Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

John and J worked hard all the winter, planning the gardens and pegging out lines for the knot garden, for the terraces and for the turf benches in the lord’s new orchards. Much of the work had to wait until the spring when the ground was soft enough for digging, but John had a small forest of trees waiting for the earth to warm so that they could be planted, each one labeled with its place, each with a plot reserved for it. For the workers who could neither read nor write, J had instituted a scheme of colored dots. They had to match the label on the tree marked with three red dots with the plot in the ground marked with three red dots. Or green or yellow. “This is code,” John said admiringly to J.

“It’s madness,” J said bluntly. “Everyone should be taught to read at dame school. How else can they understand their Bible? How else do their work?”

“We’re not all scholars like you,” John said mildly.

J flushed in one of his sudden attacks of bashfulness. “I’m no scholar,” he said gruffly. “I don’t pretend to be one. I’m no better than any man. But I do think that all men should be taught to read and write so that they can read their Bible and think for themselves.”

Work on the heated wall had already started to John’s design. The plot was marked out and the foundations for the perimeter wall were already dug. The whole garden was to be walled with a double skin of deep red brick, and there were to be built three equally spaced fireplaces, one above the other, where the charcoal burners could be lit and the smoke drift sideways through the wall till every brick was warm to the touch. The beds of the garden were not to be edged with box in the usual way. John wanted to raise them after a fashion never seen before. He wanted little brick walls to edge them, and the beds were to be filled with sifted earth and rotted manure. He even instituted a pile of manure from the stables, which was to be left to molder and then turned over every month. “I don’t want it all fresh and carrying the roots of weeds into my garden,” he explained to J and to the other vegetable gardeners. “I want the earth in these beds to be free of weeds and free of stones. I want this garden to have soil so rich and so soft that I could lay a strawberry plant on it and leave it to set its own roots. D’you understand?”

They grumbled behind his back but to his face they nodded and pulled their caps. John’s reputation as one of the greatest gardeners of the day had preceded him and it was an honor to work under him – raised beds, and stirred manure, hollow walls, or no.

The house was quiet after the festivities of Christmas; the duke had returned from the court in January and set up residence with Kate, his wife. His mother was to come later in the year. So Tradescant, rounding the stable yard in search of an errant weeding lad, was surprised to see an exceptionally fine horse, an Arab, being led from its stall into the yard, and the duke’s hunter prancing around on the cobbles, all tacked up and ready to go.

“Whose horse is that?” John asked a groom and received nothing more than a wink for a reply.

“Dolt,” John said shortly, picked up his hoe and went to pace out the orchard.

That afternoon, John was measuring the length of the new avenue which he planned to plant with lime trees leading from the Chelmsford road to the house when he heard hoofbeats on the drive, and there were the two horses with two strange men on their backs.

John stepped forward to challenge them. “Who are you? And what’s your business here? That’s my lord’s horse.”

“Let me pass, my John,” said one of the men in a familiar voice. The stranger leaned down from the duke’s horse and swept off his hat. Buckingham’s dark eyes looked down at John, and John heard his irrepressible chuckle.

“Fooled you,” Buckingham cried triumphantly. “Fooled you completely.”

John stared at the face of his lord, absurdly concealed by a false beard and a muffler. “Your Grace-” He glanced across at the other horseman and recognized, with a sense of shock, the young prince he had last seen sniveling at the heels of his older brother. But now the young prince was the heir, Prince Charles. “Good God! Your Highness!”

“Will we pass, d’you think?” Buckingham demanded joyously. “I am John Smith and this is my brother Thomas. Will we pass, d’you think?”

“Oh, yes,” John said. “But what are you about, my lord? Wenching?”

Buckingham laughed aloud at that. “The finest wench in the world,” he whispered. “We’re going to Spain, John, we’re going to marry His Highness here to the infanta of Spain! What d’you think of that?”

For a moment John was too stunned to speak; then he grabbed the hunter’s bridle above the bit. “Stay!” he cried. “You can’t.”

“You order me?” Buckingham enquired politely. “You had much better take your hand off my horse, Tradescant.”

John flinched but did not let go. “Please, your Grace,” he said. “Wait. Think on this. Why are you going disguised?”

“For the adventure!” Buckingham said merrily.

“Come on, Thomas!” the prince said. “Or are you John? Am I Thomas?”

“I beg of you,” John said urgently. “You cannot go like this, my lord. You cannot take the prince like this.”

The prince’s horse pawed the ground. “Come on!” the prince said.

“Forgive me!” Tradescant looked over at him. “Your Highness has perhaps not considered. You cannot ride into France as if it were East Anglia, Your Highness. What if they hold you? What if Spain refuses to let you leave?”

“Nonsense,” Prince Charles said briefly. “Come on, Villiers.”

Buckingham’s horse moved forward and John was dragged along, not releasing his grip on the bridle. “Your Grace.” He tried again. “Does the king know of this? What if he turns against you?”

Buckingham leaned low over the horse’s neck so he could whisper to Tradescant. “Leave me go, my John. I am at work here. If I marry the prince to the infanta then I have done something which no man has ever done – make Spain our ally, make the greatest alliance in Europe and myself the greatest marriage broker who ever lived. But even if I fail, then the prince and I have ridden out like brothers and we will be brothers for the rest of our lives. Either way, my place is assured. Now let my bridle go. I have to leave.”

