Virgin Earth Read online

  She was good with the visitors. She asked them for their money at the door without embarrassment, and then showed them into the room. She did not force herself on them as a guide; she always waited until they explained if they had a special interest. If they wanted to draw or paint an exhibit she was quick to provide a table close to the grand Venetian windows in the best light, and then she had the tact to leave them alone. If they were merely the very many curious visitors who wanted to spend the morning at the museum and afterwards boast to their friends that they had seen everything there was to see in London – the lions at the Tower, the king’s own rooms at Whitehall, the exhibits at Tradescant’s Ark – she made a point of showing them the extraordinary things, the mermaid, the flightless bird, the whale’s mouth, the unicorn’s skeleton, which they would describe all the way home – and everyone who heard them talk became a potential customer.

  She guided them smoothly to the gardens when they had finished in the rarities room, and took care that she knew the names of the plants. She always started at the avenue of chestnut trees, and there she always said the same thing:

  ‘And these trees, every single one of them, come from cuttings and nuts taken from Mr Tradescant’s first ever six trees. He had them first in 1607, thirty-one years ago, and he lived long enough to see them flourish in this beautiful avenue.’ The visitors would stand back and look at the slim, strong trees, now green and rich with the summer growth of their spread palmate leaves.

  ‘They are beautiful in leaf with those deep arching branches, but the flowers are as beautiful as a bouquet of apple blossom. I saw them forced to flower in early spring and they scented the room like a light daffodil scent, a delicious scent as sweet as lilies.’

  ‘Who forced the chestnuts for you? My father?’ J asked her when some visitors had spent a small fortune on seedlings and departed, their wagon loaded with little pots.

  She turned to him, slipping the coins into the pockets of her apron. ‘I had the gardener bring them into flower for your father as he lay sick,’ she said simply.

  ‘He saw them in bloom?’

  She nodded. ‘He said he was lying in a flowery mead. It was something we once talked about. He lay among a rich bed of scents and colours, tulips all around him, and over his bed were great boughs of flowering horse chestnut. It was a wonderful sight. He liked it.’

  J thought for a moment of the other deaths in the house: his mother’s in the room ablaze with daffodils, and the boat laden with Rosamund roses going slowly downriver to the City for Jane’s funeral. ‘Did he ask you to do it?’

  Hester shook her head.

  ‘I am glad you thought of it,’ he said. ‘I am glad there was someone here to do that for him.’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘About his plan that we should marry …’

  She flushed a little but the face she turned towards him was serene. ‘Have you come to a decision?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m glad. I cannot in all conscience stay here much longer. Your mother-in-law Mrs Hurte is bound to wonder what I am doing here, and the servants will talk.’

  ‘I have thought about it,’ he said, sounding as detached as she. ‘And I have thought that we might suit very well.’

  She stole a quick look at his face. ‘You want to marry me?’

  ‘If you desire it,’ J said coldly. ‘As my father wrote to me in his letter, I have two children and work to do. I must have someone reliable at my home. I have observed you these last months and you are clearly fond of the children and you do the work well. I cannot think of a better wife for me, especially since I have no preference in women.’

  She bowed her head. For a moment she had an odd sentimental thought that by accepting Tradescant’s loveless proposal she was cutting herself off from all the other possibilities which might have unfurled before her. Surely there would have been men, or even just one man, who might have loved her for herself, and not because she was good with his children and reliable with his business? Surely there might have been just one man who might have proposed and waited for her answer with his heart pounding? Surely there might have been just one man who might have put her hand to his lips so that she felt not a polite kiss but the sudden warm intake of breath which reveals desire?

  She gave a small unnoticed shrug. No such man had yet appeared and she was nearing thirty. The agreement with John Tradescant was the best she had ever been offered in a country where success was measured in terms of intimacy with the court. The king’s gardener and a favourite of the queen was a good catch, even for a spinster with a dowry of two hundred pounds.

  ‘I have no preference in men,’ she said, as coolly as he. ‘I will marry you, John.’

  He hesitated. ‘No-one ever calls me John,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been J. It was my father who was John.’

  Hester nodded. ‘I know that. But your father is dead now, and you are the head of the household and a son no longer. I shall call you John. You are the head of the household, you are John Tradescant.’

  ‘I suppose I am …’

  ‘Sometimes it is hard when your father or mother dies,’ she said. ‘It’s not just their death which causes you grief, but the fact that you are no longer someone’s little child. It’s the final stage of growing up, of becoming a man or a woman. My mother used to call me a pet-name, and I have never heard that name since she died. I never will hear it again. I am a grown woman now and no-one calls me anything but Hester Pooks.’

  ‘You are saying that I must take my manhood.’

  ‘You are the head of the household now. And I will be your wife.’

  ‘We will have the banns called at once then,’ he said. ‘At St Mary’s.’

  She shook her head at the thought of him walking to his wedding past the headstone of his only beloved wife. ‘I am a resident of St Bride’s in the City,’ she said. ‘I will go home and get the banns called there. Shall we marry at once?’

