Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

In the evenings they planned the work for the next day and Johnnie would ask over and over again whether the queen had chosen this plant, or that; whether the king had eaten fruit from this very tree. Despite himself, John found that he was remembering with affection the beauty of the garden and the rich frivolity of the court. Despite his own skepticism he drew a picture of a golden time, gardening in summer for a king and a queen who spent money like rain and who walked lovingly arm-in-arm along well-tended paths from one exquisite court and terrace to another.

John and his son spent a week lifting the rarest and most precious plants and potting them up and loading them into the cart. Every other day they drove the cart down to the river and transferred the pots on to a ferry to send to the Ark at Lambeth.

“Hester won’t be best pleased,” John remarked as yet another boatload of plants set off downstream. “She and Joseph will be doing nothing but unloading and watering pots this week.”

“We have to do it,” Johnnie said passionately. “We’re his gardeners. We have to save as much of his garden as we can.”

Something in the desperate note in his voice warned John. He put his hand on his son’s arm. “We’re doing this for the plants, not for the king,” he said. “Some of these are of the best quality, some of these are rare and precious. I couldn’t let them go to waste. This work is for the plants and for the Ark.”

Johnnie looked at his father. “These are the king’s plants,” he said with suppressed emotion. “We’re gardening for him now as we always have done. Once it was our duty to put the plants in and safeguard them. Now it’s our duty to save them for him. When he comes to his own again he can sit underneath his own father’s cherry tree, he can pick roses for his mother from her favorite tree. They’ve crowned him king in Scotland, haven’t they? They’ve declared him to be their king though they once called his father a prisoner and handed him over to his death. But Charles is an anointed king once more, in a kingdom which acknowledges him?”

“At such a price,” John muttered. “He agreed to every demand the Scots put to him, and betrayed men who had fought for him in the Highlands for years. Your old hero, Montrose, was captured and executed, and the king dining with the Kirk, his old enemies, looked out of the window and saw Montrose’s hand nailed to the door. He said nothing. He went on with his dinner.”

“He does what he has to do,” Johnnie said staunchly.

Once they had rescued the pick of the specimens, and rummaged in the cold soil of the courts for forgotten bulbs, they declared a general sale of plants in Weybridge. The town crier called out the news and it spread from one manor garden to another, from one cottage to another, until everyone in Surrey wanted a flower from the king’s garden.

On Saturday John set up a stall on the very front door of the palace and let people come with their own spades to choose, and then dig up their choice. He and Johnnie inspected the booty and set an instant knockdown price on the trees which marched past them, on the little pots of pansies and herbs, on the trailing creepers, torn from the walls, on the endless scarlet-budding roses.

It was a melancholy business to see the garden walking away down the drive, as if even the plants had gone into exile, and John was sorry that he had exposed his son to the sight. He had thought that the work would have given them a project to complete together, that Johnnie would see that the garden was finished, that the palace was destroyed, that the king and kingship were gone forever. But instead there was a powerful sense of loss invoked by the sale. More than one man or woman stopped at John’s table, gestured to their purchase and asked reverently: “He did love these, didn’t he? Can you remember if he ever picked a flower from it? Did he touch it?”

John realized that only half of the people were buying plants cheaply; the other half were buying relics, honoring the memory of a dead king, planting a little bit of his martyrdom in their own gardens.

All the cold gray day Johnnie priced, took money, answered questions with endless easy patience. But John, watching him, saw how his head drooped as the light faded from the sky.

“You’re tired,” he said gruffly at five o’clock as the winter twilight closed around them. “And chilled too. I know I am. Let’s go down to the ale house and get ourselves a good dinner. I’d like to leave the money in the goldsmith’s keeping anyway. I don’t want to keep it here.”

Johnnie’s face was pale. “Yes.”

“Are you sick?” John asked.

Johnnie shook his head. “Weary,” he said. “I wasn’t born to be a huckster. I hate it. How they do go on, don’t they? And the smaller the plant the more ado they make about the price.”

John laughed eagerly. “Yes. It’s been a long business. But tomorrow we’ll go.”

“And then they’ll pull it down and it will be as if it was never here,” Johnnie said dreamily.

John tied the string of the purse and slipped it into his deep pocket. “Come on,” he said cheerfully. “Before we are completely benighted.”

He marched briskly down the avenue with Johnnie keeping step beside him. They were warm by the time they saw the yellow light of the ale house and smelled the mixture of woodsmoke and frying bacon.

“You go on,” John said. “I’ll take this purse and put it in the goldsmith’s vault.”

Johnnie nodded and went ahead of his father. John stood back and watched his son walk away. “Johnnie!” he suddenly called.

The young man hesitated and turned, his face a pale blur in the twilight.

“It’s being rid of the old to prepare for the new,” John said. “A baptism. Not a funeral, you know.”

It was a melancholy business the next morning, for all of John’s forced brightness. They loaded the cart with leftover tools and the pots which they had filled with the rescued plants during their stay, and then they went round the garden and orchard and orangery in one final tour to see what had been overlooked.

