Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

They woke at dawn with the sound of the sailors making ready for port. There was little time for words and, in any case, what was between them went deeper than speech. John believed that they were bonded together in a way that nothing could break – the love of a man for his brother-in-arms, the strong powerful love of a vassal for his lord, and now the passionate devotion of lovers who have found all the pleasure of the world in each other’s bodies. Buckingham lay back in bed as John swiftly dressed, and smiled. John felt his desires – now insatiable it seemed – rise again at that seductive mischievous smile.

“Where will we lie tonight?” he asked.

“I don’t know what reception will meet me,” Buckingham said, his smile fading. “We’ll have to find the court. Chances are that Charles will be at Whitehall this season. I may have to work hard to keep my place.”

“Whatever place you win I am yours,” John said simply.

Buckingham gleamed at him. “I know,” he said quietly. “I shall need you by me.”

“And after Whitehall?”

“Home for the New Year,” Buckingham decided. He shot John a rueful smile. “To our loving wives.”

John hesitated. “I could send Elizabeth to Kent,” he offered. Elizabeth and his long years of marriage seemed part of another life; nothing could interfere with this new way of being, with this new love, with this sudden arrival of passion. “My wife has family in Kent. She could visit them. I could be alone at New Hall with you.”

Buckingham smiled. “No need. We will always be traveling, you and I, John. I will always need you at my side. People will talk, but people always talk. You will serve me in my chamber again as you have done on this voyage. Nothing will part us.”

John kneeled on the bed and reached for Buckingham. The two men embraced; Buckingham’s curly hair tickled John’s cheek, his neck. He slipped his hand down into the warmth of his lord’s body and felt the hardness of his desire rising to greet his touch.

“You want me,” John whispered.

“Very much.”

John straightened up. “I had feared that this was not going to last,” he confided. “That this was part of the madness of these days. The defeat and the grief. I had feared that when we came into port I would be forgotten.”

Buckingham shook his head.

“I could not bear to be without you, not now.” John felt strange, speaking of his feelings after years of self-imposed silence. He felt strangely freed, as if at last he could lay claim to a strange land inside his own head, an inner Virginia.

“You will not be without me,” the lord said easily. He threw back the covers and John felt his breath catch at the sight of the perfect body. The shoulders broad, the legs long, the thatch of dark hair and the rising penis, the smooth white skin of his belly and chest and the tumble of dark curls.

John laughed at himself. “I am as besotted as a girl! I am breathless at the very sight of you.”

Buckingham smiled and then pulled on his linen shirt. “My John,” he said. “Love no one but me.”

“I swear it.”

“I mean it.” Buckingham paused. “I won’t have a rival. Not wife nor child nor another man, not even your gardens.”

John shook his head. “Of course there is no one but you,” he said. “You were my master before, but after this you have me heart and soul.”

Buckingham pulled on his scarlet hose and red breeches slashed with gold. He turned his back absentmindedly and John tied the scarlet leather laces for him, relishing the intimacy, the casual touch.

“You are my talisman,” Buckingham said, speaking half to himself. “You were Cecil’s man and now you are mine. He died without failure or dishonor and so must I. And today I shall know if the king forgives me for failing him.”

“You didn’t fail,” John said. “You did all he set you to do. Others failed, and the Navy failed to supply you. But you were faultless in courage and honor.”

Buckingham leaned back against him, feeling John’s warm solid body behind him, and briefly closed his eyes. John put his arms around the younger man’s body, relishing the hardness of his chest and the contrasting softness of his curly hair.

“I need you for words like that,” Buckingham whispered. “No one else can tell me such things and make me believe them. I need your faith in me, John, especially when I have no faith in myself.”

“I never saw you show a moment’s fear,” John said earnestly. “I never saw you hesitate or fail. You were the Lord High Admiral for every minute. No man could say less. No man did more.”

Buckingham straightened up and John saw the set of his shoulders and the lift of his chin. “I shall hold those words to me,” he said. “Whatever else befalls me today. I shall know that you were there, you witnessed everything, and you say this. You have been here with me and I have your love. You are a man whose judgment is trusted, and you are my man – what did you say? – heart and soul.”

“Till death.”

“Swear it.” Buckingham turned and held John’s shoulders with sudden passionate intensity. He took John’s face roughly in his cupped hands. “Swear that you are mine till death.”

John did not hesitate. “I swear on all that I hold sacred that I am your man, and none other’s. I will follow you and serve you till death,” he promised. It was a mighty oath but John did not feel the weight of it. Instead he had a great sense of joy at being committed, at last, to another person without restraint, as if all the years with Elizabeth had been only a circling of another, a moving toward intimacy which could never be truly found. Elizabeth’s femininity, her faith, her every difference from John, had meant that he could never reach her. Always between them were the dividing fissures of opinion, of taste, of style.

But Buckingham had been in John’s heart, had penetrated deep inside him. There was nothing which could part them now. It was not a love between a man and a woman which always founders on difference, which always struggles with difference. It was a passion between men who start as equals and fight their way through to mutual desire and mutual satisfaction as equals.

The tension left Buckingham’s shoulders. “I needed to hear that,” he said thoughtfully. “It is like a chain of command; the old king needed me and called me his dog, took me like a dog too. Now I need you, and you shall be my dog.”

The noises on deck grew more urgent, they could hear the sailors shouting to the barges for tow ropes, and then came the gentle bump as the ship dropped her sails and was taken in tow.

“Fetch hot water,” Buckingham said. “I must shave.”

John nodded and did the work of a cabin boy with a heady sense of delight. He stood beside Buckingham while he shaved his smooth skin of the dark stubble, held a linen sheet for him while he washed, and then handed him his clean shirt and his waistcoat and surcoat. Buckingham dressed in silence; his hand when he reached for his perfume bottle was shaking. He sprayed his hair with perfume, set his plumed hat, winking with diamonds, on his head and smiled at himself in the mirror: a hollow smile, a fearful smile.

“I shall go on deck,” he said. “No one shall say that I was afraid to show my face.”

“I will be with you,” John promised.

They went through the door together. “Don’t leave me,” Buckingham whispered as they went up the companionway. “Whatever happens, stay at my shoulder this day. Wherever I go.”

Tradescant realized that his master was fearing worse than humiliation; he was fearing arrest. Better-loved men than he had died in the Tower for failed expeditions. They had both seen Sir Walter Raleigh taken to the Tower for less.