodded gravely, she did not rush to reassure him. ‘Are you feeling worse?’

  ‘I am feeling old,’ he said gently. ‘I don’t imagine that I will live forever, and I want to make sure that it is all settled here. Will you write it for me?’

  She hesitated. ‘If you wish. Or I could send for a clerk to write it. It might be better if it were not written by me.’

  He nodded. ‘You are a sensible woman, Hester. That’s sound advice. Get a clerk for me from Lambeth and I will dictate my letter to J and finish my will.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and went quietly from the room. At the doorway she paused. ‘I hope you will make it clear to your son that he is not bound to have me. Your son will have to make his own decision when he comes home. I am not part of his inheritance.’

  There was a small gleam of mischief in John’s pale face. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he said unconvincingly. He took a difficult breath. ‘But it shall be as you wish. Send for a clerk from Lambeth, and also send for the executors of my will. I want to leave everything straight.’

  The clerk came and the executors with him – Elizabeth’s brother, Alexander Norman, and William Ward, Buckingham’s steward, who had served with John all those years ago.

  ‘I shall be your executor with the greatest of pleasure,’ Alexander assured him, taking a seat at the bedside. ‘But I expect that you shall be mine. This is just a winter rheum. We’ll see you in the garden again this spring.’

  John managed a weary smile, leaning back against his pillows. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I’m a good age now.’

  Alexander Norman glanced over the will and set his name to it. He reached towards John and shook his hand. ‘God keep you, John Tradescant,’ he said quietly.

  The Duke of Buckingham’s old steward, William Ward, stepped forward, and signed the will which the clerk showed him. He took John’s hand. ‘I shall pray for you,’ he said quietly. ‘You shall be in my prayers every day, along with our lord.’

  John turned his head at that. ‘D’you pray for him still?’

  The steward nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said gently. ‘They can say what they like about him but we who were in his service remember a master to worship, don’t we, John? He wasn’t a tyrant to us. He paid us freely, he gave us gifts, he laughed at mistakes and he would flare into a rage and then it was all forgotten. They spoke ill of him then and they speak worse of him now; but those of us who knew him have never served a better master.’

  John nodded. ‘I loved him,’ he whispered.

  The steward nodded. ‘When you get to heaven you will see him there,’ he said with simple faith. ‘Outshining the angels.’

  The will was signed and sealed and posted with the clerk, the executors in agreement, but Hester thought that John would not go until he could see his tulips one last time. There is no gardener in the world who does not worship spring like a pagan. Every day John would take a seat at the window of his bedroom and peer outward and down to try to see the tiny spears of green springtime bulbs piercing the cold earth.

  Every day Frances came to his room with her hands filled with new buds. ‘Look, Grandfather, the lenten lilies are out, and the little white daffodils.’

  She would spread them on the coverlet wrapped around his knees, both of them careless of the sticky juice from the cut stems. ‘A feast,’ John said, his eyes on them. ‘And they smell?’

  ‘Like heaven,’ Frances replied ecstatically. ‘Yellow, they smell like sunshine and lemons and honey.’

  John chuckled. ‘Tulips coming?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait,’ she said. ‘They’re still in bud.’

  The old man smiled at her. ‘I should have learned patience by now, my Frances,’ he said gently, his breath coming short. ‘But don’t forget to look tomorrow.’

  Hester thought that John’s stubborn will would not let him die in early spring. He wanted to see his tulips before he died, he wanted to see the blossom on his cherry trees. She thought his soul could not leave his weary body until he had some warm summer flowers in his arms once more. As the cold winds died down and the light at the window of his bedroom grew brighter and warmer, his breath slowly slipped away, but still he hung on – waiting for the summer, waiting for the return of his son.

  At the end of March he turned his head to her as she sat at his bedside. ‘Tell the gardener to send me in some flowers,’ he said softly. He was breathless. ‘Everything we have. I may not be able to wait for them to bloom. Tell him to pot me up some tulips. I want to see them. They must be nearly showing by now.’

  Hester nodded and went out to find the gardener. He was weeding in the seed beds, preparing them for the great rush of planting out which would come when the danger of night frosts was over.

  ‘He wants his tulips,’ she told him. ‘You’re to pot them up and take them in. And cut some daffodils, armfuls of them. But I want us to do more for him. What are the best plants he has made? The rarest, most special plants? Can we not put them all in a pot and take them in so that he can see them from his bed?’

