Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

“I have a game to play, John. If you will take a hand for me.”

The relief to see his lord happy was so great that John assented at once, without thinking. “Of course.”

“Sit down.”

John pulled a little stool up to the dark wood desk and the two men went head to head, Robert Cecil speaking so softly that a man in the same room could not have heard them, let alone any of them waiting outside the door.

“I have a letter that I want delivered to Lord Monteagle,” he whispered. “Delivered to him and none other.”

John nodded and leaned back. “I can do that.”

Cecil reached across and pulled him closer again. “It’s more than a messenger boy I want,” he whispered. “The contents of the letter are enough to hang Monteagle, and to hang the messenger. You must not be seen delivering it, you must not be seen with it. Your own life depends on you getting it to him with no man seeing you.”

John’s eyes widened.

“Will you do it for me?”

There was a brief silence.

“Of course, my lord. I am your man.”

“Don’t you want to know what’s in the letter?”

Superstitiously, John shook his head.

Cecil, mightily amused at the sight of his gardener stunned into silence, broke down and laughed aloud. “John, my John, what a poor conspirator you will make.”

John nodded. “It is not my trade, my lord,” he said with simple dignity. “You have others in your service better skilled. But if you want me to take a letter and deliver it unseen, then I will do that.” He paused for a moment. “It will not undo Lord Monteagle? I would not be a Judas.”

Cecil shrugged his shoulders. “The letter itself is nothing more than words on a page. It’s not poison; it won’t kill him. What he does with the letter is his own choice. His end will be determined by that choice.”

John felt himself to be swimming in deep and dark waters. “I’ll do what you wish,” he muttered, clinging only to his faith in his lord and his own vow of loyalty.

Cecil leaned back and tossed a small note across the table. It was addressed to Lord Monteagle, but the hand was not Robert Cecil’s nor that of any of his secretaries.

“Get it to him tonight,” Robert Cecil said. “Without fail. There’s a boat waiting for you at the jetty. Make sure you are not seen. Not in the streets, not at his house, and not, not, with the letter. If you are captured, destroy it. If you are questioned, deny it.”

John nodded and rose to his feet.

“John-” his master called as he reached the door. John stopped and turned around. His lord sat behind his desk, his face, his whole stance alive with joy at plotting and trickery and the game of politics which he played so consummately. “I would trust no other man to do this for me,” Cecil said.

John met his master’s bright gaze and knew the pleasure of being the favorite. He bowed and went out.

He went first to the knot garden and gathered up his tools. The plants which were not yet bedded in he took back to his nursery plots and heeled them into the earth. Not even an act of high treason could make John Tradescant forget his plants. He glanced around the walled nursery garden. There was no one there. He rose to his feet and brushed the earth from his hands and then he went to the potting shed where he had left his winter cloak. He carried it over his arm, as if he were headed for the hall for a bite to eat, but turned instead toward the river.

There was a wherry boat waiting at the lord’s private jetty but it was otherwise deserted.

“For London?” the man asked without much interest, “In a hurry?”

“Yes,” John said shortly.

He stepped into the little boat and he thought the lurch it made at his weight was what caused the sudden pounding of his heart. He sat in the prow of the boat so the man might not have the chance to look in his face, and he wrapped himself warm in his cape and pulled down his hat over his face. He was sure that the sunlight along the river was pointing a rippling finger toward him so that every fisherman and riverside walker, peddler, and beggar took particular note of him as the boat went swiftly downstream.

The river flowed fast down to London, and the tide was on the ebb. They did the journey quicker than John had hoped and when the boat nudged against the Whitehall steps and John leaped ashore it was only dusk. He blamed his sense of sickness on the movement of the boat. He did not want to recognize his fear.

No one paid any attention to the workingman with his hat pulled down over his eyes and his cape up to his ears. There were hundreds, thousands of men like him, making their way across London for their suppers. John knew the way to Lord Monteagle’s house and slipped from shadow to shadow, making little sound on the dirt and mud of the streets.

Lord Monteagle’s house was lit by double burning torches in the sconces outside. The front door stood wide open and his men, hangers-on, friends and beggars passed in and out without challenge. His lordship was dining at the top table at the head of the hall; there was a continual press of people all around him, friends of his household, servants, retainers and, toward the back of the hall, supplicants and common people who had come in for the amusement of watching the lord at his dinner. John hung back and surveyed the scene.

As he waited and watched, a man touched his shoulder and went to hurry past him. John recognized one of Lord Monteagle’s servants, a man called Thomas, hurrying to dinner.

The note was in John’s hand, the direction clear. “A moment,” he said, and pressed it into the man’s hand. “For your master. For the love of Mary.”

He knew what a potent spell that name would weave. The man took it and glanced at him, but John was already turning away and diving into an alley out of sight. He took a moment and then peered cautiously out.

Thomas Ward had entered the big double doors and was making his way to the head of the table. John saw him lean to whisper in his master’s ear and hand him the note. The job was done. John stepped out into the street again and strolled onward, careful not to hurry, resisting the temptation to run. He strolled as if he were a workingman on his way to an inn, hungry for his supper. As he turned the corner and there was no shout of alarm, and no running footsteps behind him, he allowed his pace to quicken – as fast as a man who knows that he should be home by a certain time. One more corner and John allowed himself to run, a gentle jogging run, as a man might do when he was late for an appointment and hoping to make up for the delay. He kept a sharp watch out among the dirt and cobblestones so that he did not slip and fall, and he kept a brisk pace until he was ten, fifteen minutes away from Lord Monteagle’s, out of breath, but safe.

