Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

John shook his head. “She needs a dwarf apple tree,” he said. “Perhaps if one could graft an apple sapling onto a shrub root it might grow small…”

Hester stepped forward and knocked on the door. At once Frances opened it. “Father!” she said, and slipped down the step, threw her arms around him and laid her head against his shoulder.

John almost recoiled from her touch. In the three years he had been away she had grown from a girl to a woman of nearly eighteen years, and now, with her slight body pressed against him, he could feel the hard swelling of her baby.

He stepped back to see her and his face softened. “You’re so like your mother,” he exclaimed. “What a beauty you’ve become, Frances.”

“She’s the very picture of my Jane.” Mrs. Hurte emerged from the house and shook John and then Hester by the hand. She enveloped Johnnie in a breathtaking embrace but never stopped talking. “The very picture of her. Every time I see her I think she has come back to us again.”

“Come inside,” Frances urged. “You must be frozen. Did you shoot the bridge?”

“Father wouldn’t let Mother come.”

Frances shot a brief approving look at her father. “Quite right. Why should Mother risk drowning because you like it?”

“She likes it!” Johnnie protested.

“I swear I never said so,” Hester remarked.

Mrs. Hurte surged outward rather than into the house, took John by the arm and drew him aside. Hester silently admired the tactical skill of her stepdaughter. This was generalship as gifted as Oliver Cromwell’s with his New Model Army. Mrs. Hurte would change John’s mind in favor of the match in two sentences of complaints. Both Hester and Frances strained their ears to hear her do it.

“You’re home too late,” Mrs. Hurte said reproachfully to John. “This is a bad business, and you too late to prevent it.”

“I don’t see that it is bad,” John remarked.

“A man of fifty-six and a girl of seventeen?” Mrs. Hurte demanded. “What life can they have together?”

“A good one.” John gestured to the pretty house and the tracery of carefully pruned rose branches. “A boy of her own age could not hope to give her so much.”

“She should have been kept at her home.”

“In these times?” John asked. “Where safer than beside the Tower?”

“And now expecting a baby?”

“The older the bridegroom, the sooner the better,” John rejoined swiftly. “Why should you be so against it, Mother? It was a marriage for love. Your own daughter Jane had nothing less.”

She bit her lip at that. “Jane brought a good dowry and you two were well matched,” she said.

“I will see that Frances is properly dowered when peace is restored and I can sell the Virginia plants and restore the rarities to their proper place,” John said firmly. “I am trading in a small way with the West Indies and I expect to see a profit on that very soon. And Frances is well-matched. Alexander is a good and faithful friend to this family and she loves him. Why should she not marry the man of her choice in these times when men and women are making their own choices every day? When this whole war has been fought for men and women to be free?”

Mrs. Hurte smoothed her somber gown. “I don’t know what Mr. Hurte would have said.”

John smiled. “He would have liked the house, and the business. Cooper for the ordinance in the middle of a war? Don’t tell me that he wouldn’t have loved that! Alexander is earning twelve pounds a year and that’s before he draws his allowances! It’s a fine match for the daughter of a man who has little to sell and most of his stock in hiding.”

Hester and Frances exchanged a hidden smile, turned and went into the house.

“That was clever,” Hester said approvingly to her stepdaughter.

Frances gave her a most unladylike wink. “I know,” she said smugly.

When the soil warmed in April and the daffodils came out in the orchard and the grass started growing and the boughs of the Tradescant trees were filled with birds singing, courting and nest building, John strode around the brick chip paths in his new Papist boots and learned to love his garden again. He made a special corner for his Virginian plants and watched as the dried roots put up tiny green shoots and the unpromising dry seeds sprouted in their pots and could be transplanted.

“Will they do well here?” Johnnie asked. “Is it not too cold for them?”

John leaned on his spade and shook his head. “Virginia is a place of far greater extremes than here,” he said. “Colder by far in winter, hotter in summer, and damp as a poultice for month after month in summer. I should think they will thrive here.”

“And what will sell the best, d’you think?” Johnnie asked eagerly. “And what is the finest?”

“This.” John leaned forward and touched the opening leaves of a tiny plant. “This little aster.”

“Such a small thing?”

“It’s going to be a great joy for gardeners, this one.”

“Why?” Johnnie asked. “What’s it like?”

“It stands tall, almost up to your waist, and white like a daisy against thick, dark leaves, a woody stem, and it grows in profusion. It’s a kind of shrubby starwort, like the aster from Holland. In Virginia I have seen a whole forest glade filled with them, like the whiteness of snow. And I once saw a woman plait the flowers into her black hair and I thought then it was the most beautiful little flower I had ever seen, like a brooch, like a jewel. I might name it for us, it’s just the sort of little beauty that your grandfather would have liked, and it will grow for anyone. He liked that in a plant. He always said that it was the hardy plants that gave the greatest joy.”

“And trees?” Johnnie prompted.

“If it grows,” John cautioned him. “This may be our finest tree from Virginia. It’s a maple tree, a Virginian maple. You can tap it for sugar, you put a cut in the trunk in springtime, when the sap starts rising, and the sap oozes a juice. You collect it and boil it down and it makes a coarse sugar. It’s a great delight, to set a little fire in the woods and boil down the syrup, all the children lick up the spills and run around with sticky faces and…” He broke off, he couldn’t bear to tell his boy about the other – Suckahanna’s boy. “The leaves turn the deepest, finest scarlet in the autumn,” he concluded.

