Virgin Earth

He watched her close the door behind her and opened his father’s letter.

My dear son,

I have made a will leaving the Ark entire to you. I hope that it will bring you much joy. I hope that Baby John will succeed you, as you succeed me, and that the name of Tradescant will always mean something to people who love their gardens.

If I am dead when you return then I leave you my blessing and my love. I am going to join your mother, and my two masters, Sir Robert and the Duke, and I am ready to go to them. Do not grieve for me, J, I have had a long life and one which many men would envy.

The young woman called Hester Pooks has a substantial dowry and is a sensible woman. I have spoken to her about you and I believe she would make a good wife to you and a good mother to the children. She is not another Jane, because there never could be another Jane. But she is a straightforward, kind young woman and I think you need one such as her.

Of course it is your decision. But if I had lived long enough to see your return I would have introduced her to you with my earnest recommendation.

Farewell my son, my dear son,

John Tradescant.

J sat very still and watched the kindling twigs in the fire flicker and turn to knotted skeletal lace of dry ash. He thought of his father’s determination and his care, which showed itself in the meticulous nursery and seed bed, in pruning and weeding and in the unending twisting and training of his beloved climbing plants, and showed itself here too, in providing a wife for his adult son. He felt his irritated sense of thwarted independence melt before his affection for his father. And at the thought of the gardens being left to him in trust for another John Tradescant coming behind them both he felt the anger inside him dissolve, and he slipped to the floor and rested his head in his father’s chair and wept for him.

Frances, coming in a little later, found her father composed and seated in the window where he could look out at the cold horse chestnut avenue and the swirls of fog in the early-morning darkness.

‘Father?’ she said tentatively.

He turned and held out his arms to her and she ran into his embrace. He brought her close to him and felt the light tiny bones of her body and smelled the warm clean smell of her skin and hair. For a moment he thought vividly and poignantly of Suckahanna, who was no heavier but whose every muscle was like whipcord.

‘You’ve grown,’ he said. ‘I swear you are nearly up to my chest.’

She smiled up at him. ‘I am nine,’ she said seriously. ‘And Baby John is bigger than when you left. And heavier. I can’t lift him now he’s five. Hester has to.’

‘Hester does, does she? D’you like Hester?’

He thought she looked at him as if she needed help in saying something, as if there were something she could not say. ‘Yes.’

‘Your grandfather thought she might marry me, he thought she might be a mother to you.’

A look of relief crossed her face. ‘We need a mother,’ she said. ‘I can’t lift Baby John now he’s so big, and I don’t always know what to do when he cries. If he were to be sick, like Mama was sick, I wouldn’t know how to care for him and he might die …’ She broke off and gulped on a sob. ‘We need a mother,’ she said earnestly. ‘A cook isn’t the same.’

‘I’m sorry,’ J said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘I thought you would bring us one home from Virginia, with other things in the cart,’ she said childishly.

J thought for a moment of the girl, only a few years older than this one, thanked his luck that he had not been so misled as to bring her back here and burden himself with her care as well as that of his children. ‘There’s no-one in that country who could be a mother to you,’ he said shortly. ‘No-one who could be a wife to me here.’

Frances blinked back her tears and looked up at him. ‘But we need one. A mother who knows what to do when Baby John is naughty, and teaches him his letters.’

‘Yes,’ J said. ‘I see we do.’

‘Hester says breakfast is ready,’ she said.

‘Is Baby John at breakfast?’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Come.’

J took her hand and led her from the room. Her hand was cool and soft, her fingers were long and her palm had lost its baby fatness. It was the hand of an adult in miniature, not the soft plumpness of a little child.

‘You’ve grown,’ he observed.

She peeped up a little smile at him. ‘My uncle Alexander Norman says that I will soon be a proper young lady,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘But I tell him that I shall be the king’s gardener.’

‘You still want that?’ J asked. She nodded and opened the door to the kitchen.

