“In the Mediterranean?”

“ La Rochelle,” Buckingham said triumphantly. “We will sail in to a hero’s welcome from the Protestants. They have been besieged by their own countrymen, martyrs for their faith, for long enough. Our arrival will turn the tables. I doubt we will need to fire a shot! And what a snap of fingers in the face of Richelieu!”

“But only last year you sent a fleet to fight for Richelieu, you were his ally against them-”

“Policy! Policy!” Buckingham dismissed the idea. “We should have supported our brothers in religion as soon as the siege was raised. The country was wild to go to war against the Catholics; I was wild for it. But with a French queen new-come to the English throne and the Spanish such a threat – what could I do? It’s different now. It will be better now.”

“The people may have longer memories,” John warned. “They may remember that you hired our Navy out to Richelieu and English guns were trained on the Protestants at La Rochelle.”

Buckingham shook his head and laughed. “What is wrong with you today, Tradescant? Don’t you want to come with me?”

“You are never sailing yourself?”

Buckingham smiled his heart-stopping smile. “I? But of course! Who else is Lord High Admiral?”

“I didn’t think…” John broke off. “Are you not needed at home, by the king? And your enemies in the country, will they not mass against you if you are gone on an expedition for months at a time? The gossip is loud against you, I’ve heard even here that they are making accusations – my lord, surely you cannot risk being away?”

“How better to silence them than with a victory? When I come home with a victory against France, a triumph against the papists and a new English port on the west coast of France, don’t you think my enemies will disappear in a moment? They will be my dearest friends again. Sir John and Sir Dudley will love me like brothers again, come rushing out of the Tower to kiss my hand. Don’t you see? It will turn everything around for me.”

John put his hand on the richly slashed sleeve of his master’s fine doublet. “But, my lord, if you fail?”

Buckingham did not throw him off, as he could have done; did not laugh, as John half-expected. Instead he put his white fingers on John’s hand, and held his touch closer. “I must not fail,” he said softly. “To tell you truth, John, I dare not fail.”

John looked into his master’s dark eyes. “Are you in so much jeopardy?”

“The worst. They will execute me for treason if they can.”

The two men stood still for a moment, hands clasped, their heads close.

“Come with me?” Buckingham asked.

“Of course,” John replied.


“You are going where?” Elizabeth demanded, icily furious.

“To France with the fleet,” John said, keeping his head low over his dinner. J, at the other end of the table, watched his parents in silence.

“You are nearly sixty.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled with rage. “It is time you stayed home. The duke pays you as his gardener and the keeper of his rarities. Why can he not leave you to garden?”

John shook his head and cut himself a slice of ham. “This is sweet meat,” he remarked. “One of our own?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “Why does the duke want you?”

“He has asked me to go,” John said in his most reasonable tone. “I can hardly ask him if he is sure, or what his reasons are. He has ordered me to go.”

“You are at an age when men sit by their fireside and tell their grandchildren of their travels,” she said. “Not going as a common soldier off to war.”

He was stung. “I’m not a common soldier. I travel as a gentleman in his train. As his companion and adviser.”

She slapped the table with her hand. “What can you advise him? You are a gardener.”

He met her challenging eyes squarely. “I may be a gardener but I have traveled farther and faced worse danger than any other in his train,” he said. “I was at the battle of Algiers, and the long voyage to Russia. I have traveled all over Europe. He needs all the wise heads he can muster. He has asked for me and I will go.”

“You could refuse,” she challenged him. “You could leave his service. There are many other places where you could work. We could go back to Canterbury; Lord Wootton would have you back. He says that no one can grow melons like you. We could go back to Hatfield and work for the Cecils again.”

“I will not be forsworn. I will not leave his lordship.”

“You took no oath,” she pressed him. “You think of yourself as his man and he treats you like a vassal right enough, but these are new times, John. The way you served Lord Cecil with such love and devotion is the old way. Other men work for Villiers for nothing more than their wages and they move on as it suits them. You could serve him like that. You could tell him that it does not suit you to go to war with him, and seek another place.”

He was genuinely shocked. “I tell him that it does not suit me to go to war when he is going? Tell him that it suits me to stay at home when he is fighting for my country in a foreign land? I to be a turncoat, having eaten his bread and lived in his house for five years? After he has paid me and trusted me, and employed my own son so he served his apprenticeship in one of the finest households in the land? I wait till now, till the worst moment of his life, to tell him that I was only here until it suited me to be elsewhere? This is not a matter of a wage, Elizabeth, it is a matter of faith. It is a matter of honor. It is a matter between my lord and me.”

J made a little impatient gesture, and then sat still. John did not even glance at him.

“Then serve him where you are placed,” Elizabeth said urgently. “Cleave to your master and do the work he employs you to do. Keep his cabinet of rarities, keep his gardens.”

“I am placed at his side,” John said simply. “Wherever he is, there I should be. Wherever that is.”

She swallowed her pride as it rose up, a wife’s pride, a jealous pride, stung by the devotion in his voice. She kept her temper with an effort. “I don’t want you running into danger,” she said quietly. “We have a good place here; I acknowledge our debt to the duke. You have a fine life here. Why d’you have to go away? And this time to make war against the French! You told me yourself what a court they have and what an army! What chance does the fleet have against them?” – “Especially commanded by the duke,” she thought but did not say it.

