PHILIPPA GREGORY
Virgin Earth

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1999

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

Copyright © Philippa Gregory Ltd 1993

Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007228485

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007383351

Version: 2018-03-06

Dedication

For Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Winter 1638, At Sea

Spring 1638, Virginia

Summer 1638, London

October 1638

Winter 1639

1640

Spring 1641

Summer 1641

Summer 1641

Autumn 1641

Spring 1642

April 1642

July 1642

August 1642

October 1642

Winter 1642–3, Virginia

April 1643

May 1643

Spring 1643, England

Summer 1643, Virginia

Summer 1643, England

Winter 1643, Virginia

Spring 1644, Virginia

Spring 1644, England

April 1644, Virginia

Summer 1644, England

October 1644, England

Winter 1644, Virginia

January 1645, England

April 1645, England

Summer 1645, Virginia

Autumn 1645, England

Autumn 1645, Virginia

Winter 1645, England

Winter 1646, Barbados

Spring 1646, London

Spring 1646

Summer 1646

Autumn 1646

Spring 1647

Summer 1647

Autumn 1647

Spring 1648

April 1648, Oatlands Palace

Summer 1648

July 1648

Autumn 1648

January 1649

Saturday 20 January 1649

Monday 22 January 1649

Tuesday 23 January 1649

Wednesday 24 January 1649

Thursday 25 January 1649

Friday 26 January 1649

Saturday 27 January 1649

Sunday 28 January 1649

Tuesday 30 January 1649

Spring 1649

Summer 1649

Summer 1650

Autumn 1650

Spring 1651

Summer 1651

Autumn 1651

Winter 1651

Autumn 1652

Spring 1653

Winter 1654

Spring 1654

1655

March 1656

April 1656

Summer 1657

Summer 1657

Autumn 1658

Spring 1659

Summer 1659

Autumn 1659

Spring 1660

Summer 1660

Autumn 1660

Winter 1660

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Winter 1638, At Sea

He woke to the sound of the moving ship, the creaking of the timbers and the aching sigh of the full sails spread, the sudden abrupt rattle of a pulley as a sail was reefed in, the drumming of booted feet on the deck just above his face, the holler of an order, and the continual attack of the sea – the bang of the waves against the prow and the groan of the tiny ship as she climbed up one wave and then wallowed and turned to confront another.

He had slept and woken to this ceaseless din for six long weeks and now he found it familiar and soothing. It meant that the little ship was soldiering on through the terrifying expanse of wind and water, still headed westwards, faithful to the hope that westwards would be the new land. Sometimes J imagined their progress as a seagull might see it looking down, the vast waste of sea and the fragile ship with its lamps burning at dusk, headed trustfully towards where they had last seen the sun.

He had set sail in deep grief, in flight from grief. Even now he dreamed of his wife with bright joyful immediacy, dreamed that she came to him on board the ship and laughingly complained that there was no need for him to set sail, no need for him to run off to Virginia alone, for see! here she was on board herself, and it had all been a game – the plague, her long days of dying, the terrible white-faced grief of their daughter – all a May game, and here she was well and strong, and when would they go home again? Then the noises of the ship were a terrible interruption and J would pull his damp blanket over his face, and try to cling to the dream of Jane and the certainty that she was alive and everything was well.

He could not. He had to wake to the bleak truth that she was dead, and his business half-bankrupt, his father hanging on to their house and their nursery garden and their collection of rarities by the old combination of luck and the love of his friends, while J played the part of the indulged son – fleeing from all of it, calling it a venture, a chance at wealth, but knowing it was an escape.

It was not an enviable escape at first sight. The house at Lambeth was a grand house, set among its own twenty acres of nursery garden, famous for its collection of rarities from all around the world. His father, John Tradescant, had named it the Ark, and had sworn they would be safe there whatever storms rocked the country with king and Church and Parliament all set on different and opposing courses. There were half a dozen bedrooms and the great room for the rarities, a dining room, a drawing room and a kitchen. A little son, Johnnie, to inherit it all and his older sister Frances to insist on her own claims. These riches J had exchanged for a single five-foot, four-inches-long bunk built into the damp wall of the ship. There was no room to sit up, barely room to roll over. He had to lie on his back, feeling the huge movement of the waves lifting and dropping him like driftwood, looking at the planks of the bunk above him. To his right against the skin of the ship, he could feel the slap of the waves and the whisper of their ripples. To his left was the slatted door for which he had paid extra for the little space and privacy it gave him. The other, poorer emigrants slept side by side on the floor of the ’tween deck like animals in a barn. They had been loaded like baggage into the waist of the ship with the crews’ quarters at the stern behind them, and the captain’s tiny cabin and the cook’s galley and cabin – all in one – in the prow before them.

The captain would not allow passengers out on deck except for the briefest and most grudging spells in fine weather. The crew going on watch trampled over the passengers and, when they were returning to their shared hammocks in the stern, dripped water all over them. The emigrants were always in the way, they were regularly cursed, they were less than cargo.

Their bundles and boxes were piled up among their owners in a careless muddle; but as the days wore on into weeks families established their own little seats and bunks out of crates of chickens and bags of clothes. The stench was appalling. There were two buckets provided, one for washing water, one for excrement, and there was a strict rota for emptying the soil bucket over the side. The captain would not allow them to do this more than once a day and when it was J’s turn to carry the brimming pail to the side his stomach heaved.

There was scarcely enough water to drink, and it came warm and tasting of the barrel, there was hardly enough food. A lumpy porridge for breakfast, the same for dinner, and a biscuit and a slice of old cheese at night.

It would have been a nightmare but the voyage was sustained by hope. They were a shipful of gamblers, a handful of families who had thrown in their lot with a land they had never seen and whose dangers and promises they could hardly imagine. J thought they were the most foolhardy, impulsive, brave people he had ever met, and he did not know whether to fear them as madmen or admire them as heroes.

They were lucky. Seventy days into the voyage, as the temperature rose and the children cried and cried for fresh water and a breath of air, they sighted Barbados and sailed into port for one blissful week of rest as the captain sold his English goods and took on rum and sugar, food and fresh water. They were allowed to go ashore and barter for provisions, to eat fresh fruit for the first time in more than two months. When the ship was due to sail, the return to the festering hold was more than many of them could bear. A number of emigrants left the ship; but most of them gritted their teeth and endured the next leg of the voyage, J grimly among them. It was another full forty days at sea before a sailor opened a hatch and bellowed down: ‘Make yourselves ready! We’ve sighted land.’

Even then they were not allowed up on deck. J gathered with the others looking imploringly upwards to the open hatch. The sailor laughed unkindly. ‘Wait below,’ he said. ‘There’s no room for you all!’

It was evening. J, accustomed to the foul smell of the ’tween decks, smelled a fresh new scent on the air – damp earth which reminded him suddenly, poignantly, of the garden at Lambeth after rain, and the wet fresh smell of leaves.

‘Land,’ the woman next to him said, her voice hushed with awe. ‘Land. The new land. Our new land.’

J guessed from the noises of running feet and the shouted commands that they were dropping sail. The waves stopped heaving the ship up and down and instead they felt the insistent pattering slaps of a tidal river. Then there were shouts of greeting and replies from the sailors, and a jolt as the boat ran gently against the quayside and the strange steadying of her motion as the ropes drew her alongside.

‘Thank God,’ J muttered.

The woman beside him breathed, ‘Amen.’

The single women aboard who expected to find husbands as well as gold in the new land primped their hair and put on their clean caps, saved for this very moment. Those children who were not weak with sickness could not be contained; they leaped about on bags and crates and barrels and were cuffed indiscriminately, whenever they stumbled to a standstill. Husbands and wives exchanged apprehensive or hopeful glances. J wondered at the coldness around his heart; he felt no relief that the voyage was over, no excitement at the thought of a new country, of a new land, of a new horizon. He realised then that he had been half-hoping that the ship would founder and take him and his sadness down below the waves to Jane; and then he shook his head at his sin of selfishness that he should ill-wish a voyage because of his own pain.

The sailor stood at the open hatch at last. ‘Come on up!’ he called. ‘Welcome to paradise.’

There was a moment’s hesitation and then a rush up the narrow wooden steps and the first emigrants stepped out on deck, and J followed.

It was evening. The skies were a colour that J had never seen before, the palest of mauves lying in stripes like gauze over the enormous river which reflected the colours back up in pink and blue and purple. The river was still, like a tarnished silver mirror, and as J watched it went suddenly dark and stirred and then went still again as an immense shoal of fish swooped by. It was a stretch of water greater than J had ever seen, except for the sea itself. Only dimly behind the ship could he see the distant southern bank as a dark shadow of trees. All around him was the smooth sheen of river water and as he looked inland, away from the sea, it seemed to him that it went on forever, flowing as wide forever, making no compromise with narrowing banks, impossibly wide, impossibly rich, impossibly beautiful.

J looked towards the shore. The emigrants were disembarking in haste; already a chain had been formed, tossing their goods down the line to land with a careless thump on the dockside. Half of Jamestown had turned out to greet the ship, there were shouted enquiries for news of England, demands of the captain for commissions completed, bills paid, and then coming through them all was the governor, Sir John Harvey, grandly shabby in an old coat spruced up for the occasion with worn gold lace, moving through the colonists with his head turned away, as if he despised them.

J could see the walls of the original fort, still manned, with cannon at the ready; but the houses of the town had sprawled beyond their narrow compass and the fort served only as the end point of what would have been, in England, a little market town. The handsomest, biggest houses were stone-built, in a row, in a style that would not have disgraced London, and behind them and to the side of them was a range of styles from frame buildings half-completed, to little wattle-and-daub shanties. Mostly they were built of wood, planks of untreated crudely sawn boards overlayed one across the other, roofed with mats of badly thatched straw.

No gardens, J noted at once. But everywhere, in every patch of ground, at every corner, even lining the roadside, were tall ungainly plants with leaves broad and flat like those of tulips, flopping over.

‘What plant is that?’ J asked a man who was pushing up the gangplank to greet a newcomer.

He hardly glanced over his shoulder. ‘Tobacco, of course,’ he said. ‘You’ll learn to recognise it soon enough.’

J nodded. He had seen the plant before but he had not thought they would grow it to the exclusion of everything else, in the very streets of their new city.

He took his bag and made his way down the gangplank to the crowded quayside.

‘Is there an inn here?’

‘A dozen,’ a woman replied. ‘But only if you have gold or tobacco to pay.’

‘I can pay,’ J said steadily. ‘I come with a warrant from the king of England.’

She looked away as if she were not much impressed with his patent. ‘Then you had best tell the governor,’ she said, nodding towards the man’s broad back. ‘If he’ll stoop to speak with you.’

J hefted his bag onto his other shoulder and stepped up towards the man. ‘Sir John?’ he asked. ‘Let me introduce myself. I am John Tradescant the younger, gardener to the king. He has commanded me to make a collection of rare plants, and rarities of all sorts. Here is his letter.’ He bowed and produced the patent marked with the royal seal.

Sir John did not take it. He merely nodded his head in reply. ‘What’s your title?’

‘Esquire,’ J said, still uncomfortable with the lie which claimed his right to be a gentleman when he was in truth nothing more than the son of a working man, and the grandson of a labourer.

The governor turned and extended his hand. J shook the proffered two fingers. ‘Call tomorrow,’ the governor said. ‘I have to collect my letters and some bills of purchase from the captain here. Call tomorrow and I shall be at leisure to receive you.’

‘Then I’ll find a bed at an inn,’ J said uncertainly.

The governor had already turned his back. ‘Do that. Or the people are extraordinarily hospitable.’

J waited in case he would offer anything more; but he moved away and there was nothing for J to do but pick up his other bulkier bag, which had been slung down on the quayside, and trudge up the hill, past the bulging walls of the fort, towards the little town.

He found the first inn by the haunting smell of stale ale. As he paused in the doorway there was a loud baying noise of a big dog and a shrill shout commanding it to be silent. J tapped lightly on the door and stepped in.

It was dark inside, the air was thick with smoke, almost unbreathable for a stranger. J’s eyes stung and he felt his breath catch.

‘Good day,’ a woman said abruptly from the back of the room. J blinked tears from his eyes and saw her better: a woman of about fifty with the leathery skin and hard eyes of a survivor. She wore rough wooden clogs on her feet, a homespun skirt kilted up out of the way, a shirt that had once belonged to a man twice her size and a shawl tied tightly around her shoulders.

‘I’m new-come from London,’ J said. ‘I want a room for the night.’

‘You can’t have one to yourself, you’re not at Whitehall now.’

‘No,’ J said politely. ‘Might I share a room?’

‘You’ll share a bed and like it!’

‘Very well,’ J said. ‘And something to eat? And drink?’

She nodded. ‘Paying in gold? Or tobacco?’

‘Where would I get tobacco?’ J demanded, his irritation finally breaking through. ‘I landed five minutes ago.’

She smiled, as if she were pleased to see him rise to the bait. ‘How would I know?’ she demanded. ‘Maybe you’d had the sense to ask in London how we do things over here. Maybe you’d had the sense to buy some on the quayside, seeing as every planter in the colony was selling there today. Maybe you’re a returning planter coming back to your rich fields. How would I know?’

‘I’m not a planter, and I was not advised to bring tobacco to Virginia,’ J said. ‘But I am hungry and thirsty and weary. I should like a wash too. When will my dinner be ready?’

The woman abandoned her teasing of him abruptly. ‘You can wash under the pump in the yard,’ she said. ‘Don’t drink the water, it’s only a shallow well and it’s foul. You’ll sleep in the attic along with the rest of us. You’ll share a pallet bed with my son, or with whoever next comes through the door. Dinner will be ready as soon as it’s cooked, which will be the quicker if I can get on now.’

She turned her back to him and stirred something in a pot hanging over the fireplace. Then she moved to a barrel in the corner and drew him a mug of ale.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Four mugs for a penny. I’ll keep the tally.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ J said under his breath and went out into the yard to wash.

She need not have warned him not to drink the water. It came out of the pump in a brown brackish spout, stinking horribly. Still, it was better than seawater, and J stripped and washed all over, and then pulled on his breeches and sat himself down on a pile of sawn wood and shaved himself, feeling his skin with his fingertips to guide his razor.

The ground still heaved uneasily under his feet, as if he were on board ship. But he knew that his father had felt the same when they had made landfall at Rhé or in Russia after his long voyage across the North Sea. He had told him that it was the same after any long voyage. For a moment J thought of his father at home, and the two children. For a moment he had the sweetest of illusions that Jane was there too, caring for them, awaiting his return. It seemed so much more likely that she would be there, waiting for him, than that she should be dead and he never see her again. The moment was so strong that he had to remind himself of the orangery and the pallet bed, and her white-faced determination that she should die alone rather than pass the plague to him and to her children. The thought of it made him sick to the stomach with grief, and he dropped his head in his hands as the cool Virginia twilight wrapped him in darkness, and he knew that he had sailed to the new world, to the new land, but brought his three-year-old grief all that long way with him.

Spring 1638, Virginia

J opened his eyes and saw, instead of the whitewashed walls and ceiling of his Lambeth home, a thatched roof, close to his face. Beneath him, wooden boards, not even a straw mattress; a pace away, a young man on a pallet bed, still deep in sleep. He took in, slowly, the watery smell of something cooking, the discomfort of the hard floor, and the irritating itch of a fresh fleabite. He sat up cautiously, his head swimming. The solid wooden floor of the loft heaved under his gaze with the illusion of movement.

‘You can stir yourselves or it’ll be cold!’ came a shout from the woman who kept the lodging house. In one fluid movement the lad, her son, was up and out of bed and down the ladder to the kitchen below. J pulled on his boots, brushed down his breeches, shrugged his waistcoat over his grubby shirt, and followed him.

The woman was spooning a pale yellow mixture from the pot, suspended over a miserly fire, into four wooden bowls. She slapped them onto the table and bowed her head over her callused hands for a brief grace. Another man who had stayed the night sleeping on the floor beside the fire drew up his stool, took out his own spoon and ate with relish.

‘What is it?’ J asked cautiously.

‘Porridge made with Indian corn,’ she replied.

‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ the man said. ‘Indian corn is almost all we eat.’

J smiled. ‘I wasn’t expecting milk and honey.’

‘There’s many that do,’ the woman said shortly. ‘And many that die still hoping.’

There was a short silence.

‘You here prospecting?’ the man asked.

‘No,’ J said. ‘I’m a gardener, a plant collector. I’ve come to collect plants. Authorised by King Charles himself.’ He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should tell them about the great garden in Lambeth and his father’s reputation as the greatest gardener that had ever been, advisor to the Duke of Buckingham, gardener to the king and queen, one of the greatest collectors of rarities in the world. He looked at the woman’s enfolded, bitter face and thought that he would not.

The man nodded. ‘Will you see the king when you get home? If you get home,’ he added.

J nodded and took a spoon of the porridge. It was bland, the corn boiled to the consistency of paste. ‘Yes. I work for him in his garden at Oatlands Palace,’ he said.

‘Well, tell him that we can’t do with this governor,’ the man said bluntly. ‘Tell him that we won’t do with him, and that’s a fact. We’ve got enough worries to deal with here without having a fat fool set over us from England. We need a general assembly with a voice for every planter. We need a guarantee of our rights.’

‘You’d be imprisoned if you spoke like that in England,’ J pointed out mildly.

‘That’s why I’m not in England,’ the man said shortly. ‘And I don’t expect to live as if I were. Which is more than can be said for the governor who expects to live like a lord with servants in a land where men and women have come to be free.’

‘I’m not his advisor,’ J said. ‘I speak to the king – when I ever see him – about plants and his garden.’

The man nodded. ‘So who does advise him now?’

J thought for a moment. It all seemed a long way away and of little interest in this new country. ‘The queen,’ he said. ‘And Archbishop Laud.’

The man made a grimace and turned his head to spit but then checked the movement when he saw the woman glare. ‘Beg pardon. So he hasn’t called a parliament?’

J shook his head. ‘He hopes to rule without one.’

‘I heard he was halfway to being a Papist.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘I heard that he has taken so many fines and so much wealth into his own hands that he does not need to call a parliament for them to vote taxes, that he lets his wife worship openly as a Papist, and that daily there are men and women in the country crying out for him to change,’ the man said precisely.

John blinked at the accuracy and malice of the description. ‘I thought you were royalists in Virginia?’

‘Not all of us,’ the man said with a hard smile.

‘Where are you going to find your plants?’ the woman interrupted. ‘There’s nothing grown up and down the river but tobacco.’

‘Surely people farm other crops?’

She shook her head. ‘We keep beasts – or at any rate they keep themselves. But with the fish jumping out of the river and the animals in the forest it’s not worth the labour of doing more than fishing and hunting. Besides, we can trade for anything we need with the Indians. They can do the labour of farming for us. We can all be squires here.’

‘I thought I’d travel round,’ J said. ‘Hire a horse and ride round the country, see what I can find.’

They both looked at him and rudely laughed in his face.

‘Hire a horse!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘There’s not more than half a dozen horses in the whole plantation. You might as well ask for a coach and four.’

J kept his temper. ‘I see I have much to learn.’

She rose from the table and went to the fire. ‘Dark morning,’ she said irritably. She bent to the fire and lit what looked like a little twig of kindling. To J’s surprise it burnt with a bright clear flame at the very tip, like a specially made taper. She rested it on a small holder, placed on the stone hearth for that purpose, and came back to the table.

‘What’s that?’

She glanced back without interest. ‘We call it candlewood. I buy it from the Indians every autumn.’

‘But what sort of wood is it?’

‘Candlewood,’ she said impatiently.

‘But from what sort of tree?’

She looked at him as if he were foolish to be asking something that no-one else cared about. ‘How should I know? I pay the Indians to fetch it for me. D’you think I go out into the woods to gather my own candlewood? D’you think I make my own spoons from spoonwood? D’you think I make my own sugar from the sugar tree or my own soap from the soapberry?’

‘Candlewood? Spoonwood?’ J had a moment of wild imagining, thinking of a tree growing candles, a tree growing spoons, a bush growing soap. ‘Are you trying to make a fool of me?’

‘No greater fool than you are already – what else should I call them but what they are?’

‘What you want,’ the man said pacifically, pushing away his empty bowl and taking out a pipe and filling it with rich golden tobacco leaves, ‘is an Indian, a savage. One to use as your own. To take you out into the forest and show you all these things. Take you out in a canoe up and down the river and show you the things you want to know.’

‘Don’t any of the planters know these things?’ J asked. He felt fearful at the thought of being guided by an Indian. There had been too much talk in London of brown men armed with knives of stone who crept into your house and cut your throat while you slept.

The woman hawked and spat into the fireplace. ‘They don’t hardly know how to plant!’ she said. ‘Everything they know they learned from the Indians. You can find yourself an Indian to tell you what the soapberry tree is. Civilised folks here aren’t interested in anything but gold and tobacco.’

‘How shall I find an Indian to guide me?’ J asked. For a moment he felt as helpless as a child, and he thought of his father’s travels – to Russia, to the Mediterranean, to Europe. He had never asked his father if he had felt fear, or worse than fear: the babyish whimper of someone lost, friendless in a strange land. ‘Where would I find a safe Indian?’

‘No such thing as a safe Indian,’ the woman said sharply.

‘Peace!’ J’s fellow lodger said quietly. ‘If you’re serving the king you must have papers, a safe pass, that sort of thing.’

J felt inside his shirt where the precious royal order was wrapped in oilskin. ‘Of course.’

‘Best see the governor then,’ the man suggested. ‘If you’re from the king and you’ve got some influence at court, the governor’ll have time for you. God knows he has no time for honest working men trying to make a living here.’

‘Does he have a court?’ J asked.

‘Knock on his door,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘Court indeed! He’s lucky to have a girl to open the door for him.’

J stood up from the table. ‘Where shall I find his house?’

‘Set beyond the Back Road,’ the man said. ‘I’ll stroll over with you now.’

‘I have to wash first,’ J said nervously. ‘And get my hat and coat.’

The woman snorted disparagingly. ‘He’ll want to paint and powder next,’ she said.

The man smiled. ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ he said and went out, closing the door gently behind him.

There was neither jug nor ewer in the attic, nor a mirror. Everything that had to be brought from England was at a premium in the new colony. The most trivial things which J had taken for granted in England were rare luxuries here. J washed under the pump in the yard, flinching from the icy splash, and unconsciously keeping his lips tight shut, fearful of drinking the foul water.

