Virgin Earth

John was seated in his chair before the fire, drinking his wedding ale. ‘It’s good,’ he recommended. ‘And I’ve had a little cake too.’

She took up the tankard and sat opposite him, curling up her feet under her night shift. She sipped at the ale. It was strong and sweet. At once a heady sense of relaxation spread through her. ‘This is good,’ she said.

John laughed. ‘I think it probably serves its purpose,’ he said. ‘I was more nervous than for my first day at school and now I am feeling like a cock o’ the walk.’

Hester flushed at that single accidental bawdiness. ‘Oh.’

John buried his face in his tankard, as embarrassed as his new wife. ‘Go to bed,’ he said shortly. ‘I shall join you in a minute.’

She put her thin white feet down on the bare floorboards and went with her quick boyish stride to the bed. John did not turn around as she climbed in. He waited until she had settled and then got up and blew out his candle. He got undressed in the half-darkness and then pulled on his nightgown.

She was lying on the pillow, lit only by a single candle and by the flickering light from the fire. She had unbraided her hair and it spread dark and sweet-smelling on the pillow. A sudden anguish of longing for his lost wife Jane, and the serious passionate desire that they had shared, swept over John. He had promised himself he would not think of her, he had thought it would be fatal to this night if he thought of her, but when he saw Hester in his bed, he did not feel like a bridegroom, but like an unwilling adulterer.

It was a business contract, and it must be fulfilled. John turned his mind to the outrageously half-naked painted women of the old king’s court. He had seen them at New Hall when he was little more than a boy and remembered them still with an erotic mixture of disapproval and desire. He held the thought of them in his mind and moved towards Hester.

She had never been touched by a man who was in love with her, or she would have known at once that John was offering her the false coin of his body while his mind was elsewhere. But she too knew that the contract of marriage was not completed until consummation. She lay still and helpful beneath him while he pierced her and then brutally moved in the wound. She did not complain, she did not comment. She lay in silence while the pain went on and then suddenly stopped as he sighed and then moved away from her.

She rose up, biting her lip against the hurt, and wrapped a cloth tightly around her groin. There was only a little blood, she thought; it probably felt worse than it was. She thought that she would have taken the whole thing easier if she had been younger, fresher, warmer. It had been a cold-hearted assault and a cold-hearted acceptance. She shivered in the darkness and got back into bed beside her husband.

John had turned to lie on his side with his back to her as if he would shut out the sight of her and shut out the thought of her. Hester crept back under the covers, careful not to touch him, not to breach the space between them, and set her teeth against the pain, and against the bitterness of disappointment. She did not cry, she lay very still and dry-eyed and waited for the morning when her married life would begin.

‘I shall go to Oatlands this week,’ John remarked the very next morning at breakfast. Hester, seated beside Baby John, looked up in surprise. ‘This week?’

He met her gaze with bland incomprehension. ‘Yes.’

‘So soon?’

‘Why not?’

A dozen reasons why a newly wed husband should not leave his home in the first week of his marriage came to her. She folded her lips tightly on them. ‘People may think it looks odd,’ was all that she said.

‘They can think what they like,’ John retorted bluntly. ‘We married so that I should be free to do my work and that is what I am doing.’

Hester glanced at Frances, seated at her left, opposite Baby John. Frances’s white-capped head was bowed over her bowl, she did not look up at her father, she affected to be deaf.

‘There is the planting of the spring bulbs to finish,’ he said. ‘And pruning, and planning for winter. I have to make sure the silkworm house is sound against the weather. I shall be a month or so away. If you are in any need you can send for me.’

Hester bowed her head. John rose from his place and went to the door. ‘I shall be in the orchard,’ he said. ‘Please pack my clothes for me to go to Oatlands and tell the boy I shall want a horse this afternoon. I shall ride down to the docks and see if anything has come in for the king’s collection.’

Hester nodded and she and the two children sat in silence until the door closed behind John.

Frances looked up, her lower lip turned down. ‘I thought he would stay home all the time now you are married.’

