Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“I will,” the girl said.

“I will,” J swore.

The woman released them and turned away as if there was nothing more to be said. J watched her go, and then turned to Suckahanna. She seemed at once very familiar, the easy companion of weeks of traveling and camping, and exquisitely strange, a girl on the edge of womanhood, a virgin who would be his wife.

Carefully, as if he were transplanting a seedling, he put his hand to her cheek, stroked the line of her jaw. She quivered as he touched her but moved neither forward nor back. She let him caress her face for a moment, for one moment only; and then she turned on her heel and ran from him.

“Come back soon,” she called, and he could hardly see her in the darkness as she went swiftly after her mother, only her linen shift gleaming in the dusk. “Come in the good time, the fruitful time, Nepinough, and I shall make you a great feast and we will build our house before winter comes.”

“I will!” J said again. But she was already gone, and the next day at dawn the ship sailed and he did not see her.

J’s ship arrived at London docks at dawn in early April and he came blearily out of his cabin into the cold English air, wrapped in his traveling cloak with his hat pulled down on his head. A wagoner was idling on the dockside, fiddling with the feed-bag at the head of a dozing horse.

“Are you for hire?” J shouted down.

The man looked up. “Aye!”

“Come and fetch my goods,” J called. The man started up the gangplank and then recoiled at the waving fronds of saplings and small trees.

“Goods?” he asked. “This is a forest!”

J grinned. “There’s more than this,” he said.

Together they humped the barrels filled with damp earth down the gangplank and into the wagon, the whippy branches of trees stirring above their heads. Then J brought another barrel of seeds and nuts, and finally his own small bundle of clothes and a chest of rarities.

“I know where we’re headed,” the man said, climbing onto the box and waking the horse with a slap of the reins on its back.

“You do?”

“Tradescant’s Ark,” the man said certainly. “It’s the only place in the world that you’d go to with half a forest on board.”

“Quite right,” J said, and put his feet up on the board. “What’s the news?” he asked.

The carter spat accurately over the side of the wagon and hit the dirt road. “Nothing new,” he said. “A lot worse.”

J waited.

“Everything you can eat or drink is taxed,” the carter said. “But that was true before you went away, I dare say. Now they’ve got a new tax, a rotting crime of a tax: ship money levied on everyone, however far they are from the sea. It’s the ports that should pay ship money, they’re the ones that need the navy to keep them free of pirates. But the king is making all the towns pay, even inland towns. My sister lives in Cheltenham. Why should she pay ship money? What are the seas to her? But she has to.”

J nodded. “The king won’t call a parliament, then?”

“They say he won’t even hear the word mentioned.”

J allowed himself a pleasurable “tut tut” of disapproval.

“If he called a parliament and asked them to set a tax they would tell him what they think of him as king,” the carter said baldly. “They would tell him what they think about a Privy Council which is advised by a Papist French queen, and a court which is run by Frenchmen and Jesuits.”

“That can’t be so,” J said firmly. “I’ve only been gone a few months.”

“It’s well known the Tradescants are the king’s servants,” the man said unpleasantly.

“It is indeed,” J agreed, remembering his father’s regular warnings against gossip that could be overheard as treason.

“Then I’ll say no more,” the carter remarked. “And see how you like it when they knock on your door and tell you that now there is a monopoly declared on the dirt in your garden and you have to pay a fine of ten percent to some courtier if you want to plant in it. Because that’s what’s happened to every other trade in the kingdom while the king taxes the traders but won’t call a parliament which could tax the gentry for their rents.”

The man paused, waiting for a shocked response. J discreetly kept silent.

“You’ll have heard that the Scots have sworn they won’t read their prayers from the new book?”

“No?”

The man nodded. “All of ’em. Taken against Archbishop Laud’s prayer book. Say they won’t read a word of it. Archbishop is put out. King is put out. Some say he’ll make ’em, some say he can’t make ’em. Why should a king order what you say to God?”

“I don’t know,” J said tactfully. “I’ve no opinion on the matter.” And he tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed as the wagon jolted down the familiar road to his home.

He did not lift his hat as they went down the South Lambeth road toward the common; but he looked sharply all around him from under the brim. It was all well. His father’s house still stood proudly, set back from the road, the little bridge spanning the stream that ran alongside the road. It was a handsome farmhouse in the old timbered style, but on the side of the house was the ambitious new wing, commissioned by his father for the housing of the rarities, their great collection of oddities from the monstrous to the miniature. At the back of the house was the garden which made their name and their livelihood, and the rarities room overlooked the garden through its great windows of Venetian glass. J, taught by a long-standing habit, looked at the ground as the cart drove around the south side of the building so that he did not see his father’s vainglorious stone crest, affixed to the new wing in defiance both of the college of heralds and of the simple truth. They were not Tradescant esquires and never had been, but John Tradescant, his father, had drawn up and then commissioned a stonemason to carve his own crest; and nothing J could say could persuade him to take it down.

J directed the carter past the rarities room, where the terrace overlooked the orderly gardens, on to the stable yard so that the plants could be unloaded directly beside the pump for watering. The stable lad, looking out over the half door, saw the waving tops of small trees in the cart and shouted, “The master’s home!” and came tumbling out into the yard.

They heard him in the kitchen and the maid came running up the hall and flung open the back door as J mounted the steps to the terrace and stepped into his house.