  He looked indifferent. ‘It would be more convenient for me,’ he said politely. ‘But you perhaps have clothes to order? Or things you want to do?’

  ‘A few things. We can be married in October.’

  He nodded as if it were the completion date of some routine gardening work. ‘In October then.’

  October 1638

  John wondered if he should feel himself faithless to his promise to Suckahanna, but he did not. He could not remember her well enough, only foolish details like the pride of her smile or the cool clasp of her hand when he had pledged himself to her. He dreamed one night that he was in the woods with her and she was setting a fish trap. When he woke he wondered at the power of the image of her bending over the little stream and setting her trap of woven withy. But then Baby John marched determinedly into the room and the dream was gone.

  He wondered occasionally what was happening to her, whether she and her mother were safe in the woods as they had planned to be. But Virginia was so far away, a two-months’ voyage, and such a leap of the imagination that he could not keep her in his mind. Surrounded by the business worries and demands of his home J could not retain the picture of Suckahanna. Every day she seemed more exotic, more like a traveller’s tale. She was a mermaid, a barnacle goose that swam underwater and then flew from the barnacle shells, a being with its head beneath its shoulders, a flying carpet. One night when he was drunk he tried to tell a fellow gardener that he had collected his Virginia plants with an Indian maid who was covered in blue tattoos and wore nothing but a buckskin pinny; and the man roared with laughter and paid for another round of ales to praise John’s bawdy invention.

  Every day she receded further from him. Whether he tried to speak of her or kept silent, whether he dreamed of her or let her image go, every day she seemed less likely, every day she floated down the river of his memory in her little canoe, and never looked back at him.

  On the first of October Hester went to stay in her City lodgings to prepare for her wedding: buying a few pieces of lace to stitch on her petticoats and he
r shift, packing her bags, warning her landlady that she would need the little room no longer for she was going to be married to the queen’s gardener – Mr John Tradescant.

  Her uncle John de Critz gave her away and his family and the de Neve relations made an impressive show in the little church. It was a quiet ceremony. John did not want to make a fuss and the de Critz family were refined, artistic people with no desire to throw rice or ears of wheat, or shout and riot around the bedroom door.

  The bridal couple went soberly home to Lambeth. Before she left Hester had given orders that the great bedroom which had once been John and Elizabeth’s should be hung with new curtains, swept out and cleaned, and fully aired. She felt that she would rather sleep in the bed where John Tradescant had died than share the bed that had belonged to John and Jane. Frances was moved into her father and mother’s old room and Baby John had his nursery room to himself.

  John had made no comment about the arrangements except to say that it should all be done as she wished. He did not show any grief at moving from his first wife’s bedroom, nor did he object to the cost of replacing the curtains and wall hangings throughout.

  ‘They are ten years old.’ Hester justified the expense.

  ‘It doesn’t seem so long,’ he said simply.

  The children were dancing on the garden wall, waiting for them to come down the road from Lambeth.

  ‘Are you married?’ Frances demanded. ‘Where’s your new dress?’

  ‘I just wore this one.’

  ‘Am I to call you Mother?’ Frances asked.

  Hester glanced at John. He had bent to scoop Baby John from the wall and was carrying him into the house. He took care not to reply.

  ‘You can call me Hester, as you always have done. I am not your mother who is in heaven, but I shall do my best to love you and care for you as well as she would have done.’

  Frances nodded carelessly, as if she were not much concerned, and scrambled down from the wall and led the way into the house. Hester nodded, she was not disappointed in Frances’s lack of warmth. This was not a child who could easily ask for comfort; but no child needed love more than she did.

  The new family went into the parlour and Hester seated herself in the chair on one side of the fire opposite John. Baby John sat on the rug before the fire and Frances hesitated, unsure where she should sit.

  Without looking at Hester she sank to her knees before the warmth of the fire and then slowly leaned backwards against the arm of Hester’s chair. Hester dropped her hand gently on the nape of her stepdaughter’s neck and felt the tight, thin muscles of her neck relax at the touch. Frances let her head lean back against her stepmother’s touch, trusted her caress.

  ‘We shall be happy,’ Hester promised in an undertone to her brave little stepdaughter. ‘All will be well, Frances.’

  At bedtime the household gathered for evening prayers and John read from the new book of common prayer, enjoying the rhythm of the language and the sense of security which came from using the same words at the same time of day, every day. The household, which had prayed aloud, speaking freely from their hearts under Jane, now bowed their heads and listened, and when the prayers were over they went about their work of bolting the doors for the night, damping down the fires, and snuffing the candles.

  Hester and John went up the stairs together to the big bedroom for the first time. The housemaid was waiting in the room.

  ‘Cook thought you might want helping off with your gown, Miss Hester – Mrs Tradescant, I should say!’

  Hester shook her head. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘And Cook sent up this tray for the two of you,’ the maid persevered. There had evidently been a strong sense in the kitchen that more should have been done to mark the occasion. ‘She brewed a wedding ale for you,’ the maid said. ‘And there’s some cake and dainty blackberry pudding.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Hester said. ‘And thank Cook too.’

  John nodded and the maid left the room.

