Philippa Gregory - Earthly Joys

She laughed delightedly and for a moment J was afraid that her greed would outrun her desire to seem charming. “I shall leave everything here, of course!” she said. “But whenever you have something new and rare and pretty I shall come and see it.”

“We will be honored,” J said, with a sense of a danger narrowly avoided. “Will Your Majesty take a glass of wine?”

The queen turned for the door. “But who is this?” she asked as Frances leaped forward and opened the door for her. “A little footman?”

“I’m Frances,” the little girl said. She had forgotten all about the curtsey which Jane had reluctantly taught her. “I was waiting for you for ages.”

For a moment J thought that the queen would take offense. But then she laughed her girlish laugh. “I am sorry to keep you waiting!” she exclaimed. “But am I what you thought a queen would be?”

Both John and J moved forward, J smoothly standing beside Frances and giving her thin shoulder blade a swift admonitory pinch, while John filled the pause. “She was expecting Queen Elizabeth,” he said. “We have a miniature of Her Majesty, painted on ivory. She did not know that a queen could be so young and beautiful.”

Henrietta Maria laughed. “And a wife, and the mother of a son and heir,” she reminded him. “Unlike the poor heretic queen.” Frances gasped in horror and was about to argue but to J’s enormous relief the queen went past the little girl without another glance. Jane threw open the parlor door and curtseyed.

“I wasn’t expecting Queen Elizabeth, and anyway she wasn’t a heret-” Frances started to argue. J leaned heavily on her shoulder as the king went past.

“She is my first granddaughter and has been much indulged,” John explained.

The king looked down at her. “You must repay favor with duty,” he said firmly.

“I will,” Frances said easily. “But may I come and work for you and be your gardener, as my grandfather and father do? I am very good with seeds and I can take cuttings and some of them do grow.”

It would have cost the king nothing to smile and say yes; but he was always a man who could be ambushed by shyness, and by his own desire to be seen to do the right thing. With only one person had he been free of his need to set an example, to be kingly and wise in all things; and that man was long dead.

“M… maids and wives must stay at home,” he decreed, ignoring Frances’s shocked little face. “Everyone in their r… right place is what I wish for my kingdom now. You must obey your father and then your husband.” Then he passed on toward the parlor.

J threw a quick harassed glance at Frances’s appalled face, and followed him.

Frances looked up at her grandfather, and saw that his face was warm with sympathy. She turned and pitched into his arms.

“I think the king is a pig,” she wailed passionately into his coat. John, a lifelong royalist, could not disagree.

Mrs. Hurte went home that evening, pleasantly shocked and appalled by the queen’s jewels, the richness of her perfume, the king’s lustrous hair, his cane, his lace. As the wife of a mercer, she had taken particular note of their cloth and she was anxious to hurry home with news of French silk and Spanish lace, while English weavers and spinners went hungry. The king had a diamond on his finger the size of Frances’s fist, and the queen had pearls in her ears the size of pigeon’s eggs, and she had worn a cross, a crucifix, a most ungodly and unrighteous symbol. She had worn it like a piece of jewelry – heresy and vanity in one. She had worn it on her throat, an invitation to carnal thoughts as well. She was a heretical wicked woman and Mrs. Hurte could not wait to get home to her husband and confirm his worst fears.

“Come and see me next month,” she said, pressing Jane to her heart before she left. “Your father wants to see you, and bring Baby John.”

“I have to be here to guard the rarities when Father Tradescant and John are away,” Jane reminded her.

“When they are both here then,” her mother said. “Do come. Your father will want to know about Oatlands too. Did you see the quality of the lace she wore on her head? It would buy you a house inside the city walls, I swear it.”

Jane packed her mother into the wagon and handed her the basket with the empty jars and the crumpled tablecloths.

“No wonder the country is in the state it is,” Mrs. Hurte said, deliciously shocked.

Jane nodded, and stood back from the wagon as the man flipped the reins on the horses’ backs.

“God bless you,” Mrs. Hurte called lovingly. “Wasn’t she a scandal!”

“A scandal,” Jane agreed and stood at the back gate and waved until the wagon was out of sight.

Jane did not visit her mother all through the spring. Both John and J were either at Oatlands Palace or busy in the orchards and garden of Lambeth. There was always someone knocking at the garden door with a little plant in a pot, or some precious thing in a knotted handkerchief, and Jane would judge its value and buy it with the authority of a good housewife and a partner in the business. Then, there were the tulips to be watched into leaf and into flower. John had ordered an orangery to be built for them to raise up the tender plants and the builders needed to be watched as they knocked a doorway through into the main house. It was not until May that Jane felt she had enough leisure to leave the Ark and go to see her mother in the city. But then she went and stayed for a week.

The house was oddly empty without her. Frances did not miss her much; she was always her grandfather’s shadow, and when he was away she was always out in the garden with her father. But Baby John, nearly two, toddled round the house and demanded all day, “Where’s Mama? Where’s Mama?”

They expected her to come home rested and happy after a week’s cosseting in her old home, but when she finally returned she was tired and pale. The city had been unbearably hot, she said. There were more beggars on the streets than ever; she had seen a man dying in the gutter and had feared to touch him in case he was carrying the plague.

“What sort of country is this, that the act of a good Samaritan is too dangerous to do?” she demanded, genuinely grieved at the struggle between her conscience and her safety.