The rose garden was a desert of pitted holes, like the face of a beloved woman pocked with scars. The very shape of the garden had gone, the trees which had given it a structure had been uprooted, the trellised arbors which had been pulled down as people cut off the climbing roses were left as smashed wood in the mud. The lavender borders were ragged, some plants missing, some trodden down. A few snowdrops which had struggled up at the base of the wall in the queen’s court had been crushed by someone in their haste to cut down a creeper. A pot had been dropped and smashed and the shards left where they lay, cluttering up the path. The whole palace, once so rosy in pink brick and so immaculately gardened, with smooth lawns and sculpted arbors, was now a tangle of overgrown hedging and churned mud. Even the bowling green, which had been John’s great pride, was pocked with weeds and the richer green of winter moss shone in moist patches among the paler green of weak winter grass.

It had started to rain, an icy, penetrating drizzle, and the clouds sat heavily on the roof of the palace. The glass had been stolen long ago from the windows, or smashed by the successive troops quartered in the palace, and the smell of damp plaster and decay seeped into the courts from the derelict building.

“Let’s go,” John said. “Everything is finished here.”

Johnnie nodded in silence and followed his father to the cart. He climbed onto the box and took the reins of the horse which should have been his war horse, to drive away from the palace which should have been the king’s. The avenue was long gone, felled for timber. They drove between pale stumps where grand trees had once shaded the road.

“That was a miserable task,” John said heartily, hoping that Johnnie would agree and that they might share the sadness and then put it behind them.

“It was burying him and his hopes all over again,” Johnnie said somberly; and then said nothing more.

Johnnie did not forget the melon bed at Wimbledon. Of the consignment he had sent north to Charles Stuart he had kept one fruit back and from it he had another batch of seeds which he insisted on planting in the Lambeth seed bed, and, when they were grown, insisted on taking to Wimbledon.

“You could grow them here now,” Hester remarked to him reasonably when she saw him loading the earthenware pots into a carrying basket. “There’s no point in taking them all that way.”

“Of course I must plant them at Wimbledon,” he said passionately. “It was his request.”

“The garden must be overgrown.”

“It’s running to seed,” he said, “and the glass has been stolen from the windows of the house. But you can see it was a lovely place, you can tell it was one of our gardens. Every now and then I come across some special flower struggling through the weeds. Father’s Virginian foxgloves, and grandfather’s chestnuts in a little avenue in one of the courts.”

“We can’t do anything about it,” she said. “We have to leave the old places behind us. Your father gardened for years at Hatfield and after he left he never went back and it was the same at New Hall. Oatlands will be nothing more than a name in a year or two, in a few years no one will even remember where it was.”

“I know that,” he said. “I just plant the melons. I don’t deny that everything is changed for the moment.”

“You don’t change,” she observed.

For a moment his melancholy lifted. He shot her a small, roguish smile as if he hardly dared to trust her with the hope that he kept hidden. “Well, everything might change back again one day, mightn’t it? And then I will be glad that I kept faith.”

Johnnie had good cause to suggest that everything could change once again. The defeat at Dunbar was not the last battle fought in Scotland, the Scots army did not flee in a rout but in a retreat; and the shaky alliance between the Kirk and the dissolute prince did not completely collapse. Instead, the prince’s stature grew and the Scots warmed to him. All through the year, reports of a continuing campaign filtered back to London telling of Cromwell, ill-supported and in a mostly hostile country, trying to gain a decisive victory. Then in midsummer the Scots army, with Charles at their head, did the unthinkable. They broke out of Scotland and crossed the border.

“Can we hide it from him?” Hester demanded urgently of John when he told her the news in the kitchen.

He shook his head. “He’s bound to hear of it sooner or later and I’d not have him think me guilty of double dealing.”

“You swore they’d not come south,” she accused. “You said Cromwell would defeat them on Scottish soil.”

John’s face was taut with worry. “It was a gamble,” he said. “And it served us well. They have to go beyond York, remember. That was the agreement.”

“Is Lambert still there?” she asked, as if that were a talisman against the king’s advance.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” John snapped and turned away from her and marched out into the garden, looking for his son.

He found him dead-heading the roses and tossing the petals into a deep carrying basket for sale in the London markets to the perfumiers or the confectioners. Frances, staying at the Ark to avoid the plague months in town, was working at the opposite end of the bed. John heard their casual chatter and paused for a moment to hold the moment in his mind: his two children doing their work, the family’s work, in such easy harmony, in the sunshine, on their own land, in a country so near to peace.

He squared his shoulders and stepped forward. “Johnnie-”

The young man looked up. “Father?”

“There’s news. I heard it in London. Charles Stuart is leading a troop over the border. Lambert is chasing after him, but it looks as if he has broken out of Scotland and is determined to invade.”

“Is he south of York?” Johnnie demanded. For a moment John thought that the young man was resonating, like a harp string tuned too tight. “Is he south of York? Can I go to him?”

“He’s headed south,” John said cautiously. “As soon as we hear from Alexander we’ll know for sure.”

Alexander came himself in August.

“I knew you would want to know as soon as I did,” he said. The family were so anxious for news that they greeted him in the hall, as soon as he came through the door, Johnnie at the forefront. “They were marching on London but they have turned to the west. They’re probably hoping to raise recruits from Wales before they face Lambert.”

“And where is Lambert?”

“On a forced march behind them,” Alexander replied. “There is no other general in the world who could move his men at the speed he does. He’ll catch the Scots army, without a doubt. And he’ll be the one that chooses the ground.”