Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

But Charles was no better at keeping his secrets than keeping his word. News of the agreement soon leaked out, especially when a proposal from the English Parliament was insultingly rejected by the king who was visibly, excessively, puffed up with confidence. Soon everyone knew that the king was dealing a false hand again.

“He would make an alliance with the Scots Covenanters?” Johnnie asked his father in bewilderment. “But he refused to agree with them for all those months at Newark.”

“He has changed his mind,” John said quietly. “He wants to make a new agreement. He wants to beat Parliament and Cromwell’s army at any price. He hated the covenanting Scots and could not agree with them, but they are now the only allies he can get. He is agreeing to things he denied completely only a few months ago. He refused them when he was their prisoner but now he has been seized by the English army he is looking kindly on the Scots again.”

Johnnie scowled. “So what does he believe in?” he demanded in exasperation. “I thought that he would never give up the English church and the bishops. You told me he thought that was sacred. You told me he would never give up his rights as a king.”

“I think now he is looking to survive,” John said grimly. “And if he can get back on the throne then who can force him to keep to agreements he made when he was in prison?”

“He would play false?”

John softened at the sight of his son’s distress. “A king must be on his throne,” he said gently. “You can understand that he might think it was worth anything to get back to his place.”

“And will he do it?” Johnnie asked. “Will he come back to London? Will I see him on his throne?”

John shook his head. “They’ll never let him off the Isle of Wight again,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if I were General Cromwell.”

John was in his garden, planting out his tender rarities which had wintered in the orangery. The great tufted American daisy was putting out fresh shoots from its rosette of leaves, and the Virginian woodbine was throwing out scarlet snaky shoots with little unfurling green leaves from its dry, dead-looking trunk. John thought for a moment of Suckahanna with the scarlet honeysuckle flowers in her dark hair, and the nighttime scent of honeysuckle on their sleeping platform when he kissed her neck and crushed the flowers beneath his cheek. He patted the earth gently around the roots, saw that the climber could extend and find footholds on the strings hammered in to the rough wall and then turned his back on them to admire his tulip beds.

“There is nothing, nothing to compare with them,” he remarked to Hester as she came down the path toward him. Then he broke off abruptly at the sight of her face. “What’s wrong?”

He glanced toward the lane as if he feared a troop of horse there. Even with the king imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle no man could be certain that the nation would stay at peace. There were too many nations that might wish to meddle, there were too many armies that the queen or Prince Charles might prevail upon to muster.

“I don’t know,” Hester said, producing a letter from her apron pocket. “A letter. For you. From the Parliamentary commissioners.”

John scowled and held out his hand. He broke the seal, spread the paper, read it, and then read it again. He chuckled incredulously.

“What is it?” Hester demanded, trying to read upside down.

“I am to go to Oatlands and make good,” John said. “Who would have thought it? They want me to mend the walks in the vineyard garden and mow the bowling green, and make good.” He paused and looked up at her. “How times change and yet change not at all,” he observed. “I am gardener to Oatlands Palace still it seems, though there is no king and no court to see my work.”

“You’ll go-” she suggested, looking at him warily.

He folded the letter, very businesslike. “Of course. Why not?”

“I thought you might have some feeling that you wouldn’t garden for them, where you had gardened for the king, and for her.”

John shook his head. Unconsciously he put out a hand and tucked a stray shoot of the Virginian woodbine beneath a guiding piece of twine nailed into the wall. “I’ve been torn all my life, Hester. I’m growing quite resigned to divided loyalties.”

“Johnnie’ll take it hard,” she said. “He’s held to being one of the king’s gardeners through all this time.”

“We’re gardeners to the best gardens in the kingdom,” John said firmly. “And Oatlands has always been one of the best. I’d stay faithful to my garden before I stayed faithful to any master, you know that. Especially a master as faithless and as changeable as the king. The garden comes first, Hester. If someone will pay me to plant it and tend to it I’ll go at once and I’ll take Johnnie to help me. He has to learn. King or no king, we have to work for our living. And our living is the gardens. Our great duty is to the gardens.”

“But why would Parliament care for the gardens?” Hester mused. “With so much else to do? And they were the queen’s own gardens. Unless they’re putting them in order for her return? And there’s been some secret agreement?”

John shook his head. “Could be. Or maybe they’re just men of sense. If the king never returns and Parliament owns Oatlands and all the other royal palaces, then they will sell it at a better profit if it is set in a handsome garden and not in a wilderness. But if the king comes back to his own again and finds it overgrown, then he will only make them pay to set it right.”

“Will you be gone long?” she asked.

“A month at least,” he replied. “I have duties now, Hester. I am gardener to the Parliamentary commissioners! I am a Parliament man!”

She laughed with him. “But Johnnie may not find it so easy to change masters,” she warned.

“Johnnie will have to learn,” he ruled. “It is one thing to be a boy and love stories of Prince Rupert. It is another thing to be a man and to know that if you serve a master who changes as often as the weather then you had better not cleave too tight to him. The king is spinning like a weathercock. The rest of us must look to our own lives.”

A troop of Parliamentary horse was still quartered at Oatlands and John’s first action, after he had opened up his old house next to the silkworm house, was to find the commander and demand that the horses be banned from grazing in any of the courts or on the bowling lawns.