His fellow lodger was waiting for him outside the house, in the shade of a tree, sipping from a mug of small ale. The sun beat down on the blinding dust all around him. He nodded when he saw J and slowly got to his feet. ‘Don’t rush,’ he advised him. ‘A man can die of hurry in this climate.’

He led the way down the track that ran between the houses. The road was no dirtier than a back road in London but somehow it seemed worse, with the heat of the sun beating down on it and the bright light which dazzled J and made him squint. Hens clucked around in the dust and shied away from their strolling feet at every street corner, and every garden, every drainage ditch, was filled with the ungainly sprout and flapping leaves of the tobacco plant.

The governor, when J managed to gain admission to the small stone-built house, did nothing more than repeat the lodging-house woman’s advice. ‘I shall write you a note,’ he said languidly. ‘You can travel from plantation to plantation and the planters will make you welcome, if that is what you wish. There’s no difficulty there. Most of the people you meet will be glad of the company and a new face.’

‘But how shall I find my way around?’ J asked. He was afraid that he sounded humble, like a fool.

The governor shrugged. ‘You must get yourself an Indian servant,’ he said. ‘To paddle you in a canoe. To set up camp for you when you can find nowhere to stay. Or you can remain here in Jamestown and tell the children that you want flowers from the woods. They’ll bring a few things in, I dare say.’

J shook his head. ‘I need to see things where they are growing,’ he said. ‘And see the parent plants. I need roots and seed heads, I need to gather them myself. I need to see where they thrive.’

The governor nodded, uninterested, and rang a silver bell. They could hear the servant trotting across the short hall and opening the badly hung door.

‘Take Mr Tradescant to Mr Joseph,’ the governor ordered. He turned to J. ‘He’s the magistrate here at Jamestown. He often puts Indians in the stocks or in prison. He’ll know the names of one or two. He might release one from prison to you, to be your guide.’

‘I don’t know the ways of the country …’ J said uneasily. ‘I would rather have a law-abiding guide –’

The governor laughed. ‘They’re all rogues and criminals,’ he said simply. ‘They’re all pagan. If you want to go out into the forest with any one of them you take your life in your own hands. If I had my way we should have driven them over the Blue Mountains into the western sea. Just over the distant mountains there – drive them back to India.’

J blinked, but the governor rose to his feet in his enthusiasm. ‘My plan is that we should plant the land from one river to the other – from the James River to the Patowmeck River – and then build a mighty fence and push them behind it, expel them from Eden as if we were archangels with flaming swords. Let them take their sins elsewhere. There’ll be no peace for us until we are undisputed masters of all the land we can see.’

He broke off. ‘But you must take your choice, Mr Tradescant. The only people who know anything of plants or trees in Virginia are the Indians and they may slit your throat once you are in the woods with them. Stay here, safe inside the city, and go home empty-handed; or take your chance. It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I cannot rescue you if you are in the woods with them, whatever the king asks of me, whatever safe passes you have in your pocket.’

J hesitated. He had a moment to appreciate the irony that he had thought he might die on the voyage and had welcomed the thought of his own death, which he had recognised as the only thing to ease his grief. But the thought of meeting his death violently and in fear in unknown woods at the hands of murderous pagans was a different matter altogether.

‘I’ll speak to this Mr Joseph,’ he said at last. ‘See what he advises.’

‘As you wish,’ the governor said languidly. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay in Virginia. Please assure His Majesty that I did everything in my power to assist you, when you get home; if you get home.’

‘Thank you,’ J said levelly, bowed and left the room.

The maid would not take him even for the short walk to Mr Joseph’s house until she had tied a shawl around her shoulders and put a broad-brimmed hat on her head.

‘It’s cool,’ J protested. ‘And the sun is not even overhead.’

She shot him a swift defensive look. ‘There are bugs that bite and a sun which strikes you down, and the heat that comes off the marshes,’ she warned. ‘The graveyard is full of men who thought that the Virginia sun was not yet up, or that the water was good enough to drink.’

With that she said nothing more but led the way to the magistrate’s house, past the fort where the bored soldiers whistled and called to her, and inland up a rough dirt road until she stood before a house which was grand by Virginia standards but would have been nothing more than a yeoman’s cottage in England.

‘Mr Joseph’s house,’ she said shortly, and turned and left him at the rough wood front door.

J knocked, and opened the door when a voice shouted to him to come inside.

The house was divided into two. The largest room, where J was standing, served as the kitchen and dining room. There was no separate parlour. There was a ladder at the back of the room leading to attic bedrooms. A light wooden partition, hardly a wall, divided the master bedroom on the ground floor from the rest of the house. Mr Joseph was sitting at the roughly made table in the living room, writing in a ledger.

‘Who are you?’

‘John Tradescant, from England,’ J said, and proffered the governor’s note.

Mr Joseph read it quickly. ‘I’ve got no native guide for you,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got no messengers due to arrive either. You will have to wait, sir.’

J hesitated. ‘I wonder if a white person might be free to take me out, now and then. Perhaps a servant or a labourer might be spared from their work.’ He looked at the man’s unhelpful expression. ‘Perhaps just for a few hours?’

Mr Joseph shook his head. ‘How long have you been here?’ he demanded.

‘Just arrived.’

‘When you have been here a little longer you will realise that there is never a spare hour,’ the man said grimly. ‘Never a spare moment. Look around you. Every single thing you see here has to be wrested from this land. Remember your ship – did you see houses as cargo? Ploughs? Baker’s shops? Market stalls?’ He paused for emphasis and then shook his head.

‘You did not, and that is because we can ship hardly anything. All that we need has to be made or grown or wrought here. Everything. From the shingles on the roof to the ice in the cellar. And this by people who did not come here to farm; but came hoping to pick up gold plates from the seashore, or emeralds from the rivers, or pearls from out of every oyster. So not only are we farming with wooden ploughshares that we have to carve ourselves, but we are farming with labourers who have never seen a ploughshare before, wooden or metal! Who have to learn every step of the way. Who are taught by men who came out to mine gold but find themselves growing tobacco. So there is no-one, not a man nor woman nor child, who has a moment to do anything but work.’

J said nothing. He thought of his father who had travelled half way round the world and never came back without his pockets filled with treasures. He thought of the debts at home which would be mounting and only his father and two young children to care for the business of nursery plants and rarities.

‘Then I shall have to go out alone. On my own. For I must go home with plants and rarities.’

‘I can give you an Indian girl,’ the man said abruptly. ‘Her mother is in prison for slander. She’s only in for the month. You can have the child for a month.’

‘What good will a child be?’ J demanded.

The man smiled. ‘This is an Indian child,’ he corrected. ‘One of the Powhatan people. She can pass through the trees as quiet as a deer. She can cross deep rivers by stepping on stones that you cannot even see. She can eat off the land: berries, roots, nuts, the earth itself. She’ll know every single plant and every single tree within a hundred miles of here. You can have her for a month, then bring her back.’

He threw back his head and shouted an order. From the yard outside came an answering shout and the back door opened and a child was thrust into the room, her hands still full of the flax which she had been beating.

‘Take her!’ Mr Joseph said irritably. ‘She understands some English, enough to do your bidding anyway, she’s not deaf, but she’s dumb. She can make noises but not speech. Her mother is a whore for the English soldiers, or a servant, or a cook, or something. She’s in prison for a month for complaining of rape. The girl knows enough to understand you. Take her for a month and bring her back here three weeks on Thursday. Her mother comes out of prison then and she’ll want her back.’

He waved the girl towards J and she stepped slowly, unwillingly forward.

‘And don’t rape her,’ he warned matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t want a half-breed baby nine months from now. Just order her to find your plants and bring you back within the month.’

The magistrate waved them both from the room and J found himself on the doorstep in the bright morning sunlight with the girl like a shadow at his elbow. He turned and looked at her.

She was an odd mixture of child and woman; that was the first thing he saw about her. The roundness of her face and the open gaze of the dark eyes was that of a child, an inquisitive, bonny child. But the straightness of her nose and the high cheekbones and the strength of her jaw would make her a beautiful woman in only a few years’ time. Her head was not yet level with his shoulder, but the long legs and slim long feet showed that she would grow taller. She was dressed according to Jamestown convention in someone’s cast-off shift which reached down to her calves and flapped around her shoulders. Her hair was long and dark, flowing loose on one side of her head; but the other side, around her right ear, was shaved close, giving her a curious, exotic appearance. The skin of her neck and her shoulders, which he could see around the gaping gown, was painted with outlandish blue ridges of tattoos. She was looking at him with apprehension, but not outright fear; looking at him as if she were measuring his strength, and thinking that whatever might happen next she would survive it.

It was that look that told J she was a child. A woman fears pain: the pain inside her body, and the pain of a man’s command. But this was still a girl, since she had a girl’s confidence that she could survive anything.

J smiled at her, as he would have smiled at his own nine-year-old daughter Frances, left so far away in London. ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you,’ he said.

Years later he would remember that promise. The first thing he, a white man, had said to an Indian: ‘Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.’

J led the girl away from Mr Joseph’s house to the shade of a tree in the centre of what would in England have been the village green, but here was a dusty piece of waste ground between the river and the Back Road. A couple of cows foraged pessimistically around them.

‘I need to find plants,’ J said slowly, watching her face for any signs of understanding. ‘Candlewood. Soapberry. Spoonwood.’

She nodded, but whether she understood him, or was merely trying to please him, he could not tell.

He pointed to the tree. ‘I want to see trees.’ He pointed to where the thick line of the forest fringed the river, beyond the desert of waste ground that the settlers had made around the little town, tree stumps still showing in the new fields, dust blowing away from the exhausted tobacco rows.

‘Will you take me into the woods?’

She looked at him with sudden keen intelligence, and stepped towards him. She put a hand on his chest and then turned from him and mimed walking: a wonderful vivid mime that made J laugh at once. It was the English walk, the rolling swagger of a self-important man walking in ill-fitting shoes. She rolled her hips as English men do when they walk, she picked up her feet as English men do when their blisters are nipping their toes. She nodded at him when she saw that he understood, and then she turned and pointed far out beyond the felled trees to the dark, impenetrable wall of forest. She stood for a moment, and then spread her arms and with a little shudder of movement from the crown of her dark head to her bare feet made him see – see the inexpressible: a tall tree with wide spreading branches. It was an illusion, like a mountebank’s trick; but for a moment J, watching her, saw not girl but tree; saw the movement of wind in the branches, saw the sway of the trunk. Then she stepped away from her mime and looked at him inquiringly.

‘Yes,’ J said. ‘Trees. I want to see trees.’ He nodded and smiled at her, nodded again. Then he stepped closer and pointed to himself. ‘And flowers,’ he said. He bent down and mimed delightedly finding something on the ground, picking it and smelling it.

He was rewarded by a bright smile and then a tiny, half-suppressed chuckle of laughter.

He mimed picking berries and eating them, he mimed gathering nuts or digging roots from the ground. The girl nodded; she had understood.

‘We go now?’ J demanded. He gestured towards the woods, started to march forward to indicate his readiness.

She looked at him from his heavy leather boots to his tall hat. She said not a word but J sensed that his clothes, his boots, his walk, even his very body – so heavy and stiff – seemed to her an impossible burden to take into the woods. But then she sighed, and with a little lift of her shoulders seemed to shrug away the difficulty of how a lumpish overdressed white man could be taken into the forest. She stepped forward and with a gesture of her hand indicated that he should walk behind her, and headed towards the trees at a gentle trot.

Sweat poured off J before they were halfway through the cultivated fields outside the half-opened walls of Jamestown. A crowd of midges and strange, sharply biting moths spun around his head and stung and nipped at every exposed inch of skin. He wiped his face with his hand and it came away dirty with the wings and legs of little bloodsucking insects and left his face sore. They reached the shade of the forest edge; but it was no better. At every pace a small cloud of insects bloomed around his big feet and fastened themselves to every piece of reddening skin.

J swatted and wiped and smoothed his face and his neck and his hands, making a thousand awkward ungainly movements to each one of her gliding paces. She trotted like an animal, with no wasted energy. Her arms were relaxed at her side, her upper body still, only her feet pattered forward in little steps, steadily one before the other in a thin one-track path. J, watching her run, at first thought it was the pace of a little child; but then found he could hardly keep up with her as she crossed the fields and headed for the trees.

The edge of the forest was like the face of a friend with half the teeth knocked out. The girl looked around at the ragged stumps of trees as if she was grieving for the loss of someone’s smile. Then she made that little gesture of her shoulder which said so eloquently that there was no accounting for what a white man might do, and went forward with that slow, very slow trot that was just faster than J’s normal walk, and too slow for his running stride. He was continually walking and then breaking into a run to catch her up and then walking again.

As soon as they were beyond the felled trees she stepped off the path, looked around her, listened for one intent moment and then went to a hollow tree at the side of the path. With one fluid movement she flung the shift over her head, folded it carefully, and stowed it in the roots of the tree.

She was all but naked. A little buckskin skirt covered her privates in front but left her long thighs and buttocks exposed. Her breasts were those of a young girl, pointed and as firm as muscle. J exclaimed, not with desire but with fear, and looked around him. For a moment he thought he might have been entrapped by her, and that someone would spring up to witness that he was with her, looking at her shameful nakedness, and some dreadful punishment would follow.

The forest was silent, there was no-one there but the two of them. At once J imagined that she must be inviting him, seducing him; and he could not deny that she was halfway to being desirable. But then he saw that she was not even aware of him, blind to his rapid succession of fears and thoughts. Without fear, without any sense of her own nudity, without the shame she should feel, she bent to the foot of the tree and drew out a small black jug. She dipped in her fingers and drew out a handful of a reddish grease. She smoothed it all over her body as a rich woman will stroke perfume on her skin, and smiled at J when she straightened up and her body glistened with it.

He could see now that the blue and red tattoos which ringed her shoulder blades went down her narrow back in wild spirals. Only her small breasts and belly were bare of them. The grease had added a redder colour to her skin and a darker sheen to the tattoos. She looked stranger and older than she had on the Jamestown green. Her hair looked longer and thicker, her eyes darker and wilder. J watched this transformation from a child in someone’s hand-me-down clothes to a young woman in her own gleaming skin with a growing sense of awe. She had changed from a serving maid – the child of a criminal serving maid – into a creature of the wood who looked as if she belonged there, and whose skin, dappled with the light through the shifting canopy of the leaves, was almost invisible against the dappled light of the forest floor.

She held out the pot for him to take some grease.

‘No, thank you,’ J said awkwardly.

Again she proffered it.

J shook his head.

Patiently she pointed to the cloud of insects around his face and neck, and J noticed for the first time that there were no midges and moths around her. She thrust the pot towards him.

Squeamishly, J dipped his hand into the pot and brought out a little grease on the tips of his fingers. It smelled rancid like old sweat and well-hung meat. J could not help a swift expression of distaste at the powerful stink, he wiped the grease away on a leaf and shook his head again. The girl was not offended. She merely shrugged and then corked the pot with a bundle of leaves, and put it in a woven bag which she drew out from under the tree trunk along with a small quiver made of reeds holding half a dozen arrows, and a small bow.

The quiver she hung at her side, the bow over her shoulder, the soft woven bag across her body to hang on the other hip. Then she nodded to him briskly, to indicate she was ready. She gestured towards the river – did he want to go along the shoreline?

J pointed towards the deeper trees to their left. She nodded and stepped before him, made that little confident gesture that told him to follow behind her, and led the way.

She moved as quietly as an animal through the shadows and the trees. Not even the arrows in her quiver rattled together. The tiny, almost invisible, track was blocked at every pace by a fallen log or a strand of creeper stretching from one tree to another. She trotted over the one and ducked beneath the other without ever breaking her steady stride. J, out of breath, breaking twigs and kicking stones with his heavy shoes, ducking beneath vines, rubbing his face against the trailing disagreeable stickiness of spiders’ webs and the stinging moths, stamped behind her like a pursuing cart horse.

She did not look around. ‘Well, she hardly needs to look to know that I am following her,’ J thought. The noise alone was enough to alert all of Virginia. But she did not even glance to see if all was well with him. She just went at her slow steady trot, as if having been assigned the task of taking him into the deep forest she need no longer consult him until she delivered him to his destination.

They jogged for about half an hour as J’s breathing went from a pant to a straining, painful snatching for breath, until at last they came to a clearing where she paused and turned. J, who had been watching every step on the treacherous path, though blinded by his own sweat and dazzled by a cloud of stinging insects, dropped to the ground and whooped for air. Courteously she hunkered down beside him, sitting on her heels, and waiting, composed and silent, for the white man to stop panting and mopping his face, and grabbing at his side where he had a stitch and at his ankle where he had a sprain.

Slowly J fell silent. The noises of the wood which had been obscured by his trampling progress rose up all around him. There were frogs croaking from the river behind them, there were crickets singing. There were birds singing in the thick canopy of leaves above them, pigeons cooing, jays calling, and an interweaving of sounds which J, a town boy, could not recognise.

He heard the rasp of his own breath subside and he turned to look at her. She was quiet and composed.

J gave her a small, almost apologetic, smile, and lifted his hand to the neck of his thick linen shirt and flapped it to indicate his heat. She nodded solemnly and pointed to his thick jacket.

J, feeling every inch a fool, slid his arms out of the sleeves and handed it to her. She folded it as carefully as a housewife in England and put it beside them and scattered a handful of leaves and moss on it. At once it had disappeared. J blinked. He could not even see the outline of it. She had hidden it completely.

She turned and pointed at his breeches and his boots. J shook his head.

Again she pointed at his breeches and mimed pulling them down. J, feeling like an aged virgin clutching to modesty, held the waistband tighter to him. He saw the glimpse of a smile cross her face but then she moulded her expression into impassivity. She gave a little shrug which said as eloquently as any words that he might wear his breeches if he chose to be hot and uncomfortable, and keep his boots if he wanted to alert the whole forest by his heavy tread.

She made a small gesture with her hand that said: ‘Here. Trees,’ and then she sat back on her heels and looked at him expectantly.

The trees were coming into leaf. J gazed around in wonderment at the height of them, at the richness of the growth, at the vines which looped one to another and twisted around them. Some of them he could recognise as English trees and he found he was nodding towards them, almost as a man might greet the welcome sight of an acquaintance in a strange land. He saw elderberry bushes, oak, hornbeam, cherry trees, walnut trees and dogwood with a sense of relief. But there was also a jumble, an overwhelming richness of foliage and trunk, bark and small flowers, that he could not name, could not identify, that crowded upon him, all beautiful or interesting, large or shapely, calling for his attention and competing with each other. J rubbed his hand across his sweating face. There was a lifetime’s work here for a plant collector; and he had promised his father to be home by early summer.

He glanced at the girl. She was not watching him, she was sitting on her heels, waiting patiently, as steady and still as the trees around them. When she felt his gaze upon her she looked up and gave him a small shy smile, a child’s smile, as if to say that she was proud of her little cleverness in bringing him to the heart of the wood, happy to wait until she could demonstrate her cleverness at fetching him home. It was a smile that no father could have resisted. J smiled back at her. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘This is just what I wanted.’

The girl did not lead him home until the evening and then her little bag was packed with seedlings that J had dug from the forest floor. J was carrying his hat like a bowl, filled to the brim with tiny tree seedlings, each showing no more than a pair of leaves, a white stem and a trail of little roots. There were more plants packed into the pockets of his breeches. He had wanted to put some in her quiver but she had shaken her head decisively, and when he proffered the plants again, she had stepped back from him to show him why she refused.

In one swift movement the bow came off her shoulder and into her hand, with the other hand she had an arrow out of the quiver and notched on the bow. She was ready with a sharpened reed arrow head in moments. She nodded; her meaning was clear. She could not waste time fumbling with plants in her quiver.

J tried to hide a smile at this child’s seriousness over a child’s toy. She was certainly deft; but the bow was a tiny one and the arrows were as light as their flights: made of reed, tipped with sharpened reed.

‘May I see?’ he asked.

She unstrung the arrow from the bow and handed it to him. At once he realised his mistake. The arrow in his hand was a killing blade. The reed at its head was honed to razor sharpness. He drew it against his thumb and there was no pain, but a fine line of blood bloomed at its touch.

‘Damnation!’ he swore, and sucked his thumb. It might be made of reed, it might be so light that a young girl could carry it all day; but the arrow head was sharper than a knife.

‘How exact is your aim?’ J asked her. He pointed to a tree. ‘Can you hit that?’

She stepped towards the tree and pointed instead to a leaf which was shifting slightly in the wind before the trunk. She stepped back, notched the arrow into the bow and let fly. The arrow whistled softly in the air and thudded into the tree trunk. J stepped forward to look. There were traces of the leaf around the arrow shaft: she had hit a moving leaf at twenty paces.

J made a little bow to her, and meant the gesture of respect.

She smiled, that little gleam of pride again, and then pulled the arrow from the tree trunk, discarded the broken arrow head and replaced it with another, put the arrow back in her quiver and led the way from the forest clearing at her usual trot.

‘Slower,’ J commanded.

She glanced at him. He was clumsy with tiredness, his leg muscles singing with pain, and unbalanced by his burden of seedlings. Again he saw that small smile and then she turned and walked before him with a loping pace which was only a little slower. She paused for a moment in the clearing where he had thrown off his jacket and picked it up, dusted off the leaves and handed it to him. Then she led the way back to the hollow tree at the edge of the forest. She hid her bow and arrow in the trunk and drew out her servant’s shift.

J, after a long day of jogging behind her dappled flanks, was now accustomed to her nakedness. He found that he liked the gleam of her skin better than the crumpled mess of the shift. He thought she was diminished by the gown, she looked less modest than in her proud tattoos and buckskin. He made a little shrug to show his sense that she was returning to some sort of unnatural constraint and she nodded at his sympathy, her face grave.

‘You will stay at my inn tonight,’ J said, pointing down to Jamestown where there were already lights showing and chimneys smoking.

She neither nodded nor shook her head, she was frozen still, her eyes never leaving his face.

‘And tomorrow we shall go out into the forest again. Mr Joseph said you should come out with me every day for a month, until your mother is freed.’

She nodded her consent to that. Then she stepped forward and pointed at the little plants in his pocket and gestured towards the river. She mimed the strong paddling of a canoe, out towards the sea. Her hand gestured to the right, they should go south, she waved, a long way, waved again, a very long way; then she stepped back from him and with her arms spread and her shoulders rounded she mimed for him a tree: a tree with branches that bowed down, bowed down low over still water, spread her fingers: with branches that trailed into the water.

J was entranced. ‘But can we get a canoe?’