They were all waiting for him at their places around the dark wooden table: the gardener and the two lads, the cook and the maid and the boy who worked in the house and the stables. Hester was at the foot of the table with Baby John beside her, still half-asleep, his drowsy eyes barely showing above the table top. J drank in the sight of him: the beloved boy, the Tradescant heir.

‘Oh, Father!’ Baby John said, mildly surprised.

J lifted him up, held him close, inhaled the sweet warm smell of sleepy child, hugged him tight and felt his heart turn over with tenderness for his boy, for Jane’s boy.

They waited for him to sit before they took their own places on the benches around the table and then Hester bowed her head and said grace in the simple words approved by the church of Archbishop Laud. For a moment it struck a discord with J – who had spent his married life in the fierce independent certainties of his wife and listening to her powerful extempore prayers – but then he bowed his head and heard the rhythm and the simple comfort of the language.

He looked up before Hester said ‘Amen’. The household was around the table in neat order, his two children were either side of Hester, their faces washed, their clothes tidy. A solid meal was laid on the table but there was nothing rich or ostentatious or wasteful. And – it was this which decided him – on the windowsill there was a bowl of indigo and white bluebells which someone had taken the trouble to uproot and transplant from the orchard for the pleasure of their bright colour and their sweet, light smell.

No-one but J’s father, John Tradescant, had ever brought flowers into the kitchen or the house for pleasure. Flowers were part of the work of the house: reared in the orangery, blooming in the garden, shown in the rarities room, preserved in sugar or painted and sketched. But Hester had a love of flowers that reminded him of his father, and made him think, as he saw her seated between his children, and with flowers on the windowsill, that the great aching gaps in his life where his wife and his father had once been might be resolved if this woman would live here and work alongside him.

J could not take his young children from their home to Virginia, he could not imagine that he might be able to go back there himself. His time in the forest seemed like a dream, like something which had happened to another man, a free man, a new man in the new land. In the months that followed, busy anxious months, in which John the Younger had to become John Tradescant, the only John Tradescant, he hardly thought of Suckahanna and his promise to return. It seemed like a game he had played, a fancy, not a real plan at all. Back in Lambeth, in the old world, the old life closed around him and he thought that his father was probably right – as he generally was – and that he would need Hester to run the business and the house.

He decided that he would ask her to stay. He knew that he would never ask her to love him.

J did not formally propose marriage to Hester until the end of the summer. For the first months he could think of nothing but clearing the debts caused by the crash of the tulip market. The Tradescants, father and son, had invested the family fortune in buying rare tulip bulbs, certain that the market was on the rise. But by the time the tulips had flowered and spawned more bulbs under their perfect soil in their porcelain pots the market had crashed. J and his father were left with nearly a thousand pounds owed to their shareholders, and bound by their sense of honour to repay. By selling the new Virginia plants at a handsome profit and by ensuring that everyone knew of his new maidenhair fern, an exquisite variety which everyone desired on sight, J doubled and re-doubled the business for the nursery garden, and started to drag the family back into profit.

The maidenhair fern was not the only booty that visitors to the garden sought. John offered them new jasmine, the like of which no-one had ever seen before, which would climb and twist itself round a pole as rampant as a honeysuckle, smelling as sweet, but flowering in a bright primrose yellow. A new columbine, an American columbine, and best of all of the surviving saplings: a plane tree, an American plane tree, which John thought might grow as big as an oak in the temperate climate of England. He had no more than half a dozen of each, he would sell nothing. He took orders with cash deposits and promised to deliver seedlings as soon as they were propagated. The American maple which he brought back with such care did not thrive in the Lambeth garden though John hung over it like a new mother; and he lost also the only specimen he had of a tulip tree, and nearly came to blows with his father’s friend the famous plantsman, John Parkinson, when he tried to describe the glory of the tree growing in the American wood, which was nothing but a drying stick in the garden in Lambeth.

‘I tell you it is as big as an oak with great greasy green leaves and a flower as big as your head!’ John swore.