He took his dinner at an inn by the river and then found he was too weary to face the journey back to Theobalds. He headed instead for his lord’s house near Whitehall, where Tradescant might always command a bed. He shared an attic room with two other men, saying that he had been sent to the docks for some rarity promised by an East India trader but which had proved to be nothing.

When all the clocks in London struck eight, John went down to the great hall and found his master, as if by magic, also resident in London, calmly seated to break his fast at the big chair at the head of the big table at the top of the hall. Robert Cecil raised an eyebrow at him, John returned the smallest nod, and master and man, at either end of the hall, fell on their bread and cheese and small ale and ate with relish.

Cecil summoned him with a crook of his long finger. “I have a small task for you today and then you can go back to Theobalds,” he said.

John waited.

“There is a little room in Whitehall where some kindling is stored. I should like it damped down to prevent the danger of a fire.”

John frowned, his eyes on his master’s impish face. “My lord?”

“I’ve got a lad who will show you where to go,” Cecil continued smoothly. “Take a couple of buckets and make sure the whole thing is soaked through. And come away without being observed, my John.”

“If there is a danger of fire I should clear it all out,” John offered. He had the sense of swimming in deep and dangerous water and knew that this was his master’s preferred element.

“I’ll clear it out when I know who laid the fire in the first place,” Cecil said, very low. “Just damp it down for me now.”

“Then I’ll get back to my garden,” Tradescant said.

Cecil grinned at the firmness of the statement. “Then your job is finished here; go and plant something. My work is coming into its flowering time.”

It was only after November fifth that John learned that the whole Gunpowder Plot had been discovered by Lord Monteagle, who had received a letter warning him not to go near Parliament. He had, quite rightly, taken the letter to Secretary Robert Cecil, who, unable to understand its meaning, had laid the whole thing before the king. The king, quicker-witted than them all – how they praised him for the speed of his understanding! – had ordered the Houses of Parliament to be searched and found Guido Fawkes crouched amid kindling, and nearby, barrels of gunpowder. On the wave of anti-Catholic sentiment Cecil enforced laws to control papists, and mopped up the remaining opposition to the English Protestant succession. The handful of desperate, dangerous families were identified as one confession led to another, and as the young men who had staked everything on a barrel of wet gunpowder were captured, tortured and executed. The one bungled plot forced everyone from the king to the poorest beggar to turn against the Catholics in a great wave of revulsion. The one dreadful threat – to the king, to his wife, to the two little princes – was such that no monarch in Europe, Catholic or Protestant, would ever plot again with English Catholics. The Spanish and French kings were monarchs before they were Catholics. And as monarchs they would never tolerate regicide.

Even more importantly for Cecil, the horror at the thought of what might have happened if Monteagle had not proved faithful, if the king had not proved astute, persuaded Parliament to grant the king some extraordinary revenue for the year and pushed back for another twelve months the impending financial crisis.

“Thank you, John,” Cecil said when he returned to Theobalds in early December. “I won’t forget.”

“I still don’t understand,” John said.

Cecil grinned at him, his schoolboyish conspiratorial grin. “Much better not to,” he replied engagingly.

After the king’s first successful visit to Theobalds it was as if he could not keep away. Every summer brought the court hungry as locusts out of London and into the country, to stay at Theobalds and then to move on in a constant circle of all the wealthy houses. The courtiers braced themselves for the unimaginable expense of entertaining the king, and sighed with relief when he moved on. He might shower the host with honors or with favors, or with some of the new farmed-out taxes, so that a favorite might grow rich collecting a newly invented duty from some struggling industry; or the king might merely smile and pass on. Whether he paid for his board in privileges or took it with nothing more than a word of thanks, his courtiers had to provide him with the best of food, the best of drink, the best hunting they could manage and the best entertainment.

They had learned their skills with Queen Elizabeth; no one could teach them anything about lavish hospitality, extravagant gifts and outright sycophancy. But King James demanded all this and more. His favorites too must be honored, and his days filled with unending sport, hunting hunting hunting, until gamekeepers were at a premium and no man dared cut down a tree in a forest which the king knew and loved. His evenings must be filled with a parade of pretty men and pretty women. No one refused him. No one even thought to refuse him. Anything the new king wanted he had to have.

Even when he wanted Theobalds Palace itself.

“I shall have to give it to him.” Sir Robert had left his palace as he often did to find Tradescant. The gardener was directing the garden lads at the entrance to the maze. A team of boys was being supplied with blunt knives and sent into the maze on their hands and knees to root up weeds in the gravel. A team of older men would go with them with little hatchets and knives to trim the yew hedging; they had already been lectured with passion and energy by John as to the care they must take to keep the top of the hedge even, and on no account, on pain of instant dismissal, were they to cut an unruly bough in such a way that it might leave a hole which would make a peephole from one path to another and spoil the game.