  The gardener smiled at her ignorance. ‘It’d be a big pot.’

  ‘Several pots then,’ Hester persisted. ‘What are his other plants?’

  The gardener’s gesture took in the whole garden, and the orchards beyond. ‘This is not a man who gardens in pots,’ he said grandly. ‘There’s his orchard: d’you know how many cherry trees alone? Forty! And some of his fruit trees were never grown before, like the diapered plum he got from Malta.

  ‘And he found wonderful trees for the park or garden. See those beauties so fresh and green with those pale needles? He grew them from seed. They are Archangel larches, from Russia itself. He brought the pine cones back and managed to make them grow.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ Hester objected, looking at the spiky yellowing needles clinging to the brown twigs.

  The gardener smiled at her and took one of the swooping bare branches. There was a tiny rosette of green needles at the tip of the rusty brown branches.

  ‘In the autumn they turn as golden as a beech tree and shed their needles like yellow rain. Come the spring they burst out, all fresh and green like grass. He reared them from seed and now look at the height of them!

  ‘In the orchards he grows the service tree, and his favourites are the great horse chestnuts. Look at that avenue down the garden! And every one of them flowers like a rose and makes leaves like a fan. It’s the greatest tree that has ever been seen, and he grew the first from a nut. On the lawn before the house? That’s an Asian plane. And nobody can say how big it will grow because nobody has ever seen one before.’

  Hester looked down the avenue at the arching swooping branches. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘He showed me all around the garden and the orchard but he never told me they were all his own, discovered by him and grown here in Lambeth for the very first time. He only told me they were rare and beautiful.’

  ‘And there’s the herbs and vegetables,’ the gardener reminded her. ‘He’s got seven sorts of garlic alone, a red lettuce which can make seventeen ounces of good leaves, allspick lavender, Jamaican pepper. His flowers come
from all over the world, and we send them all over the country. Spiderwort – he gave his name to it. Tradescant’s spiderwort, a three-petalled flower the colour of the sky. On a wet day it closes up so you think it’s dead, on a sunny day it is as blue as your gown. A flower to lift your heart, grow for you anywhere. Mountain valerian, lady’s smock, large-flowered gentians, silver knapweed, dozens of geraniums, ranunculus – a flower like a springtime rose, anemones from Paris, five different types of rock rose, dozens of different clematis, the moon trefoil, the shrubby germander, erigeron – as pretty as daisies but as light and airy as snowdrops, his great rose daffodil with hundreds of petals. In the tulip beds alone we have a fortune. D’you know how many varieties? Fifty! And a Semper Augustus among them. The finest tulip ever grown!’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Hester said. ‘I just thought he was a gardener …’

  The gardener smiled at her. ‘He is a gardener, and an adventurer, and a man who was always there when history was being made,’ he said simply. ‘He’s the greatest man of this age for all that he’s always been someone’s servant. Fifty tulip varieties alone!’

  Hester was gazing along the avenue of the horse chestnut saplings. Their buds were green, breaking out of the bud casings which were fat and shiny, wet and brown like molasses.

  ‘When will they bloom?’

  The gardener followed her glance. ‘Not for another few weeks.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘If we cut some branches and took them indoors and kept them warm?’

  He nodded. ‘They might dry up and die. But they might open early.’

  ‘Pot up the tulips then,’ she decided, ‘all of them, every one of his fifty varieties. And anything that is ready to bloom in the rarities room or the orangery. Let’s make his bedroom a little forest, let’s make it a flowery mead, with branches and flowers and plants, everything he loves.’

  ‘To help him get better?’ the gardener asked.

  Hester turned away. ‘So that he can say goodbye.’