The girl nodded. She pointed to herself and held out her hand, pointing to her palm, the universal mime for money. J proffered a silver coin, she shook her head. He drew out his tobacco pouch. She nodded and took a fat handful. Then she pointed his face towards Jamestown, looked into his eyes again as if she were reluctant to trust so stupid a man to find his own way home, and then she nodded at him and turned towards a shrubby bush.

In a second she had disappeared. Disappeared without trace. J saw the little branches of the bush quiver and then she was gone, not even a glimmer of the servant’s smock showing in the darkness. For a moment he waited, straining his eyes against the failing light to see if he could spot her, but she had disappeared as surely as a roe deer will vanish by merely standing still.

J, realising that he would never find her against her will, knowing that he had to trust her, turned his face towards Jamestown as she had bid him and trudged home.

When the lodging-house woman knew that J had spent all day with the Indian girl in the woods, and would spend nights away with her, she was scathing.

‘I’d have thought a man fresh out of England could have done without,’ she said. She dumped in front of him a wooden bowl filled to the brim with a pale porridge.

‘Suppawn,’ his fellow lodger said out of the side of his mouth. ‘Indian cornmeal and milk.’

‘More corn?’ J asked.

The man nodded grimly and spooned his portion in silence.

‘I’d have thought you could have brought a woman from England, if your needs are that urgent,’ the woman said. ‘God knows, the town needs more women. You can’t make a plantation with nothing but soldiers and fools.’

J bent his head and slurped porridge from his spoon.

‘Don’t you have a wife you could have brought?’ the woman demanded.

Grief stabbed J like a knife in the belly. He looked up at her and something in his face silenced her nagging.

‘No,’ he said abruptly.

There was a short embarrassed silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘if I spoke wrong …’

J pushed away the bowl, the familiar feeling of grief choking him from his belly to his throat.

‘Here,’ the man offered. He produced a leather bottle from the folds of his breeches and poured a slug over J’s unwanted porridge. ‘Have a drop of Barbados rum, that’s the thing to give it flavour.’ He poured a measure for himself and stirred it in. He waved to J with his spoon. ‘Eat up,’ he said with rough kindliness. ‘This is not a land where a man can go hungry and eat later. Eat up and drink up too. You never know where your next meal is coming from here.’

J pulled his bowl towards him, stirred in the rum and tasted the porridge. It was much improved.

‘The girl is guiding me to plants and trees,’ he said to them both. ‘As I told you, I am a collector. Neither the governor nor Mr Joseph could think of anyone else who could assist me. But she is a good little girl. She is not much older than my own daughter. I should think she is little more than thirteen. She leads me to the forest and then waits quietly and leads me home.’

‘Her mother is a whore,’ the lodging-house woman remarked spitefully.

‘Well, she is but a little maid yet,’ J said firmly. ‘And I would not be the man to abuse her.’

The woman shook her head. ‘They’re not like us. She’s no more a maid than my young mastiff bitch is a maid. When she’s ready she’ll couple like an animal. They’re not like us, they’re half-beasts.’

‘You speak badly of them because of your losses,’ J’s fellow lodger said fairly. He nodded to J. ‘Mistress Whitely here lost her man and her child in the Indian rising of ’twenty-two. She doesn’t forget. No-one who was here at the time can ever forget.’

‘What happened?’ J asked.

The woman lowered herself to the bench opposite him and leaned her chin on her hand. ‘They were in and out of Jamestown every night and day,’ she said. ‘The children stayed in our houses, our men went out hunting with them. Again and again we would have starved if they had not traded with us – food, fish, game. They taught us how to plant: corn and the rest. They taught us how to harvest it and cook it. We would have died over and over again if they had not sold us food. The vicar was going to have an Indian school. We were going to teach them our ways, Christian ways. They were to be subjects of the king. There was not the slightest warning, not the hint of a warning. The chief had been their leader for years and he came and went through Jamestown as free as a white man. We had his own son as a hostage, we feared nothing. Nothing.’

‘Why did you have hostages then?’ J asked.

‘Not hostages,’ she corrected herself swiftly. ‘Adopted children. Godchildren. Children in our care. We were educating them in our ways. Turning them from savagery.’

‘And what happened?’ J asked.

‘They waited and planned.’ Her voice was lowered, the two men leaned forward to hear her, there was something fearful in the way the three white faces went closer together, and her voice dropped to a haunting whisper. ‘They waited and planned and at eight o’clock one morning – Good Friday morning they chose in their blasphemy – all over the country they came out of the bushes, to each little farm, to each little family, to each lone man, they came out and struck us dead. They planned to kill every single one of us without a word of warning reaching the others. And they’d have done it too; but for one little turncoat Indian boy who told his master that he had been ordered to kill him, and the man ran to Jamestown and raised the alarm.’

‘What happened?’

‘They opened the arsenal at Jamestown and called the settlers in. Everyone who was near enough came in and the town was saved, but up and down the river, in every isolated farmhouse, there was a white man and woman with their skull staved in by a stone axe.’

She turned her bleak face to J. ‘My husband’s head was cleaved in two, with an axe of stone,’ she said. ‘My little boy was stabbed through the heart with an arrow head of shell. They came against us without proper weapons, they came against us with reeds and shells and stones. It was like the land itself rose up and struck at us.’

There was a long silence.

She rose from the table and stacked the bowls, callous again. ‘That’s why I have no time for even the smallest girl of theirs,’ she said. ‘They are like stones and reeds and trees to me. I hate every stone and reed and tree in this land, and I hate every one of them. I hate them to their death and destruction. This land will never be home for me until everyone of them is gone.’

‘How many of us died?’ J asked. He said ‘us’ without thinking. This was a war of the dark forests against the white men; of course he counted himself among the planters.

‘Not quite four hundred,’ she said bitterly. ‘Four hundred men and women who wanted nothing more than to live in peace in a little part of a great great land. And then the hunger came.’

‘Hunger?’

‘We had to leave the crops in the field, we were too afraid to bring them in,’ she explained. ‘We all crowded into Jamestown and manned the guns over the wooden walls. It was a bitter winter, and there wasn’t enough to eat. And we couldn’t trade with them as we usually did. We had always traded with them for their winter stores, they always had plenty and they always sold to us. But now we were at war with the very people who had fed us.’

J waited for more.

‘We don’t talk about that time,’ she said shortly. ‘About that winter. We ate what we could, and no blame to those who found what they could.’

J turned to his fellow lodger for an explanation.

‘The graveyard,’ the man said in an undertone. ‘They dug up their dead and ate them.’

The woman’s face was stony. ‘We ate what we could get,’ she said. ‘And you’d have done the same. There’s no such thing as Christian behaviour when you’re starving. We did what we had to do.’

J felt the suppawn dinner rise up in the back of his throat at the thought of what the cook had tasted.

‘We survived,’ she said flatly.

‘I’m sure –’ J stammered.

‘And when the weather got warmer those who were not dead of their wounds, or of grief, or of starvation, died of the plague,’ she went on. ‘All of us packed in to this little town, all of us sick with grief and fear. Hundreds died that winter, and it was all the Indians’ fault. As soon as we could muster men and supplies we went against them. We passed a law and we swore an oath, that not a man or a woman would be left alive.’

The man nodded. ‘We hunted them down like dogs and we pushed them further and further away. It was an order – kill all the men and women and enslave the children. We pretended to be at peace for a while and we watched them plant their crops and commit themselves to their fields, and then, and only then, we went in and destroyed their harvest. They make fish weirs, intricate clever things, we destroyed them wherever we saw them. We drove away the game so that they would starve when they went hunting, we burned them out of their villages so they were homeless, we trampled their crops in the field so they would know hunger as we had known hunger. We took our revenge.’

‘We had some good hunting,’ the woman said reminiscently. She drew three mugs of ale and set them on the table. ‘I remember the soldiers from the fort coming in with the heads of the savages at their belt, and then setting them up along the gate like a gamekeeper stakes up a dead weasel.’

‘And are they finished now?’ J could hear the nervousness in his own voice.

‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘This was sixteen years ago, remember, and there’s not been a word from them since. They cannot live without the spread of land for their game and farming, and we have pushed them backwards and backwards towards the mountains. They used to live always on the move you see: winter inland, summer down towards the sea, spring to the fields. Once we built our houses and cleared the forest we drove them out, drove them like a herd of deer into bad foraging.’

‘They must hate us as their worst enemies,’ J said.

Neither of them answered. The man shrugged and lowered his face into his mug.

‘We won, and that’s the main thing,’ the woman said firmly. ‘It’s our land now and if they want to live here they have to serve us. There’s no more schools and teaching of them. There’s no more peace and promises of friendship. If they want to stay in our borders they do as they are bid. They can be our slaves or their blood can water the fields. Nothing else.’

At dawn J was down at the quayside, Jamestown silent behind him and only the gleam of the fires in the bread ovens showing that anyone was awake.

The girl was there before him. She had a small dugout canoe bobbing in the dark water. J surveyed it uneasily. It too much resembled the tree it recently had been. The bark had been stripped off and the sides roughly chiselled so that it was shaped to a point at both ends, the inside had been scorched and then scraped clean; but it still looked nothing more than a small tree: stripped, shaped, and hollowed.

She was seated in the prow, a paddle in the water, waiting for him. When she saw him she looked up and gestured, with a tiny authoritative movement, that he should take his place behind her.

‘Won’t it sink?’ J demanded.

Again she made that small gesture.

J assumed that she could swim, and reminded himself that they were alongside the dock and the ship which had brought him from England was moored at the quayside, within hailing distance. He put his little travelling satchel in the boat and then stepped in himself. At once it rocked and nearly overturned.

J dropped to his knees, and found that the canoe steadied immediately. Before him was a paddle. He drew it out, careful not to move too fast, and put it in the water, on the same side as hers.

She glanced over her shoulder, her child’s face serious, and shook her head. J transferred his paddle to the other side and was rewarded by a grave nod. Then she leaned forward and dug the blade of her paddle into the lapping river water, and they moved slowly away from the wooden pier.

At first J could see nothing, but all his other senses were fully alert. He felt the canoe moving smoothly and easily on the water, the current of the river and the ebb of the tide together drawing them out to sea. He sensed the immensity of the water around them, a great desert of water, and their canoe moving among it like a sleek, dark fish. He could smell the land ahead of them: the salt mud, rank tidewash weed and rotting driftwood; and from Jamestown, falling away behind them, the homely smell of woodsmoke and the rancid stink of the household waste which they tipped at the water’s edge for the tide to take away.

Slowly the sky lightened and J could see the girl’s outline, kneeling in the canoe ahead of him. She bowed forward, digging her paddle into the inky black water. J tried to copy her motion and the canoe suddenly skidded as he got the stroke right. She did not turn her head, she was absorbed in her own task of weaving air and water together.

He could hear the birds stirring in the woods on either side of the river. A thousand single calls and coos and cries were building to a cacophony of sound that drifted over the glassy water towards them. There must be hundreds of thousands of birds in the wood to make such a sweep of sound, and then the river birds started to wake. J heard a clatter of quacking and a huge flight of ducks took off from the bank on his left and headed towards the brightening sky. Gulls were swirling and calling overhead, and then the whole world suddenly went dark as a flock of pigeons, innumerable birds, fled across the sky, blocking the light for minutes and filling the whole shadowy world with the creaking of their wings and the rush of their passage.

J had a sense of a virgin world: a place where man was a stranger, an interloper, who had not left a mark, a world where vast flocks and herds of animals and birds moved, obeying their natural order, and nothing could prevent them. It was a new world, another Eden, a paradise for a plant collector. For the first time in years, for the first time since Jane’s death, J had a powerful sense of hope, of the possibilities before him. If men could make their home in this new land they could make a country like a paradise, rich and easy. Perhaps even he could make a home here. Perhaps he and the children could make a new home here and the old life at Lambeth, London, and the old losses of Lambeth, could be left far behind.

They paddled for an hour to cross the wide river and reach the other bank. Then they turned and followed the south bank eastward, towards the sea. Even though the ebbing tide was taking them downriver they had to paddle to hold the canoe on course, and J’s shoulders and arm muscles were tight with strain after the first hour, but the girl still moved fluidly and easily, as if the delicate feathering of the paddle and the deep digging movement to push the boat forward were nothing to her.

As they drew closer to the bank J saw the virgin woods coming down to the water’s edge and brightly coloured birds flirting from trees to water and back again. Every now and then there was a clearing in the woods and the bare earth of a ploughed field. Sometimes there were black men and white men planting side by side, and they raised their heads to watch the canoe go by. J waved, but the girl stared straight ahead as if she were a little statue, with no curiosity about her fellow men at all.

The sun came up, a pale yellow sun swimming in cloud. The mist was burned off the river and the stinging moths came out and formed a cloud around J’s red, sweaty face. He puffed them off his lips but he could not spare a hand from the paddle to swat them away. He shook his head irritably and the canoe made a little wobble in the water.

At that movement she glanced back and saw him, hot, flushed, irritable, and with one smooth stroke she turned the canoe and plunged towards the shade of an inlet.

The trees closed around them, over their heads, around their backs, they were hidden in a world of green. The girl ran the canoe up on a sandbank and stepped out. She slipped off her servant’s smock, folded it carefully and stowed it in the canoe. Then she pointed commandingly at him.

J took off his jacket, then she pointed at his boots.

‘I’ll keep my boots on,’ J said.

She shook her head. Pointed to the vast reach of water, closed her eyes and mimed a man plunging downwards, dragged under by the weight of his boots.

‘Oh,’ J said. ‘All right then.’

He sat on the wet sand and pulled off his boots, stood before her in his stockings, breeches and shirt. She gestured at the rest of his clothes.

J smiled, shook his head. ‘I’ll keep them on …’

She tugged at his shirt with an impatient little hand, and produced from the canoe, with a flourish, a little buckskin skirt, like her own.

‘Indian breeches?’ J asked.

She nodded.

‘I cannot dress like a savage,’ J said reasonably.

She pointed to the dugout canoe, to herself, to the distance they had come and the distance they were to go. Her meaning was clear. You are travelling like one of the Powhatan, with one of the Powhatan. Why not be comfortable?

‘I’ll get bitten,’ J protested. He made little pinchers of his thumb and finger and pinched at the skin of his forearm, showed her the tiny irritating swellings on the skin of his face.

The girl nodded and produced the jar of grease she had used in the forest the day before, held her own smooth arm for his inspection, turned her little unmarked face towards him.

J looked around him in embarrassment. But the woods were loud only with birdsong and impervious to his shame. There was no-one within ten miles in any direction.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said awkwardly.

He stripped off his breeches, grateful for his long shirt tails which hid his nakedness from her. She held out the buckskin skirt. J struggled to put it on, under his shirt. She stepped lightly around to his back, pulled the shirt out of the way and tied the strings of the apron for him. The soft leather nestled against him like another skin. The air was cool on his legs. J felt white and ungainly, a bleached leviathan beside her slight brown body; but he also felt comfortable for the first time since he had arrived in this painfully humid country.

She gestured that he should take off his shirt. J shucked it over his head and then she presented him with the jar of grease. With a sense of nothing left to lose, J put his fingers into the pot and smoothed it all over his face, his neck and his chest. It smelled dreadful and felt as sticky as honey.

She gave a tiny trill of laughter, and he looked down and saw his white skin streaked with red. She held out her bare arm to show him the comparison. Against her treacle-coloured skin the grease showed only as a darker brown, but J was striped white and red.

He paused, but she clicked at him like someone encouraging an animal, took the pot herself and ducked under his arm. He felt her little hands painting the stuff on his back. Despite himself he felt the tiniest flicker of arousal at the touch. But then she came before him again, and he saw that grave child’s face and the swinging black plait of hair, and remembered that she was a little maid, not much older than his daughter, and under his protection.

J rubbed the grease into his skin. He thought he must look like a mummer at a feast, painted and dressed like a fool. But at least he felt cool. His embarrassment faded, and then he realised also he was no longer being bitten. The grease was repelling the insects that danced in a cloud on the waters all around them.

The girl nodded at him with evident approval and picked up his discarded clothes, folded them and stowed them in the canoe. Then she steadied the canoe while he climbed in again.

Without his breeches and awkward boots, J found he was more comfortable. There was a hollow carved in the wooden floor and without the bulk of his breeches and boots his knees fitted into the space. The wood, slightly porous, was cool and pleasantly damp on his bare legs, the river air blew gently against his naked chest. He put his face up, enjoying the cool breeze on his neck, feeling the sweat on his face cooling and drying. The girl gave him a small triumphant smile and pushed off, stepping into the canoe before him and kneeling in one smooth movement. The canoe barely bobbed in the water. Then she turned it around and paddled it strongly towards the main river once more.

They paddled until midday. J was troubled neither by insects nor by the growing heat of the sun in his face. When the sun was at its highest, the girl turned the canoe into an inlet of the river and ran it ashore.

At once the cool greenness of the trees engulfed them. J got out of the canoe, and staggered a little on his cramped legs. She smiled and went sure-footed as a deer up the sandy beach to the forest. J reached for his satchel and followed her.

She offered him the forest with a little wave of her hand, as a princess might gesture to a visiting ambassador as if to say: ‘my lands’.

J nodded. The girl took his hand and pulled him a little way towards the trees. He was to go and collect whatever specimens he wanted. J paused.

‘What will you do?’

She made a gesture to show that she would stay there. She picked up a few dry sticks and piled them together: she would make a fire. She took a little hoeing stick from the purse at her belt, and mimed digging up roots: she would find food. She gestured towards the trees and mimed sleep: she would find some shelter for them.

‘We stay here tonight?’ J asked, repeating her mime of sleep.

She nodded.

‘I will come back here in a little while,’ he said. He pointed to himself and to the forest, and showed his walking fingers. She nodded, and then mimed herself calling and then a mime of listening.

‘I’m to stay where I can hear you?’ J asked, and was rewarded with a nod and a smile.

Feeling like a child sent out to play, J went to the canoe and pulled on his leather boots, took his bag and went along the shoreline. He glanced back.

She was drawing the canoe higher up the beach, away from the reach of the tide. Then she turned and started collecting firewood. She seemed as comfortably at home in this wilderness as a young woman in the kitchen of her own house. J turned away and wandered further along the shoreline, his eyes at the edge of the wood looking for saplings and little plants in their first flush of spring growth that he might get safely home to England.

He obeyed her order that he stay within earshot, and worked his way in a sweep around their little camp until he emerged on the shoreline on the other side, his satchel bulging with seedlings and cuttings wrapped in damp linen.

She was putting the finishing touches on a shelter for the night. She had bent three saplings together and lashed them to make a low bender. She had roofed them with some wide green leaves and filled in the walls with rushes. The canoe was drawn up before the open mouth of the little hut and tipped on its side as protection, and there was a small fire smoking before the hut and two fishes staked on sharp sticks, waiting to be roasted. J came quietly but she did not jump when she saw him, he imagined that she had heard his every move since he had left her at midday. She nodded gravely as she saw him and then pointed to his satchel.

‘Yes. I’ve done well,’ he said. He opened the flap of the bag and showed her. She nodded her approval and then indicated behind him. She had weeded and dug a little patch of ground.

J felt a sense of real delight. ‘For my plants?’ He pointed to his satchel.

She nodded and looked at him, querying if it was what he wanted.

‘That is excellent!’ J beamed. ‘I shall collect more tomorrow and plant them up here, and only move them again when we go back to Jamestown. Thank you!’

The girl nodded with a little smile and he saw that she relished his praise just as his daughter Frances did. ‘You’re very, very clever,’ he said, and was rewarded by a slight blush and another smile.

She turned to the fire and threw on some dry kindling, and the blaze flickered up. She hunkered down on her heels and fanned the flame with a handful of stiff reeds until the twigs were glowing red, then she took one stick with the spitted fish and gave J the other. She showed him how to hold it above the glowing twigs so that it roasted in the heat but did not catch fire, and to turn it when the skin was brown and crispy.

When it was cooked she tipped the one on her stick on to a broad green leaf and proffered it to J, and then took the one he had cooked which was too dark on one side, and still a little raw on the other. She bowed her head over it for a moment, for all the world as if she were saying grace in a Christian home, and extended a hand to the sky, then turned it palm down to the earth. J realised that she was saying grace, which he had quite forgotten, and he had a momentary uncomfortable sense of confusion as to which of them was the ignorant pagan and which the civilised human. Then she smiled at him and started eating.

It was a firm white fish with a wonderful spicy taste from the scorched skin. J ate with relish, leaving only the bones, the head, tail and fins. When he had finished she drew from inside the canoe a little basket of dried fruit and gave him a handful of berries, dried blueberries. They were like a handful of pebbles in his mouth at first and then their taste seeped out, making his face pucker with their sourness, which made her laugh.

It was growing cold. The sun was behind them, inland behind the high trees. J put some more wood on the fire, and the girl got to her feet. She took a small glowing twig from the fire, went down to the water’s edge, and laid the twig on a shell at her bare feet. From the purse at her waist she took out a small pinch of something and then, without embarrassment, untied the thong of her buckskin skirt and laid it to one side. She picked up the burning twig and the pinch of herbs and, naked, waded into the water. J heard her gasp a little at the coldness of it.

The tide was coming in; the river, a mixture of salt and sweet, lapped at the sand beach. The girl was nothing more than a dark shadow against the dancing, gleaming water. J watched her blow on the glowing end of the twig and then put it to her cupped hand and blow again. She was lighting the herbs. J smelled a sharp, acrid smell like tobacco, carried to him on the onshore wind. Then he saw her scatter the smoking herb on the water.

She washed her face and her body, and then raised her wet head to where the moon was showing low on the horizon and lifted her hands in prayer. Then she turned back to the land and waded out of the water.

J thought of evening prayers at Lambeth, of his dead wife’s faith, and of the lodging-house woman who had assured him that these people were animals. He shook his head at the contradictions. He pulled off his boots and went into the shelter she had built them.

Inside she had heaped two beds of leaves. They were soft and aromatic. J’s clothes were neatly spread over the top of one heap, his travelling cloak on top of it all. J rolled himself up in its comforting smelly wool and was asleep before she had come inside.

J and the Indian girl stayed for nearly a month in the shelter she had built. Every day they went further afield, paddling in the morning in the canoe, and then she would run it aground and fish, or set snares for birds, while J foraged in the undergrowth for saplings and young spring growth. They would come companionably home in the light of the setting sun to the little camp and J would heel in his collection while she plucked the birds or cleaned the fish and prepared the evening meal.

