Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“I shall miss you,” Hester whispered as she took her leave in the cramped hall of Alexander’s house the next day.

“Oh, Mother-” Frances said, and dived into her embrace. “But I shall come to the Ark often, and you will come and see us. Won’t she, Alexander?”

Alexander Norman, looking years younger as if sheer joy had smoothed the lines from his face, beamed at Hester and said: “You can come and live with us, if you like. I should think myself a Pasha of Turkey with two such beauties in the house.”

“I have the Ark to see to,” Hester affirmed. “But I expect you on a visit often. And when there is plague in the city…”

“I shall send her to you at once,” Alexander reassured her. “Never fear. And I shall write you what news there is.”

After that, there was nothing to do but to let her go. Hester held on a moment longer than was necessary, and when Frances stepped back into the encircling arm of her husband, Hester felt a pain in her whole body, as if something slowly and deeply was peeling away from her. She smiled at once. “God bless you,” she said, as if the pain was not gripping her inside. “Be happy.”

She turned from the pretty hall and stepped out into the street. The Tower of London threw a shadow over the street in the morning and the chill struck Hester as she gathered her cape around her. In a second Johnnie was at her side, offering his arm like a cavalier, and Hester managed to step briskly out toward the river and the boat to take them home.

“That was well done,” Johnnie said stoutly, keeping his face turned away from her.

“Very well,” Hester replied, rubbing her gloved hand against her cheeks. “A plague on this cold wind, it’s making my eyes water.”

“Mine too,” Johnnie said.

Hester felt that the Ark, Tradescant’s Ark, was adrift in the spring of 1645. The promise that she had made to John Tradescant – to care for his grandchildren and his rarities – seemed to be slipping away from her; though she had always thought that whatever else slipped away, that promise at least could hold firm.

But Frances was a woman, with a house and a new life of her own, and Johnnie was growing and would be off to war within four, perhaps five, years. Every young man in England knew that he would see fighting before he was old, and Johnnie, even precious Johnnie, could be no exception. The rarities were well hidden and she could only hope that neither the cold nor the damp would spoil them. The ice house was safely locked and bolted, and Joseph had planted a cherry tree, one of Tradescant’s great black cherry trees, before it. The sapling had taken well and was spreading its boughs as if it would deny that there had ever been a door there at all. The springing leaves blurred the outline of the wall, and when the blossoms came there would be nothing to see but bobbing flowers.

“We’ll have to cut that tree down when we want to get the door open and the treasures out,” Joseph observed to Hester in a quiet voice as she was walking around the garden.

“The way things are going, we’ll never be safe to have them out,” she replied, and went on.

The garden was looking as lovely as it did every spring, as if war was not the nation’s chief occupation, as if hunger and plague were not a certainty in the coming summer. The daffodils were bobbing in the orchard and in the tulip beds the spears of buds were thickening and blushing with light stripes of color. If in the autumn there was anyone left alive who cared to buy tulips there would be a fortune in the rich earth of the Tradescant garden.

But nobody was buying, they were not taking money at the door of the rarities room, they were not selling plants. The Ark was slowly sinking under debt. Joseph was working for half wages and his keep, the lads had left, run away to war, the maids had been dismissed and only Cook stayed on and shared the work of the house with Hester.

The trees were in their first green leaves, Hester could almost smell their freshness in the air. The grass was growing long; as soon as the daffodils had died back then Joseph would scythe it and rake the clippings away. The branches in the orchards were bobbing with their twigs bursting into leaf and the buds thickening with the promise of flowers to come. It should have been a joyous place; but Hester walked among the fertility and overbrimming life of it like a woman chilled to the bone and weary nearly to death.

She walked to the end of the garden and looked out across the pond. It was years since she had brought Johnnie here to feed the ducks, years since they had sat in the little waterlogged boat and he had rowed her backward and forward and told her that he would undoubtedly be a great sailor as his grandfather had been – chasing pirates in the Mediterranean, sailing to the very icy doors of Russia. And now she was the wife of another traveling Tradescant and she thought that this would be the year that she would have to find the courage to face the fact that John was never coming home.

Since he had left she had received only one letter, to say that he was leaving Jamestown and going to build his house farther up the river and that she should not expect to hear from him again for some time. Then she had received a consignment of Indian rarities and a couple of barrels of plants, badly packed, and badly shipped, which told her that it was not John who had seen them loaded on board. Since then – nothing. And now there was news of an Indian uprising and Jamestown attacked, and all the planters all along the river scalped and skinned and butchered.

She thought she must learn to stop looking for John, learn to stop waiting for him. She thought she would wait till the summer and then, if there was still no news, find a way to tell Johnnie, who was sometimes still her little boy, and sometimes now a young man, that his father was not coming home, and that he was the only Gardener Tradescant left.

“Excuse me,” a voice behind her said politely. “I am looking for John Tradescant.”

“He’s not here,” Hester said wearily and turned around. “I am his wife. Can I help you?”

The man before her was one of the handsomest she had ever seen in her life. He swept off his hat to her and the plumes brushed the ground as he bowed, one long brown suede boot stretched forward. He was dressed in gray – a sober enough color, which might indicate he was a Parliament man and one of the dreary Presbyterian sort at that; but his thick, curly head of hair, his rich lace collar, and that laughing confidence in his smile was that of a cavalier.

Hester’s first response was to smile in reply, he was not a man that any woman would find easy to resist. But then she remembered the times they lived in and she glanced toward the house as if she feared a guard of soldiery at his call and a warrant for arrest in his pocket.

“Can I help you?” she asked again.

“I’m looking for tulips,” he said. “Everyone knows that John Tradescant’s is the only garden worth visiting in England, and also these are troubled times to go flower hunting in the Low Countries.”

“We have tulips,” Hester said gravely, not taking advantage of the conversational opening to deplore the badness of the times. “Was it a special variety you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said. “What do you have?”

Hester smiled. The verbal fencing was a typical approach to naming a plant which had, in its heyday, cost the value of a house. “We have everything,” she said with the simple arrogance of a professional at the very top of her profession. “You had much better tell me simply what you want. We only ever charge a fair price, Mr.-?”

He stepped back slightly as if to reasses her, as if his view of a plain woman plainly dressed had hidden the strength of her character, and her pride. “I’m John Lambert,” he said. “And last year I grew half a dozen tulips at my home, and this year I must have more. I simply must. Do you know what I mean, Mrs. Tradescant? Or are they nothing more than a crop to you, like wheat to a farmer?”