  Tradescant lay propped high on thick pillows to help him to breathe, his nightcap on his head, his hair combed. The fire was burning in the grate and the window was slightly opened. The room was filled with the perfume of a thousand flowers. Over his bed arched boughs of chestnuts, the leaves broken out of the sticky buds. Higher again were beech branches, the buds like dried icicles on the thin twigs, but every plumper bud was splitting and showing the startling sweetmeat-pink and white lining, where the leaves were pushing to come through. In great banks around the side of the room were the tulips, fat and round, showing every colour that had ever come out of the Low Countries: the blaze of scarlet, the magnificent stripes and broken colours in red and white and yellow, the shining purity of the Lack tulip, the wonderful spiky profile of the Tulipa australis, and the flower that was still John’s joy, the white and scarlet Semper Augustus. There were boughs of roses, their tight buds promising the beauty of their flower if John could stay just another month, or another month after that. There were clumps of bluebells like spilled ink on the carpet, and white and navy violets in pots. There were late daffodils, their little heads nodding, and everywhere threaded through the riot of colour and shape was Tradescant’s own lavender, springing fresh green shoots from the pale spines and putting out violet blue spikes.

  He lay back on his pillows and looked from one perfect shape to another. The colours were so bright and joyous that he closed his eyes to rest them, and still saw, on the inside of his eyelids, the blazing red of his tulips, the shining yellow of his daffodils, the sky-blue of his lavender.

  Hester had left a little pathway from his bed to the door so that she could come and go to him, but the rest of the room was banked with his flowers. He lay like a miser in a gold vault, half-drowned in treasure.

  ‘I have left a letter for you to give to John when he returns,’ he said quietly.

  She nodded. ‘You need not worry for me. If he will have me then I will stay, but whatever happens I will be a friend to the children. You can trust me to stand their friend.’

  He nodded and closed his eyes for a moment.

  ‘Why did you not name the plants for yourself?’ she asked softly. ‘There are so many. You could have had your name remembered with thanks a dozen times a day in every garden in the country.’

  Tradescant smiled. ‘Because they are not mine to name. I did not make them, like a carpenter makes a newel post. God made them. All I did was find them and bring them into the gardens. They belong to everyone. To everyone who loves to grow them.’

  He dozed for a few moments.

  In the silence Hester could hear the household going about its business, the noise of the lad sweeping the yard, and the continual murmur from the rarities room where visitors came and stayed to study and to marvel. The bright yellow spring sun poured into the room.

  ‘Shall I close the shutters?’ Hester asked. ‘Is it too bright?’

  John was looking at the Semper Augustus, with its radiant white petals and the glossy red dappled stripe. ‘It’s never too bright,’ he said.

  He lay very still for a while and Hester thought he had gone to sleep. Quietly, she rose from her chair and tiptoed to the door. She looked back at the bed embedded in flowers. Above Tradescant’s sleeping head his chestnut tree was bursting into leaf.

  The creak of the wooden door disturbed his sleep. He was awake, looking towards the door; but he did not see Hester. His gaze went a little higher than her head, and his entranced look of delight was that of a man who has seen the love of his life coming, smiling, towards him. He raised himself up, as if he would move lightly forward, like a young man greeting his love. His smile of recognition was unmistakable, his face was filled with joy.

  ‘Ah! You at last!’ he said softly.

  Hester went quickly to the bed, her skirts brushing the banks of flowers, pollen and perfume swirling like ground mist as she ran to him, but by the time she touched his hand the pulse had stopped and John Tradescant had died in a bed of his flowers, greeting the person he loved most in all the world.

  About the Author

  Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen’s Fool. The Other Boleyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.

  Also by the Author

  The Tudor Court Series

  THE CONSTANT PRINCESS

  THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL

  THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE

  THE QUEEN’S FOOL

  THE VIRGIN’S LOVER

  THE OTHER QUEEN

  The Wideacre Trilogy

  WIDEACRE

  THE FAVOURED CHILD

  MERIDON

  Earthly Joys

  EARTHLY JOYS

  VIRGIN EARTH

  The Cousins’ War

  THE LADY OF THE RIVERS

  THE WHITE QUEEN

  THE RED QUEEN

  THE KINGMAKER’S DAUGHTER

  THE WHITE PRINCESS

  Standalones

  PERFECTLY CORRECT

  ALICE HARTLEY’S HAPPINESS

  A RESPECTABLE TRADE

  THE WISE WOMAN

  FALLEN SKIES

  THE LITTLE HOUSE

  ZELDA’S CUT

  Short Stories

  BREAD AND CHOCOLATE

  Copyright

  Harper

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998

  Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1998

  Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this boo
k is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  Source ISBN: 9780007228478

  Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2006 ISBN: 9780007396313

  Version: 2013–09–04

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