Her father and all the merchants were complaining that they were taxed for trading, and then taxed for selling, and then taxed for storing goods. They too were ordered to pay ship money, which was set by an assessor who would come around and guess how much you were worth by the appearance of your house and business, and there was no appeal against him.

Josiah Hurte had to stand the charge of paying for his own lecturer in his own chapel, and also had to pay his parish dues to a church he never entered, and tithes to a vicar he despised for Roman practices. Meanwhile the price of goods soared; there were pirates openly operating up and down the English Channel; there were rumors of a rebellion in Ireland; and the king was said to spend more on his collection of pictures than he did on the Navy.

Jane, as the wife and daughter-in-law of a man in the employ of the court, had been pestered for scandalous details and had suffered from association. “Nothing good will come from this king,” her father had said. “You may think your husband is high in his favor but nothing good can come from him because he is a king halfway to damnation already. And if you do not beware, he will drag you all down with him. Now that your father-in-law and husband have a fair house in Lambeth, why can they not bide there?”

Useless to try to explain to Josiah that if this king issued a command you could be hanged for treason if you said “no.” “The king himself ordered it,” Jane said. “How could we refuse?”

“By simply refusing,” her father said stoutly.

“And do you refuse to pay your taxes? Do you refuse to pay ship money? Other men do.”

“And they lie in prison,” Josiah said. “And shame the rest of us who are less staunch. No, I do as I am ordered.”

“And so does my husband,” Jane insisted, defending the Tradescants despite herself. “The king and court take our skills and ser-vice just as they take your money. This king takes whatever he desires and nothing can stop him.”

“You must be glad to be home,” J said in bed that night. He put his arm around her and she rested her head against his shoulder.

“I’m so tired,” she said fretfully.

“Then rest,” he said. He turned her face toward him and kissed her lips but she moved away.

“The room stinks of honeysuckle,” she cried suddenly. “You’ve brought cuttings into the bedroom again, John! I won’t have it.”

“No,” he said. He could feel a small niggle of fear, as small as a seedling, in his heart. “There’s nothing in the room. Does the air smell sweet to you, Jane?”

She suddenly realized what she had said, and what he was thinking, and she clapped her hand over her mouth as if she would hide her words and stop her breath from reaching him. “Oh God, no,” she said. “Not that.”

“Was it in the city?” John asked urgently.

“It’s always in the city,” she said bitterly. “But I spoke to no one knowingly.”

“Not the servants, not the apprentice boys?”

“Would I take the risk? Would I have come home if I had thought I was carrying it?”

She was half out of bed, throwing back the covers and throwing open the window, her hand still cupped over her mouth as if she did not want the smallest breath to escape. John reached out for her but did not pull her to him. His fear of the illness was as great as his love for her. “Jane! Where are you going?”

“I’ll get them to make me up a bed in the new orangery,” she said. “And you must put my food and water at the door, and not come near me. The children are to be kept away. And my bedding is to be burned when it is dirty. And burn candles around the door.”

He would have held her but she turned on him with a face of such fury that he recoiled. “Get away from me!” she screamed at him. “D’you think I want to give it to you? D’you think I want to tear down this house which has been the joy of my life to build up?”

“No…,” John stammered. “But Jane, I love you, I want to hold you…”

“If I survive,” she promised, her face softening, “then we will spend weeks in each other’s arms. I swear it, John. I love you. But if I die you are not even to touch me. You are to order them to bolt down the coffin and not even to look at me.”

“I can’t bear it!” he cried suddenly. “This can’t happen to us!”

Jane opened the door and called down the stairs. “Sally! Make up a bed for me in the orangery, and put all my clothes in there.”

“If I take it, I will join you,” John said. “And we will be together then.”

She turned her determined face to him. “You will not take it,” she said passionately. “You will live to care for Baby John, and for Frances, and for the trees and the gardens. Even if I die there is still Baby John to carry your name, and the trees and the gardens.”

“Jane-” It was a low cry, like a hurt animal’s.

She did not soften for a moment. “Keep my children from me,” she ordered harshly. “If you love me at all. Keep them from me.”

And she turned, gathered up all the clothes she had brought from the city, went down the stairs into the new-built orangery, lay down on the pallet bed which the maid had thrown on the floor and looked up to where the warm summer moonlight poured in the little window in the wooden wall, and wondered if she would die.

On the fourth day Jane found swollen lumps under her arms, and she could not remember where she was. She had a lucid interval at midday and when John came to speak to her from the doorway, behind the wall of candle flame, she told him to put a lock on the door so that she could not come out looking for Baby John, when she was out of her mind with the fever.

On the fifth day a message came from her mother to say that one of the apprentices had taken the plague and that Jane should burn everything she had worn or brought from her visit. They sent back the messenger with the news that the warning came too late, that already there was a white cross on the front door, and a warden standing outside to make sure that no one left the house to spread the plague in Lambeth. All the goods and groceries, and even the new rarities, were left on the little bridge which led from the road to the house, and all the money was left in a bowl of vinegar, to wash the coins clean. No one would go near the Tradescants’ door until they were all recovered or dead. The parish wardens were legally bound to make sure that any plague victims were isolated in their houses until they were proven to be dead or proven to be clean, and no one – not even the Tradescants with their fine business and their royal connections – could escape the ruling.