Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“Do you hate him?” she whispered.

The look he gave her was that of a man carrying a mortal wound deep in his belly. “No,” he said softly. “I love him still. But I know that he is no good. That’s worse than hatred for me. To know that I have given my word and my love to a man who is no good.”

She took his hands in hers and felt how cold they were, as if his heart were beating slowly, painfully. “Can’t you escape him?”

He shook his head. “I am his, in every way that there is, until death.”

They sat in silence for long moments, Elizabeth chafing his hands as if he were cold from sickness and she had to warm him. She thought that there was nothing that she could say which would take that dark painful look from his face. The sun was setting slowly in the deep red of autumn and a cool wind began to blow.

“The chestnut tree flowered this summer,” she said inconsequently. “As you left, d’you remember you asked me to look to it, for you?”

He did not raise his gaze from his boots. “The sweet chestnuts?”

“No. Your sapling. The one you gave me. The chestnut from Turkey. It bore a strange beautiful blossom, like huge pine cones, a white blossom of many flowers with tiny scarlet freckles inside them, and smelling sweet.”

“Eh? My sapling flowered? At last?”

“As you left. And it is setting seed,” she said. “You will have nuts off it this year, John. You can see the seed cases already. They are very strange, I had forgotten how strange. They are fat and fleshy and with a few thick spikes. But they are holding to the tree and swelling with the ripeness of the nut inside.”

He straightened up and looked at her. “Are you sure?”

“I think so,” she said with loving cunning. “But you had better see for yourself; you know there is no one who has your skill with trees.”

“Perhaps I should take a look.” He got to his feet and winced as his boots rubbed his sore feet, but he stepped out down the garden path to where his tree was kept in its great carrying case at the bottom of the garden near the kitchen garden wall.

“I wish we had named it for you,” she said, suddenly struck by how little they owned, now that he was a vassal and had lost everything. “I wish we had called them ‘Tradescantia’ when Lord Cecil first gave them to you to grow. You were the first to grow them; you had the right.”

John shrugged his shoulders as if it did not matter what they were named as long as they grew tall and strong. “The name does not matter. Rights do not matter. But to grow a new tree, to put a new tree into the gardens of England – now that is to live forever.”

J did not come home till dusk and he did not know his father was returned until he came in through the front door and saw the Portsmouth-bought walking boots side by side inside the doorway. He hesitated, but it was too late. John, sitting at the well-worn table, had already seen him.

J was dressed in a suit of gray broadcloth, white linen bands at his throat, plain without lace. On his head was a tall plain black hat, unadorned by feather or badge. Over his shoulder was his warm coat of black.

John, who had bathed and changed into his russet suit with a rich lace collar, rose slowly from the table.

“You’re dressed very plain,” he said cautiously.

Elizabeth heard the front door slam and came slowly from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.

J measured his father and spoke steadily. “I believe that finery is a waste of a man’s money and an abomination in the sight of the Lord.”

John wheeled around and looked accusingly at Elizabeth. She met his gaze without flinching. “You’ve turned him into a Puritan at last,” he said. “I suppose he preaches and bears witness and can fall down in a faint if required?”

“I can speak for myself,” J said. “And it was not my mother’s decision, but my own.”

“Decision!” John scoffed. “What can a boy of eighteen decide?”

J flinched. “I am a man,” he said. “I am nineteen now. I earn a man’s wage, I do a man’s work and I give a man’s whole duty to my God.”

For a moment they thought John would roar out his temper. J braced himself for the blast of anger, but to his surprise none came. The older man’s shoulders dropped and he turned and fell heavily in his chair. “And how long will you draw a wage here, looking like that?” he asked. “When the king comes to visit? When Archbishop Laud comes to visit? Do you think they want to see a sectary in their garden?”

J’s head went up. “I don’t fear them.”

“Yes, I daresay you are longing for martyrdom, to be burned at the stake for your beliefs, but this is not a burning king. He will merely turn away from you and Buckingham will dismiss you. And where will you work then?”

“For a nobleman who shares my faith,” J said simply. “The country is full of men who believe in worshipping our God in simplicity and in truth, who have turned against the waste and sin of the court.”

“Do I have to spell it out?” John shouted. “They will turn you off and no one will employ you!”

“Husband-”

“What?”

“You told me yourself that your faith in the king and the duke has been shaken,” Elizabeth said gently. “J is trying to find his own way.”

“What way?” John demanded. “There is no other way.”

“There is going back to the Bible and seeking a way through prayer,” J said earnestly. “There is the beauty of hard work, and turning away from show and masques and waste. There is sharing the land, every man to have his own piece of ground to grow his own food so that none go hungry. There is opening up the enclosed sheep runs and the enclosed parks so that everyone can share in the wealth which God has given.”

“Opening parks?”

“Yes, even like this one,” J said earnestly. “Why should my lord duke have the Great Park of five hundred acres and the Little Park of three hundred? Why should he own the common road, and the green before the gate? Why does he need an avenue of a mile of lime trees? Why should he enclose good fields, productive fields, and then plant a few pretty trees and grass and use it for walking and riding? What folly to take good farming land and plant it with shrubs and call it a wilderness when children are dying for lack of food in Chorley, and people are driven out of their cottages because their plots of land have been taken away from them?”

“Because he is the duke,” John said steadily.

“He deserves to own half of the county?”

“It is his own, given to him by the king, who owns the whole country.”

“And what did the duke do for the king to earn such wealth?”

John had a sudden vivid recollection of the rocking cabin and the swaying light and Buckingham rearing above him, and the wound like a swordthrust which was the extreme of pleasure and pain all at once.

J waited for a reply.

“Don’t,” John said shortly. “Don’t torment me, J. It is bad enough that you should come into my house looking like a hedgerow lecturer. Don’t torment me about the duke and the king and the rights and the wrongs of it. I have been close to death, my life hanging on whether the king would remember his friend on a barren island far away, or not. And then he did not. I have no stomach for an argument with you.”

“Then I may wear what I choose, and pray as I choose?”

John nodded wearily. “Wear what you will.”

There was a silence as J absorbed the extent of his victory. Tradescant turned his back on him and returned to his seat at the table. J stepped out of his mud-caked working boots and came into the room in his socks.

“I am thinking of taking a wife,” he announced quietly. “And leaving the duke’s service. I want to go to Virginia and start again, in a country where there are no lords and no kings, and no archbishops. I want to be there where they are planting an Eden.”