There was a powerful dreamlike quality to the time. It was a relationship like no other. The grieving man and the silent girl worked together day after day with a bond that grew but needed no words. J was absorbed in one of the greatest pleasures a man can have – discovering a new country, a country completely unknown to him – and she, freed from the conventions and dangers of Jamestown, practised her woodcraft skills and observed the laws of her own people for once without a critical white observer judging and condemning her every move, but only with a man who smiled at her kindly and let her teach him how to live under the trees.

They never exchanged words. J would talk to her, as he would talk to his little seedlings in the seed bed she had made for him, for the pleasure of hearing his own voice, and for the sense of making a connection. Sometimes she would smile and nod or make a little grunt of affirmation or give a trill of laughter, but she never spoke words, not in her language nor his own, until J thought it must be as the magistrate had said and that she was dumb.

He wanted to encourage her to speak. He wanted to teach her English, he could not imagine how she could survive in Jamestown, comprehending only the outflung pointing arm or a clip to the head. He showed her a tree and said ‘pine’, he showed her a leaf and said ‘leaf’, but she would only smile and laugh and refuse to repeat what he told her.

‘You must learn to speak English,’ J said earnestly to her. ‘How will you manage if you cannot understand anything that is said to you?’

The girl shook her head and bent over her work. She was twisting supple green twigs into a mesh of some sort. As he watched she made the final knot and held it up to show him. J was so ignorant that he could not even tell what it was that she had made. She was smiling proudly.

She set the little contraption on the forest floor and stepped back a few paces. She dropped to her feet, hunched her back and sidled towards it, her arms stretched before her, her hands shaped like beaks, snapping together. At once she was a lobster, unmistakable.

J laughed. ‘Lobster!’ he said. ‘Say “lobster”!’

She pushed back her hair where it fell over the left side of her face and shook her head in her refusal. She mimed eating, as if to say, ‘No. Eat lobster.’

J pointed to the trap. ‘You have made a lobster pot?’

She nodded and stowed it in the canoe ready for setting at dawn the next day when they went out.

‘But you must learn to speak,’ J persisted. ‘What will you do when I go back to England? If your mother is put in prison again?’

She shook her head, refusing to understand him, and then she took a twig from the fire and walked towards the river and J fell silent, respecting the ritual of casting tobacco on the water, which was the same at dawn and dusk, and which marked her transition from day to night to day again.

He went into the shelter and pretended to sleep so that she might come in and sleep beside him without any fear. It was a ritual he had developed of his own to keep them both safe from his growing fascination with her.

Only on the first night, when he had been so weary from paddling that he could not keep his eyes open, had he slept at once. All the other nights he had lain awake listening to her near-imperceptible breathing, enjoying the sense of her closeness beside him. He did not desire her as he might have desired a woman. It was a feeling more subtle and complicated than that. J felt as he might have done if some precious rare animal had chosen to trust him, had chosen to rest beside him. With all his heart he wanted neither to frighten nor disturb her, with all his heart he wanted to stretch out a hand and stroke that smooth, beautiful flank.

Physically, she was the most beautiful object he had ever seen. Not even his wife Jane had ever been naked before him, they had always made love in a tumble of clothes, generally in darkness. His children had been bound in their swaddling bands as tight as silkworms in a chrysalis from the moment of their birth, and dressed in tiny versions of adult clothing as soon as they were able to walk. J had never seen either of them naked, had never bathed them, had never dressed them. The play of light on bare skin was strange to J, and he found that when the girl was working near him he watched her, for the sheer pleasure of seeing her rounded limbs, the strength in her young body, the lovely line of her neck, the curve of her spine, the nestling mystery of her sex which he glimpsed below the little buckskin apron.

Of course he thought of touching her. The casual instruction from Mr Joseph not to rape her was tantamount to admitting that he might do so. But J would not have hurt her, any more than he would have broken an eggshell in a drawer of the collection at Lambeth. She was a thing of such simple beauty that he wanted only to hold her, to caress her. He supposed that of all the things he might imagine with her, what he wanted to do most was to collect her, and take her back to Lambeth to the warm, sunlit rarities room where she would be the most beautiful object of them all.

J would have lost track of time in the woods, but one morning the girl started to take the thatch from the roof of the little hut and untie the saplings. They sprang back undamaged, only a slight bend in the trunks betraying the fact that they had been walls and roof joists.

‘What are you doing?’ J asked her.

In silence she pointed back the way they had come. It was time to go home.

‘Already?’

She nodded and turned to J’s little bed of plants.

It was filled with heads and leaves of small plants. J’s satchel was bursting with gathered seed heads. With her hoeing stick she started to lift the plants, tenderly pulling at the thin filaments of roots and laying them in the dampened linen. J took his trowel and worked at the other end of the row. Carefully they packed them into the canoe.

The fire which she had faithfully kept glowing for all the days of their stay she now damped with water, and then scuffed over with sand. The cooking sticks which they had used as spits for fish, game birds, crabmeat and even the final feast of lobster she broke and cast into the river. The reeds which had thatched the walls and the leaves which had thatched the roof she scattered. In only a little while their campsite was destroyed, and a white man would have looked at the clearing and thought himself the first man there.

J found that he was not ready to leave. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said unwillingly. He looked into her serene uncomprehending face. ‘You know … I don’t want to go back to Jamestown, and I don’t want to go back to England.’

She looked at him, waiting for his next words. It was as if he were free to decide, and she would do whatever he wished.

J looked out over the river. Now and then the water stirred with the thick shoals of fish. Even in the short weeks that they had been living at the riverside he had seen more and more birds flying into the country from the south. He had a sense of the continent stretching forever to the south, unendingly to the north. Why should he turn his back on it and return to the dirty little town on the edge of the river, surrounded with felled trees, inhabited by people who struggled for everything, for life itself?

The girl did not prompt him. She hunkered down on the sand and looked out over the river, content to wait for his decision.

‘Shall I stay?’ J asked, secure in the knowledge that she could not understand his rapid speech, that he was raising no hopes. ‘Shall we build ourselves another shelter and spend our days going out and bringing in fine specimens of plants? I could send them home to my father, he could pay off our debts with them, and then he could send me enough money so that I could live here always. He could raise my children, and when they are grown they could join me. I need never go back to that house in London, never again sleep alone in that bed, in her bed. Never dream of her. Never go into church past her grave, never hear her name, never have to speak of her.’

She did not even turn her head to look at him, to see if there was meaning in his quiet whispering.

‘I could make a new life here, I could become a new man. And this year, next year, you will be a beautiful woman,’ J said, his voice very gentle. ‘And then …’

She turned at that, as if she understood the tone of his voice. Turned and looked directly at him, without shame, as if she were about to ask him what he meant – if he were serious. J broke off and flushed. He managed an awkward smile.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘Just as well this all means nothing to you! Better be off!’

She rose to her feet and gestured to the river. Her half-tilted head asked: ‘Which way?’ South into the country, which neither of them knew, or upriver to Jamestown?

‘Jamestown,’ J said shortly, pointing north-west. ‘I have been rambling like a fool. Jamestown, of course.’

He seated himself in the canoe and steadied it with his paddle. It was easier now that they had gone out every day and he had grown skilful. She pushed off the prow of the boat and stepped aboard. They paddled as a team and the boat wove easily along the shoreline, and then they felt the stronger push of the river.

An hour out of Jamestown, where the river started getting dirty and the bank was pocked with felled trees, she called a halt and they ran the canoe ashore. Slowly, unwillingly, they washed off the grease in the water. She took a handful of leaves and scrubbed his back so that his white skin shone through the dark grease and the familiar smell, which he had hated so much on the first day, was dispersed. Together they put on the clothes they must wear in the town, and she shrank into the confines of the ragged shift and looked no longer like a deer in dappled sunlight but instead like a sluttish maidservant.

J, shrugging back into his shirt and breeches after the freedom of the buckskin loincloth, felt as if he were taking on the shackles of some sort of prison, becoming a man again with a man’s sorrows and no longer a free being, at home in the forest. At once the cloud of insects settled greedily on his sunburned arms and shoulders and face. J swatted at them and swore, and the girl smiled with her lips but with no laughter in her eyes.

‘We’ll come out again,’ J said encouragingly. He pointed to himself and to her and to the trees. ‘We’ll come out again some day.’

She nodded but her eyes were dark.

They got into the canoe and began to paddle upstream to Jamestown. J was plagued all the way by the biting moths and the sweat in his eyes, the tightness of the shirt across his back and the rub of his boots. By the time they came alongside the little wooden quay he was sweating and irritable. There was a new vessel in port and a crowd on the quayside. No-one wasted more than a quick glance on the little Indian girl and the white man in the dugout canoe.

They ran the canoe aground at the side of the quay and started to unload the plants. From the shadow of the dockside building a woman came and stood before them.

She was an Indian woman but she wore a dress and a shawl tied across her breasts. Her hair was tied back like a white woman’s and it exposed her face which was badly scarred, pocked all over with pale ridges of scar tissue as if someone, long ago, had fired a musket at point-blank range into her face.

‘Mr Tradescant?’ She spoke with a harsh accent.

J spun to hear his name and recoiled from the bitterness in her face. She looked past him at the girl and spoke in a rapid string of words, fluting and meaningless as birdsong.

The child answered, as voluble as she, shaking her head emphatically and then pointing to J and to the plants and to the canoe.

The woman turned to J again. ‘She tells me you have not hurt her.’

‘Of course not!’

‘Not raped her.’

‘No!’

The bowstring-tight line of the woman’s shoulders suddenly slumped, and she gave a sharp sob, like a cough of vomit. ‘When they told me you had taken her into the woods I thought I would not see her again.’

‘I am a plant collector,’ J said wearily. ‘See. There are the plants. She was my guide. She made a camp. She hunted and fished for us. She has been a very, very good girl.’ He glanced at her and she gave him a swift encouraging smile. ‘She has been very helpful. I am in her debt.’

The Indian woman had not followed all of the words but she saw the glance that passed between them and read correctly the affection and mutual trust.

‘You are her mother?’ J asked. ‘Just … er … released?’

The woman nodded. ‘Mr Joseph told me he had given her to you for the month. I thought I would not see her again. I thought you had taken her to the woods to use her and bury her there.’

‘I’m sorry,’ J said awkwardly. ‘I am a stranger here.’

She looked at him with a bitter line around her mouth. ‘You are all strangers here,’ she observed.

‘She can speak?’ J remarked, tentatively, wondering what it might mean.

The woman nodded, not bothering to answer him.

The girl had finished unloading the canoe. She looked at J and gestured to the plants, as if asking what should be done with them. J turned to the woman. ‘I have to fetch some barrels and prepare these plants for my voyage home. I may take a passage on this ship. Can she stay and help me?’

‘We’ll both help,’ the woman said shortly. ‘I don’t leave her alone in this town.’ She hitched her skirts a little and went down to the shoreline. J watched the two women. They did not embrace; but they stood just inches away from each other and gazed into each other’s faces as if they could read all they needed to know in one exchange of looks. Then the mother nodded briefly and they turned side by side and their shoulders brushed as they bent over the plants together.

J went up to his lodging to fetch the barrels for packing the plants.

They worked until it was dusk, and then they worked again the next day, wrapping the cuttings in earth and damp linen, layering them in the barrel separated by damp linen and leaves, and packing the seeds in dry sand and sealing down the lid. When it was done, J had four half-barrels of plants which he would keep open to the air and damp with fresh water, and one sealed barrel of seeds. He shouted up to the ship and a couple of sailors came down and loaded them for him. At least he would have room to care for them on the voyage home. There were only a couple of people making the return voyage to England. The rest of the space was taken up with the cargo of tobacco.

‘We sail in the morning at first light,’ the captain warned him. ‘You’d best get your things aboard tonight and sleep aboard yourself. I can’t wait for passengers, when the tide ebbs we go out with it.’

J nodded. ‘I will.’ He had no desire to return to the inn and the embittered landlady. He thought if she called the girl a beast in his hearing then he would speak in her defence and then there would be a quarrel and perhaps worse.

He turned to the two women. ‘What is her name?’ he asked the mother.

‘Mary.’

‘Mary?’

She nodded. ‘She was taken from me when she was a baby and baptised Mary.’

‘Is that the name you use for her?’

She hesitated, as if she was not sure she would trust him. But then there was a murmur from the girl at her side.

‘She is called Suckahanna.’

‘Suckahanna?’ J confirmed.

The girl smiled and nodded. ‘It means “water”.’

J nodded, and then the fact of her speaking his own language suddenly struck him. ‘You can speak English?’

She nodded.

He had a moment of profound, unhappy bewilderment. ‘Then why did you never …? You never …? I did not know! All this time we have travelled together and you have been dumb!’

‘I ordered her never to speak to a white man,’ the woman said. ‘I thought she would be safer if she did not answer.’

J opened his mouth to argue – it must be right that the girl should be able to speak, to defend herself.

But the mother cut him off with an abrupt gesture of her hand. ‘I have just come from a month in prison for saying the wrong thing,’ she pointed out. ‘Sometimes it is better to say nothing at all.’

J glanced at the ship behind them. Suddenly he did not want to leave. The realisation that the girl had a name, and could understand him, made her intensely interesting. What had she been thinking during their days of silent companionship? What might she not say to him? It was as if she had been a princess under a spell in a romance and suddenly she had found her tongue. When he had confided in her and told her of his feelings, for his home, for his children, for his plants, she had met his confession with an impassive face. But she had understood, she had understood everything he said. And so, in a way, she knew him better than any woman had ever known him before. And she would know that only yesterday morning he was tempted to stay in this new land; to stay with her.

‘I have to go. I am promised in England,’ he said, thinking that they might contradict him, that he might not have to go, as if the breaking of the spell which had kept her silent might release him too.

The two women said nothing, they simply watched the indecision and reluctance in his face.

‘What will become of you two now?’ he asked, as if their plans might affect him.

‘We will leave Jamestown,’ the woman said quietly. ‘We will go back into the forest and find our people. I thought we would be safer to stay here, my husband and my father are dead. I thought I could live inside the walls and work for the white men. I thought I could be their servant.’ She shook her head. ‘But there is no trusting them. We will go back to our own.’

‘And Suckahanna?’

The woman looked at him, her eyes bitter. ‘There is no life for her,’ she said. ‘We can find our people but not our old life. The places where we used to grow our crops are planted with tobacco, the rivers are thin of fish and the game is going, scared away by the guns. Everywhere we used to run, there is the mark of a boot on the trails. I don’t know where she will live her life. I don’t know where she will find a home.’

‘Surely there is room for your people as well as the planters,’ J said passionately. ‘I can’t believe there is not space in this land … we were out for nearly a month and we saw no-one. It’s a mighty land, it stretches for miles and miles. Surely there is room for your people as well as mine?’

‘But your people don’t want us here. Not since the war. When we plant fields they destroy our crops, when they see a fish weir they break it, when they see a village they fire it. They have sworn we shall be destroyed as a people. When my family were killed they took me into slavery and I thought that Suckahanna and I would be safe as slaves. But they beat me and raped me, and the men will soon want her too.’

‘She could come with me,’ J suggested wildly. ‘I could take her to my home in England. I have a son and a daughter there, I could bring them up all together.’

The woman thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘She is called Suckahanna,’ she said firmly. ‘She must be by the river.’

J was about to argue but then he remembered seeing Pocahontas, the great Princess Pocahontas, when he was just a boy himself and had been taken to view her as a child might be taken to see the lions in the Tower. She had not been Princess Pocahontas by then, she had been Rebecca Rolfe, wearing ordinary English clothes and shivering in an English winter. A few weeks later she had died, in exile, longing for her own land.

‘I will come again,’ he said. ‘I will take these things to England and come out again. And next time, when I come, I shall build a house here and you shall be my servant and she shall be safe.’

‘How could she be safe with you?’ her mother asked swiftly. ‘She’s not a child, though she’s so slight. She’s near thirteen now, by the time you come back she’ll be a woman. There’s no safety for a Powhatan woman in the white man’s town.’

J thought for a moment and then took the step, the next step, speaking without thought, speaking from his heart, his unexamined heart. ‘I shall marry her,’ he promised. ‘She will be my wife and I will keep her safe and she shall have her own house and fields here. I shall build her a house beside the river and she need fear for nothing.’

He was speaking to her mother but he was looking at the girl. A deep rosy blush was spreading from the coarse linen neck of the shift up to her forehead where the bear grease still stained her brown skin at the dark hairline. ‘Should you like that?’ J asked her gently. ‘I am old enough to be your father, I know. And I don’t understand your ways. But I could keep you safe, and I could make a house for you.’

‘I should like that,’ the girl said very quietly. ‘I should like to be your wife.’

The older woman put out her hand to J and he felt the roughened palm in his own. Then she took her daughter’s hand and joined them together in a hard grip. ‘When you come back she shall be your wife,’ she promised him.

‘I will,’ the girl said.

‘I will,’ J swore.

The woman released them and turned away as if there was nothing more to be said. J watched her go, and then turned to Suckahanna. She seemed at once very familiar, the easy companion of weeks of travelling and camping, and exquisitely strange, a girl on the edge of womanhood, a virgin who would be his wife.

Carefully, as if he were transplanting a seedling, he put his hand to her cheek, stroked the line of her jaw. She quivered as he touched her but moved neither forwards nor back. She let him caress her face for a moment, for one moment only; and then she turned on her heel and ran from him.

‘Come back soon,’ she called, and he could hardly see her in the darkness as she went swiftly after her mother, only her linen shift gleaming in the dusk. ‘Come in the good time, the fruitful time, Nepinough, and I shall make you a great feast and we will build our house before winter comes.’

‘I will!’ J said again. But she was already gone, and the next day at dawn the ship sailed and he did not see her.

Summer 1638, London

J’s ship arrived at London docks at dawn in early April and he came blearily out of his cabin into the cold English air, wrapped in his travelling cloak with his hat pulled down on his head. A wagoner was idling on the dockside, fiddling with the feedbag at the head of a dozing horse.

‘Are you for hire?’ J shouted down.

The man looked up. ‘Aye!’

‘Come and fetch my goods,’ J called. The man started up the gangplank and then recoiled at the waving fronds of saplings and small trees.

‘Goods?’ he asked. ‘This is a forest!’

J grinned. ‘There’s more than this,’ he said.

Together they humped the barrels filled with damp earth down the gangplank and into the wagon, the whippy branches of trees stirring above their heads. Then J brought another barrel of seeds and nuts, and finally his own small bundle of clothes and a chest of rarities.

‘I know where we’re headed,’ the man said, climbing on to the box and waking the horse with a slap of the reins on its back.

‘You do?’

‘Tradescant’s Ark,’ the man said certainly. ‘It’s the only place in the world that you’d go to with half a forest on board.’

‘Quite right,’ J said, and put his feet up on the board. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked.

The carter spat accurately over the side of the wagon and hit the dirt road. ‘Nothing new,’ he said. ‘A lot worse.’

J waited.

‘Everything you can eat or drink is taxed,’ the carter said. ‘But that was true before you went away, I dare say. Now they’ve got a new tax, a rotting crime of a tax: ship money levied on everyone, however far they are from the sea. It’s the ports that should pay ship money, they’re the ones that need the navy to keep them free of pirates. But the king is making all the towns pay, even inland towns. My sister lives in Cheltenham. Why should she pay ship money? What are the seas to her? But she has to.’

J nodded. ‘The king won’t call a parliament, then?’

‘They say he won’t even hear the word mentioned.’

J allowed himself a pleasurable ‘tut tut’ of disapproval.

‘If he called a parliament and asked them to set a tax they would tell him what they think of him as king,’ the carter said baldly. ‘They would tell him what they think about a Privy Council which is advised by a Papist French queen, and a court which is run by Frenchmen and Jesuits.’

‘That can’t be so,’ J said firmly. ‘I’ve only been gone a few months.’

‘It’s well known the Tradescants are the king’s servants,’ the man said unpleasantly.

‘It is indeed,’ J agreed, remembering his father’s regular warnings against gossip that could be overheard as treason.

‘Then I’ll say no more,’ the carter remarked. ‘And see how you like it when they knock on your door and tell you that now there is a monopoly declared on the dirt in your garden and you have to pay a fine of ten per cent to some courtier if you want to plant in it. Because that’s what’s happened to every other trade in the kingdom while the king taxes the traders but won’t call a parliament which could tax the gentry for their rents.’

The man paused, waiting for a shocked response. J discreetly kept silent.

‘You’ll have heard that the Scots have sworn they won’t read their prayers from the new book?’

‘No?’

The man nodded. ‘All of ’em. Taken against Archbishop Laud’s prayer book. Say they won’t read a word of it. Archbishop is put out. King is put out. Some say he’ll make ’em, some say he can’t make ’em. Why should a king order what you say to God?’

‘I don’t know,’ J said tactfully. ‘I’ve no opinion on the matter.’ And he tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed as the wagon jolted down the familiar road to his home.

He did not lift his hat as they went down the South Lambeth road towards the common; but he looked sharply all around him from under the brim. It was all well. His father’s house still stood proudly, set back from the road, the little bridge spanning the stream that ran alongside the road. It was a handsome farmhouse in the old timbered style, but on the side of the house was the ambitious new wing, commissioned by his father for the housing of the rarities, their great collection of oddities from the monstrous to the miniature. At the back of the house was the garden which made their name and their livelihood, and the rarities room overlooked the garden through its great windows of Venetian glass. J, taught by a long-standing habit, looked at the ground as the cart drove around the south side of the building so that he did not see his father’s vainglorious stone crest, affixed to the new wing in defiance both of the college of heralds and of the simple truth. They were not Tradescant esquires and never had been, but John Tradescant, his father, had drawn up and then commissioned a stonemason to carve his own crest; and nothing J could say could persuade him to take it down.

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 substantial 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 surviving 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.

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 her 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?’

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.’

Baby John looked up and wiped his milky moustache on his sleeve.

‘Use your napkin,’ Hester corrected him.

Baby John grinned. ‘I shall go to Oatrands,’ he said firmly. ‘Pranting and pranning and pruning. I shall go.’

‘Certainly,’ Hester said, and she emphasised the correct pronunciation: ‘Planting and planning and pruning are most important.’

Baby John nodded with dignity. ‘Now I shall go and look at my warities.’

‘Can I take the money from the visitors?’ Frances asked.

Hester glanced at the clock standing in the corner of the room. It was not yet nine. ‘They won’t come for another hour or so,’ she said. ‘You can fetch your school work, both of you, for an hour, and then you can work in the rarities room.’