“And this is a trumpet vine. When I had my house I planted one at the side of my door. It grows as fast as wild honeysuckle, I should think it is up to my chimney pot by now. If it hasn’t pulled the whole house down. This I had on the other side of my doorway – the Virginian woodbine tree, like a honeysuckle. But best of all will be the tulip tree.” John touched the saplings, which were planted against the shelter of the wall and were putting out glossy dark leaves at the tips of their branches. “Please God we can grow it here, it would be a fine thing to see in an English garden.”

“Finer than our horse chestnut?” Johnnie asked, naming the tree that would always be the Tradescant benchmark of beauty.

“It is the only tree I have ever seen to match your grandfather’s horse chestnut. Truly, Johnnie, it is a most wonderful tree. If I can grow the tulip tree and sell it to the gardeners of England, as he grew the horse chestnut, then we will have done wonderful work, he and me.”

“And what will there be left for me to do?” Johnnie asked. “Since he went east to Russia and south to the Mediterranean and you have been west to America. What will there be left for me?”

“Oh,” John said longingly. “So much still to see, Johnnie. You can’t imagine what a great country it is and how far the rivers run inland and how distant the mountains are and how wide the grass meadows stretch. And beyond the mountains they told me there are plains and meadows and forests and more mountains, and inland lakes of sweet water that are as big as the sea, so vast that they have storms which whip up the water into waves that crash on the shore. There will be so much for you to see when you are a man grown and ready to travel.”

“And will you take me, if you go again?” Johnnie asked.

Tradescant hesitated only for a moment, thinking of Attone and Suckahanna and that other, alien life. Then he looked at the bright face of his son and thought how proud he would be to show him to Attone and to say to him: “And this is my son.” Johnnie was not a child of the Powhatan: a dark-eyed, brown-skinned boy of intense self-discipline and skill. But he was a child of equal beauty: an English boy, blond-headed, round-faced, and with a smile like sunlight.

“Yes,” he said simply. “If I go again, I will take you too. It will be our adventure next time.”

“We can go when the king has come to his own again,” Johnnie said firmly.

“Mmm.” John was noncommittal.

“You are for the king still?” Johnnie pressed him. “I know you were away for most of the fighting but you were there when he raised his standard, and you are the king’s man, aren’t you, Father?”

John looked into the determined face of his son and dropped a hand on his shoulder. “It’s hard for me to say,” he said. “I am the king’s man in the sense that my father was his gardener and I gardened for him too. I don’t forget that I have been in his service, or in the service of the court, for most of my life. But I never thought that he was perfect – not like some of the others, not like he would have had us think. I saw him make too many mistakes, I heard too much nonsense for that sort of faith. I thought he was a foolish man, sometimes wickedly foolish. So I don’t think him one step below God.”

“But still the king,” Johnnie persisted.

John nodded, resigned. “Still the king.”

“If he sent for you, would you go?”

“If he sent for me, I would have to go. I would be bound by honor and duty to go if he sent for me by name.”

“Would you take me?”

John hesitated for a moment. “It’s a burden I’d rather not lay on you, my son. If he does not have command of the gardens of the royal palaces then there is no need for you to call him master.”

Johnnie’s conviction blazed out of his brown eyes. “But I long to call him master,” he said. “If I had been there when he raised his standard I would never have left his side. I’m so afraid it will be all over before I can go into his service, and I’ll have missed it all.”

John gave a gruff bark of laughter. “Aye,” he said. “I can see you would fear missing it all.”

That night John put his head around the door of Hester’s bedroom to see his wife, kneeling at the foot of her bed. He waited in silence till she rose to her feet and noticed him, standing in the doorway.

“I came to ask if I might sleep here.”

She got into bed and held up the covers to him, grave-faced. “Of course,” she said. “I am your wife.”

John pulled the nightcap off his head and came into the room.

“I don’t want you to have me in your bed as part of your duty,” he said carefully.

“No.”

“I would want there to be warmth and tenderness between us.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to forgive me for going away and leaving you alone and unprotected, and for being with another woman.”

She hesitated. “Did you leave her of your own free will?”

John could not find a simple answer. “She saved my life,” he said. “I was starving in the forest and she took me to the Powhatan and they accepted me for her sake.”

Hester nodded. “Did you leave her of your own free will? Did you choose to leave her and come home to me?”

“Yes,” John said. “Yes.” The baldness of the lie dropped like a stone into the pool of candlelight by the bed.

John got into bed beside Hester and took her hand. It was white-skinned after Suckahanna’s bronze, calloused by the work she had done for him in his house and in his garden. The backs of her hands were scratched, she had been tying back the climbing roses. John took her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers one by one.

With a sense of relief he felt desire slowly rising up. At least he would be able to do the physical act, even if his heart were not wholly present. He turned the palm of her hand over and planted a kiss in the middle.

Hester put her hand on his shoulder and stroked the short hair at the nape of his neck.

“Do you love her still?”

He stole a quick glance at Hester’s face. She was intent, serious. She did not look enraged as she had every right to be. He risked telling her the truth. “Not as I love you; but it is true. I do love her.”

“You have never loved me,” she said steadily. “You married me as an act of convenience and sometimes I think you have felt gratitude or affection toward me. But it was not a marriage for love and I never pretended that it was.”