J shifted on his seat. “You would not drive me to rebellion,” he said. “You would respect my conscience, Father. I am a full-grown man.”

“You’re twenty-two,” John said bluntly. “Barely into your majority. You make your own choices; you are a man with a wife and child of your own. But I am still your father and it will be my work which will put the bread on your table, if you refuse to work.”

“I work here!” J exclaimed, stung. “I work hard enough!”

“In winter we earn almost no money,” John pointed out. “We live off our savings. There is no stock to sell, and the visitors tail off in the bad weather. Last year we were down to the bottom of our savings by the spring. The work at the palace would be money paid to us all the year round.”

“Papist gold,” Jane muttered to her plate.

“Honestly earned by us,” John countered. “I am an old man. I did not think to go out to work to keep you, J. I did not think your conscience would be more precious than your duty to me.”

J shot a furious look at his father. “It’s always the same!” he burst out. “You are always the one who is free to come and go. I am always the one who has to obey. And now that we have a home where I want to stay, and now you are free to stay yourself, you are still going away. And now I have to go too!”

“I am not free,” John said sternly. “The king commands me.”

“Defy the king!” J shouted. “For once in your life don’t go at some great man’s bidding. For once in your life speak for yourself! Think for yourself! Defy the king!”

There was a long shocked silence.

John rose from the table and walked to the window and looked out over the garden rinsed of color and lovely in the gray light of dusk. A star was shining over the chestnut tree and somewhere in the orchard a nightingale started to sing.

“I will never defy the king,” he said. “I will not even hear such talk in my house.”

The pause stretched till breaking point and then J spoke low and earnestly. “Father, this is not Queen Elizabeth and you are not still working for Robert Cecil. This is not a king as she was a queen. This is not a country as it was then. This is a country that has been run into debt and torn apart by heresy. It is ruled by a vain fool who is ruled in turn by a papist wife, in the pay of her brother, the King of France. I cannot bear to go and work for such a king nor for her. I cannot bear to be under their command. If you force me to this I would rather leave the country altogether.”

John nodded, taking in J’s words. The two women, Elizabeth and Jane, sat silent, hardly breathing, waiting to hear what John would reply.

“Do you mean this?”

J, breathing heavily, merely nodded.

John sighed. “Then you must follow your conscience and go,” he said simply. “For the king is my master before God, and he has ordered me. And I am your father and should command your duty and I have ordered you. If you choose to defy me then you should go, J. Just as Adam and Eve had to leave their garden. There are laws in heaven and earth. I cannot pretend to you that it is otherwise. I have tolerated loose thoughts and wild talk from you all your life, even in my lord’s garden. But if you will not serve the king then you should not garden in his garden. You should not garden in his country.”

J rose from the table. His hands were trembling and he swiftly snatched them out of sight, behind his back.

“Wait-” Elizabeth said softly. Neither man paid any attention to her.

“I shall go, then,” J said as if he were testing his father’s resolve. John turned his back on the room and looked out to his garden.

“If you do not accept your obedience to me, and to the king above me, and to God above him, then you are no longer my son,” John said simply. “I would to God that you do not take this path, J.”

J turned and walked jerkily to the door. Jane rose too, hesitant, looking from her husband to her father-in-law. J went out without another word.

“Go to him,” Elizabeth said swiftly to Jane. “Soothe him. He can’t mean it. Keep him here tonight at least – we’ll talk more in the morning.” A swift nod toward John at the window showed Jane that meanwhile Elizabeth would work on her husband.

Jane hesitated. “But I think he is right,” she whispered, too low for John to hear.

“What does it matter?” Elizabeth hissed. “What do the words matter? Nothing matters more than Frances and you and J living here now, and living here when we are gone. The gardens and the Tradescant name. Go quick and stop him packing at least.”


Jane prevented J from leaving home that night by presenting the folly of taking a sleeping baby out of her cradle into the night air, into a city filled with plague. The two men, father and son, met at breakfast and went out to the garden together in stiff silence.

“What can we do?” Jane asked her mother-in-law.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Pray that the two of them will see that the interests of this family are more important than whose gold pays the bills.”

“Father should not force J to work for the king against his conscience,” Jane said.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Ah, my dear, it was so different for us when we were your age. There was no other way to work but for a lord. There were no other gardens but those belonging to great lords. At J’s age his father would never have dreamed of owning a house, or fields. At J’s age he was an under-gardener in the Cecil household and living in hall; he didn’t even choose his own meat for breakfast – everything came from the lord’s kitchen. Things have changed so fast, you two must understand. The world is so different now. And J is still a very young man. Things could change again.”

“Things are changing,” Jane agreed. “But not in favor of lords and the court. Perhaps this family should not be linked with the king. Perhaps we would do better to be like my family, independent traders who do not fear the king’s favor. Who are not dependent on any master.”

“Yes, if we were mercers,” Elizabeth answered gently. “And could trade from a little shop, and every man and woman in the country would need our goods and could afford them. But we are gardeners and keepers of a rarities collection. Only the wealthy men will buy what we have to sell and show. And we cannot get our stock without owning land to grow it in. It is not a trade that can be done on a small scale. This is a business that puts us in the hands of the great men of the country. We sell to the great houses, we sell to the courtiers. Of course, sooner or later, we would come to the mind of the king.”