‘Never mind!’ Hester said with assumed cheerfulness. ‘We’ll have lots to do. There’s a bonfire to build for Guy Fawkes’s day, and then Christmas to prepare for.’

‘But I thought he would stay home,’ Frances persisted. ‘He will come home for Christmas, won’t he?’

‘Of course,’ Hester said easily. ‘Of course he will. But he has to go and work for the queen in her lovely gardens. He’s a royal gardener! He can’t stay home all the time.’

Baby John looked up and wiped his milky moustache on his sleeve.

‘Use your napkin,’ Hester corrected him.

Baby John grinned. ‘I shall go to Oatrands,’ he said firmly. ‘Pranting and pranning and pruning. I shall go.’

‘Certainly,’ Hester said, and she emphasised the correct pronunciation: ‘Planting and planning and pruning are most important.’

Baby John nodded with dignity. ‘Now I shall go and look at my warities.’

‘Can I take the money from the visitors?’ Frances asked.

Hester glanced at the clock standing in the corner of the room. It was not yet nine. ‘They won’t come for another hour or so,’ she said. ‘You can fetch your school work, both of you, for an hour, and then you can work in the rarities room.’

‘Oh, Hester!’ Frances complained.

Hester shook her head and started to pile up the empty porridge bowls and the spoons. ‘Books first,’ she said. ‘And, Baby John, I want to see all our names written fair in your copybook.’

‘And then I will go pranting,’ he said.

Hester packed John’s clothes for him and added a few jars of bottled summer fruit to the hamper which would follow him by wagon. She was up early on the day of his departure to see him ride away from the Ark.

‘You had no need to rise,’ John said awkwardly.

‘Of course I had need. I am your wife.’

He turned and tightened the girth on his big bay cob to avoid speaking. They were both aware that since the first night they had not made love, and now he was going away for an indefinite period.

‘Please take care at court,’ Hester said gently. ‘These are difficult times for men of principle.’

‘I must say what I believe if I am asked,’ John said. ‘I don’t venture it, but I won’t deny it.’

She hesitated. ‘You need not deny your beliefs but you could say nothing and avoid the topic altogether,’ she suggested. ‘The queen especially is touchy about her religion. She holds to her Papist faith, and the king inclines more and more to her. And now that he is trying to impose Archbishop Laud’s prayer book on Scotland, this is not a time for any Independent thinker; be he Baptist or Presbyterian.’

‘You wish to advise me?’ he asked with a hint of warning in his voice which reminded her that a wife was always in second place to a man.

‘I know the court,’ she said steadily. ‘I spent my girlhood there. My uncle is an official painter there, still. I have half a dozen cousins and friends who write to me. I do know things, husband. I know that it is no place for a man who thinks for himself.’

‘They’re hardly likely to care what their gardener thinks,’ John scoffed. ‘An undergardener at that. I’ve not even been appointed to my father’s post, yet.’

She hesitated. ‘They care so much that they threw Archie the jester out with his jacket pulled over his head for merely joking about Archbishop Laud; and Archie was the queen’s great favourite. They certainly care what you think. They are taking it upon themselves to care what every single man, woman, and child thinks. That’s what the very quarrel is all about. About what every individual thinks in his private heart. That’s why every single Scotsman has to sign his own covenant with the king and swear to use the Archbishop’s prayer book. They care precisely what every single man thinks.’ She paused. ‘They may indeed question you, John; and you have to have an answer ready that will satisfy them.’

‘I have a right to speak to my God in my own way!’ John insisted stubbornly. ‘I don’t need to recite by rote, I am not a child. I don’t need a priest to dictate my prayers. I certainly don’t need a bishop puffed up with pride and wealth to tell me what I think. I can speak to God direct when I am planting His seeds in the garden and picking His fruit from His trees. And He speaks to me then. And I honour Him then.

‘I use the prayer book well enough – but I don’t believe that those are the only words that God hears. And I don’t believe that the only men God attends are bishops wrapped up in surplices, and I don’t believe that God made Charles king, and that service to the king is one and the same as service to God. And Jane –’ He broke off, suddenly aware that he should not speak to his new wife of his constant continuing love for her predecessor.