At once he recoiled in surprise. A woman he did not know, dark haired, sober faced, with a pleasant, confident smile, came down the stairs, hesitated when she saw him looking up at her, and then came steadily on.

“How d’you do,” she said formally, and gave him a small nod of her head, as if she were a man and an equal.

“Who the devil are you?” J asked abruptly.

She looked a little awkward. “Will you come in here?” she said, and showed him into his own parlor. The maid was on her hands and knees lighting the fire. The woman waited until the flame had caught and then dismissed the girl with a quick gesture of her hand.

“I am Hester Pooks,” she said. “Your father invited me to stay here.”

“Why?” J demanded.

Hester hesitated. “I imagine you don’t know-” She broke off. “I am very sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.”

He gasped and swayed. “My father?”

She nodded, saying nothing.

J dropped into a chair and was silent for a long moment. “I shouldn’t be surprised… but it is a dreadful shock… I know he was a great age, but he was always…”

She took a chair opposite him without invitation, and sat quietly, folding her hands in her lap. When J turned to her she was waiting, judging her time to tell him more.

“He didn’t suffer at all,” she said. “He grew very tired, over the winter, and he went to bed to rest. He died very peacefully, just as if he fell asleep. We had brought many of his flowers into his room. He died surrounded by them.”

J shook his head, still incredulous. “I wish I had been here,” he said. “I wish to God I had been here.”

Hester paused. “God is very merciful,” she said gently. “At the moment of his death he thought that he saw you. He was waiting and waiting for you to return, and he woke as his bedroom door opened, and he thought that he saw you. He died thinking that you had come safe home. I know that he died happy, thinking that he had seen you.”

“He said my name?” J asked.

She nodded. “He said: ‘Oh! You at last!’”

J frowned. The old fear that he was not first in his father’s heart returned to him. “But did he say my name? Was it clear that he meant me?”

Hester paused for a moment and then looked into the gentle, vulnerable face of the man that she meant to marry. She lied easily. “Oh yes,” she said firmly. “He said: ‘Oh! You at last!’, and then as he lay back on the pillow he said ‘J.’”

J paused, and took it all in. Hester watched him in silence.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t know how to go on without him. The Ark, and the gardens, the royal gardens – I have always worked beside him. I have lost my employer and my master as well as my father.”

She nodded. “He left a letter for you.”

J watched her as she crossed the room and took the sealed letter from a drawer in the table.

“I think it’s about me,” she said bluntly.

J paused as he took it from her. “Who are you?” he asked again.

She took a little breath. “I am Hester Pooks. I’m all but alone in the world. Your father liked me, and my uncle told him I had a good dowry. I met him at court. My uncle is a painter, commissioned by the queen. My family is a good family, all artists and musicians, all with royal or noble patrons.” She paused and smiled. “But not much money. Your father thought I might suit you. He wanted to make sure that there was someone to bring up his grandchildren, and to keep them here. He didn’t want them living in London with your wife’s parents. He thought I would marry you.”

J’s jaw dropped open. “He has found me a wife? I’m a man of thirty years of age and he found me a wife as if I were a boy? And he chose you?”

Hester looked him squarely in the face. “I’m no beauty,” she said. “I imagine your wife was lovely. Frances is such a pretty girl, and they tell me she takes after her mother. But I can run a house, and I can run a business, I love plants and trees and a garden, and I like children, I like your children. Whether or not you want to marry me, I should like to be a friend to Frances in particular. It would suit me to marry you and I wouldn’t make great demands on you. I don’t have great expectations.”

She paused. “It would be an arrangement to suit ourselves,” she said. “And it would leave you free to garden at the royal palace of Oatlands or to go abroad again and know that everything was safe here.”

J looked from her to his letter. “This is outrageous! I have barely been home a moment and already I learn that my father is dead and that some woman, who I’ve never met before in my life, is half betrothed to me. And anyway-” He broke off. “I have other plans.”

She nodded soberly. “It would have been easier if he had lived to explain it himself,” she said. “But you are not half-betrothed, Mr. Tradescant. It is entirely up to you. I shall leave you to read your letter. Is it your wish that I wake the children and bring them down to see you?”

He was distracted. “Are they both well?”

She nodded. “Frances especially grieves for her grandfather but they are both in perfect health.”

J shook his head in bewilderment. “Bring them in to me when they wake,” he said. “No need to wake them early. I will read this letter from my father. I need time. I do feel-” He broke off. “All my life he has managed and controlled me!” he exclaimed in a sudden explosion of irritation. “And just when I think I am my own man at his death I find that he had my future life in his hands, too.”

She paused at the doorway with her hand on the brass door ring. “He did not mean to order you,” she said. “He was thinking that I might set you free, not be a burden. And he told me very clearly that you had buried your heart with your wife and that you would never love me nor any woman again.”

J felt a pang of deep guilt. “I shall never love a woman in my wife’s place,” he said carefully. “Jane could never be replaced.”

She nodded, she thought he was warning her. She did not realize that he was speaking to himself, reproaching himself for that runaway sense of freedom, for his sense of joy with the young girl in the wood so far from home and responsibilities and the normal rules of life.

“I don’t expect love,” Hester said simply, recalling him to the shadowy room. “I thought we might be able to help each other. I thought we might be… helpmeets.”