‘Oh, Hester!’ Frances complained.

Hester shook her head and started to pile up the empty porridge bowls and the spoons. ‘Books first,’ she said. ‘And, Baby John, I want to see all our names written fair in your copybook.’

‘And then I will go pranting,’ he said.

Hester packed John’s clothes for him and added a few jars of bottled summer fruit to the hamper which would follow him by wagon. She was up early on the day of his departure to see him ride away from the Ark.

‘You had no need to rise,’ John said awkwardly.

‘Of course I had need. I am your wife.’

He turned and tightened the girth on his big bay cob to avoid speaking. They were both aware that since the first night they had not made love, and now he was going away for an indefinite period.

‘Please take care at court,’ Hester said gently. ‘These are difficult times for men of principle.’

‘I must say what I believe if I am asked,’ John said. ‘I don’t venture it, but I won’t deny it.’

She hesitated. ‘You need not deny your beliefs but you could say nothing and avoid the topic altogether,’ she suggested. ‘The queen especially is touchy about her religion. She holds to her Papist faith, and the king inclines more and more to her. And now that he is trying to impose Archbishop Laud’s prayer book on Scotland, this is not a time for any Independent thinker; be he Baptist or Presbyterian.’

‘You wish to advise me?’ he asked with a hint of warning in his voice which reminded her that a wife was always in second place to a man.

‘I know the court,’ she said steadily. ‘I spent my girlhood there. My uncle is an official painter there, still. I have half a dozen cousins and friends who write to me. I do know things, husband. I know that it is no place for a man who thinks for himself.’

‘They’re hardly likely to care what their gardener thinks,’ John scoffed. ‘An undergardener at that. I’ve not even been appointed to my father’s post, yet.’

She hesitated. ‘They care so much that they threw Archie the jester out with his jacket pulled over his head for merely joking about Archbishop Laud; and Archie was the queen’s great favourite. They certainly care what you think. They are taking it upon themselves to care what every single man, woman, and child thinks. That’s what the very quarrel is all about. About what every individual thinks in his private heart. That’s why every single Scotsman has to sign his own covenant with the king and swear to use the Archbishop’s prayer book. They care precisely what every single man thinks.’ She paused. ‘They may indeed question you, John; and you have to have an answer ready that will satisfy them.’

‘I have a right to speak to my God in my own way!’ John insisted stubbornly. ‘I don’t need to recite by rote, I am not a child. I don’t need a priest to dictate my prayers. I certainly don’t need a bishop puffed up with pride and wealth to tell me what I think. I can speak to God direct when I am planting His seeds in the garden and picking His fruit from His trees. And He speaks to me then. And I honour Him then.

‘I use the prayer book well enough – but I don’t believe that those are the only words that God hears. And I don’t believe that the only men God attends are bishops wrapped up in surplices, and I don’t believe that God made Charles king, and that service to the king is one and the same as service to God. And Jane –’ He broke off, suddenly aware that he should not speak to his new wife of his constant continuing love for her predecessor.

‘Go on,’ Hester said.

‘Jane’s faith never wavered, not even when she was dying in pain,’ John said. ‘She would never have denied her belief that God spoke simple and clear to her and she could speak to Him. She would have died for that belief, if she had been called to do so. And for her sake, if for nothing else, I will not deny my faith.’

‘And what about her children?’ Hester asked. ‘D’you think she would want you to die for her faith and leave her children orphans?’

John checked. ‘It won’t come to that.’

‘When I was at Oatlands only six months ago, the talk was all about each man’s faith and how far each man would go. If the king insists on the Scots following the prayer book he is bound to insist on it in England too. If he goes to war with the Scots to make them do as he bids, and some say he might do that, who can doubt that he will do the same in England?’

John shook his head. ‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘Nonsense and heartache about nothing.’

‘It is not nothing. I am warning you,’ Hester said steadily. ‘No-one knows how far the king will go when he has to protect the queen and her faith, and to conceal his own backsliding towards popery. No-one knows how far he will go to make everyone conform to the same church. He has taken it into his head that one church will make one nation, and that he can hold one nation in the palm of his hand and govern without a word to anyone. If you insist on your faith at the same time as the king is insisting on his, you cannot say what trouble you might be running towards.’

John thought for a moment and then he nodded. ‘You may be right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘You are a powerfully cautious woman, Hester.’

‘You have given me a task and I shall do it,’ she said, unsmiling. ‘You have given me the task of bringing up your children and being a wife to you. I have no wish to be a widow. I have no wish to bring up orphans.’

‘But I will not compromise my faith,’ he warned her.

‘Just don’t flaunt it.’

The horse was ready. John tied his cape tightly at the neck and set his hat on his head. He paused; he did not know how he should say farewell to this new, common-sense wife of his. To his surprise she put out her hand, as a man would do, and shook his hand as if she were his friend.

John felt oddly warmed by the frankness of the gesture. He smiled at her, led the horse over to the mounting block and got up into the saddle.

‘I don’t know what state the gardens will be in,’ he remarked.

‘For sure, they will appoint you in your father’s place when you are back at court,’ Hester said. ‘It was only your absence which made them delay. It is out of sight, at once forgotten with them. When you return they will insist on your service again.’

He nodded. ‘I hope they have not mistook my orders while I was gone. If you leave a garden for a season it slips back a year.’

Hester stepped forward and patted the horse’s neck. ‘The children will miss you,’ she said. ‘May I tell them when you will be home?’

‘By November,’ he promised.

She stepped back from the horse’s head and let him go. He smiled at her as he passed out of the stable yard and round the path which led to the gate. As he rode out he had a sudden sense of joyful freedom – that he could ride away from his home or ride back to it and that everything would be managed without him. This was his father’s last gift to him – his father who had also married a woman who could manage well in his absence. John turned in his saddle and waved at Hester who was still standing at the corner of the yard where she could look after him.

John waved his whip and turned the horse towards Lambeth and the ferry. Hester watched him go and then turned back to the house.

The court was due at Oatlands in late October so John was busy as soon as he arrived planting and preparing the courts which were enclosed by the royal apartments. The knot gardens always looked well in winter, the sharp geometric shapes of the low box hedging looked wonderful thinned and whitened by frost. In the fountain court John kept the water flowing at the slowest speed so that there would be a chance for it to make icicles and ice cascades in the colder nights. The herbs still looked well, the angelica and sage went into white lace when the frost touched their feathery fronds behind the severe hedging. Against the walls of the king’s court John was training one of his new plants introduced from the Ark: his Virginian winter-flowering jasmine. On warm days its scent drifted up to the open windows above, and its colour made a splash of rich pink light in the grey and white and black garden.

The queen’s orangery was like a jungle, packed tight with the tender plants which would not survive an English winter. Some of the more handsome shrubs and small trees were planted in containers with loops for carrying poles and John’s men lifted them out to the queen’s garden at first light, and brought them in again at dusk so that even in winter she would always have something pretty to see from her windows. John placed a lemon and an orange tree, both trained into handsome balls, on either side of the door to her apartments, like aromatic sentries.

‘These are pretty,’ she said to him from her window one day as he was supervising the careful placing of some little trees in the garden below.

‘I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,’ John said, pulling off his hat, recognising the heavily accented voice of Queen Henrietta Maria at once. ‘They should have been in their places before you looked out.’

‘I woke very early, I could not sleep,’ she said. ‘My husband is worried and so I am sleepless too.’

John bowed.

‘People do not understand how hard it is sometimes for us. They see the palaces and the carriages and they think that our lives are given up to pleasure. But it is all worry.’

John bowed again.

‘You understand, don’t you?’ she asked, leaning out and speaking clearly so that he could hear her in the garden below. ‘When you make my gardens so beautiful for me, you know that they are a respite for me and the king when we are exhausted by our anxieties and by our struggle to bring this country to be a great kingdom.’

John hesitated. Obviously it would be impolite to say that his interest in the beauty of the gardens would have been the same whether she was an idle vain Papist – as he believed – or whether she was a woman devoted to her husband and her duty. He remembered Hester’s advice and bowed once more.

‘I so want to be a good queen,’ she said.

‘No-one prays for anything else,’ John said cautiously.

‘Do you think they pray for me?’

‘They have to, it’s in the prayer book. They are ordered to pray for you twice every Sunday.’

‘But in their hearts?’

John dipped his head. ‘How could I say, Your Majesty? All I know are plants and trees. I can’t see inside men’s hearts.’

‘I like to think that you can give me a glimpse of what common men are thinking. I am surrounded by people who tell me what they think I would like to hear. But you would not lie to me, would you, Gardener Tradescant?’

John shook his head. ‘I would not lie,’ he said.

‘So tell me, is everyone against the Scots? Does everyone see that the Scots must do what the king wishes and sign the king’s covenant, and use the prayer book that we give them?’

John, on one knee, on cold ground, cursed the day that the queen had taken a fancy to him, and reflected on the wisdom of his wife who had warned him to avoid this conversation at all costs.

‘They know that it is the king’s wish,’ he said tactfully. ‘There is not a man or woman or child in the country who does not know that it is the king’s wish.’

‘Then it should need nothing more!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is he the king or not?’

‘Of course he is.’

‘Then his wish should be a command to everyone. If they think any different from him they are traitors.’

John thought intently of Hester and said nothing. ‘I pray for peace, God knows,’ he said honestly enough.

‘And so do I,’ said the queen. ‘Would you like to pray with me, Gardener Tradescant? I allow my favourite servants to use my chapel. I am going to Mass now.’

John forced himself not to fling away from her and from her dangerous ungodly Papistry. To invite an Englishman to attend Mass was a crime punishable by death. The laws against Roman Catholics were very clear and very brutal, and clearly, visibly, flouted by the king and queen in their own court.

‘I am all dirty, Your Majesty.’ John showed her his earth-stained hands and kept his voice level though he was filled with rage at her casual flouting of the law, and deeply shocked that she should think he would accept such an invitation to idolatory and hell. ‘I could not come to your chapel.’

‘Another time, then.’ She smiled at him, pleased with his humility, and with her own graciousness. She had no idea that he was within an inch of storming from the garden in a blaze of righteous rage. To John, a Roman Catholic chapel was akin to the doors of hell, and a Papist queen was one step to damnation. She had tried to tempt him to deny his faith. She had tried to tempt him to the worst sin in the world – idolatory, worshipping graven images, denying the word of God. She was a woman steeped in sin and she had tried to drag him down.

She closed the window on the cold air without saying farewell or telling him that he could rise. John stayed kneeling until he was sure that she had gone, and that the audience was over. Then he got to his feet and looked behind him. The two assistant gardeners were kneeling where they had dropped when the window opened.

‘You can stand,’ John said. ‘She’s gone.’

They scrambled to their feet, rubbing their knees and complaining of the discomfort. ‘Please God she does not look out of the window again,’ said the younger one. ‘Why will she not leave you alone?’

‘She thinks I am a faithful servant,’ J said bitterly. ‘She thinks I will tell her the mood of the people. What she does not realise is that no-one can tell her the truth since any word of disagreement is treason. She and the king have tied our consciences in knots and whatever we do or think or say we are in the wrong. It makes a man want to cut loose.’

He saw the gardeners looking at him in surprise. ‘Oh, waste no more time!’ John snapped impatiently. ‘We’ve kneeled enough for one day.’

Winter 1639

The court always spent the long Christmas feast at Whitehall, so John was able to leave the royal gardens at Oatlands dormant under a thick frost, and go home to Lambeth in November and spend Christmas at home. The children had made him little presents of their own for Twelfth Night, and he gave them sweets and fairings bought from Lambeth winter fair. To Hester he gave a couple of yards of grey silk for a gown.

‘They had a blue silk too but I did not know what you would like,’ he said. He would have known exactly what Jane would have preferred; but he seldom observed what Hester was wearing. He had only a general impression of demure smartness.

‘I like this. Thank you.’

After the children had gone to bed, Hester and John stayed by the fireside, drinking small ale and cracking nuts in companionable domestic peace. ‘You were right about being cautious at Oatlands,’ John said. ‘In Lambeth the news was all of a war against Scotland. The northern counties are armed and ready, and the king has called a council of war. They say that the militia will be called up too.’

‘Do they really think that the king would go to war over a prayer book? Does he really think he can fight the Scots into praying with Archbishop Laud’s words?’

John shook his head in disagreement. ‘It’s more than the prayer book. The king thinks that he has to make one church for all his kingdom. He thinks one church will bind everyone together, bind us all together under his will. He has taken it into his head that if the Scots refuse their bishops then they will refuse their king.’

‘You’ll not have to go?’ Hester asked, going straight to the point.

John grimaced. ‘I may have to pay for a substitute to go soldiering in my place. But perhaps they will not muster the Lambeth trained bands. Perhaps I may be excused since I serve the king already.’

Hester hesitated. ‘You would not publicly refuse to serve, as a matter of conscience?’

‘It would certainly go against my conscience to fire on a man who has said nothing worse than he wants to worship his God in his own way,’ John said. ‘Such a man, be he Scots or Welsh or English, is saying nothing more than I believe. He cannot be my enemy. I am more like a Scots Presbyterian than I am like Archbishop Laud, God knows.’

‘But if you refuse you might be pressed to serve, and if you refuse the press, they could try for treason.’

‘These are difficult times. A man has to hold clear on to his conscience and his God.’

‘And try not to be noticed,’ Hester said.

John suddenly realised the contrast in their opinions. ‘Hester, wife, do you believe in nothing?’ he demanded. ‘I have never had a word from you of belief or conviction. All you ever speak of is surviving and avoiding awkward questions. You are married into a household where we have been faithful servants of the king and his ministers since the start of the century. My father never heard a word against any of his masters in all his days. I didn’t agree with him, that’s not my way; but I am a man of conscience. I hold very strongly to the belief that a man must find his own way to God. I have been a man of independent belief since I was old enough to think for myself, praying in the words of my own choosing, a Protestant, a true Protestant. Even when I have wavered in my faith, even when I have had doubts, profound doubts, I am glad to have those doubts and think them through. I have never run to some priest to tell me what I should think, to speak to God for me.’

She met his gaze with her own straight look. ‘You’re right. I believe in surviving,’ she said flatly. ‘That’s all, really. That’s my creed. The safest route for me and mine is to obey the king; and if I do happen to think differently to what he commands – I keep my thoughts to myself. My family works for noble and royal patrons, I was brought up around the court. I am loyal to my king and loyal to my God; but, like any courtier, my first interest is in surviving. And I fear that my creed is going to be as thoroughly tested as any other in the next few months.’

The press gang did not come for John. But he did receive a letter from the Mayor of London. John was to pay a tax demanded personally by the king to finance the war against the Scots. The king was marching north and desperately needed money to equip and arm his soldiers. And more soldiers would be coming, soldiers from Ireland, and mercenaries from Spain.

‘The king is bringing in Papists to fight against Protestants?’ John demanded, scandalised. ‘What next? French soldiers from his wife’s country? Or the Spanish army? What was the point of us defeating the Armada, fighting to stay free of Papist powers, if we now invite them in?’

‘Hush,’ Hester said. She closed the door of the parlour so that the visitors in the rarities room could not hear her husband’s shout of outrage.

‘I will not pay!’

‘Wait and see,’ Hester advised.

‘I will not,’ John said. ‘This is a matter of principle to me, Hester. I will not pay money to an army of Papists to march against men who think as I do, whose consciences are as tender as mine.’

To his surprise she did not argue but bit her lip and bowed her head. John looked at the top of her cap and had a sense at last of being master in his own house and impressing on his wife the importance of principle.

‘I have spoken,’ he said firmly.

‘Yes indeed,’ she said quietly.

Hester said nothing to disagree with John, but that day, and every day thereafter, she stole from the little collection of coins which the visitors paid until she had enough to pay John’s tax without him knowing, if the tax collector came back.

He did not return. The Lord Mayor of London, with the great men of the City behind him, was not inclined any more than John to hand over thousands of pounds’ worth of City gold for the king’s war against an enemy who was a natural ally. Especially when the king was demanding money without the agreement of a parliament.

1640

In the absence of any voluntary money the king was forced to call a parliament. For the first time in ten years the squires and landlords returned to Westminster with a belief that they might now get back to the proper task of advising the king and running the country.

Hester went to find John in the orchard with the news of the new parliament. The buds on the apple trees were fattening and splitting and showing white and pink petals as crumpled as ribbons crammed into a pocket.

‘Perhaps the king will listen to the voice of the people,’ John said hopefully.

‘He might,’ she said. ‘But he is listening to the old Earl Strafford and to the queen. Two voices instead of the one. Will he listen to the voice of the people in preference to the voice of his own wife, who is trying to gather an army of English Papists and a Spanish army for him?’

John thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

Hester nodded. ‘Takings are down for the gardens,’ she warned. ‘People are not ordering plants and seeds. This should be our busiest time of the year but it’s as quiet as winter. No-one can think about gardens while the king is half at war with the Scots and has called a parliament which is filled with men who disagree with him.’

‘We can manage for a short spell,’ John said.

‘We earn more in the spring than we do for all the rest of the year,’ she said. ‘I have been looking at the account books. We have to make money in spring. A war starting in springtime is the worst thing that could happen for us. If the uncertainty carries on till June or July we will not make a profit this year.’

‘What about the rarities?’

‘There are more visitors because there are more people in the city,’ Hester said. ‘The country gentry who have come in for the parliament are curious to see Tradescant’s Ark. But if the business between the king and Scots grows more serious I think they’ll stop coming too. A trade like ours depends on people feeling safe enough to spend money on pleasure: on visiting, on rarities, and on their gardens. A country at war does not plant gardens.’

‘I still have my post at Oatlands,’ John pointed out. ‘And I will succeed my father as chief gardener and draw his wage.’

Hester nodded. ‘If the worst comes to the worst we can live on your wages.’

‘At the very worst we can close the Ark and live at Oatlands,’ John said. ‘The house there is only little; but we could manage for a while if we cannot afford to keep the Ark open.’

‘I’m not sure that I would want to live in the grounds of a royal palace in times like these,’ Hester said cautiously.

‘I thought you were such a royalist?’

‘I don’t want to take sides,’ Hester said. ‘Not when I don’t know exactly what the sides will be. Nor when I don’t know which side will win.’

The sides became rapidly clearer after the king’s army, unenthusiastic and poorly paid, were defeated by the Scots who went on to occupy Newcastle and Durham and hammer out a peace with the king which would force him to call a new parliament in England. It became clear to everyone in the country, except perhaps to the king and the queen, that the Scots and the Independent English thinkers had the king on the run. Hester started a correspondence with Mrs Hurte, the mother of John’s first wife, who kept her eyes and ears open in the City and was as sceptical as Hester, and rightly concerned for the safety of her grandchildren.

The new Parliament will impeach Strafford, just as the old one was wild to impeach Buckingham. If J has ever had any dealings with the Earl, or if his father kept any correspondence, it should be hidden or, better yet, burned. They are saying that Strafford is a traitor prepared to wage war against his own country for the benefit of the king and queen. They will accuse him of treason – treason against the people of England, and once one royal servant is accused how many others will be charged?

Hester went upstairs to the attic and opened John’s old chest of papers. The Tradescants had supplied seeds and young saplings to the Earl but there were no incriminating letters left from the years when John Tradescant had been known as a discreet man who regularly visited Europe and could be trusted with a letter or a message.

The Earl was a loud-mouthed unattractive old man, twisted with gout and losing his sight. He had been a relentless force in Ireland, hammering a Protestant will on a Catholic people; but he was old now. The king had recalled him to England only for the unscrupulous clarity of his advice, and been indebted to him for the suggestion that if towns did not send enough money for the king’s army their aldermen should be hanged in their robes to clarify the urgency of the situation. The Earl had walked past John in the gardens of Oatlands a dozen times and never wasted more than a glance on him.

The Tradescants were safe from any accusation of complicity with the king. But many royal servants slipped away and went abroad, or retired to their country estates. Others were not so quick or careful. In December, Archbishop Laud was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower to await the pleasure of the Houses of Parliament.

Hester did not pray from any prayer book at evening prayers that night but read from the King James Bible as the only text which did not define the household as for or against the king.

‘No prayers?’ John asked her quietly as the household went about its last tasks of the day and Hester counted out the bedtime candles.

‘I don’t know any more what words God would prefer,’ she said drily. ‘And no-one knows what man requires.’

Spring 1641

The day that Strafford was called to account in the great hall at Westminster there were no visitors to the Ark at all. Everyone who could get a ticket or a pass to see Strafford at bay before his accusers was in the city. Even the streets were deserted.

In the unnatural silence of the house at Lambeth there was suddenly a thunderous knock on the front door. Frances went running to open it, but Hester darted out from the rarities room and caught her in the hall.

‘Frances! Don’t answer it!’

The girl halted at once.

‘Go round to the gardens and find your father. Tell him to go to the stables, saddle a horse, and wait till I send a message.’

Frances caught the note of urgency in her stepmother’s voice, nodded, white-faced, and ran. Hester waited until she was out of sight, smoothed down her apron, straightened her cap, and opened the door.

It was a gentleman usher of the royal household. Hester showed him into the parlour. ‘My husband is not here at the moment,’ she said, deliberately vague. ‘I can send a message for him if it is urgent.’

‘The king is at Whitehall and wishes to see him.’

Hester nodded. ‘I shall have to write to him at Oatlands,’ she said. ‘He is the king’s gardener at Oatlands, you know. May I tell him why the king wants him?’

The gentleman usher raised his eyebrows. ‘I should have thought it would be enough to tell him that he is wanted,’ he said rudely.

Hester bowed slightly. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But if the king requires some plants or seeds then we need to know at once, so that we can prepare them. Or if he wants some rarities delivered …’

‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘I see. The king is buying a hunting lodge at Wimbledon for the queen. They want Mr Tradescant to design a garden.’

No trace of her relief appeared on Hester’s face. ‘I will send for him at once,’ she said. ‘He may not even have arrived at Oatlands yet. He left only this morning. I may catch him on the road, and tell him to come back.’

The gentleman usher nodded.

‘Can I offer you some refreshment?’ Hester asked. ‘A glass of wine?’

The gentleman usher shook his head. ‘I shall return to Whitehall,’ he said. ‘These are difficult times.’

‘Very difficult,’ Hester agreed with feeling. She showed him to the door and then went to the stables to find John. He was leaning against the pump in the stable yard, enjoying the early warm sunshine on his face.

‘Frances came flying out as if all the devils in hell were at the door,’ he said carelessly. ‘Why are you so fearful?’

