Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“You will find your own way to hell,” John said bitterly. And he turned on his heel and left his son without another word.

Buckingham, at New Hall for the summer, frightened back to Essex by the enmity of the parliament, found John in the fruit garden, tying back peach trees against the red brick wall. John turned when he heard the duke’s quick step on the brick-chip path and Buckingham, seeing the leap of joy in Tradescant’s face, put a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I was a hero to all the world as I am to you, John,” he said.

“Is there trouble?”

Buckingham threw back his head and laughed his reckless gambler’s laugh. John smiled in reply but felt a chill sense of unease. He had learned to be wary when his lord was in joyful mood. “There is always trouble,” Buckingham said. “I snap my fingers at it. And what of you, John? What are you doing here?”

“I am trying a little experiment; I don’t know if it will work. It is a fancy of mine to see if I can give the peach trees a little extra heat, where they grow, here in the garden.”

“Will you set fire to their trunks?”

“I shall burn charcoal,” Tradescant said seriously. “Here.” He showed the duke the high wall and three small fireplaces placed one above the other. “The flues from the fireplaces run along the length of the wall and the hot smoke travels behind the bricks where the trees are tied. I am hoping it will keep the frost off them so that you can have early peaches and apricots. Weeks, perhaps even months, early. I think it must be something in the nature of the tree which makes it bear fruit; but then I am sure it is the heat of the sunshine which makes it ripen. The first year I scorched them and last year I was too cautious and the frost got them. But this year I think I may have done it right and you shall have sweet ripe fruit in June.”

“I shall be eating no English peaches in June this year, and nor will you,” the duke remarked.

Alerted, John turned away from his heated wall. “Not this year?”

“Unless you wish to eat peaches while I go to war!”

“You, my lord!”

Buckingham threw back his head and laughed once more. John thought for a moment that he might have crowed like a cock on the farmyard wall. “Listen to this, my John. We are to take on the French! Won’t that be a game? While they trouble us in the Lowlands and threaten the fair Queen Elizabeth, driven off her rightful throne in Bohemia, we will sail around and attack their soft underbelly.”

“In the Mediterranean?”

“ La Rochelle,” Buckingham said triumphantly. “We will sail in to a hero’s welcome from the Protestants. They have been besieged by their own countrymen, martyrs for their faith, for long enough. Our arrival will turn the tables. I doubt we will need to fire a shot! And what a snap of fingers in the face of Richelieu!”

“But only last year you sent a fleet to fight for Richelieu, you were his ally against them-”

“Policy! Policy!” Buckingham dismissed the idea. “We should have supported our brothers in religion as soon as the siege was raised. The country was wild to go to war against the Catholics; I was wild for it. But with a French queen new-come to the English throne and the Spanish such a threat – what could I do? It’s different now. It will be better now.”

“The people may have longer memories,” John warned. “They may remember that you hired our Navy out to Richelieu and English guns were trained on the Protestants at La Rochelle.”

Buckingham shook his head and laughed. “What is wrong with you today, Tradescant? Don’t you want to come with me?”

“You are never sailing yourself?”

Buckingham smiled his heart-stopping smile. “I? But of course! Who else is Lord High Admiral?”

“I didn’t think…” John broke off. “Are you not needed at home, by the king? And your enemies in the country, will they not mass against you if you are gone on an expedition for months at a time? The gossip is loud against you, I’ve heard even here that they are making accusations – my lord, surely you cannot risk being away?”

“How better to silence them than with a victory? When I come home with a victory against France, a triumph against the papists and a new English port on the west coast of France, don’t you think my enemies will disappear in a moment? They will be my dearest friends again. Sir John and Sir Dudley will love me like brothers again, come rushing out of the Tower to kiss my hand. Don’t you see? It will turn everything around for me.”

John put his hand on the richly slashed sleeve of his master’s fine doublet. “But, my lord, if you fail?”

Buckingham did not throw him off, as he could have done; did not laugh, as John half-expected. Instead he put his white fingers on John’s hand, and held his touch closer. “I must not fail,” he said softly. “To tell you truth, John, I dare not fail.”

John looked into his master’s dark eyes. “Are you in so much jeopardy?”

“The worst. They will execute me for treason if they can.”

The two men stood still for a moment, hands clasped, their heads close.

“Come with me?” Buckingham asked.

“Of course,” John replied.

“You are going where?” Elizabeth demanded, icily furious.

“To France with the fleet,” John said, keeping his head low over his dinner. J, at the other end of the table, watched his parents in silence.

“You are nearly sixty.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled with rage. “It is time you stayed home. The duke pays you as his gardener and the keeper of his rarities. Why can he not leave you to garden?”

John shook his head and cut himself a slice of ham. “This is sweet meat,” he remarked. “One of our own?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Why does the duke want you?”

“He has asked me to go,” John said in his most reasonable tone. “I can hardly ask him if he is sure, or what his reasons are. He has ordered me to go.”

“You are at an age when men sit by their fireside and tell their grandchildren of their travels,” she said. “Not going as a common soldier off to war.”

He was stung. “I’m not a common soldier. I travel as a gentleman in his train. As his companion and adviser.”

She slapped the table with her hand. “What can you advise him? You are a gardener.”

He met her challenging eyes squarely. “I may be a gardener but I have traveled farther and faced worse danger than any other in his train,” he said. “I was at the battle of Algiers, and the long voyage to Russia. I have traveled all over Europe. He needs all the wise heads he can muster. He has asked for me and I will go.”

“You could refuse,” she challenged him. “You could leave his service. There are many other places where you could work. We could go back to Canterbury; Lord Wootton would have you back. He says that no one can grow melons like you. We could go back to Hatfield and work for the Cecils again.”

“I will not be forsworn. I will not leave his lordship.”

“You took no oath,” she pressed him. “You think of yourself as his man and he treats you like a vassal right enough, but these are new times, John. The way you served Lord Cecil with such love and devotion is the old way. Other men work for Villiers for nothing more than their wages and they move on as it suits them. You could serve him like that. You could tell him that it does not suit you to go to war with him, and seek another place.”

He was genuinely shocked. “I tell him that it does not suit me to go to war when he is going? Tell him that it suits me to stay at home when he is fighting for my country in a foreign land? I to be a turncoat, having eaten his bread and lived in his house for five years? After he has paid me and trusted me, and employed my own son so he served his apprenticeship in one of the finest households in the land? I wait till now, till the worst moment of his life, to tell him that I was only here until it suited me to be elsewhere? This is not a matter of a wage, Elizabeth, it is a matter of faith. It is a matter of honor. It is a matter between my lord and me.”