‘Aye,’ Parkinson retorted. ‘The fish that get away are always the biggest.’

Alexander Norman, John’s brother-in-law and an executor of John Tradescant’s will, took over some of the Tradescant debts on easy terms as a favour to the young family. ‘For Frances’s dowry,’ he said. ‘She’s such a pretty maid.’

J sold some fields that his father had owned in Kent and cleared most of the rest of the debts. Those still outstanding came to two hundred pounds – the very sum of Hester’s dowry. With his account books before him one day, he found he was thinking that Hester’s dowry could be his for the asking, and the Tradescant accounts could show a clear profit once more. On that unromantic thought he put down his pen and went to find her.

He had watched her throughout the summer, when she knew she was doubly on trial: tested whether she was good enough for the Tradescant name, and how she matched up to Jane. She never showed a flicker of nervousness. He observed her dealing with the visitors to the rarities. She showed the exhibits with a quiet pride, as if she were glad to be part of a house that contained such marvels, but without boastfulness. She had learned her way around the busy room quicker than anyone could have expected, and she could move from cabinet to wall-hanging, ordering, showing, discussing, with fluid confidence. Her training at court meant that she could be on easy terms with all sorts of people. Her artistic background made her confident around objects of beauty.

She was good with the visitors. She asked them for their money at the door without embarrassment, and then showed them into the room. She did not force herself on them as a guide; she always waited until they explained if they had a special interest. If they wanted to draw or paint an exhibit she was quick to provide a table close to the grand Venetian windows in the best light, and then she had the tact to leave them alone. If they were merely the very many curious visitors who wanted to spend the morning at the museum and afterwards boast to their friends that they had seen everything there was to see in London – the lions at the Tower, the king’s own rooms at Whitehall, the exhibits at Tradescant’s Ark – she made a point of showing them the extraordinary things, the mermaid, the flightless bird, the whale’s mouth, the unicorn’s skeleton, which they would describe all the way home – and everyone who heard them talk became a potential customer.

She guided them smoothly to the gardens when they had finished in the rarities room, and took care that she knew the names of the plants. She always started at the avenue of chestnut trees, and there she always said the same thing:

‘And these trees, every single one of them, come from cuttings and nuts taken from Mr Tradescant’s first ever six trees. He had them first in 1607, thirty-one years ago, and he lived long enough to see them flourish in this beautiful avenue.’ The visitors would stand back and look at the slim, strong trees, now green and rich with the summer growth of their spread palmate leaves.

‘They are beautiful in leaf with those deep arching branches, but the flowers are as beautiful as a bouquet of apple blossom. I saw them forced to flower in early spring and they scented the room like a light daffodil scent, a delicious scent as sweet as lilies.’

‘Who forced the chestnuts for you? My father?’ J asked her when some visitors had spent a small fortune on seedlings and departed, their wagon loaded with little pots.

She turned to him, slipping the coins into the pockets of her apron. ‘I had the gardener bring them into flower for your father as he lay sick,’ she said simply.

‘He saw them in bloom?’

She nodded. ‘He said he was lying in a flowery mead. It was something we once talked about. He lay among a rich bed of scents and colours, tulips all around him, and over his bed were great boughs of flowering horse chestnut. It was a wonderful sight. He liked it.’

J thought for a moment of the other deaths in the house: his mother’s in the room ablaze with daffodils, and the boat laden with Rosamund roses going slowly downriver to the City for Jane’s funeral. ‘Did he ask you to do it?’

Hester shook her head.

‘I am glad you thought of it,’ he said. ‘I am glad there was someone here to do that for him.’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘About his plan that we should marry …’

She flushed a little but the face she turned towards him was serene. ‘Have you come to a decision?’

He nodded.

‘I’m glad. I cannot in all conscience stay here much longer. Your mother-in-law Mrs Hurte is bound to wonder what I am doing here, and the servants will talk.’

‘I have thought about it,’ he said, sounding as detached as she. ‘And I have thought that we might suit very well.’