The commander was happy to agree and promised John the use of as many troopers as he needed to help him in the weeding and the setting of the garden to rights.

“I visited your garden ten years ago,” he said. “It was a wonderful sight. D’you still have that service tree? I remember it so well.”

“Yes,” John said. “It still grows. And we have many more rare trees that I have brought back from Virginia. I have a tulip tree with great green leaves that flowers with a blossom like a tulip as big as your head. I have a maple tree which has leaves of scarlet. I have a creeper called a passion flower since some say it shows the marks of Jesus. I have a beautiful new convolvulus, I can sell you the seeds for that, and a Virginian foxglove.”

“As soon as I am discharged and in my own home again I shall come and see what you have for sale,” the officer promised.

“Where is your home?” John asked.

“Sussex, in the west of the county,” the man replied. “I have a light, sandy soil, very fertile and easy to work. A little dry in summer perhaps, and I’m on the edge of the South Downs so I get a cold wind in winter; my Lenten lilies only come at Easter. But my summer flowers last for longer than my neighbors’.”

“You will grow almost anything then,” John said encouragingly. “Some of my new Virginia plants can tolerate very cold weather and very hot summers since that is the weather of their home. They would do well with you. I have a creeper with leaves that turn as red as a cardinal’s cloak in autumn. It would look well against any wall, red as a rose.”

“I should like to see it,” the man said. “And what will you do here?”

“Just set the place in order again,” John said. “I was not ordered to do any planting.”

“Is His Majesty to be brought here?” Johnnie asked, driven to interrupting.

The officer heard the hero worship in the boy’s voice and looked hard at him. “I think we should all pray that he never comes near any of his palaces again,” he said sternly. “His greed has taken me and all my men away from our homes and our families and our gardens for six long years. He can rot in Carisbrooke Castle forever, for all I care.”

John leaned on his son’s shoulder and the boy obediently said nothing, only the scarlet flush up to his ears showed his distress.

“But you were in his service,” the man said irritably. “I suppose you’re all royalists.”

“We’re gardeners,” John said steadily. “And now I am gardening for Parliament. Still gardening. My enemies are inclement weather and pests. I need no other.”

Unwillingly the commander laughed. “I know no worse, actually,” he said.

There was a knock on the big front door of the Ark in mid-May and Hester, putting aside her working apron, went to open it with her usual sense of apprehension. But when she saw the visitor on the doorstep her expression turned to pleasure. “Major Lambert!” she exclaimed. “Come to see our tulips?”

“Yes indeed. I couldn’t resist.” He stepped into the hall and bent over her hand.

“Is it still Major?” she asked, looking at the rich feather in his hat and the shining leather of his boots.

“Ah no!” he said with a flourish. “I am a general now, Mrs. Tradescant. And before I have done I shall sit in Parliament and bestow a baronetcy on you for your services to gardeners. Or a dukedom. Whatever you could wish.”

Hester giggled. “Come and see the tulips then,” she urged. “They are lovely this year. My husband came back last spring and he has many new species which you will want to see, some beautiful plants from Virginia. You will never resist our tulip tree.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Hester laughed. “I promise. A most beautiful tree which bears white flowers shaped exactly like a tulip. I’ve not seen them yet because we have only two saplings but we have taken cuttings and my husband swears they will thrive.”

John Lambert followed her through the house and paused on the terrace to look out over the garden. It was the first time he had seen it properly weeded and pruned and looking its best.

“This is a little piece of paradise,” he said, his eyes going over the nodding blossoms of the fruit trees and the flowerbeds and nursery beds before the house. “It was well-named when you called it the Ark. It has been like a flood of terror outside these walls and yet here it always seems to be like peace.”

Hester stood very still and absorbed the compliment like a blessing. “I have spent my whole life trying to make it so,” she said. “I am glad you can see it.”

He glanced at her as if they understood each other very well. “If we can make the country as peaceful and fertile as this garden, Mrs. Tradescant, then it will all have been worthwhile. If I can make every cottage garden a safe place like this, and every hardworking man in the country with a legal right to his cottage and his garden, then I will have done my duty as well as you have done yours.”

She looked curiously at him. “Aren’t those Leveler sentiments?” she asked. “I thought the Leveler cause was stamped out?”

He smiled but he did not disagree. “Not out of the hearts and minds. I think that any man who has seen how the poor suffer in this country, and has seen the way that poor men fought for their rights, would want to see the great wastes and parks opened up so that homeless people could build themselves houses, and hungry people could grow food. I’m a landholder myself, Mrs. Tradescant. I don’t want my garden walls pulled down. But I don’t want huge parks enclosed to feed and shelter deer while men and women outside go hungry.”

Hester nodded and led the way down the garden path toward the blaze of color that was the tulip beds. She glanced back with a half smile at John Lambert’s transfixed expression.

“They’re good, aren’t they?”

“They are superb,” he breathed. “I must, I must have some of those.”

“I’ll fetch a pen and paper for your order,” Hester said with satisfaction. “And you must come again next month and see the roses. They are going to be wonderful this year. I like our roses even better than our tulips.”

He shook his head, and something in that gesture alerted her that he was not as carefree as he had suggested. “I’m afraid I will be busy elsewhere in June,” he said.