Virgin Earth Read online

  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 parlour. 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 realise 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.’

  J looked at her, looked at her and saw her for the first time as she stood in the doorway, framed by the dark wood. He saw the simple plain face, the smooth white cap, the intelligent dark eyes and the strength of her jaw. ‘What on earth put it into his head?’ he asked.

  ‘I think I did,’ she said with a glimmer of a smile. ‘It would suit me very well. Perhaps, when you are over the surprise of it, you will think that it will suit you too.’

  He watched her close the door behind her and opened his father’s letter.

  My dear son,

  I have made a will leaving the Ark entire to you. I hope that it will bring you much joy. I hope that Baby John will succeed you, as you succeed me, and that the name of Tradescant will always mean something to people who love their gardens.

  If I am dead when you return then I leave you my blessing and my love. I am going to join your mother, and my two masters, Sir Robert and the Duke, and I am ready to go to them. Do not grieve for me, J, I have had a long life and one which many men would envy.

  The young woman called Hester Pooks has a substan
tial dowry and is a sensible woman. I have spoken to her about you and I believe she would make a good wife to you and a good mother to the children. She is not another Jane, because there never could be another Jane. But she is a straightforward, kind young woman and I think you need one such as her.

  Of course it is your decision. But if I had lived long enough to see your return I would have introduced her to you with my earnest recommendation.

  Farewell my son, my dear son,

  John Tradescant.

  J sat very still and watched the kindling twigs in the fire flicker and turn to knotted skeletal lace of dry ash. He thought of his father’s determination and his care, which showed itself in the meticulous nursery and seed bed, in pruning and weeding and in the unending twisting and training of his beloved climbing plants, and showed itself here too, in providing a wife for his adult son. He felt his irritated sense of thwarted independence melt before his affection for his father. And at the thought of the gardens being left to him in trust for another John Tradescant coming behind them both he felt the anger inside him dissolve, and he slipped to the floor and rested his head in his father’s chair and wept for him.

  Frances, coming in a little later, found her father composed and seated in the window where he could look out at the cold horse chestnut avenue and the swirls of fog in the early-morning darkness.

  ‘Father?’ she said tentatively.

  He turned and held out his arms to her and she ran into his embrace. He brought her close to him and felt the light tiny bones of her body and smelled the warm clean smell of her skin and hair. For a moment he thought vividly and poignantly of Suckahanna, who was no heavier but whose every muscle was like whipcord.

  ‘You’ve grown,’ he said. ‘I swear you are nearly up to my chest.’

  She smiled up at him. ‘I am nine,’ she said seriously. ‘And Baby John is bigger than when you left. And heavier. I can’t lift him now he’s five. Hester has to.’

  ‘Hester does, does she? D’you like Hester?’

  He thought she looked at him as if she needed help in saying something, as if there were something she could not say. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your grandfather thought she might marry me, he thought she might be a mother to you.’

  A look of relief crossed her face. ‘We need a mother,’ she said. ‘I can’t lift Baby John now he’s so big, and I don’t always know what to do when he cries. If he were to be sick, like Mama was sick, I wouldn’t know how to care for him and he might die …’ She broke off and gulped on a sob. ‘We need a mother,’ she said earnestly. ‘A cook isn’t the same.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ J said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘I thought you would bring us one home from Virginia, with other things in the cart,’ she said childishly.

  J thought for a moment of the girl, only a few years older than this one, thanked his luck that he had not been so misled as to bring her back here and burden himself with her care as well as that of his children. ‘There’s no-one in that country who could be a mother to you,’ he said shortly. ‘No-one who could be a wife to me here.’

  Frances blinked back her tears and looked up at him. ‘But we need one. A mother who knows what to do when Baby John is naughty, and teaches him his letters.’

  ‘Yes,’ J said. ‘I see we do.’

  ‘Hester says breakfast is ready,’ she said.

  ‘Is Baby John at breakfast?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Come.’

  J took her hand and led her from the room. Her hand was cool and soft, her fingers were long and her palm had lost its baby fatness. It was the hand of an adult in miniature, not the soft plumpness of a little child.

  ‘You’ve grown,’ he observed.

  She peeped up a little smile at him. ‘My uncle Alexander Norman says that I will soon be a proper young lady,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘But I tell him that I shall be the king’s gardener.’

  ‘You still want that?’ J asked. She nodded and opened the door to the kitchen.

  They were all waiting for him at their places around the dark wooden table: the gardener and the two lads, the cook and the maid and the boy who worked in the house and the stables. Hester was at the foot of the table with Baby John beside her, still half-asleep, his drowsy eyes barely showing above the table top. J drank in the sight of him: the beloved boy, the Tradescant heir.

  ‘Oh, Father!’ Baby John said, mildly surprised.

