“Shall you go to the house?” Elizabeth asked. “Will you go to work today?”

John turned to the door. “No. I’ll walk until I can live with myself. I feel…” He made a strange distressed gesture. “I feel all… racked… I can’t say more. I feel as if I have pulled myself out of shape and I need to restore myself somehow.”

Elizabeth took a small piece of linen and wrapped a piece of bread and cheese. “You walk,” she advised. “Here is your dinner, and when you come home tonight I will have a good supper prepared for you. You look like a man who has been poisoned.”

John recoiled as if she had slapped him. “Poisoned? What are you saying?”

Elizabeth’s face was graver than ever. “I meant that you looked as if the court had not agreed with you, John. What else should I mean?”

He passed his hand quickly over his face as if he were wiping away a cold sweat. “It does not,” he said. “It does not agree with me. For here I am as nervous as a deer when I should be quietly at peace and setting my seeds.”

He took the bread and cheese from her. “I’ll be home by dusk,” he promised.

She drew him to her, took his worried face in her hands and drew his head down to her. She put a kiss on his brow, as if she were his mother blessing and absolving him. “You say a little prayer as you walk,” she said. “And I shall pray for you while I set the house to rights.”

John reached for his hat and opened the door. “What shall you pray for me, Lizzie?” he asked.

Elizabeth’s look was calm and steady. “That you shall avoid temptation, husband. For I think you have chosen a way which is much among the snares of the world.”


John worked through the spring with a dogged sullenness on the gardens of New Hall. The cherries which had always been his special pleasure blossomed well, and he watched the pink and white buds swell and then bloom, denying his own feeling that since their master did not see them their sweetness was wasted.

Buckingham did not come. The rumor was that London was dreadfully infested by plague, the dead lying in the streets of the poorer quarters and the plague cart coming by two and three times a day, healthy citizens shrinking back into doorways and locking themselves into their houses, every man who could afford it moving out to the country and then finding that villages on the road from the capital barred their doors to London trade. No one knew how the plague spread; perhaps it was by touch, perhaps it was in the air. People spoke of a plague wind as the season grew warmer and said that the soft warm breezes of spring blew the plague into your skin and set the buboes like eggs in your armpit and groin.

John longed to see Buckingham and to know that he was well. He could hardly believe that the court would linger in London while the hot weather came. The young king must be mad to expose himself to such danger, to expose his friends. But no one at New Hall could say when the court would move, no one could tell John if the court would come on a visit, or even if the duke might come home alone, tired of the squabbles and rivalry of the court and longing to be quietly in his own house, in his garden, among those who loved him.

John unpacked the India rarities and laid them out, as his fancy took him, in a small room. They looked well all together, he thought. There were some handsome skins and some silks, and he ordered the maids to sew them to strips of stout canvas which he could fix to the walls to make into hangings. He had a cabinet made to hold the jewels, fastened with an intricate gold lock with only one key, which he held for the duke. Still, the duke never came.

Then John had news. The king’s delayed marriage to the French princess was to go ahead; the duke had already left for France.

“He’s out of the country?” John asked the steward, in the safe privacy of the household office.

William Ward nodded.

“Who has he taken from his household?” John demanded.

“You know his way,” Ward said. “He was up and gone within the day. He forgot half his great wardrobe. The moment the king said he was to go, he was gone. He took hardly a dozen servants for his own use.”

“He did not ask for me?”

He shook his head. “Out of sight, out of mind, when you serve His Grace,” he said.

John nodded and went back outside.

The plan for the fish had worked. The terrace was a delightful place in the April sunshine. The goldfish swam in their own pool on the top terrace and the banks around them were gleaming with kingcups and celandine, as gold as they. The stream overflowed and babbled down to the next level, where silver fish swam under the overhanging pale green stems of what would bloom into white carnations. The glass fence was quite invisible; the water rippled down just as John had planned. He sat in one of the arbors and watched the water play, knowing that it was only his own folly which made the sound mournful and made him feel that great events were taking place out of reach and out of sight.

There was much to do in the garden. The ships of the Navy still obeyed Buckingham’s command that John should have the pick of rarities and new plants every time they returned from a voyage. Often a traveler would make his way to the garden at New Hall with something to sell: a plant, a seed, a nut, or some rare and curious gift. John bought many things and added them to the collection, keeping a careful account and submitting it to William Ward, who repaid him. The things accumulated in the cabinet, the India skins grew dirty and John ordered a woman to come into the rarities room to dust and clean. Still the duke did not come home.

Finally, in May a message came for Tradescant, scrawled in the duke’s own hand and brought all the way from Paris. It read:


My best suit and shirts forgotten in the hurry. Do bring all the things I may need, and anything precious and rare which might amuse the little princess.


“He sends for you?” the steward asked.

John read and reread the note and then laughed aloud, like a man who has been told that he shall be rescued. It was a laugh of relief. “He needs me. At last he needs me. I am to take his best suit and some curious playthings for the princess herself!” He stuffed the note in his pocket and headed for the rarities room, his step lighter, his whole being straighter, more determined, as if he were a young man commanded to set out on a quest, a chivalric quest.

