Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“I’m back in favor then,” Buckingham said idly. “I thought I was finished for this reign.”

“But you brought Prince Charles safe home,” Tradescant protested. “What more did His Majesty want?”

Buckingham slid a sly sideways smile at his gardener and sniffed at the spray of snowdrops which Tradescant had brought him. “A little less rather than more,” he said. “He envied me the triumphant entry into London. He thought I was setting up to be king myself. He thought I wanted Kit Villiers to marry the Elector Frederick’s daughter and ally myself to the Stuarts.” He laughed shortly. “As though I would put Kit over myself,” he said scornfully. “And then he looks from me to the prince and back again and he fears my influence over the heir. And he’s jealous as an old woman. He cannot bear to see us make merry when he is old and aching and longing for his bed. He cannot bear to think that we are merry without him when he has withdrawn. He has given me everything I ask and now he is jealous that I am wealthy and courted. Jealous that I am the richest man in the kingdom with the most beautiful house.” He broke off and tossed his head.

“Though it is true that it is better not to flaunt your wealth,” Tradescant remarked to the sky outside the bay window.

“What d’you mean?”

“I’m thinking that my old lord loved Theobalds Palace before anything else in the country and the king, this king, in very truth, saw it through his eyes, acknowledged its value and claimed it for himself. And here we’ve only just gotten the avenue planted.”

Buckingham cracked a laugh. “John! My John! If he wants it, he’ll have to have it! Avenue and all. Anything so long as I am back in his favor.”

John nodded. “You think he will forgive you?”

The younger man lay back on the rich cushions heaped in the window-seat and turned his face to look out at the view. John noted, with affection, the perfect profile, white against red velvet.

“What d’you think, John? If I am very pale and very quiet and very submissive, and look – so – would you forgive me?”

John tried to stare at his master unmoved, but he found he was smiling as if his master were a tender wilful maid in the first years of her beauty, at the time when a girl can do anything and be forgiven by everyone. “I suppose so,” he admitted ungraciously. “If I were a besotted old fool.”

Buckingham grinned. “I suppose so too.”

The duke waved farewell to the royal coach and the hundreds of courtiers and outriders, and watched them move slowly down the newly planted avenue. John Tradescant had done his best but the limes in the double-planted avenue were still only saplings. The duke watched the coach with the crown and the nodding feathers rumble from one thin leafy shade to another. When they grew, the trees would be a powerful symbol of the greatness of the house. And by then the prince would be on the throne, with Buckingham as his adviser, and the king, the jealous difficult bad-tempered old king, would be dead.

The king had wept and asked for forgiveness after a long bitter quarrel. He had tolerated Buckingham’s marriage, indeed he loved Kate, and he was even amused by Buckingham’s notorious affairs with every pretty woman at court, but he could not bear to feel that his son the prince had supplanted him in Buckingham’s affections. Tearfully he accused them of conspiring against him and that Prince Charles – never the favored son – had stolen from his father his love, his only love.

He publicly called Prince Charles a changeling and wished that his brother, the handsome and godly Prince Henry, had never died. He publicly called Buckingham a heartbreaker and a false son to him. He called him a traitor and wept the easy tears of an old man, and swore that no one loved him.

It took all Buckingham’s charm to talk the king into a more reasonable frame of mind, and all his patience to tolerate the moist kisses on his face and his mouth. It took all his ready humor and his genuine joy of life to seek to make the elderly king happy again, and the court happy with him. A sick man, newly up from his bed, Buckingham danced with Kate before the king, and sat at his side and listened to his rambling complaints about the Spanish alliance and the Spanish threat, and never showed so much as a flicker of weariness or sickness.

Buckingham waited until the royal carriage was out of sight before he put his hat back on his head and turned away toward the stone steps to the knot garden. Already it was as Tradescant had promised it would be. Each delicately shaped bed was filled with plants of a single uniform color, edged with dark green box and entwined in an unending pattern with another. Buckingham walked around them, feeling his anxiety melt away at the sight of the twisting patterns, at the perfection of the planting.

It was a joy he had not known before Tradescant had made this place for him. He had seen gardens as part of the furniture of a great house, something a great man must have. But Tradescant had made him see things with a plantsman’s eye. Now he walked around and around the little twisting paths of the knot garden with a sense of renewed pleasure and a feeling of liberty. The little hedges destroyed the sense of perspective; when he looked across them from one end of the knot garden to the other they seemed as if they enclosed acres of land, one field after another. They were a little parable of wealth. They looked like great fields, great acres, and yet they were encompassed within a few hundred yards.

“A thing of beauty,” Buckingham murmured softly to himself. “I should thank him for it. Thank him for making it for me, and then for training my eye to see it.”

He walked down from the formal garden toward the lake. There were the lilies that Tradescant had promised him, and waving in the slight breeze were the golden buttercups and flag irises. A little pier jutted out into the water and the still reflection of the lake showed another pier reflected darkly beneath it. At the very end of it, looking down into the water, was John Tradescant himself, watching a boy drop baskets of osier roots into the deep mud.

When he heard Buckingham approach he pulled off his hat and nudged the boy with his foot. The boy dropped to his knees. Buckingham waved him away.

“Will you row me?” he asked Tradescant.

“Of course, my lord,” John replied. He took in at once the dark shadows under the eyes, the pallor of Buckingham’s skin. He looked like an angel carved in purest marble with sooty fingerprints on its face.

John pulled in the little boat by its dripping rope and held it steady while the duke climbed in and leaned back against the cushions.

“I am weary,” he said shortly.

John cast off, sat down, and bent over the oars without speaking. He rowed his master first toward the island where the mount had been thrown up, just as they had first planned. He rowed slowly around it. Whitethorn and roses tumbled down to the water’s edge and the blossoms nodded at themselves in the still water. A few ducks came quacking out of hiding but Buckingham did not stir at the noise.

“Do you remember Robert Cecil?” he asked idly. “In your thoughts, or in your prayers?”

“Yes,” Tradescant said, surprised. “Daily.”

“I met a man the other day who said that the first time he went to Theobalds Palace they could not find Sir Robert anywhere and in the end they found him in the potting shed with you, eating bread and cheese.”

Tradescant gave a short laugh. “He used to like to watch me work.”

“He was a great man, a great servant of state,” Buckingham said. “No one ever thought the less of him because he served first one monarch and then her heir.”

John nodded, leaned forward on his oars and rowed.