‘I thought it might have been the press gang or the tax collectors, or a message from the court that you would be safer to miss,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know what I fear except I am uneasy, I am afraid for us. If the king’s own advisor can be on trial for his life then the king can protect no-one. Indeed, it’s the loyal servants of the king who are the most endangered. And we have been known as royal servants for two generations. I don’t want this family suddenly named as enemies of the people of England because we have taken royal gold. We all have to make our own safety in these days.’

John put his hand on her shoulder. It was his first ever gesture of affection. Hester stood very still, as if she had been approached by a wary wild animal and did not want to scare it away. She felt herself lean, very slightly, towards his caress.

‘You’re very careful for me,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

She could have stood like that, in the warm sunny yard with his hand on her shoulder, forever. But John dropped his hand. ‘So who was it?’

‘It was a message from the court. The king is buying a manor at Wimbledon for the queen and they want you to design a garden.’ She paused for a moment. ‘The king’s advisor and chief minister is at bay before his enemies and on trial for his life, and yet the king has time to send to you to tell you to make a new garden.’

‘Well, at least that solves the problem of selling seeds and plants,’ he said. ‘If I am making a new royal garden we will need all our stocks. We’re back in profit, Hester. Am I to go at once?’

‘I said you were on the road to Oatlands, before I knew what the message was. So you can go today or tomorrow.’

‘So our troubles are over!’ John exclaimed happily. ‘A new garden to design, and all our seedlings and plants bought by the king.’

‘I don’t think our troubles will be over that quickly,’ Hester said cautiously. ‘Take great care, John, when you meet the king and queen.’

When John got to Wimbledon the king and queen were not to be found.

‘Their Majesties are walking privately in the garden,’ one of the courtiers told him. ‘They said you were to go and meet them there. You may approach Their Majesties.’

John, accustomed to the ways of the court, expected to find twenty to thirty people with the king and queen walking privately, but for once they were indeed alone, just the two of them, with her hand in the crook of his arm and her embroidered silk skirts brushing against his legs as they walked together.

John hesitated, thinking that for once they might have chosen to be alone and might be enjoying their privacy. But when they turned at the edge of the grass court and saw him the queen smiled and the king beckoned him forward with one of his little gestures. Although they wished it to be always understood that they were very much in love, they preferred each other’s company before an audience. The queen liked to be seen publicly basking in the king’s adoration, even more than she enjoyed a private moment.

‘Ah, Gardener Tradescant!’ the queen said. John bowed low and dropped to one knee. The king flicked his finger to permit John to rise and John got up. At once he saw that they were not having a carefree stroll in the garden. The queen was flushed and her eyelids were red, the king looked pale and strained.

‘Your Majesties,’ John said warily.

‘The king has bought me this pretty house to take our minds off our troubles,’ the queen said in her lilting accent. ‘We are much troubled, Gardener Tradescant. We want to be diverted.’

John bowed. ‘It could be a fine garden,’ he said. ‘The soil is good.’

‘I want it done all new,’ the queen said eagerly. ‘A pretty style to match the house.’ She gestured back at the manor house. It was a handsome place new-built of red brick, with two arching flights of steps down from the terrace and gardens terraced down the slope. ‘I want many fruit trees. The king and I will come here in midsummer to escape from the noise and fuss of the court and we will eat fruit off the trees and grapes off the vine and melons off the …’ She broke off.

‘Off the ground,’ the king suggested. ‘They g … grow on the g … ground, do they not, Tradescant?’

‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ John said. ‘My father learned the way of making them grow rich and ripe when he was with Sir Henry Wootton at Canterbury, and he taught me the way. I can grow you melons here and all sorts of fruit.’

‘And pretty flowers,’ the queen added. ‘White and blue flowers in the knot garden.’

John bowed his assent, keeping his face hidden. White and blue were the flowers of the Virgin Mary. The queen was asking for a Papist knot garden on the very edge of a London on the brink of revolt.

‘We need somewhere to retire in these troubled times,’ the king said. ‘A little hidden garden, Tradescant. Somewhere that we can b … be ourselves.’

The queen stepped to one side to look at a neglected watercourse, lifting her silk dress carefully away from the wet ground.

‘I understand,’ John said. ‘Will you be here only in summer, Your Majesty? It helps me if I know. If you are not to be here in autumn then I do not need to plant for that season.’

‘Yes,’ the king said. ‘A summertime p … place.’

John nodded and waited for further orders.

‘It pleases me to give her a p … pretty little h … house of her own,’ the king said, watching the queen at the end of the little terrace. ‘I have great work to do – I have to d … d … defend my crown against wild and wicked men who w … would pull me down, I have to d … defend the church against levellers and s … and s … and sectaries and Independents who would unstitch the very fabric of the country. It is all for m … me to do. Only I can preserve the country from the m … madness of a few wicked men. Whatever it costs me, I have t … to do it.’

John knew he should say nothing; but there was such a strange mixture of certainty and self-dramatisation in the king’s voice that he could not remain silent. ‘Are you sure that you have to do it all?’ he asked quietly. ‘I know some sectaries, and they are quiet men, content to leave the Church alone, provided that they can pray their own way. And surely, no-one in the country wants to harm you or the queen, or the princes.’

Charles looked tragic. ‘They d … do,’ he said simply. ‘They drive themselves on and on, c … caring nothing for my good, c … caring nothing for the country. They want to see me cut down, cut down to the size of a little P … Prince, like the D … Doge of Venice or some catspaw of Parliament. They want to see the p … power my father gave me, which his aunt g … gave him, cut down to n … nothing. When was this country t … truly great? Under King Henry, Queen Elizabeth and my f … father King James. But they do not remember this. They don’t w … want to. I shall have to fight them as traitors. It is a b … battle to the death.’

The queen had heard the king’s raised voice and came over. ‘Husband?’ she inquired.

He turned at once, and Tradescant was relieved that she had come to soothe the king.

‘I was saying how these m … madmen in Parliament will not be finished until they have destroyed my ch … church and destroyed my power,’ he said.

John waited for the queen to reassure him that nothing so bad was being plotted. He hoped that she would remind him that the king and queen he most admired – his father James, and his great-aunt Elizabeth, had spent all their lives weaving compromises and twisting out agreements. Both of them had been faced with argumentative parliaments and both of them had put all their power and all their charm into turning agreements to their own desire, dividing the opposition, seducing their enemies. Neither of them would ever have been at loggerheads with a force which commanded any power in the country. Both of them would have waited and undermined an enemy.

‘We must destroy them,’ the queen said flatly. ‘Before they destroy us and destroy the country. We must gain and then keep control of the parliament, of the army and of the Church. There can be no agreement until they acknowledge that Church, army, and Parliament is all ours. And we will never compromise on that, will we, my love? You will never concede anything!’

He took her hand and kissed it as if she had given him the most sage and level-headed counsel. ‘You see how I am advised?’ he asked with a smile to Tradescant. ‘You see how w … wise and stern she is? This is a worthy successor to Queen Elizabeth, is sh … she not? A woman who could defeat the Sp … Spanish Armada again.’

‘But these are not the Spanish,’ John pointed out. He could almost hear Hester ordering him to be silent while he took the risk and spoke. ‘These are Englishmen, following their consciences. These are your own people – not a foreign enemy.’

‘They are traitors!’ the queen snapped. ‘And thus they are worse than the Spanish, who might be our enemies but at least are faithful to their king. A man who is a traitor is like a dog who is mad. He should be struck down and killed without a second’s thought.’

The king nodded. ‘And I am s … sorry, Gardener Tradescant, to hear you sympathise with them.’ There was a world of warning despite the slight stammer.

‘I just hope for peace and that all good men can find a way to peace,’ John muttered.

The queen stared at him, affronted by a sudden doubt. ‘You are my servant,’ she said flatly. ‘There can be no question which side you are on.’

John tried to smile. ‘I didn’t know we were taking sides.’

‘Oh yes,’ the king said bitterly. ‘We are certainly t … taking sides. And I have paid you a w … wage for years, and you have worked in my h … household, or in the household of my dear D … Duke since you were a boy – have you not? And your f … father worked all his life for my advisors and servants, and my f … father’s advisors and servants. You have eaten our b … bread since you were weaned. Which side are you on?’

John swallowed to ease the tightness in his throat. ‘I am for the good of the country, and for peace, and for you to enjoy what is your own, Your Majesty,’ he said.

‘What has always b … been mine own,’ the king prompted.

‘Of course,’ John agreed.

The queen suddenly smiled. ‘But this is my dear Gardener Tradescant!’ she said lightly. ‘Of course he is for us. You would be first into battle with your little hoe, wouldn’t you?’

John tried to smile and bowed rather than reply.

The queen put her hand on his arm. ‘And we never betray those who follow us,’ she said sweetly. ‘We are bound to you as you are bound to us and we would never betray a faithful servant.’ She nodded at the king as if inviting him to learn a lesson. ‘When a man is ready to promise himself to us he finds in us a loyal master.’

The king smiled at his wife and the gardener. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘From the highest servant to the 1 … lowest, I do not forget either loyalty or treachery. And I reward b … both.’

Summer 1641

John remembered that promise on the day that the Earl of Strafford was taken to the Tower of London and thrown into the traitors’ prison to be executed when the king signed the Act of Attainder – his death warrant.

The king had sworn to Strafford that he would never betray him. He had written him a note and gave him the word of a king that Strafford would never suffer ‘in life, honour or fortune’ for his service – those were his exact words. The most cautious and wily members of the Privy Council fled the country when they recognised that Parliament was attacking the Privy Council rather than attacking the king. Most of them were quick to realise too that whatever the king might promise, he would not raise one hand to save a trusted servant from dying for his cause. But the Bishop of Ely and Archbishop William Laud were too slow, or too trusting. They too were imprisoned for plotting against the safety of the kingdom, alongside their ally Strafford in the Tower.

For all of the long spring months, Parliament had met on Strafford’s case and heard that he had recommended bringing in an army of Irish Papist troops to reduce ‘this kingdom’. If the king had interrupted the trial to insist that Strafford was referring to the kingdom of Scotland he might have saved him then from the executioner. But he did not. The king stayed silent in the little ante-room where he sat and listened to the trial. He did not insist. He offered, rather feebly, to never take Strafford’s advice again as long as the old man lived if they would but spare his life. The Houses of Parliament said they could not spare his life. The king struggled with his conscience for a short, painful time, and then signed the warrant for Strafford’s execution.

‘He sent little Prince Charles to ask them for mercy,’ Hester said in blank astonishment to John as she came back from Lambeth in May with a wagon full of shopping and a head full of news. ‘That poor little boy, only ten years old, and the king sent him down to Westminster to go before the whole Parliament and plead for the Earl’s life. And then they refused him! What a thing to do to a child! He’s going to think all his life that it was his fault that the Earl went to his death!’

‘Whereas it is the king’s,’ John said simply. ‘He could have denied that Strafford had ever advised him. He could have borne witness for him. He could have taken the decision on his own shoulders. But he let Strafford take the blame for him. And now he will let Strafford die for him.’

‘He’s to be executed on Tuesday,’ Hester said. ‘The market women are closing their stalls for the day and going up to Tower Hill to see his head taken off. And the apprentices are taking a free day, an extra May Day.’

John shook his head. ‘So much for the king’s loyalty. These are bad days for his servants. What’s the word on Archbishop Laud?’

‘Still in the Tower,’ Hester said. She rose to her feet and took hold of the side of the wagon to clamber down but John reached out his arms and lifted her down. She hesitated for a moment at the strangeness of his touch. It was nearly an embrace, his hands on her waist, their heads close together. Then he released her and moved to the back of the wagon.

‘You’ve bought enough for a siege!’ he exclaimed, and then, as his own words sunk in, he turned to her. ‘Why have you bought so much?’

‘I don’t want to go into market for a week or so,’ she said. ‘And I won’t send the maids either.’

‘Why not?’

She made a little helpless gesture. He thought he had never before seen her anything other than certain and definite in her movements. ‘It’s strange in town,’ she began. ‘I can’t describe it. Uneasy. Like a sky before a storm. People talk on corners and break off when I walk by. Everyone looks at everyone else as if they would read their hearts. No-one knows who is a friend and who is not. The king and Parliament are splitting this country down the middle like a popped pod of peas and all of us peas are spilling out and rolling around and not knowing what to do.’

John looked at his wife, trying to understand, for the first time in their married life, what she might be feeling. Then he suddenly realised what it was. ‘You look afraid.’

She turned away to the edge of the wagon as if it were something to be ashamed of. ‘Someone threw a stone at me,’ she said, her voice very low.

‘What?’

‘Someone threw a stone as I was leaving the market. It hit me in the back.’

John was dumbfounded. ‘You were stoned? In Lambeth?’

She shook her head. ‘A glancing blow. It was not thrown to hurt me. I think it was an insult, a warning.’

‘But why should anyone at Lambeth market insult you? Or warn you?’

She shrugged. ‘You’re well-known as the king’s gardener, the king’s man, and your father before you. And these people don’t inquire where your heart lies, what you think in private. They think of us as the king’s servants, and the king is not well-regarded in Lambeth and the City.’

John’s mind was whirling. ‘Did it hurt you? Are you hurt?’

She started to say ‘No’, but she stumbled over the word and John, without thinking, caught her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder as the torrent of words spilled out.

She was afraid, very afraid, and she had been afraid every market day since Parliament had been recalled and the king had come home defeated from the war with the Scots. The women would not always serve her, they overcharged her and leaned on the scales when they were weighing out flour. And the apprentice boys ran after her and called out names, and when the stone had struck her back she had thought it would be the first of a hail of stones which would hit her and knock her from the box of the wagon and beat her down in the street.

‘Hester! Hester!’ John held her as the storm of crying swept over her. ‘My dear, my dear, my little wife!’

She broke off from crying at once. ‘What did you call me?’

He had not been aware of it himself.

‘You called me little wife, and your dear –’ she said. She rubbed her eyes, but kept her other hand firmly on his collar. ‘You called me dear, you’ve never called me that before.’

The old closed look came down on his face. ‘I was upset for you,’ he said, as if it was a sin to call his own wife an endearment. ‘For a moment I forgot.’

‘You forgot that you had been married before. You treated me like a wife you are … fond of,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘I am glad,’ she said softly. ‘I should like you to be fond of me.’

He disengaged himself very gently. ‘I should not forget I was married before,’ he said firmly, and went into the house. Hester stood beside the cart, watching the kitchen door closing behind him, and found she had no more tears left to cry but only loneliness and disappointment and dry eyes.

Summer 1641

Hester did not go to market again all summer. And she had been right to fear the mood of the village of Lambeth. The apprentice boys all ran wild one night and the fever was caught by the market women and by the serious chapel goers, who made a determined mixed mob and marched through the streets shouting, ‘No popery! No bishops!’ Some of the loudest and most daring shouted, ‘No king!’ They threw a few burning brands over the high walls of the empty archbishop’s palace, and made a half-hearted attempt at the gates, and then they broke the windows down Lambeth High Street at every house that did not show a light at the window for Parliament. They did not march down the road as far as the Ark and John thanked God for the luck of the Tradescants, which had once again placed them on the very edge of great events and danger and yet spared them by a hair’s breadth.

After that, John sent the gardener’s lad and the stable lad together to market and though they often muddled the order and stopped for an ale at the taverns, at least it meant that any muttering about the king’s gardener was not directed at Hester.

John had to go to Oatlands and before he went he ordered wooden shutters to be made for all the windows of the house, especially the great windows of Venetian glass in the rarities room. He hired an extra lad to wake at nights and watch out down the South Lambeth road in case the mob came that way, and he and Hester went out one night in the darkness with shaded lanterns to clear out the old ice house, and put a heavy bolt on the thick wooden doors to make a hiding place for the most valuable of the rarities.

‘If they come against us you will have to take the children and leave the house,’ he ordered.

She shook her head and he found himself admiring her cool nerve. ‘We have a couple of muskets,’ she said. ‘I won’t have my house overrun by a band of idle apprentice lads.’

‘You must not take risks,’ he warned her.

She gave him a tight, determined smile. ‘Everything is a risk in these days,’ she said. ‘I will see that we come safe through it all.’

‘I have to leave you,’ John said anxiously. ‘I am summoned to Oatlands. Their Majesties will visit next week and I have to see the gardens are at their best.’

She nodded. ‘I know you have to go. I shall keep everything safe here.’

John was at Oatlands ready for the full court, but the queen came alone. The king and half the court were missing, and the rumour was that he had gone north to negotiate with the Scots himself.

‘He is in Edinburgh and all will be mended,’ the queen said with her complacent smile when she came upon John dead-heading the roses. She was concealing her boredom as best as she could. She was accompanied only by a few ladies, the old flirtatious, artistic, idle entourage was broken up. The more adventurous and more ambitious men were riding with the king. There was the smell of opportunity and advancement in the court of a king at war, and the young men had been sick of peace and a court devoted to marital love for so long. ‘It will all be resolved,’ the queen promised. ‘Once they meet him again he will charm them into seeing that they were wrong to march against him.’

John nodded. ‘I hope so, Your Majesty.’

She came close to him and lowered her voice. ‘We will not go to London again until it is all agreed,’ she confided. ‘Not even to my little manor at Wimbledon. We shall go nowhere near to Westminster. After the death of my Lord Strafford –’ She broke off. ‘They said they would try me after the Earl! Try me for treasonous advice!’

John had to resist the temptation to take one of her little white hands. She looked genuinely afraid.

‘He should have stood against them,’ she whispered. ‘My husband should not have let them take Strafford, nor Laud. If he lets them pick us off one after another we will all be lost. And then he will be left all alone and they will have tasted blood. He should have stood against them for William Laud, he should have stood against them for Strafford. How can I be sure he will stand for me?’

‘Your Majesty, matters cannot go so far,’ John said soothingly. ‘As you say yourself, the king will come home and it will all be resolved.’

She brightened at once. ‘He can scatter a few baronies around the Houses of Parliament, and places at court,’ she said. ‘These are all lowly men, commoners up from the provinces. They have neither learning nor breeding. They will forget their folly if the price is high enough.’

John felt the familiar rise of irritation. ‘Majesty, I think they are men of principle. They did not behead Lord Strafford on a whim. I think they believe in what they are doing.’

She shook her head. ‘Of course not! They are scheming with the Scots, or with the Dutch, or with someone for their own ends. The House of Lords is not with them, the court is not with them. These are little men come up from the country, crowing like little cocks on their own dunghills. We just have to wring their necks like little cocks.’

‘I pray that the king can find a way to agree with them,’ John said steadily.

She flashed him her charming smile. ‘Why, so do I! He shall make all sorts of promises to them, and then they can vote us the taxes we need and the army we need to crush the Scots and they can go back to their dunghills and we can rule without them again.’

Autumn 1641

It might have gone either way for the king, and the queen, but for their fourth kingdom of Ireland. The news that Strafford was dead ran through Ireland like a heath fire. Strafford had held Ireland down with a mixture of legal rigour and terrible abuse of power. He had ruled them like a cynical old soldier and the only law in the land was that of superior military power. Once he was dead the Papist Irish rose up in a defiant storm of rage against their Protestant masters. Strafford had kept them brutally down, but now Strafford was gone. The rumours and counter-rumours had flown around the kingdom of Ireland until every man who called himself a man took up a pitchfork or a hoe and flung himself against the newly arrived Protestant settlers, and the greedy land-grabbing Protestant lords, and spared neither them nor their women nor children.

The news of what had taken place, horrifically embellished by the terrified imagination of a minority in a country they did not own, reached London in October and fuelled the hatred against Papists a thousand times over. Even Hester, normally so level-headed, departed from discretion that night and prayed aloud in family prayers that God might strike down the dreadful savage Irish and preserve His chosen people, settled in that most barbaric land; and the Tradescant children, Frances and Johnnie, round-eyed with horror at what they heard in the kitchen and in the stable, whispered a frightened, ‘Amen’.

The Papist rebels were spitting Protestant children on their pikes and roasting them over the fires, eating them before the anguished gaze of their parents. The Papist rebels were firing cottages and castles with the Protestant owners locked inside. Everyone knew a story of fresh and unbelievable horror. No-one questioned any report. It was all true, it was all the worst of the worst nightmares. It was all worse than reports told.

John was reminded, for a brief moment, of the bitter woman who kept the lodging house in Virginia, and how she had called the Indians pagans and beasts, and how she too had stories of skinning and flaying and eating alive. For a moment he stepped back from the terror which had caught up the whole of England, for a moment he wondered if the stories were as true as everyone swore. But only for a moment. The circumstances were too persuasive, the stories were too potent. Everyone said it; it had to be true.

And there was worse. In the streets of Lambeth and in London they did not call it the Irish rebellion, they called it the queen’s rebellion, in the absolute certainty that all the nightmare tales from Ireland were gospel truth, and that the rebellion was fomented by Henrietta Maria herself in support of the devilish Papists. What the queen wanted was a free Roman Catholic Ireland and then, as soon as she dared, the queen would ship her fellow Papists from Ireland to England so they could butcher and eat English babes as well.

Spring 1642

Parliament, still in session, drew ever closer to accusing the queen. It was a steady, terrifying approach, which would not waver nor hesitate. They impeached twelve bishops for treason, one after another, until a round dozen had appeared before the bar of the House, with their lives on the line. And then the word was that the queen was next on the list.

‘What shall you do?’ Hester asked John. They were in the warmth of the rarities room where a large fire kept the collection warm and dry though there was a storm of wintry sleet dashing against the grand windows. Hester was polishing the shells and precious stones to make them gleam on their beds of black velvet, and John was labelling a new collection of carved ivories which had just arrived from India.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go to Oatlands to see to the planning for the gardens next season. I will learn more there.’

‘Planning gardens for a queen who will be beheaded?’ Hester asked quietly.

John met her gaze, his mouth twisted with anxiety. ‘I am following your creed, wife. I’m trying to survive these times. I don’t know what’s best to do other than to behave as if nothing has changed.’

‘But John –’ Hester started, but was interrupted by a knock at the front door, and they both froze. John saw Hester’s colour drain from her cheeks, and the hand that held the duster trembled as if she had an ague. They stood in complete silence and then they heard the maid answer and the reassuring chink of a coin as a visitor paid for entrance to the collection. Hester whisked her cloth out of sight into the pocket of her apron and threw open the handsome double doors to him. He was a well-dressed man, a country man, by the look of his brown suit and his weather-beaten face. He paused in the doorway and looked around at the grand, imposing room and the warm fire.