‘Go on,’ Hester said.

‘Jane’s faith never wavered, not even when she was dying in pain,’ John said. ‘She would never have denied her belief that God spoke simple and clear to her and she could speak to Him. She would have died for that belief, if she had been called to do so. And for her sake, if for nothing else, I will not deny my faith.’

‘And what about her children?’ Hester asked. ‘D’you think she would want you to die for her faith and leave her children orphans?’

John checked. ‘It won’t come to that.’

‘When I was at Oatlands only six months ago, the talk was all about each man’s faith and how far each man would go. If the king insists on the Scots following the prayer book he is bound to insist on it in England too. If he goes to war with the Scots to make them do as he bids, and some say he might do that, who can doubt that he will do the same in England?’

John shook his head. ‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘Nonsense and heartache about nothing.’

‘It is not nothing. I am warning you,’ Hester said steadily. ‘No-one knows how far the king will go when he has to protect the queen and her faith, and to conceal his own backsliding towards popery. No-one knows how far he will go to make everyone conform to the same church. He has taken it into his head that one church will make one nation, and that he can hold one nation in the palm of his hand and govern without a word to anyone. If you insist on your faith at the same time as the king is insisting on his, you cannot say what trouble you might be running towards.’

John thought for a moment and then he nodded. ‘You may be right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘You are a powerfully cautious woman, Hester.’

‘You have given me a task and I shall do it,’ she said, unsmiling. ‘You have given me the task of bringing up your children and being a wife to you. I have no wish to be a widow. I have no wish to bring up orphans.’

‘But I will not compromise my faith,’ he warned her.

‘Just don’t flaunt it.’

The horse was ready. John tied his cape tightly at the neck and set his hat on his head. He paused; he did not know how he should say farewell to this new, common-sense wife of his. To his surprise she put out her hand, as a man would do, and shook his hand as if she were his friend.

John felt oddly warmed by the frankness of the gesture. He smiled at her, led the horse over to the mounting block and got up into the saddle.

‘I don’t know what state the gardens will be in,’ he remarked.

‘For sure, they will appoint you in your father’s place when you are back at court,’ Hester said. ‘It was only your absence which made them delay. It is out of sight, at once forgotten with them. When you return they will insist on your service again.’

He nodded. ‘I hope they have not mistook my orders while I was gone. If you leave a garden for a season it slips back a year.’

Hester stepped forward and patted the horse’s neck. ‘The children will miss you,’ she said. ‘May I tell them when you will be home?’

‘By November,’ he promised.

She stepped back from the horse’s head and let him go. He smiled at her as he passed out of the stable yard and round the path which led to the gate. As he rode out he had a sudden sense of joyful freedom – that he could ride away from his home or ride back to it and that everything would be managed without him. This was his father’s last gift to him – his father who had also married a woman who could manage well in his absence. John turned in his saddle and waved at Hester who was still standing at the corner of the yard where she could look after him.

John waved his whip and turned the horse towards Lambeth and the ferry. Hester watched him go and then turned back to the house.

The court was due at Oatlands in late October so John was busy as soon as he arrived planting and preparing the courts which were enclosed by the royal apartments. The knot gardens always looked well in winter, the sharp geometric shapes of the low box hedging looked wonderful thinned and whitened by frost. In the fountain court John kept the water flowing at the slowest speed so that there would be a chance for it to make icicles and ice cascades in the colder nights. The herbs still looked well, the angelica and sage went into white lace when the frost touched their feathery fronds behind the severe hedging. Against the walls of the king’s court John was training one of his new plants introduced from the Ark: his Virginian winter-flowering jasmine. On warm days its scent drifted up to the open windows above, and its colour made a splash of rich pink light in the grey and white and black garden.

The queen’s orangery was like a jungle, packed tight with the tender plants which would not survive an English winter. Some of the more handsome shrubs and small trees were planted in containers with loops for carrying poles and John’s men lifted them out to the queen’s garden at first light, and brought them in again at dusk so that even in winter she would always have something pretty to see from her windows. John placed a lemon and an orange tree, both trained into handsome balls, on either side of the door to her apartments, like aromatic sentries.