  J lifted him up, held him close, inhaled the sweet warm smell of sleepy child, hugged him tight and felt his heart turn over with tenderness for his boy, for Jane’s boy.

  They waited for him to sit before they took their own places on the benches around the table and then Hester bowed her head and said grace in the simple words approved by the church of Archbishop Laud. For a moment it struck a discord with J – who had spent his married life in the fierce independent certainties of his wife and listening to her powerful extempore prayers – but then he bowed his head and heard the rhythm and the simple comfort of the language.

  He looked up before Hester said ‘Amen’. The household was around the table in neat order, his two children were either side of Hester, their faces washed, their clothes tidy. A solid meal was laid on the table but there was nothing rich or ostentatious or wasteful. And – it was this which decided him – on the windowsill there was a bowl of indigo and white bluebells which someone had taken the trouble to uproot and transplant from the orchard for the pleasure of their bright colour and their sweet, light smell.

  No-one but J’s father, John Tradescant, had ever brought flowers into the kitchen or the house for pleasure. Flowers were part of the work of the house: reared in the orangery, blooming in the garden, shown in the rarities room, preserved in sugar or painted and sketched. But Hester had a love of flowers that reminded him of his father, and made him think, as he saw her seated between his children, and with flowers on the windowsill, that the great aching gaps in his life where his wife and his father had once been might be resolved if this woman would live here and work alongside him.

  J could not take his young children from their home to Virginia, he could not imagine that he might be able to go back there himself. His time in the forest seemed like a dream, like something which had happened to another man, a free man, a new man in the new land. In the months that followed, busy anxious months, in which John the Younger had to become John Tradescant, the only John Tradescant, he hardly thought of Suckahanna and his promise to return. It seemed like a game he had played, a fancy, not a real plan at all. Back in Lambeth, in the old world, the old life closed around him and he thought that his father was probably right – as he generally was – and that he would need Hester to run the business and the house.

  He decided that he would ask her to stay. He knew that he would never ask her to love him.

  J did not formally propose marriage to Hester until the end of the summer. For the first months he could think of nothing but clearing the debts caused by the crash of the tulip market. The Tradescants, father and son, had invested the family fortune in buying rare tulip bulbs, certain that the market was on the rise. But by the time the tulips had flowered and spawned more bulbs under their perfect soil in their porcelain pots the market had crashed. J and his father were left with nearly a thousand pounds owed to their shareholders, and bound by their sense of honour to repay. By selling the new Virginia plants at a handsome profit and by ensuring that everyone knew of his new maidenhair fern, an exquisite variety which everyone desired on sight, J doubled and re-doubled the business for the nursery garden, and started to drag the family back into profit.

  The maidenhair fern was not the only booty that visitors to the garden sought. John offered them new jasmine, the like of which no-one had ever seen before, which would climb and twist itself round a pole as rampant as a honeysuckle, smelling as sweet, but flowering in a bright primrose yellow. A new columbine, an American columbine, and best of all of the surviviving saplings: a plane tree, an
American plane tree, which John thought might grow as big as an oak in the temperate climate of England. He had no more than half a dozen of each, he would sell nothing. He took orders with cash deposits and promised to deliver seedlings as soon as they were propagated. The American maple which he brought back with such care did not thrive in the Lambeth garden though John hung over it like a new mother; and he lost also the only specimen he had of a tulip tree, and nearly came to blows with his father’s friend the famous plantsman, John Parkinson, when he tried to describe the glory of the tree growing in the American wood, which was nothing but a drying stick in the garden in Lambeth.

  ‘I tell you it is as big as an oak with great greasy green leaves and a flower as big as your head!’ John swore.

  ‘Aye,’ Parkinson retorted. ‘The fish that get away are always the biggest.’

  Alexander Norman, John’s brother-in-law and an executor of John Tradescant’s will, took over some of the Tradescant debts on easy terms as a favour to the young family. ‘For Frances’s dowry,’ he said. ‘She’s such a pretty maid.’

  J sold some fields that his father had owned in Kent and cleared most of the rest of the debts. Those still outstanding came to two hundred pounds – the very sum of Hester’s dowry. With his account books before him one day, he found he was thinking that Hester’s dowry could be his for the asking, and the Tradescant accounts could show a clear profit once more. On that unromantic thought he put down his pen and went to find her.

  He had watched her throughout the summer, when she knew she was doubly on trial: tested whether she was good enough for the Tradescant name, and how she matched up to Jane. She never showed a flicker of nervousness. He observed her dealing with the visitors to the rarities. She showed the exhibits with a quiet pride, as if she were glad to be part of a house that contained such marvels, but without boastfulness. She had learned her way around the busy room quicker than anyone could have expected, and she could move from cabinet to wall-hanging, ordering, showing, discussing, with fluid confidence. Her training at court meant that she could be on easy terms with all sorts of people. Her artistic background made her confident around objects of beauty.