‘Well, this is a treat,’ he said in the round tones of the west country.

Hester moved forward. ‘You are welcome,’ she said pleasantly. ‘This is John Tradescant, and I am his wife.’

The man dipped his head. ‘I am Benjamin George,’ he said. ‘From Yeovil.’

‘A visitor to London?’

‘Here on business. I am a Parliament man representing the borough of Yeovil.’

John stepped forward. ‘My wife will show you the rarities,’ he said. ‘But first can you tell me what news there is?’

The man looked cautious. ‘I can’t say whether it is good or bad,’ he said. ‘I am on my way home and Parliament is dissolved, I know that much.’

John and Hester exchanged a quick look. ‘Parliament dissolved?’

The man nodded. ‘The king himself came marching in to arrest five of our members. You would not have thought that he was allowed to come into Parliament with his own soldiers like that. Whether he was going to arrest our members for treason or cut them down where they stood, I don’t know which!’

‘My God!’ John exclaimed, aghast. ‘He drew a sword in the House of Commons?’

‘What happened?’ Hester demanded.

‘He came in very civil though he had his guards all about him, and he asked for a seat and sat in the Speaker’s chair. But they were gone – the men he wanted. They slipped out the back half an hour before he came in the front. We were warned, of course. And so he looked about for them, and made a comment, and then went away again.’

John was struggling to hide his irritation with the slowness of the man’s speech. ‘But what did he come for, if he left it too late to arrest them?’

The man shrugged. ‘I think myself it was some grand gesture, but he bodged it.’

Hester looked quickly at John. He made an impatient exclamation. ‘Are you saying he marched his guard into the House to arrest five members and failed?’

The man nodded. ‘He looked powerfully put out,’ he observed.

‘I should think he was. What will he do?’

‘As to that … I couldn’t say.’

‘But then what will Parliament do?’

The man slowly shook his head. Hester, seeing her husband on the edge of an outburst and the man still thinking his answer through, had to bite her lip to keep silent herself.

‘As to that … I couldn’t say either.’

John took a swift step to the door and then turned back. ‘So what is happening in the City? Is everything quiet?’

The country squire shook his head at the mystifying speed of change. ‘Well, the Lord Mayor’s trained bands are to be called out to keep the peace, the king’s men have all gone into hiding, the City is boarded up and ready for a riot or … something worse.’

‘What could be worse?’ Hester asked. ‘What could be worse than a riot in the City?’

‘War, I think,’ he said slowly. ‘A war would be worse than a riot.’

‘Between who?’ John asked tightly. ‘A war between who? What are you saying?’

The man looked into his face, struggling with the enormity of what he had to say. ‘War between the king and Parliament, I’m afraid.’

There was a brief shocked silence.

‘It has come to this?’ John asked.

‘So I am come to see the greatest sight of London which I promised myself I would see before I left, and then I am going home.’ George looked around. ‘There is even more than I thought.’

‘I will show it all to you,’ Hester promised him. ‘You must forgive our hunger for news. What will you do when you get home?’

He bowed courteously to her. ‘I shall gather the men of my household and train them and arm them so that they can fight to save their country from the enemy.’

‘But will you fight for the king or for Parliament?’

He bowed again. ‘Madam, I shall fight for my country. I shall fight for Right. The only thing is: I wish I knew who was in the right.’

Hester showed him the main features of the collection and then, as soon as she could, left him to open the drawers and look at the smaller things on his own. She could not find John in the house, nor in the orangery. As she feared, he was in the stable yard, dressed in his travelling cloak, waiting for his mare to be saddled.

‘You’re never going to court!’ she exclaimed.

‘I have to,’ he said. ‘I cannot bear having to wait for scraps of news like this.’

‘You are a gardener,’ she said. ‘Not a courtier, not a Member of Parliament. What is it to you whether the king is quarrelling with Parliament or not?’

‘I am on the edge of it all,’ John said. ‘I know too much to sit quietly at home and nurse up my ignorance. If I knew less of them then I would care less. If I knew more then I could decide better what to do. I am halfway between knowledge and ignorance and I have to settle on one side or the other.’

‘Then be ignorant!’ she said with sudden passion. ‘Get into your garden, John, and set seeds for the gardens at Wimbledon and Oatlands. Do the trade you were born to. Stay home where you are safe.’

He shook his head and took both her hands. ‘I won’t be long,’ he promised her. ‘I shall go over the river to Whitehall and find out the news and then come back home. Don’t fret so, Hester. I must learn what is happening and then I’ll come home. It is better for us if I know which way the wind is blowing. It is safer for us.’

She left her hands in his, enjoying the warmth of his callused palms. ‘You say that, but you are like a boy setting out on an adventure,’ she said shrewdly. ‘You want to be in the heart of things, my husband. Don’t deny it.’

John gave her a roguish grin and then kissed her quickly on both cheeks. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s true. Let me go with your blessing?’

She was breathless with the sudden casual embrace and felt herself flushing. ‘With my blessing,’ she repeated. ‘Of course you have my blessing. Always.’

He swung himself into the saddle and let the horse walk out of the yard. Hester put her hand to her cheek where his lips had briefly touched, and watched him go.

He had to wait for a place on the horse ferry at Lambeth, and then the traffic on the City side of the river was busier than he had ever seen it. There were hundreds of people milling around in the narrow streets, asking for news and stopping ballad sellers and pedlars of news-sheets to demand what they knew. There were armed groups of men marching down the road, pushing people aside and demanding that they shout, ‘Hurrah! for the king!’ But then down another road would come another group shouting, ‘Hurrah! for Pym! No bishops! No Papist queen!’

John drew his horse back into a sidestreet, fearful of being caught up in a fight, when he saw two of these groups heading towards each other. But the royalists wheeled off quickly to one side, as if they were on an urgent errand that took them away; and the others took care not to see them, and not to give chase. He watched them go and saw that they, like himself, were not ready for a fight yet. They didn’t even want a brawl, let alone a war. He thought the country must be filled with men like himself, like the honest Member of Parliament for Yeovil, who knew that they were in the grip of great times, and wanted to take their part in the great times, who wanted to do the right thing; but were very, very far from knowing what the right thing might be.

John’s father would have known. He would have been for the king. John’s father had had a straightforward faith that his son had never learned. John made a wry face at the thought of the certainties of the man and of his own confused layering of doubts, which left him now still mourning one woman, half in love with another, and married to a third; in the service of a king while his heart was with the opposition; always torn both ways, always on the fringe of everything.

The crowds grew thicker around the palace of Whitehall and there were armed guards looking grim and frightened with their pikes crossed at the doorways. John rode his horse round to an inn and left her in the stable, and then walked back to the palace, jostled all the way. The crowd was the same strange mix of people. There were beggars and paupers and ill-doers in rags and shabby old livery who were there to shout and perhaps collect a few coppers for their hired loyalty. There were working men and women, young apprentices, artisans and market people. There were the serious black-coated preachers of the independent churches and sectaries, and there were the well-to-do merchants and City men who would not fight themselves, but whose hearts were in the fight. There were sailors from the ships in port, shouting for Parliament since they blamed the king and his French wife for the dangers of the Dunkirk pirates, and there were members of the London trained bands, some of them trying to impose order and find their men, and others running wild and shouting that they would die to defend the rights of Parliament. This motley crowd had a motley chant which ranged from the catcalls and boos of those who did not know what they cared for, to the regular call of those who knew their cause: ‘No bishops! No queen!’, and the new call which had come about since the king had taken a sword into the House of Commons: ‘Privilege! Privilege!’

John fought his way to the front of the mob at the gates to the palace of Whitehall and shouted, over the noise, to the guard.

‘John Tradescant! The king’s gardener.’

The man shifted slightly, and John ducked under the pike and went in.

The old palace of Whitehall was the most disorganised of all the royal palaces, a jumble of buildings and courts and gardens, dotted with statuary and fountains and alive with birdsong. John, hoping to find a face he knew, made his way towards the royal apartments and then was brought short as he rounded a corner and nearly collided with the queen herself.

She was running, her cape flying behind her, her jewel box in her hands. Behind her came the king, carrying his own travelling desk of papers and a dozen maidservants and manservants, each burdened with whatever they had been able to snatch up. Behind them came two royal nursemaids, running with the two royal babies in their arms, the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth trotting to keep up, and the two young princes, James and Charles, lagging in the rear.

John dropped to his knee as she saw him but she rushed towards him and he jumped to his feet as she pushed her jewel box at him.

‘Gardener Tradescant!’ she cried. ‘Take this!’ She turned to the king. ‘We must wait!’ she insisted. ‘We must face the rabble! We must face them down!’

The king shook his head and motioned for her to go on. Unwillingly, she went before him. ‘I t … tell you they have run mad!’ he said. ‘We must get out of the C … City! There’s not a loyal heart here. They have all run m … mad. We must go to Hampton Court and c … c … consider what to do! We must summon soldiers and take advice.’

‘We are running like fools from our own shadows!’ she shrieked at him. ‘We must face them and face them down or we will spend the rest of our life on the run.’

‘We are l … lost!’ he shouted. ‘L … lost! D’you think I want to see you dragged before the b … bar and impeached for treason? D’you think I want to see your h … h … head on a pike? D’you think I want to see the rabble take y … you, and the children, t … take you now?’

John joined the train of servants running behind them and followed them to the stables. All the way the quarrel between the king and queen grew more inarticulate as her French accent deepened with her temper and his stammer grew worse with his fear. When they reached the stable yard she was beside herself.

‘You are a coward!’ she spat at him. ‘You will lose this city forever if you leave it now. It is easier to run away than to retake. You must show them that you are not afraid.’

‘Ha … Hi … I fear nothing!’ He drew himself up. ‘N … Nothing! But I must have you safe and the children safe before I can m … make m … my m … move. It is your safety, Madam, that I am securing now. For myself I care nothing! N … ha … N … Nothing!’

John pressed forward and put the jewel box on the coach floor. He was reminded of the king’s odd mixture of shyness and boastfulness. Even now, with a mob hammering on the doors of the palace, the two of them were playing out their parts in a masque. Even now they did not seem to be completely real. John looked around, the servants were like an audience at a great play. No-one urged a course of action, no-one spoke. The king and queen were the only actors; and their script was a great romance of danger and heroism and lost causes and sudden flights. John felt his heart pounding at the noise of the crowd outside and knew the deep visceral fear of a mob. He had a sudden vision of them breaking down the gates and tumbling into the stable yard. If they found the queen beside her travelling coach with her jewel box beside her, anything could happen. The whole power of the royal family which the old Queen Elizabeth had so powerfully cultivated depended on the creation and maintenance of distance and magic and glamour. Let the people once see the queen swearing at their king like a French lace-seller, and the game would be up.

‘I will see you s … safe at Hampton Court and then I will return and crush these traitors,’ Charles swore.

‘You shall crush them now!’ she shrieked. ‘Now, before they gain their strength. You shall face them and defy them and destroy them or I swear I shall leave this kingdom and never see it again! They know how to respect a princess of the blood in France!’

At once the mood of the scene shifted. The king took her hand and bowed over it, his silky hair falling to shield his face. ‘N … never say it,’ he said. ‘You are q … queen of this country, queen of all the h … hearts. This is a faithful country, they I … love you, I love you. Never even th … think of leaving me.’

There was renewed shouting at the door. John, forgetting that he should stay silent, could not bear to see them taken like a pair of runaway servants in the stable yard. ‘Your Majesty!’ he urged. ‘You must either prepare for a siege or get the coach out! The crowd will be upon you in a moment!’

The queen looked to him. ‘My faithful Gardener Tradescant!’ she exclaimed. ‘Stay with us.’

‘G … Get up at the back,’ the king ordered. ‘Y … You shall escort us t … to safety.’ John gaped at him. The only thing he had thought to do was to bring the two of them to a sense of urgency.

‘Your Majesty?’ he asked.

The king handed the queen into the coach where the two little princes, Charles and James, white-faced and silent, were waiting, their eyes like saucers with terror. Then the nursemaids and the babies bundled in and the king climbed in himself. John slammed the door on them. He wanted to tell them that he could not possibly go with them but he heard the rising volume of the crowd at the gates and he was afraid that they might argue with him, command his service, question his loyalty, delay again.

John stepped back from the coach, waiting for it to draw away; but it did not move. Nobody would do anything without a specific order and the king and queen were arguing again inside.

‘Oh! Damnation! Drive on!’ John shouted, taking command in the absence of any authority, and swung himself up beside the footmen clinging on the back. ‘Westward, to Hampton Court. And drive steadily. Don’t for God’s sake run anyone down. But don’t stop!’

Even then the footmen hesitated at the stable doors.

‘Open the doors!’ John shouted at them, his temper at breaking point.

They leaped to obey the first clear order they had heard all day and the great wooden doors swung open.

At once the men and women in the very front of the crowd fell back, as the doors opened up and the coach pulled out. John saw they were taken aback at the sudden movement of the doors, at the progress of the fine horses, and the wealth and richness of the gilding on the royal coach. The king’s ornate carriage with the plumes of feathers on each roof corner, and the huge high-stepping Arab horses harnessed with tack of red leather and gold studs, still had the mystique of power, divine power, even with a traitorous Papist queen inside. But those in the front could not get back very far; they were held steady by the weight of the crowd behind them, still pushing forward.

The crowd had pikes but they were using them as banners, not yet as weapons. On each one was tied a white flag scrawled with the word ‘Liberty!’ and they jogged them up and down at the windows of the coach. John prayed that the queen kept her face turned down and for once in her life kept quiet. The prestige of the king might get them safely through the mob if she did not antagonise them.

John heard a frightened child crying from inside the coach. ‘Drive on!’ he ordered the coachman above the noise of the crowd. ‘Go steady!’, and he shouted as loud as he could: ‘Make way for the king! For the rightful king!’

‘Liberty!’ someone yelled, jabbing a pike dangerously close to his face.

‘Liberty and the king!’ John replied, and heard another voice at once echo the new slogan. The footman beside him flinched as someone spat. ‘Stay still, you fool, or they will drag you down,’ John muttered.

At any moment the mood of the crowd could change from boisterous protest to murder. John looked over the roof of the carriage to where the streets narrowed for the way out of town.

‘Make way for the rightful king!’ John shouted.

The crowd grew denser at the crossroads. ‘Keep going!’ John yelled at the coachman. He had an absolute certainty that if they stopped, even for a moment, the doors would be pulled open and the royal family dragged from the coach and torn apart on the very street. Once the mob learned that they could stop the king in his carriage, then they would know they could do whatever they wished. All that was holding them back was the old superstitious belief in the king’s power, the divinity of kingship that King James had preached and that Charles so passionately believed. The crowd kept reaching towards the coach as it crawled slowly past them but their hands would drop back as if they feared a burning from the gold paintwork. If they touched and snatched just once, then they would all know that the king was not a god, a vengeful god. If they found the courage to touch just once, they would snatch at everything.

‘Keep back,’ John shouted. ‘Make way for the king!’

Everything depended on the coach maintaining the painfully slow walking pace, and never checking, and never stopping, all the way westwards where the sun shone on the water in the open sewers, like a pointer to safety.

Someone pulled at his coat, nearly hauling him off balance. John grabbed tighter at the footman’s strap and looked down. It was a woman, her face contorted with rage. ‘Liberty!’ she cried. ‘Death to the Papists! Death to the Papist queen!’

‘Liberty and the king!’ John shouted back. He tried to smile at her and felt his lips stick on his dry teeth. As long as the queen kept her face hidden! ‘Liberty and the king.’

The carriage lurched over the cobbles. The crowd was thicker but the road further ahead was clear. Someone threw a handful of mud at the coach door but the crowd was too dense for them to start stoning, and though the pikes still jogged to the cry of ‘Liberty!’ they were not yet aimed towards the glass of the windows.

As the road went on, out of town, the crowd thinned, as John had hoped it would. Most of these people had homes or market stalls or even businesses in the City, there was nothing to be gained by following the coach out along the West Way. Besides, they were out of breath and tiring of the sport.

‘Let’s open the doors!’ someone exclaimed. ‘Open the doors and see this queen, this Papist queen. Let’s hear her prayers, that they’re so keen that we should learn!’

‘Look!’ John yelled as loud as he could. ‘An Irishman!’ He pointed back the way they had come. ‘Going into the palace! An Irish priest!’

With a howl the mob turned back and ran, slipping and sliding over the cobbles back towards the palace, chasing their own nightmares.

‘Now drive on!’ John yelled at the driver. ‘Let them go!’

The carriage gave a great lurch as the driver whipped the horses and they leaped forward, bumping on the cobbles. John clung like a barnacle on the back of the great coach, swaying on the leather straps, and ducked his head down as the wind blowing down the street whisked his hat away.

When they reached the outskirts of London the streets were quiet, the people either boarded inside their houses and praying for peace, or roaming in the city. John felt the slackening of tension around his throat and he loosened his grip on the footman’s strap and rocked with the sway of the coach all the way to Hampton Court.

The king was not expected at Hampton Court. There was nothing ready for the royal family. The royal beds and furniture, rugs and pictures were all left at Whitehall. The family stepped down before the solidly closed great doors of the palace and there was not even a servant to open up for them.

John had a sense that the whole world was collapsing around him. He hesitated and looked towards his monarch. The king leaned back against the dirty wheel of the coach, as if he were exhausted.

‘I did not expect this sort of welcome!’ Charles said mournfully. ‘The doors of my own palace closed to me!’

The queen looked pleadingly at Tradescant. ‘What shall we do?’

John felt an irritable sense of responsibility. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll find someone.’

He left the royal coach before the imposing grand front doors and went around to the back. The kitchens were in their usual careless state; the whole household always took a holiday during the king’s absence.

‘Wake up,’ John said, putting his head around the door. ‘The king, queen and royal family are outside waiting to be let in.’

It was as if he had set off a fire-ship among the cockle boats at Whitby. There was a stunned silence and then instantaneous uproar.

‘For God’s sake get the front door open and let him in,’ John said, and went back to the courtyard.

The king was leaning back against the coach surveying the high, imposing roofs of the palace as if he had never seen them before. The queen was still seated in the carriage. Neither of them had moved since John had left them, although the children were whimpering inside the coach and one of the nursemaids was praying.

John pinned a smile on his face and stepped forward and bowed. ‘I am sorry for the poor welcome,’ he said. As he spoke the great doors creaked open and a frightened-looking footman peeped out. ‘There’s a couple of cooks here, and a household of servants,’ John said reassuringly. ‘They’ll make Your Majesties comfortable enough.’

At the sight of a servant the queen brightened. She rose to her feet and waited for the footman to hand her down from the carriage. The children followed her.

The king turned to John. ‘I thank you for the service you have given us this day. We were glad of your escort.’

John bowed. ‘I am glad to see Your Majesty safe arrived,’ he said. At least he could say that with a clear conscience, he thought. He was indeed glad to get them safe out of London. He could not have stood by and seen the queen and the royal princes pulled out of their carriage by a mob, any more than he could have watched Hester and the children abused.

‘Go and see that there are r … rooms made ready for us,’ the king commanded.

John hesitated. ‘I should return home,’ he said. ‘I will give orders that everything shall be done as you wish, and then go to my home.’

The king made that little gesture with his hand which signified ‘No.’

John hesitated.

‘S … stay until we have some order here,’ the king said coolly. ‘Tell them to prepare our p … privy chambers and a dinner.’

John could do nothing but bow and walk carefully backwards from the king’s presence and go to do his bidding.

There was only so much that could be done. There was only one decent bed in the house fit for them; and so the king, queen, and the two royal princes were forced to bed down together in one bed, in the only aired linen in the whole palace. There was a dinner which was ample, but hardly royal; and no golden plate and cups for the service. The trappings of monarchy – the tapestries, carpets, gold plate and jewels, even the richly embroidered bed linen that always travelled with the king in his great progresses around the country – were still at Whitehall. All that was ever left in the empty palaces was second-rate goods, and Hampton Court was no exception. The queen ate off pewter with an air of shocked disdain.

Dinner was served by the kitchen staff and the lowly gentlemen of the household who maintained the palace in the king’s absence. They served it as it should be done, on bended knee, but all the ceremony in the world could not conceal that it was plain bread and meat on pewter plates on a plain board table.

‘You will escort the queen and I to Windsor tomorrow,’ the king said, when he had finished eating. ‘And from thence to Dover.’

Tradescant, who was seated at a lower table down the hall, got up from his bench and dropped to his knee on the stale rushes on the floor. ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ He kept his head down so that he showed no surprise.

‘See that the horses are ready at dawn,’ the king ordered.

The royal family rose from their places at the top table and left the great hall by the door at the back of the dais. Their withdrawing room would be cold and smoky with a chimney which did not properly draw.

‘Are they running for it?’ one of the ushers asked John as he rose from his knees. ‘All of them?’

John looked appalled. ‘They cannot do so!’

‘Did they need to run from London? Like cowards?’

‘How can you tell? The mood of the rabble around Whitehall was angry enough. There were moments when I feared for their lives.’

‘The rabble!’ the man jeered. ‘They could have thrown them a purse of gold and turned them around in a moment. But if they run from London, will they run from the country? Is that why they’re going to Dover? To take a ship to France? And what will become of us then?’

John shook his head. ‘This morning I was taking leave of my wife in my stable yard at Lambeth,’ he said. ‘I hardly know where I am, let alone what is to become of the king and the queen and their kingdoms.’

‘Well I bet you they run for it,’ the young man said cheerfully. ‘And good riddance,’ he added under his breath, and then snapped his fingers at his dog and left the hall.

It was a long, cold journey to Dover; the royal family were muffled up inside the coach but John was standing in the footman’s place behind, holding on to the strap. By the time the coach rumbled in to Dover castle John was clinging on with fingers that were blue, his eyes running with tears from the cold wind in his face, every bone in his face aching as if he had an ague. From his place on the back of the coach he had heard, over the rumble of the wheels, the queen steadily complaining, all the way down the long frosty roads.

They slept that night in Dover castle, in better comfort; and then lingered undecided for a week. First they were waiting for news, then deciding to sail to France, missing the tide, changing their minds, waiting for more news. Courtiers slowly reassembled from the rout of London, noblemen were recalled from their country seats. Everyone had different advice, everyone was listened to with kingly courtesy, no-one could agree, no-one could act. Eleven-year-old Princess Mary, setting sail to live with her bridegroom in Holland, joined them during the week that they hesitated, havering between one choice and another, and found that the queen, her mother, was very bitter with her daughter for marrying a Protestant and leaving the family in such distress. Princess Mary made no undutiful replies to her mother, but sulked in eloquent silence.