“He thinks that we will sail into a heroes’ welcome and sail home again,” John said. “The Protestants of La Rochelle have been under siege by the French government troops for months. When we relieve the siege we will free the Huguenots and slap Richelieu’s face.”

“And why should you slap Richelieu’s face?” she demanded. “He was an ally only months ago.”

“Policy,” John answered, concealing his ignorance.

She drew a breath as if she would draw in patience again. “And if it is not so easy? If the duke cannot slap Richelieu’s face, just like that?”

“Then the duke will need me,” John said simply. “If they have to build siege machines, or bridges, he will need me there.”

“You are a gardener!” she exclaimed.

“Yes!” he cried, goaded at last. “But the rest of them are poets and musicians! The officers are young men from the court who have never ridden out for anything more arduous than a day’s hunting, and the sergeants are drunkards and criminals. He needs at least one man in his train who can work with his hands and measure a length with his eye! Who in my lord’s train will guard him? Who can he trust?”

She got up from her stool and snatched up the platters from the table. John saw her blink away angry tears and he softened at once. “Lizzie…” he said gently.

“Are we never to be at peace together?” she demanded. “You are a young man no longer, John; will you never stay home? We have our son, we have our home, you have your great garden and your rarities. Is this not enough for you that you have to go chasing off halfway round the world to fight the French, who were our allies and friends only last year?”

He got up and went over to her. His knees ached, and he was careful to walk steadily without a limp. He put his arm around her waist. He could feel the warmth and softness of her body beneath her gray gown. “Forgive me,” he said. “I have to go. Give me your blessing. You will never make me sail without your blessing.”

She turned her troubled face toward him. “I can bless you and I can pray for the Lord to watch over you,” she said. “But I fear that you are sailing with bad company into a senseless fight. You will be badly commanded, badly ruled and poorly paid.”

Tradescant flinched back from her. “This is not a blessing, this is ill-wishing!”

Elizabeth shook her head. “It is the truth, John, and everyone in the country but you knows it. Everyone but you thinks that your duke is leading this country into war to spite Richelieu and to tease the King of France whom he cuckolded already. Everyone but you thinks he is showing off before the king. Everyone but you thinks he is a wicked and dangerous man.”

John was white. “I see you have been listening to the preachers and the gossips again,” he said. “This poison is not of your cooking!”

“The preachers speak nothing but the truth,” she said, confronting him at last. “They say that a new world is coming where men can share in the wealth of the country and that every man should have his share. They say that the king will see reason and give the country to his people when his adviser is thrown down. And they say that if the king will not turn against papist practices in his home, and ritual in his church, and poverty in his streets, then we should all go to make a new world of our own.”

“Virginia!” John mocked scathingly. “That was an investment of mine in a promising business. It was not a dream of a new world.”

“There is certainly no dreaming in this old world,” she flashed back. “Innocent men in the Tower, poor men taxed into paupers. Plague in the streets every summer, starvation in the country, and the richest king in the world riding around in silk with his Favorite riding beside him on a horse from Arabia.”

John put his hand under her chin and turned her face so that she was forced to meet his eyes. “This is treason,” he said firmly. “And I will not have it spoken in my house. I have struck J for less. Mark me well, Elizabeth, I will put you aside if you speak against my lord. I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

For a moment she looked as if he had indeed struck her. “Say that again,” she whispered.

He hesitated; he did not know if she was daring him to repeat it, or if she simply could not believe her ears. But either way he could not back down before a woman. The chain of command from God to man was clear; a wife’s feelings could not disrupt the loyalty from man to lord to king to God. “I will put you aside if you speak against my lord,” John said to his wife, as solemnly as he had spoken the marriage oath in church that long-ago day in Meopham. “I will turn you out if you speak against the king. I have given my heart and soul to the duke and the king. I am their man.”

He turned on his heel and went out of the room. Elizabeth heard his heavy step going up the stairs to their bedroom and then the noise of the wooden chest opening as he took his traveling suit from where it was laid in lavender and rue. She put out her hand to the chimney breast to steady herself as her knees grew suddenly weak beneath her, and she sank down to the little three-legged stool at the fireside.

“I want to go with him,” J suddenly said from his seat at the table.

Elizabeth did not look around. She had forgotten her son was there. “You’re too young,” she said absently.

“I’m nearly nineteen, I am a man grown. I could keep him safe.”

She looked up at his bright hopeful face and his dark eyes, as dark as his father’s. “I cannot bear to let you go,” she said. “You stay home with me. This voyage is going to break hearts enough in this household and in others all over the country. I can’t risk you as well.” She saw the refusal in his face. “Ah, John, don’t waste your time reproaching me or trying to convince me,” she suddenly cried out bitterly. “He won’t take you. He won’t allow you to go. He will want to be with the duke alone.”

“It is always the duke,” J said resentfully.

She turned her face from her son to look into the fire. “I know,” she said. “If I had been able to hide from that knowledge before, I would certainly know it now. Now that he has told me to my face and repeated it – that he is their man and not mine.”