‘These are pretty,’ she said to him from her window one day as he was supervising the careful placing of some little trees in the garden below.

‘I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,’ John said, pulling off his hat, recognising the heavily accented voice of Queen Henrietta Maria at once. ‘They should have been in their places before you looked out.’

‘I woke very early, I could not sleep,’ she said. ‘My husband is worried and so I am sleepless too.’

John bowed.

‘People do not understand how hard it is sometimes for us. They see the palaces and the carriages and they think that our lives are given up to pleasure. But it is all worry.’

John bowed again.

‘You understand, don’t you?’ she asked, leaning out and speaking clearly so that he could hear her in the garden below. ‘When you make my gardens so beautiful for me, you know that they are a respite for me and the king when we are exhausted by our anxieties and by our struggle to bring this country to be a great kingdom.’

John hesitated. Obviously it would be impolite to say that his interest in the beauty of the gardens would have been the same whether she was an idle vain Papist – as he believed – or whether she was a woman devoted to her husband and her duty. He remembered Hester’s advice and bowed once more.

‘I so want to be a good queen,’ she said.

‘No-one prays for anything else,’ John said cautiously.

‘Do you think they pray for me?’

‘They have to, it’s in the prayer book. They are ordered to pray for you twice every Sunday.’

‘But in their hearts?’

John dipped his head. ‘How could I say, Your Majesty? All I know are plants and trees. I can’t see inside men’s hearts.’

‘I like to think that you can give me a glimpse of what common men are thinking. I am surrounded by people who tell me what they think I would like to hear. But you would not lie to me, would you, Gardener Tradescant?’

John shook his head. ‘I would not lie,’ he said.

‘So tell me, is everyone against the Scots? Does everyone see that the Scots must do what the king wishes and sign the king’s covenant, and use the prayer book that we give them?’

John, on one knee, on cold ground, cursed the day that the queen had taken a fancy to him, and reflected on the wisdom of his wife who had warned him to avoid this conversation at all costs.

‘They know that it is the king’s wish,’ he said tactfully. ‘There is not a man or woman or child in the country who does not know that it is the king’s wish.’

‘Then it should need nothing more!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is he the king or not?’

‘Of course he is.’

‘Then his wish should be a command to everyone. If they think any different from him they are traitors.’

John thought intently of Hester and said nothing. ‘I pray for peace, God knows,’ he said honestly enough.

‘And so do I,’ said the queen. ‘Would you like to pray with me, Gardener Tradescant? I allow my favourite servants to use my chapel. I am going to Mass now.’

John forced himself not to fling away from her and from her dangerous ungodly Papistry. To invite an Englishman to attend Mass was a crime punishable by death. The laws against Roman Catholics were very clear and very brutal, and clearly, visibly, flouted by the king and queen in their own court.

‘I am all dirty, Your Majesty.’ John showed her his earth-stained hands and kept his voice level though he was filled with rage at her casual flouting of the law, and deeply shocked that she should think he would accept such an invitation to idolatory and hell. ‘I could not come to your chapel.’

‘Another time, then.’ She smiled at him, pleased with his humility, and with her own graciousness. She had no idea that he was within an inch of storming from the garden in a blaze of righteous rage. To John, a Roman Catholic chapel was akin to the doors of hell, and a Papist queen was one step to damnation. She had tried to tempt him to deny his faith. She had tried to tempt him to the worst sin in the world – idolatory, worshipping graven images, denying the word of God. She was a woman steeped in sin and she had tried to drag him down.

She closed the window on the cold air without saying farewell or telling him that he could rise. John stayed kneeling until he was sure that she had gone, and that the audience was over. Then he got to his feet and looked behind him. The two assistant gardeners were kneeling where they had dropped when the window opened.

‘You can stand,’ John said. ‘She’s gone.’

They scrambled to their feet, rubbing their knees and complaining of the discomfort. ‘Please God she does not look out of the window again,’ said the younger one. ‘Why will she not leave you alone?’