“William, help me. Send for the housekeeper and get his things packed for me at once. He must have everything he might need. His best suit, but shirts as well, and I had better take a pair of his horses. Remember his riding clothes, and his hats. Everything he might want, I must take it all. His jewel box and his best diamonds. Nothing must be forgotten!”

The steward laughed at Tradescant’s urgency. “And when is all this to be ready?”

“At once!” John exclaimed. “At once! He has sent for me, and he trusts me to forget nothing. I must leave tonight.”

John scattered orders like plentiful seed up the stairs and down the stairs, in the stable and in the kitchen, until everyone in the household was running to pack whatever the duke might require in France.

Tradescant himself ran like a man half his age across the park to his cottage. Elizabeth was spinning, her wheel pushed alongside the window so that the sunshine fell on her hands. John hardly saw the beauty of the moving strands of wool in the sunshine and the quiet peace of his wife, humming a psalm as she worked.

“I’m off!” he cried. “He has sent for me at last!”

She rose to her feet, her face shocked, knowing at once who he meant. “The duke?”

“God be praised!”

She did not say, “Amen.”

“I am to follow him to France, with his baggage,” John said. “He wrote to me himself. He knows that no one else could get it done. No one else would take the care. He wrote to me by name.”

She turned her face away for a moment, and then quietly put her spindle down. “You will need your traveling cape, and your riding breeches,” she said and went to climb the little stair to their bedchamber.

“He wants me!” Tradescant repeated exultantly. “He sent for me! All the way from France!”

Elizabeth turned back to look at him and for a moment he could not understand her expression. She was looking at him with regret, with a strange inexplicable pity.

“This is what I have been waiting for!” he said. But at once the words sounded lame. “At last!”

“I know you have been waiting for him to whistle and for you to run,” she said gently. “And I will pray that he does not lead you down dark pathways.”

“He is leading me to the court of France!” John exclaimed. “To the heart of Paris itself to bring home the new Queen of England!”

“To a papist court and a papist queen,” Elizabeth said steadily. “I will pray for your deliverance night and day, husband. Last time you went to court you came home sickened to your soul.”

John swore under his breath and flung himself out of the cottage to wait on the road for his wife to pack his bag. So when they said farewell he did not take her in his arms but merely nodded his head to her. “I bid you farewell,” he said. “I cannot say when I shall return.”

“When he has finished with you,” she said simply.

John flinched at the words. “I am his servant, as he is the king’s,” he said. “Duty to him is an honor as well as my task.”

“Indeed, I hope his service always is an honor,” she said. “And that he never asks anything of you that you should not perform.”

John took her hand and kissed her lightly, coldly, on the forehead. “Of course not,” he said irritably. The cart, packed with the duke’s goods and drawn by two good horses, with his lordship’s two best hunters tossing their heads at being tied on behind, clattered down the lane. John hailed it and swung up on the seat beside the driver. When he looked down on her he thought his wife seemed very small, but as indomitable as she had been the day of their engagement twenty-four years ago.

“God bless you,” he said gruffly. “I shall come home as soon as I have done my duty.”

She nodded, still grave. “J and I will be waiting for you,” she said. The cart rolled forward; she turned and watched it go. “As we always are.”


When J came in for his supper she sent him back out to the pump to wash his hands again. He came in wiping his palms on his smock, leaving muddy stains.

“Look at you!” Elizabeth exclaimed without heat.

“It’s clean earth,” he defended himself. “And I’ve never seen my father’s hands without grimy calluses.”

Elizabeth brought bread and meat broth to the table.

“Chicken broth again?” J asked without resentment.

“Mutton,” she said. “Mrs. Giddings killed a sheep and sold me the lights and a leg. We’ll have a roast tomorrow.”

“Where’s Father?”

She let him break bread and take a spoonful of soup before she answered. “Gone to France after my lord Buckingham.”

He dropped his spoon back in his bowl. “Gone where?” he asked incredulously.

“I’d have thought you’d have heard.”

He shook his head. “I was over at the far side of the estate all day, with the game birds. I heard nothing.”

“The duke sent for him, wanted him to take some clothes, and some playthings for the French princess.”

“And he went?”

She met his angry glare. “Of course, J my boy. Of course he went.”

“He runs after the duke as if he were a dog!” J burst out.

Elizabeth shot a fierce look at him. “You remember your duty!” she hissed.

J dropped his gaze to the table, and fought for control. “I miss him,” he said quietly. “When he is not there then people look to me to tell them what to do. Because I am his son they assume that I know things, and I don’t know them. And the lads in the stable tease me when he is not there. They mock me behind my back and call me names. They say things about him and the duke which are not fit to be repeated.”

“He won’t be long,” Elizabeth said without conviction.

“You cannot know that.”

“I know he will come as soon as he can.”

“You know he will come when the duke has finished with him, and not a moment sooner. Besides, he loves traveling; if he gets the chance he will be off around Europe again. Did he leave you with an address where we can reach him?”

“No.”

“Or money?”

“No.”

J sighed heavily and spooned broth. When his bowl was empty he took the last piece of bread and wiped it carefully around, mopping up the gravy. “So at the end of the month I shall have to go to the almoner for his wages and he will swear they will be paid to him in Paris, and we will have to make do on my money until he returns.”