She stole a quick look at his face. ‘You want to marry me?’

‘If you desire it,’ J said coldly. ‘As my father wrote to me in his letter, I have two children and work to do. I must have someone reliable at my home. I have observed you these last months and you are clearly fond of the children and you do the work well. I cannot think of a better wife for me, especially since I have no preference in women.’

She bowed her head. For a moment she had an odd sentimental thought that by accepting Tradescant’s loveless proposal she was cutting herself off from all the other possibilities which might have unfurled before her. Surely there would have been men, or even just one man, who might have loved her for herself, and not because she was good with his children and reliable with his business? Surely there might have been just one man who might have proposed and waited for her answer with his heart pounding? Surely there might have been just one man who might have put her hand to his lips so that she felt not a polite kiss but the sudden warm intake of breath which reveals desire?

She gave a small unnoticed shrug. No such man had yet appeared and she was nearing thirty. The agreement with John Tradescant was the best she had ever been offered in a country where success was measured in terms of intimacy with the court. The king’s gardener and a favourite of the queen was a good catch, even for a spinster with a dowry of two hundred pounds.

‘I have no preference in men,’ she said, as coolly as he. ‘I will marry you, John.’

He hesitated. ‘No-one ever calls me John,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been J. It was my father who was John.’

Hester nodded. ‘I know that. But your father is dead now, and you are the head of the household and a son no longer. I shall call you John. You are the head of the household, you are John Tradescant.’

‘I suppose I am …’

‘Sometimes it is hard when your father or mother dies,’ she said. ‘It’s not just their death which causes you grief, but the fact that you are no longer someone’s little child. It’s the final stage of growing up, of becoming a man or a woman. My mother used to call me a pet-name, and I have never heard that name since she died. I never will hear it again. I am a grown woman now and no-one calls me anything but Hester Pooks.’

‘You are saying that I must take my manhood.’

‘You are the head of the household now. And I will be your wife.’

‘We will have the banns called at once then,’ he said. ‘At St Mary’s.’

She shook her head at the thought of him walking to his wedding past the headstone of his only beloved wife. ‘I am a resident of St Bride’s in the City,’ she said. ‘I will go home and get the banns called there. Shall we marry at once?’

He looked indifferent. ‘It would be more convenient for me,’ he said politely. ‘But you perhaps have clothes to order? Or things you want to do?’

‘A few things. We can be married in October.’

He nodded as if it were the completion date of some routine gardening work. ‘In October then.’

October 1638

John wondered if he should feel himself faithless to his promise to Suckahanna, but he did not. He could not remember her well enough, only foolish details like the pride of her smile or the cool clasp of her hand when he had pledged himself to her. He dreamed one night that he was in the woods with her and she was setting a fish trap. When he woke he wondered at the power of the image of her bending over the little stream and setting her trap of woven withy. But then Baby John marched determinedly into the room and the dream was gone.

He wondered occasionally what was happening to her, whether she and her mother were safe in the woods as they had planned to be. But Virginia was so far away, a two-months’ voyage, and such a leap of the imagination that he could not keep her in his mind. Surrounded by the business worries and demands of his home J could not retain the picture of Suckahanna. Every day she seemed more exotic, more like a traveller’s tale. She was a mermaid, a barnacle goose that swam underwater and then flew from the barnacle shells, a being with its head beneath its shoulders, a flying carpet. One night when he was drunk he tried to tell a fellow gardener that he had collected his Virginia plants with an Indian maid who was covered in blue tattoos and wore nothing but a buckskin pinny; and the man roared with laughter and paid for another round of ales to praise John’s bawdy invention.

Every day she receded further from him. Whether he tried to speak of her or kept silent, whether he dreamed of her or let her image go, every day she seemed less likely, every day she floated down the river of his memory in her little canoe, and never looked back at him.

On the first of October Hester went to stay in her City lodgings to prepare for her wedding: buying a few pieces of lace to stitch on her petticoats and her shift, packing her bags, warning her landlady that she would need the little room no longer for she was going to be married to the queen’s gardener – Mr John Tradescant.