“And he wants us, as he wants everything that is beautiful and rare,” Jane said bitterly. “And he thinks he can buy us too.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Just so.”


The men came into dinner in silence. Jane and Elizabeth exchanged a few remarks about the weather and the progress of the work in the garden but gave up when neither man responded with more than a word or a nod.

As soon as they had eaten the men went back outside and Jane, looking from the window of the rarities room, saw J heading down for the orchard, as far away from the house as he could go, while John was weeding the seed beds in the cool shadow of the house. The day was hot. Even the wood pigeons that usually cooed in the Tradescant trees were silent. Jane took Frances to feed the ducks in the pond at the side of the orchard and saw her husband scything nettles in a distant corner. When he saw her he carefully sheathed the blade and came over.

“Wife.”

She looked into his unhappy face. “Oh, John!”

“You don’t want to leave here,” he said flatly.

“Of course not. Where could we go?”

“We could go to your father’s while we looked about and found some position.”

“You swore you would garden for no master.”

“The Devil himself would be better than the king.”

She shook her head. “You said no master.”

Frances leaned longingly toward the deeper water. Jane took the little hand in a firm grip. “Not too near,” she said.

“There are two places I would choose to live, if you would consent,” J said tentatively.

Jane waited.

“There is a community, of good men and women, who are trying to make a life of their own, to worship as they wish, to live as they wish.”

“Quakers?” Jane asked.

“Not Quakers. But they believe in freedom for men and even for women. They have a farm in Devon near the sea.”

“How have you heard of them?”

“A traveling preacher spoke of them, a few months ago.”

Jane thought for a moment. “So we don’t know them directly.”

“No.”

He saw her grip on Frances’s hand tighten. “I can’t go among strangers and so far from my family,” she said firmly. “What would become of us if one of us were ill? Or if they are no longer there? I can’t go so far from my mother. What if we have another baby? How would we manage without my mother or your mother?”

“Other women manage,” J said. “Leave home, manage among strangers. They will become your friends.”

“Why should we?” Jane asked simply. “We, who have two families who love us? We, who have a house to live in which is the most beautiful house in Lambeth and famed throughout the world for the rarities and the gardens?”

“Because it comes with too high a price!” J exclaimed. “Because I rent this beautiful house with my obedience, by putting my conscience in the keeping of my father who himself has never thought a thought which was not licensed by his lord. He is an obedient dutiful man, Jane, and I am not.”

She thought for a moment. Frances pulled at her hand. “Frances feed ducks,” she said. “Frances feed ducks.”

“Down there,” Jane said, hardly looking. “Where the bank is not so steep. Don’t get your feet wet.” She let the little girl go and watched her progress to the water’s edge. The ducks gathered hopefully around; Frances plunged her hands into the pockets of her little gown and came out with fistfuls of breadcrumbs.

“What is your other wish?” Jane asked.

J took a deep breath. “Virginia,” he said.

Jane looked into his face and then came into his arms as simply as she had done the day they were married. “Oh, my love,” she said. “I know you have such dreams. But we cannot go to Virginia; it would break my mother’s heart. And I could not bear to leave her. And besides – we don’t need to go. We are not adventurers, we are not desperate for a fortune or to run away from here. We have a place here, we have work here, we have a home here. I would not leave here for choice.”

J would not look at her. “You are my wife,” he said flatly. “You are duty-bound to go where I go. To obey me.”

She shook her head. “I am bound in duty to you as you are to your father, as he is to the king. If you break one link they all go, J. If you do not acknowledge him as your father then I need not acknowledge you as my husband.”

“Then what do we become?” he demanded in impatience. “All whirling, unconnected, unloving, atoms; like thistledown finding its own way on the wind?”

She said nothing. Behind them, Frances put one tentative foot in the water.

“If you are guided by your conscience and only by your conscience then that is what we must become,” she said thoughtfully. “All of us, guided by our own consciences, coming together only when it suits us.”

“A society cannot live like that,” J replied.

“A family cannot,” Jane said. “As soon as you love someone, as soon as you have a child, you acknowledge your duty to put another’s needs first.”

J hesitated.

“The other way is the king’s way,” Jane continued. “The very thing you despise. A man who puts his own desires and needs before everyone else. Who thinks his needs and desires are of superior merit.”

“But I am guided by my conscience!” J protested.

“He could say the same,” she said gently. “If you are Charles the king, then your wishes could very well seem to be conscience and there would be no one to tell you your duty.”

“So where is my course?” J asked. “If you are my adviser this day?”

“Somewhere between duty and your own wishes,” Jane said. “Surely we can find a way for you to keep your soul clear of heresy and yet still live here.”

J’s face was bleak. “You would put your comfort before my conscience,” he said flatly. “All it is with you, is living here.”

She did not turn away from him but tightened her grip around his waist. “Think,” she urged him. “Do you really want to walk away from the garden that is your inheritance? The chestnut tree which your father gave to your mother the year you were conceived? The black-heart cherry? His geraniums? The tulips that you saved from New Hall? The larches from Archangel?”