“Have you food and money, a change of clothes?”

Buckingham laughed. “John, my John, next time you shall pack for me. But I must go now!”

His spur touched the hunter’s side and it threw up its head and bounded forward. Prince Charles’s horse leaped after, and there was a swirl of dust in John’s face and the two of them were gone.

“Please God keep him safe, keep them safe,” Tradescant said, looking after them. His new master and the prince he had known as a lonely incompetent little boy. “Please God, stop them at Dover.”

Elizabeth saw at once that something had happened when John came home at dusk for his dinner and stared into his broth without eating. As soon as J had eaten she sent him from the room with a nod of her head, and then seated herself beside John on the settle which stood at the fireside, and put her hand on his. “What’s the matter?”

He shook his head. “I cannot tell you.” He glanced down into her worried face. “Nothing wrong with me, my dear. Nothing wrong with J, and nothing wrong with the garden. But I cannot tell you. It is a secret and not my secret. I cannot tell anybody.”

“Then it’s the duke,” she said simply. “He’s done something bad.”

John’s stricken look told her that her guess had struck home.

“What’s he done?” she pressed.

He shook his head again. “Please God, it won’t be too bad. Please God there will be a happy outcome.”

“Is he at home?”

He shook his head.

“Gone to London? Gone to the king?”

“Gone to Spain,” he whispered very low.

Elizabeth recoiled from him as if he had pinched her. “Spain?”

John gave her a swift unhappy glance and put his finger to his lips. “I cannot say more,” he said firmly.

Elizabeth rose and went to the fire, bent and stirred the poker under the glowing logs. He saw her lips moving in a silent prayer. Elizabeth was a devout woman; a trip to Spain was like a trip to the underworld to her. Spain was the heart of Catholicism, the home of the anti-Christ against whom all good Protestants must struggle and fight from birth till death. Buckingham’s choice of destination at once condemned him in her eyes. He must be a bad man if he chose to go to Spain.

John closed his eyes briefly. He could not imagine what condemnation would be released on his master if Elizabeth, and all the many hundreds, thousands, of devout men and women like Elizabeth, knew that he was planning to bring a Spanish princess home to be queen of England.

Elizabeth straightened up and hooked the poker onto the bracket at the side of the fire. “We should leave,” she announced abruptly.

“What?” John opened his eyes again and blinked.

“We should leave now.”

“What are you saying? We’ve only just gotten here.”

She came back beside him, took his hand in hers and pressed it to her lips and then held it to her heart, like a pledge. He could feel her heartbeat, steady and reassuring, as her earnest face looked into his. “John, this duke is not a good man. I have spoken with the people of the house and half of them worship him and will hear nothing against him, and the other half say that he is a sinner of dreadful vices. There is no balance in this household. There is no steadiness. This is a whirlwind of worldly desires and we have strayed into the very heart of it.”

John wanted to speak but she gently pressed his hand and he let her finish.

“I did not want to leave Canterbury but you prevailed and it was my duty to obey you,” she said softly. “But please now, husband, hear this. We can go to any household in the world that you choose as long as we do not stay here. I will pack our goods and our clothes and go tomorrow, wherever you say, as long as we do not stay here. I will follow you overseas even, Virginia even, as long as we do not stay here.”

John waited until she was silent; then he spoke cautiously, feeling his way. “I never thought to hear you speak so. Why do you dislike him so much? As a man? As my master?”

She shrugged and looked toward the fire, where the flames were leaping over the wood and casting a flickering light on her face. “I don’t know him as a man, and it’s too early to say how he will be as your master. All I have seen of him is worldly show. The diamonds in his hat, the horses in his coach. What man in England has ever had a coach before? No one but the old queen and King James, and now this man has one, with rare horses to go before it. All I have seen of him would make me suspect that he is not a true Christian. And all that I have heard of him, and all that I know of him, tells me that he is very deep in sin.” She dropped her voice. “Have you not thought that he may even be in league with the devil himself?”

John tried to laugh but Elizabeth’s sincerity was too much for him. “Oh, Elizabeth!”

“Where did he come from?”

“Not from hell! From Leicestershire!”

She frowned at the flippancy of his tone. “The son of a servant and a mere knight of the shires,” she said. “Look at his rise, John. D’you think a man can get such fortune honestly?”

“He has enjoyed the favor of the king,” John insisted. “He was a cup-bearer and then a groom of the bedchamber and the favorite of many great men. They helped him to the post of Master of the Horse and he has brought the king such horses as no prince ever had before. Of course he enjoys great favor; he has earned it. He brought the king an Arab horse, the only one in England. The finest horse that ever was seen in England.”

She shook her head. “So they make him Lord High Admiral – for trading in a horse?”

“Elizabeth-” John said warningly.

“Bear with me,” she said swiftly. “Hear me out, this once.”

He nodded. “But I will not hear treason.”

“I will speak nothing but the truth.”

They looked at each other for a moment and she saw in the sliding away of his glance that he knew that the truth was treasonous. That you could speak the truth about Buckingham and the truth was that the king was mad for the man and unfit to rule through his madness. That Buckingham was higher than his ability, higher than any single man’s ability could ever take him, because the king was mad to please him.

“What hold is it that he has over the king?” she asked, her voice very low.

“The king loves him,” Tradescant said firmly. “And he is his faithful servant.”

“He calls himself the king’s dog,” she said, naming the unthinkable.