Her uncle John de Critz gave her away and his family and the de Neve relations made an impressive show in the little church. It was a quiet ceremony. John did not want to make a fuss and the de Critz family were refined, artistic people with no desire to throw rice or ears of wheat, or shout and riot around the bedroom door.

The bridal couple went soberly home to Lambeth. Before she left Hester had given orders that the great bedroom which had once been John and Elizabeth’s should be hung with new curtains, swept out and cleaned, and fully aired. She felt that she would rather sleep in the bed where John Tradescant had died than share the bed that had belonged to John and Jane. Frances was moved into her father and mother’s old room and Baby John had his nursery room to himself.

John had made no comment about the arrangements except to say that it should all be done as she wished. He did not show any grief at moving from his first wife’s bedroom, nor did he object to the cost of replacing the curtains and wall hangings throughout.

‘They are ten years old.’ Hester justified the expense.

‘It doesn’t seem so long,’ he said simply.

The children were dancing on the garden wall, waiting for them to come down the road from Lambeth.

‘Are you married?’ Frances demanded. ‘Where’s your new dress?’

‘I just wore this one.’

‘Am I to call you Mother?’ Frances asked.

Hester glanced at John. He had bent to scoop Baby John from the wall and was carrying him into the house. He took care not to reply.

‘You can call me Hester, as you always have done. I am not your mother who is in heaven, but I shall do my best to love you and care for you as well as she would have done.’

Frances nodded carelessly, as if she were not much concerned, and scrambled down from the wall and led the way into the house. Hester nodded, she was not disappointed in Frances’s lack of warmth. This was not a child who could easily ask for comfort; but no child needed love more than she did.

The new family went into the parlour and Hester seated herself in the chair on one side of the fire opposite John. Baby John sat on the rug before the fire and Frances hesitated, unsure where she should sit.

Without looking at Hester she sank to her knees before the warmth of the fire and then slowly leaned backwards against the arm of Hester’s chair. Hester dropped her hand gently on the nape of her stepdaughter’s neck and felt the tight, thin muscles of her neck relax at the touch. Frances let her head lean back against her stepmother’s touch, trusted her caress.

‘We shall be happy,’ Hester promised in an undertone to her brave little stepdaughter. ‘All will be well, Frances.’

At bedtime the household gathered for evening prayers and John read from the new book of common prayer, enjoying the rhythm of the language and the sense of security which came from using the same words at the same time of day, every day. The household, which had prayed aloud, speaking freely from their hearts under Jane, now bowed their heads and listened, and when the prayers were over they went about their work of bolting the doors for the night, damping down the fires, and snuffing the candles.

Hester and John went up the stairs together to the big bedroom for the first time. The housemaid was waiting in the room.

‘Cook thought you might want helping off with your gown, Miss Hester – Mrs Tradescant, I should say!’

Hester shook her head. ‘I can do it.’

‘And Cook sent up this tray for the two of you,’ the maid persevered. There had evidently been a strong sense in the kitchen that more should have been done to mark the occasion. ‘She brewed a wedding ale for you,’ the maid said. ‘And there’s some cake and dainty blackberry pudding.’

‘Thank you,’ Hester said. ‘And thank Cook too.’

John nodded and the maid left the room.

The couple looked at each other, their embarrassment dissolved by the maid’s intervention.

‘Clearly they think we should be carousing and singing,’ John said.

‘Perhaps they think they should be carousing,’ Hester observed astutely. ‘I imagine that not all the wedding ale is in these two tankards.’

‘Shall you have a drink?’ John asked.

‘When I’m ready for bed,’ she said, keeping her tone as light and inconsequential as his. She moved towards the bed and climbed up into it. She did not draw the bed curtains against him, but managed, in their shadows, to undress from her gown and to get into her night shift without embarrassment. She emerged with her hair still braided to put her fine gown in the press at the foot of the bed.