‘She thinks I am a faithful servant,’ J said bitterly. ‘She thinks I will tell her the mood of the people. What she does not realise is that no-one can tell her the truth since any word of disagreement is treason. She and the king have tied our consciences in knots and whatever we do or think or say we are in the wrong. It makes a man want to cut loose.’

He saw the gardeners looking at him in surprise. ‘Oh, waste no more time!’ John snapped impatiently. ‘We’ve kneeled enough for one day.’

Winter 1639

The court always spent the long Christmas feast at Whitehall, so John was able to leave the royal gardens at Oatlands dormant under a thick frost, and go home to Lambeth in November and spend Christmas at home. The children had made him little presents of their own for Twelfth Night, and he gave them sweets and fairings bought from Lambeth winter fair. To Hester he gave a couple of yards of grey silk for a gown.

‘They had a blue silk too but I did not know what you would like,’ he said. He would have known exactly what Jane would have preferred; but he seldom observed what Hester was wearing. He had only a general impression of demure smartness.

‘I like this. Thank you.’

After the children had gone to bed, Hester and John stayed by the fireside, drinking small ale and cracking nuts in companionable domestic peace. ‘You were right about being cautious at Oatlands,’ John said. ‘In Lambeth the news was all of a war against Scotland. The northern counties are armed and ready, and the king has called a council of war. They say that the militia will be called up too.’

‘Do they really think that the king would go to war over a prayer book? Does he really think he can fight the Scots into praying with Archbishop Laud’s words?’

John shook his head in disagreement. ‘It’s more than the prayer book. The king thinks that he has to make one church for all his kingdom. He thinks one church will bind everyone together, bind us all together under his will. He has taken it into his head that if the Scots refuse their bishops then they will refuse their king.’

‘You’ll not have to go?’ Hester asked, going straight to the point.

John grimaced. ‘I may have to pay for a substitute to go soldiering in my place. But perhaps they will not muster the Lambeth trained bands. Perhaps I may be excused since I serve the king already.’

Hester hesitated. ‘You would not publicly refuse to serve, as a matter of conscience?’

‘It would certainly go against my conscience to fire on a man who has said nothing worse than he wants to worship his God in his own way,’ John said. ‘Such a man, be he Scots or Welsh or English, is saying nothing more than I believe. He cannot be my enemy. I am more like a Scots Presbyterian than I am like Archbishop Laud, God knows.’

‘But if you refuse you might be pressed to serve, and if you refuse the press, they could try for treason.’

‘These are difficult times. A man has to hold clear on to his conscience and his God.’

‘And try not to be noticed,’ Hester said.

John suddenly realised the contrast in their opinions. ‘Hester, wife, do you believe in nothing?’ he demanded. ‘I have never had a word from you of belief or conviction. All you ever speak of is surviving and avoiding awkward questions. You are married into a household where we have been faithful servants of the king and his ministers since the start of the century. My father never heard a word against any of his masters in all his days. I didn’t agree with him, that’s not my way; but I am a man of conscience. I hold very strongly to the belief that a man must find his own way to God. I have been a man of independent belief since I was old enough to think for myself, praying in the words of my own choosing, a Protestant, a true Protestant. Even when I have wavered in my faith, even when I have had doubts, profound doubts, I am glad to have those doubts and think them through. I have never run to some priest to tell me what I should think, to speak to God for me.’

She met his gaze with her own straight look. ‘You’re right. I believe in surviving,’ she said flatly. ‘That’s all, really. That’s my creed. The safest route for me and mine is to obey the king; and if I do happen to think differently to what he commands – I keep my thoughts to myself. My family works for noble and royal patrons, I was brought up around the court. I am loyal to my king and loyal to my God; but, like any courtier, my first interest is in surviving. And I fear that my creed is going to be as thoroughly tested as any other in the next few months.’

The press gang did not come for John. But he did receive a letter from the Mayor of London. John was to pay a tax demanded personally by the king to finance the war against the Scots. The king was marching north and desperately needed money to equip and arm his soldiers. And more soldiers would be coming, soldiers from Ireland, and mercenaries from Spain.