  The couple looked at each other, their embarrassment dissolved by the maid’s intervention.

  ‘Clearly they think we should be carousing and singing,’ John said.

  ‘Perhaps they think they should be carousing,’ Hester observed astutely. ‘I imagine that not all the wedding ale is in these two tankards.’

  ‘Shall you have a drink?’ John asked.

  ‘When I’m ready for bed,’ she said, keeping her tone as light and inconsequential as his. She moved towards the bed and climbed up into it. She did not draw the bed curtains against him, but managed, in their shadows, to undress from her gown and to get into her night shift without embarrassment. She emerged with her hair still braided to put her fine gown in the press at the foot of the bed.

  John was seated in his chair before the fire, drinking his wedding ale. ‘It’s good,’ he recommended. ‘And I’ve had a little cake too.’

  She took up the tankard and sat opposite him, curling up her feet under her night shift. She sipped at the ale. It was strong and sweet. At once a heady sense of relaxation spread through her. ‘This is good,’ she said.

  John laughed. ‘I think it probably serves its purpose,’ he said. ‘I was more nervous than for my first day at school and now I am feeling like a cock o’ the walk.’

  Hester flushed at that single accidental bawdiness. ‘Oh.’

  John buried his face in his tankard, as embarrassed as his new wife. ‘Go to bed,’ he said shortly. ‘I shall join you in a minute.’

  She put her thin white feet down on the bare floorboards and went with her quick boyish stride to the bed. John did not turn around as she climbed in. He waited until she had settled and then got up and blew out his candle. He got undressed in the half-darkness and then pulled on his nightgown.

  She was lying on the pillow, lit only by a single candle and by the flickering light from the fire. She had unbraided her hair and it spread dark and sweet-smelling on the pillow. A sudden anguish of longing for his lost wife Jane, and the serious passionate desire that they had shared, swept over John. He had promised himself he would not think of her, he had thought it would be fatal to this night if he thought of her, but when he saw Hester in his bed, he did not feel like a bridegroom, but like an unwilling adulterer.

  It was a business contract, and it must be fulfilled. John turned his mind to the outrageously half-naked painted women of the old king’s court. He had seen them at New Hall when he was little more than a boy and remembered them still with an erotic mixture of disapproval and desire. He held the thought of them in his mind and moved towards Hester.

  She had never been touched by a man who was in love with her, or she would have known at once that John was offering her the false coin of his body while his mind was elsewhere. But she too knew that the contract of marriage was not completed until consummation. She lay still and helpful beneath him while he pierced her and then brutally moved in the wound. She did not complain, she did not comment. She lay in silence while the pain went on and then suddenly stopped as he sighed and then moved away from her.

  She rose up, biting her lip against the hurt, and wrapped a cloth tightly around her groin. There was only a little blood, she thought; it probably felt worse than it was. She thought that she would have taken the whole thing easier if she had been younger, fresher, warmer. It had been a cold-hearted assault and a cold-hearted acceptance. She shivered in the darkness and got back into bed beside her husband.

  John had turned to lie on his side with his back to her as if he would shut out the sight of her and shut out the thought of her. Hester crept back under the covers, careful not to touch him, not to breach the space between them, and set her teeth against the pain, and against the bitterness of disappointment. She did not cry, she lay very still and dry-eyed and waited for the morning when her married life would begin.

  ‘I shall go to Oatlands this week,’ John remarked the very next morning at breakfast. Hester, seated beside Baby John, looked up in surprise. ‘This week?’
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  He met her gaze with bland incomprehension. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Why not?’

  A dozen reasons why a newly wed husband should not leave his home in the first week of his marriage came to her. She folded her lips tightly on them. ‘People may think it looks odd,’ was all that she said.

  ‘They can think what they like,’ John retorted bluntly. ‘We married so that I should be free to do my work and that is what I am doing.’

  Hester glanced at Frances, seated at her left, opposite Baby John. Frances’s white-capped head was bowed over her bowl, she did not look up at her father, she affected to be deaf.

  ‘There is the planting of the spring bulbs to finish,’ he said. ‘And pruning, and planning for winter. I have to make sure the silkworm house is sound against the weather. I shall be a month or so away. If you are in any need you can send for me.’

  Hester bowed her head. John rose from his place and went to the door. ‘I shall be in the orchard,’ he said. ‘Please pack my clothes for me to go to Oatlands and tell the boy I shall want a horse this afternoon. I shall ride down to the docks and see if anything has come in for the king’s collection.’

  Hester nodded and she and the two children sat in silence until the door closed behind John.

  Frances looked up, her lower lip turned down. ‘I thought he would stay home all the time now you are married.’

  ‘Never mind!’ Hester said with assumed cheerfulness. ‘We’ll have lots to do. There’s a bonfire to build for Guy Fawkes’s day, and then Christmas to prepare for.’

  ‘But I thought he would stay home,’ Frances persisted. ‘He will come home for Christmas, won’t he?’

  ‘Of course,’ Hester said easily. ‘Of course he will. But he has to go and work for the queen in her lovely gardens. He’s a royal gardener! He can’t stay home all the time.’