Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“How can I?” he demanded of her. “People know who I am. They will ask me who I serve. I won’t deny him – I’m not a Judas. And he will send for me.” He nodded. “Sooner or later he will realize that I am not at court and he will send for me again.”

“Then what shall we do?”

“We’ll go to Virginia,” John said with decision. “All of us. We’ll take ship as soon as we can get a passage. We’ll take what we can carry and leave the rest. Leave the house and the garden and even the rarities. We’ll get out of this country and leave it to tear itself to pieces. I won’t see it. I won’t be here. I can’t bear it.”

Hester sat very still and measured the despair in her husband’s voice against her love for him, and her love for their home.

“Will you have a glass of ale?” she asked.

He lifted his gaze from the fire, as if he suddenly remembered where he was. “Yes,” he said. “And then let’s go to bed. I have wanted you in my bed for night after long night, Hester. I have missed you, and thought of you here, missing me. I have wanted you and cursed the miles that were between us. And in the morning I shall see my children and we’ll tell them that we are leaving.”

“You have wanted me?” she asked, very low.

He put his hand out and turned her face up to him, one gentle finger under her chin. “Knowing that you are here has kept me going through one dark night after another,” he said. “Knowing that you are here and that I have someone to come home to. Knowing that you will open your bed to me, and open your arms to me, and that whatever is going wrong all around me, I have somewhere that I can call my home.”

She could have moved forward, she could have kneeled before him as he sat in his chair, he would have drawn her to him and on to his lap and he would have kissed her, as he had never yet kissed her, and they could have gone to bed as he wanted to do, and as she had wanted to do from the moment she had first seen him.

But Hester caught hold of her determination, forced herself to wait, and drew back from him, drew back and sat on her seat on the other side of the fireplace.

“Now wait a minute,” she said. “Not so fast, husband. I cannot leave here.”

For a moment John did not hear her. He was so conscious of the fall of her nightgown, and of her dark hair only half hidden by her cap, of the play of the firelight on her neck and the glimpse of her shoulder. “What?”

“I cannot leave here,” she said steadily. “This is my home.”

“You don’t understand,” he said abruptly. “I have made up my mind. I have to go. I cannot stay here, I will be torn apart by the two of them – king and Parliament. Parliament will have me out entrenching and drilling for their defense, and the king will summon me to court. I cannot be faithless to them both. I cannot watch the king ride into war as if it were a masqued ball. I cannot stay in England and see him die!”

“And I cannot leave.” She spoke steadfastly, as if nothing would ever move her.

“You are my wife,” John reminded her.

She bowed her head.

“You owe me absolute obedience,” he said. “I am your master before God.”

“As the king is yours,” she said gently. “Isn’t that what this war is all about?”

He hesitated. “I thought you wanted to be my wife?”

“I do. I agreed to be your wife, and to rear your children, and to care for the rarities and the garden and the Ark. How can I do these things in Virginia?”

“You can care for me and the children.”

Hester shook her head. “I won’t take the children there. You know yourself how dangerous it is there. There are wild Indians, and hunger, dreadful disease. I won’t take the children into danger.” She paused for a moment. “And I won’t leave here.”

“This is my home,” John reminded her. “And I am prepared to leave it.”

“It is my home too.”

They locked gazes like enemies. John remembered his first impression of her as a plain-faced managing woman who had been put in his house without his consent. “Hester, I am going to Virginia,” he said coldly. “And it is my wish that you come with me and the children.”

Her straight gaze never wavered. “I am sorry,” she said evenly. “I cannot do that. I will not take the children into danger and I have no wish to leave my home. If you go then I will keep everything safe for your return, and I will welcome you when you return.”

“My father…” he started.

“Your father trusted me with the care of this house and with the care of the children while you were away,” she said. “I promised him on his deathbed that I would keep it all safe: plants, rarities, and children. I will not leave this house for any wandering battalion to take it over and to chop down his trees for firewood. I won’t leave his chestnut avenue for them to spoil. I won’t leave it unprotected for any vagrants to steal the fruit or pick the flowers. I won’t leave the rarities stored in a warehouse with no idea of when I can return. And I will not take Jane’s children to a country far away where I know they cling to survival against all the odds.”

“Jane’s children!” he shouted. “Jane was my wife! They are my children! She is nothing to you! They are nothing to you!”

John saw her flinch as if he had slapped her face. But it did not shake her steadiness. “You are wrong,” she said simply. “I have long thought of myself as caring for Jane’s children and trying to care for them as she would wish. And sometimes I think that she looks down from heaven and sees them, growing strong and beautiful, and that she is happy for them. But they are my children too, I have loved them without fail for four years and I will not take them from their home because you have decided to leave your master and leave your country and leave your home.”

“I’m not faithless!” he said, stung.

Hester gave him a long, level look. “You and your father are the king’s gardeners,” she said. “You are in his service.”

“He doesn’t own my soul!” John shouted. “I am his servant, not his slave! I can withdraw my service. I can work for myself, I can leave. I have just left.”

She nodded. “Then a man has a right to choose where he lives and who he calls master?”

“Yes,” John said firmly.

“A woman too?”

“Yes,” he said begrudgingly.

“Then I choose to live here, and you will not take the children without me to care for them.”

“You want to stay here and face who knows what dangers?”

“I shall face the dangers when they come,” she said. “I am not such a fool as to think that we are safe here. We’re too near to the city – if the king brings in a Papist army we will be in the worst place. But if that happens I shall take them to Oatlands, or away into the country. We will have a warning of the dangers. I can prepare for them. And Jane’s parents will warn us and protect them, and Alexander Norman knows to the minute where the king’s army can be found, he makes the barrels for the gunpowder. My own family have refuges planned. I shall have advisers, I shall have protectors.

“But in Virginia there would be no one to keep us safe but you; and you don’t know the country, and you are not a farmer or a laborer, and I think only a farmer or a laborer can get a living there.”

John got to his feet and spoke bitterly. “I won’t argue with you,” he said spitefully. “Because I don’t care enough to take the trouble. It doesn’t matter to me if you will come with me to Virginia as my wife or if you prefer to stay at home like a housekeeper. It is your choice. I shall go to Virginia a single man, if that is your wish.”

She felt a pain inside her which was worse than anything she had suffered from him so far. She heard the threat of infidelity in his words but she would not let him frighten her into abandoning her home. “I am sorry to stand against you,” she said steadily. “But I promised your father I would guard his trees and his grandchildren, and I cannot escape that promise.”