A couple of heavy bags arrived at dawn from the Tower of London and John assumed, but did not ask, from the dour expression of the guard who never let them out of his sight, that the king was sending the country’s treasure overseas with his wife and that once again the most precious stones in England would be hawked around the moneylenders in Europe.

The king and queen finally came to a decision to separate. Princess Mary was bound for Holland in one ship, the queen and the three babies were to set sail for France in another: the Lion. The two princes – Charles and James – and the king were to stay in England and find a solution to the demands of Parliament. John and the other attendants waited at a distance on the quayside as the royal couple forced themselves to the brink of parting. The king held both her hands and kissed them tenderly.

‘You will not yield one inch to them,’ the queen said, her voice demanding and penetrating so that every man on the quayside could hear how the king of England was hag-ridden. ‘You will not make one concession. They must be brought to heel. They must know their master. You will not even speak with them without keeping me informed.’

Charles kissed her hands again. ‘No,’ he promised. ‘M … My love, my dear love. I will not have a m … moment when I do not think of you.’

‘Then think that I will never be able to come back until the traitor Pym is executed for treason,’ she said fiercely. ‘And think of your son and his inheritance which must be passed to him entire. And I shall raise such an army in Europe that if they will not agree they will be destroyed! So make no concessions, Charles, I will not permit it!’

‘My dear, d … dear love,’ he said quietly.

He raised his head from her hands and she kissed him full on the mouth as if to pledge him to an oath.

‘Don’t forget!’ she said passionately. ‘We have lost too much already by your weakness! Not one concession without my agreement. You must tell them that they will have to concede to us: Church, army, and Parliament. I am a queen, not a market trader to huckster over the price. Not one concession.’

‘God speed, m … my love,’ he said tenderly.

She smiled at him at last. ‘God bless you,’ she said. Without thinking of the effect it would have on the king’s waiting servants, she made the sign of the cross, the dreadful Papist gesture, over his head; and Charles bowed his head beneath the sign of the Anti-Christ.

Henrietta Maria picked up her full silk skirts and went carefully up the gangplank to the sailing ship. ‘And don’t forget,’ she called, raising her voice from the ship. ‘No concessions!’

‘No, my love,’ the king said sadly. ‘I would d … die rather than disappoint you.’

The ship moved away from the quayside and the king called for his horse. He mounted and rode alone, up the steep cliffs behind the little town, keeping the queen’s sail in sight, riding and waving his hat to her until the little ship was vanished into the pale mist lying sluggishly on the waves, and there was nothing for God’s anointed monarch to do but ride slowly and sadly back to Dover castle and write to his wife promising that he would always do whatever she thought best.

John subtracted himself carefully from the men who surrounded the king as they returned to break their fast in Dover castle. He ordered a horse from the tavern, and when he was ready to leave went to seek the king.

‘With Your Majesty’s permission I will go to my home,’ he said carefully. He saw at a glance that the king was in one of his moods of high drama. John did not want to be the audience to one of the tragic speeches. ‘I promised my wife I would only be away a matter of hours, and that was weeks ago. I must return.’

The king nodded. ‘You may travel w … with me for I am going to London.’

‘Back to the City?’ John was astounded.

‘I shall see. I shall see. Perhaps it is n … not too late. Perhaps we can agree. The queen would be pleased, d … don’t you think, if my next letter to her came from my palace at Whitehall?’

‘I am sure everyone would be pleased if you could reclaim your palace by agreement,’ John said carefully.

‘Or I could go to B … Bristol,’ the king said. ‘Or north?’

John bowed. ‘I shall pray for Your Majesty.’

‘I hope you will do … do more than that. I hope you will be with me.’

There was an awkward silence. ‘In these troubled times …’ John began.

‘In these troubled times a man must bid farewell to his wife and then do his duty,’ the king said flatly. ‘P … Painful duty. As I have done.’

John bowed.

‘You may go and bid her farewell and then j … join me.’

John bowed again, thinking rapidly of how he could escape from this service. ‘I am only a gardener,’ he said. ‘I doubt that I can assist Your Majesty better than by keeping your palaces in beauty. And when the queen returns I would want her to have a pretty garden to greet her.’

The king softened at that, but he had the needy anxiety of a man who hates to be left alone. The loss of the queen made him cling to anyone, and John’s presence was a reassuring reminder of the days of gardens and masques and royal progresses and loyal speeches. ‘You shall s … stay with me,’ he said. ‘I shall send you back to the garden when I have more men about me. In the meantime you shall write your f … farewell to your wife and join me. I am separated from my wife – you would not w … wish to be more happy than your king?’

Tradescant could see no escape. ‘Of course not, Your Majesty.’

He sent Hester a note before they left Dover.

Dear Hester,

I am commanded by His Majesty to stay with him until he takes up his new quarters, wherever they may be. We are travelling northwards at present and I will return home as soon as I am permitted, and write to you if not. Please keep my children and rarities safe. And preserve your own safety. If you think it best, you may store the rarities in the place you know, and take the children to Oatlands. These are troubled times and I cannot advise you at this distance. I wish I were with you. If I were free from my duty to my king, I would be with you.

He did not dare to say more for fear of someone stealing and opening the letter. But he hoped she would read between the lines and understand his reluctance to travel with the king and the two princes, and his deep anxiety that none of them, least of all the king, seemed to know where they should go or what they should do next.

They rode north, still uncertain. The king was instantly diverted by the pleasure of being on the road. He loved to ride and liked being free of the formality of the court. He spoke of the time that he and the Duke of Buckingham had ridden across Europe – from England to Spain – without a courtier or a servant between them. He spoke of his present journey as if it was the same playful piece of adventure and the two young princes caught his mood. Prince James and Prince Charles for once in their lives were allowed to ride alongside their father, as his companions, and the country people lined the roadsides as they entered market towns and called out their blessings on the handsome bareheaded king and the two charming boys.

The courtiers, returning from their country houses and from Whitehall, joined the train, and the whole trip became an adventure: riding through the spring countryside and staying each night in a hunting lodge or a fine Tudor mansion.

A court formed around the king, and many of the loyal gentlemen dug deep into their own fortunes to support him, and tried not to begrudge the cost of the hunting and the dancing and the music which the king had to have wherever he went. Even so, there were many debts that remained unpaid. Many gentlemen stayed at home, although they were summoned more than once; many did not send money. When the king, tired of provincial minstrels, sent for the court musicians they sent back a polite letter saying they would come if they could, but since they had not been paid any wages for months they could not afford to attend His Majesty without payment in advance. The king had to do without his own musicians for the first time in his life. There was no money to pay them, neither in advance nor in arrears.

John said nothing, and did not remind the king that his wages also had not been paid since the end of last summer when he had been appointed gardener at Oatlands in his father’s place and also given the care of the Wimbledon garden. He was not following the king for gold, after all. He was not following him for love nor loyalty either. He was neither mercenary nor courtier. He was following him because the king refused to release him, and John was not yet ready to insist on his freedom. The habit of obedience was ingrained in him, he was not yet ready fully to rebel. Loyalty to the king was like honouring his father whose loyalty had never wavered; honouring his father was one of the ten commandments. John was trapped by habit and by faith.

He did not cease to try for his release. He spoke to the king in the stable yard of a pretty hunting lodge that they had commandeered for the week. Charles was out hunting on a borrowed horse and was in light-hearted mood. John checked the tightness of the girth under the saddle flap and looked up at his king.

‘Your Majesty, do I have your permission to go to my home now?’

‘You can ride with us to Theobalds,’ the king said casually. ‘It was one of your father’s gardens, was it not?’

‘His first royal garden,’ John said. ‘I didn’t know the court was moving again. Are we going back to London?’

The king smiled. ‘Who can say?’ he said mysteriously. ‘The game is not even opened yet, John. Who can say what moves there are to b … be made?’

‘It is not a game to me,’ John burst out incautiously. ‘Nor to the men and women that are drawn into it.’

The king turned a frosty look down on him. ‘Then you will have to be a reluctant player,’ he said. ‘A s … s … sulky pawn. For if I am prepared to gamble my future with daring then I expect the lesser men to throw in their all for me.’

John bit his lip.

‘Especially those who were b … born and b … bred into my service,’ the king added pointedly.

John bowed.

The stay at Theobalds brought them closer to London, but no closer to an agreement. Almost every day a messenger came and went from the palace at Theobalds to Parliament at Westminster but no progress was made. The king was certain that the country was solidly behind him – in his journey northwards from Dover people had brought invalids to him at every stopping point and the mere touch of his hand had cured them. Every loyal address at every inn and staging post assured him that the country was solidly his. No-one had the courage to point out that anyone who disagreed with the king was likely to stay away from his progress, and no-one reminded the king that at every major town there had also been petitions from common people and gentry begging him to acknowledge the rights of Parliament and to reform his advisors, and live at peace with the Scots and with his Parliament.

From London came the rumours that the Lord Mayor’s trained bands were out drilling and practising every Sunday and they would fight to the death to defend the liberty of Parliament and the freedom of the city of London. The city was solidly for Parliament and against the king and was preparing itself for a siege, entrenching both to the west and north. Every workman was bidden to dig great ditches which would run all around the city, and women, girls, and even ladies saw it as their patriotic duty to ride out on Sundays and holidays and help the men dig. There was a great wave of enthusiasm for the Parliamentary cause against the impulsive, arrogant, and possibly Papist king. There were great fears of an army coming from Ireland to put him back inside his capital city and to force Roman Catholicism back on a country which had only been free of the curse for less than a hundred years. Or if the king did not bring in the Irish then he might bring in the French, for it was well-known that his wife was openly recruiting for a French army to subdue the city and its supporters. Chaotic, excited, fearful, London prepared itself for siege against hopeless odds, and decided to choose a martyr’s death.

‘We go to York,’ the king decided. John waited to see if he would be released from royal service.

The king’s heavy-lidded gaze swept over the men in the stable yard, saddling up their horses for the ride. ‘You will all come too,’ he said.

John mounted his horse and edged it through the courtiers to the king’s side.

‘I should like to go to Wimbledon,’ he said cunningly. ‘I want to make sure that all is well there. So that it is fit for the queen when she comes home again.’

Charles shook his head and John, glancing sideways, saw that his king was beaming. The king was enjoying the sense of action and adventure, the end of the effeminate routine of masques and plays and poetry of the peacetime court.

‘W … We have no time for g … gardens now!’ he laughed. ‘M … March on, Tradescant.’

John wondered for a moment if there was anything he could say to abstract himself from the small train, and then shrugged his shoulders. The king had a whim that Tradescant should stay with him, but the whim would pass, as did all royal whims. When his attention was diverted elsewhere Tradescant would ask and receive permission to leave.

John pulled his horse up and fell in at the rear of the royal train as they trotted down the great avenue of Theobalds Park, through the sea of golden daffodils between the trees. He thought for a moment of his father, and how his father would have loved the ripple of cold wind through the yellow bobbing heads, and then he realised with a smile that his father had probably had a hand in planting them. As the party trotted out through the great gates John looked back at the avenue of trees and the sea of gold washing around their trunks and thought that his father’s legacy to the country might last longer than that of the royal master he had served.

When they reached York in mid-March the king and his immediate friends settled in the castle, while the other courtiers and hangers-on found billets in all the inns and ale houses in the town. John lodged in the stables on a pallet bed in the hay store. After a few days when he had not been summoned he thought that the king had finished with his service and he might go home. He went to find the king in the main body of the castle. He was in his privy chambers, books and maps all around him.

‘Your Majesty, I beg your pardon,’ John said, putting his head around the door.

‘I did not send for you,’ the king said frostily.

John came no nearer. ‘Spring is here, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I seek your permission to go and supervise the planting of the queen’s gardens. She likes the flower gardens at Oatlands to be well-planted, and she wants fruits from her manor at Wimbledon. They need to be planted soon.’

The king softened at once at the mention of his wife.

‘I would hate Her Majesty to be disappointed.’

‘You shall go,’ the king decided. He thought for a moment. ‘After we have taken Hull.’

‘Hull, Your Majesty?’

He beckoned Tradescant in and gestured him to shut the door against eavesdroppers. ‘The queen bids me to make the garrison of Hull my own,’ he said. ‘So that I may have a strong port for our allies to send supplies. She has bought up half the armies of Europe, and her brother the king of France will aid us.’

John closed his eyes briefly at the thought of French Papist troops marching against the English Protestant Parliament.

‘She wants us to take Hull for her – and so we will,’ the king said simply. ‘After that you can go home.’

John dropped to one knee. ‘Your Majesty, may I speak freely?’

The king smiled his tender smile. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘All my people can speak to me freely, and in safety. I am their father, I am their only true friend.’

‘A French army, a Papist army, will not aid your cause,’ John said earnestly. ‘There are many men and women in the country who do not understand the rights and wrongs of this quarrel between you and Parliament; but they will see a French army as their enemy. People will speak ill of the queen if they think she has summoned the French against her own people, English people. Those that love her and love you now will not accept a French army. You will lose their love and trust.’

Charles looked thoughtful as if he had never had such counsel before. ‘You believe this, Gardener Tradescant?’

‘I know these people,’ John urged. ‘They are simple people. They don’t always understand arguments, they often cannot read. But they can see the evidence of their own eyes. If they see a French army marching on the English Parliament they will think we have been invaded and that their right course of action is to fight against the French. My own father went with your friend, the Duke of Buckingham, to make war against the French. They have been our enemies for years. Country people will think that the French have invaded us, and they will take up arms against them.’

‘I had not seen it that way.’ Charles looked undecided. ‘But I must have an army and I must have munitions and H … Hull has the mightiest store of weapons outside of London …’

‘Only if you have to fight a war,’ John said persuasively. ‘You only need arms if you fight. But if you could come to an agreement …’

‘I l … long to come to an agreement,’ the king said. ‘I have sent them m … message after message offering talks and concessions.’

John thought of the queen’s tempestuous demands that the Members of Parliament should be hanged before she would return to her city.

‘I shall take Hull, and then I shall be able to make concessions,’ the king said decisively.

John felt the sense of frustration that all the king’s advisors were learning to endure.

‘If you came to an agreement you would not have to take Hull,’ he pointed out. ‘If you could agree with Parliament, then the country would be at peace and there would be no need for a fort, Hull or any other. There would be no need for a position of strength.’

‘She wants me to take Hull,’ the king said stubbornly. ‘And it is mine own. I am claiming nothing but what is mine by right.’

Tradescant bowed. When the king started speaking of his rights it was difficult to make any headway. By right everything in the four kingdoms was his; but in practice the countries were ruled by all sorts of compromises. Once the king assumed the voice he used in his masques and spoke grandly of his rights nothing could be agreed.

‘When do we go to Hull?’ John asked resignedly.

The king smiled at him, a flash of the old merriment in his eyes. ‘I shall send the P … Prince James in to Hull on a visit,’ he said. ‘They cannot refuse a visit from the prince. He shall g … go with his cousin, the Elector Palatine. And then I shall f … follow him. They cannot separate father and son. And once he is inside he will open the gates to me. And once I am there –’ he snapped his fingers ‘– it is mine! As easily and peacefully as that.’

‘But what if …’

The king shook his head. ‘No. N … No carping, Tradescant,’ he said. ‘The city of Hull is all for me, they will throw open the gates at the sight of Prince James, and then when we are installed we can make what terms we wish with Parliament.’

‘But Your Majesty …’

‘You may go now,’ the king said pleasantly. ‘Ride with me at n … noon tomorrow to Hull.’

They left late, of course, and idled along the road. By the time they finally arrived on a little rise before the town it was getting cold with the sharp coldness of a northern spring afternoon, and growing dark, getting on for dinner time. The king had brought thirty cavalrymen, carrying his standards and pennants, and there were ten young gentlemen riding with him as well as Tradescant and a dozen servants.

As they came towards the city Tradescant saw the great gates swing closed, and his heart sank.

‘What’s this?’ the king demanded.

‘A damned insult!’ one of the young men cried out. ‘Let’s ride at the gates and order them open.’

‘Your Majesty …’ Tradescant said, bringing his horse a little closer. The young courtiers scowled at the gardener riding among them. Tradescant pressed on. ‘Perhaps we should ride by, as if we never intended coming in at all.’

‘What use would that be?’ the king demanded.

‘That way, no-one could ever say that an English town closed its gates to you. It did not close its gates because we were not trying to enter.’

‘Nonsense!’ the king said easily. One or two of the young men laughed aloud. ‘That’s the way to teach them b … boldness. Prince James’s party will open the gates to us if the governor of Hull does not.’

The king took off his hat and rode down towards the town. The sentries on the wall looked down on him and John saw, with a sense of leaden nausea, that they were casually pointing their crossbows towards him, their monarch, as if he were an ordinary highwayman coming towards the city walls.

‘Please God no fool fires by accident,’ John said as he followed.

‘Open the gates to the king of England!’ one of the courtiers shouted up at the sentries.

There was a short undignified scuffle and the governor of Hull, Sir John Hotham himself, appeared on the walls.

‘Your Majesty!’ he exclaimed. ‘I wish we had known of your coming.’

Charles smiled up at him. ‘It does not m … matter, Sir John,’ he said. ‘Open the gates and let us in.’

‘I cannot, Your Majesty,’ Sir John said apologetically. ‘You are too many for my little town to house.’

‘We don’t m … mind,’ the king said. ‘Open the gates, I would see my son.’

‘There are too many of you, it is too large and too warlike a party for me to let in at this late hour,’ Sir John said.

‘We are not warlike!’ Charles exclaimed. ‘Just a small party of pleasure-seekers.’

‘You are armed,’ the governor pointed out.

‘Only my usual g … guards,’ the king said. He was still smiling but John could see the whiteness around his mouth and his hand trembling slightly on the reins. His horse shifted uneasily. The royal guards stared, stony-faced, at the sentries on the towers of Hull.

‘Please, Your Majesty,’ Sir John Hotham pleaded. ‘Enter as a friend if you must enter. Bring in just a few of your men if you come peacefully.’

‘This is my t … town!’ the king shouted. ‘Do you … do you … do you deny your king the right to enter his own town?’

Sir John closed his eyes. Even from the road before the gate the king’s party could see his grimace. John felt a deep sense of sympathy for the man, torn between loyalties just like himself, just like every man in the kingdom.

‘I do not deny Your Majesty the right to enter into your town,’ the governor said carefully. ‘But I do deny these men the right to enter.’ His gesture took in the thirty guards. ‘Bring in a dozen to guard Your Majesty and you shall dine with the prince in the great chamber this night! I shall be proud to welcome you.’

One of the courtiers edged his horse up to the king. ‘Where is the prince’s party?’ he said. ‘They should have thrown open the gates to us by now.’

Charles shot him an angry look. ‘Where indeed?’ He turned back to the governor of Hull. ‘Where is m … my son? Where is Prince James?’

‘He is at his dinner,’ the governor said.

‘Send for him!’

‘Your Majesty, I cannot. I have been told he is not to be disturbed.’

Charles spurred his horse abruptly forward. ‘Have d … d … done with this!’ he shouted up at the governor. ‘Open the gates! That is an order from your k … king!’

The man looked down. His white face had gone paler still. ‘I may not open the gates to thirty armed men,’ he said steadily. ‘I have my orders. As my king you are always welcome. But I do not open the gates of my town to any army.’

One of the king’s courtiers rode forward and shouted at the people whose curious faces were peering over the tops of the defensive walls. ‘This is the king of England! Throw your governor down! He is a traitor! You must obey the king of England!’

No-one moved, then a surly voice shouted, ‘Aye, and he’s the king of Scotland and Ireland too and what justice do they have there?’

The king’s great horse reared and shied as he pulled it back. ‘Then b … be damned to you!’ the king shouted. ‘I shall not forget this, John Hotham! I shall n … not forget that you locked me out of my own town!’

He wheeled the horse around and flung it into a gallop down the road, the guards thundering behind him, the courtiers, servants and John with them. He did not pull up till his horse was blown and then they turned and looked back down the road. In the distance they could see the gates finally open, the drawbridge come down, and a small party of horsemen ride out, following in their tracks.

‘Prince James,’ the king said. ‘Ten minutes too l … late.’

The king’s party waited while the horsemen rode nearer and nearer and then pulled up.

‘Where the devil were you, sir?’ the king demanded of his nephew, the Elector Palatine, who had led the party.

‘I am sorry, Your Majesty,’ the young man replied stolidly. ‘We were at our dinner and did not know you were outside the gates until Sir John came to us just now and said you had ridden away.’

‘You were supposed to open the g … gates to me! Not idle with your no … noses in the trough!’

‘We were not sure you were coming. You were due before dinner. You said you would come in the afternoon. We gave up waiting for you. I thought the governor would have opened the gates to you himself.’

‘But he refused! And there was no-one to force him, b … b … because you were at your dinner, as usual!’

‘I’m sorry, Uncle,’ the young man replied.

‘You will be sorrier yet!’ the king said. ‘For now I have been refused admittance to one of my t … t … towns as well as being banned from my City! You have done evil, evil work this day!’ He turned on his son. ‘And you, J … James! Did you not know that your father was outside the gates?’

The prince was only eight years old. ‘No, sire,’ he said. His little voice was scarcely more than a thread in the cold evening air.

‘You have disappointed your f … father very much this day,’ Charles said gloomily. ‘Pray to G … God that we have not taught disloyal and wicked men the lesson that they can defy me and travel in their w … wicked ways and fear nothing.’

The prince’s lower lip trembled slightly. ‘I didn’t know. I am sorry, sir. I didn’t understand.’

‘It was a harebrained plan from first to last,’ the Elector said dourly. ‘Whose was it? Any fool could see that it would not work.’

‘It was m … my plan,’ the king said. ‘But it required speed and decisiveness and c … courage, and so it failed. How am I to succeed with such servants?’ He surveyed them as if they were all equally to blame, then he turned his horse’s head towards York and led them back to the city through the darkening twilight.

April 1642

When they got back to York John found a letter waiting for him from Hester. It had taken nearly a month to reach him instead of the usual few days. John, looking at the dirt-stained paper, realised that, along with loyalty and peace, everything else was breaking down too: the passage of letters, the enforcement of laws, the safety of the roads. He went to his pallet bed in the hayloft and sat where a crack in the shingles of the roof let in the cold spring light and he could see to read.

Dear Husband,

I am sorry that you have gone away with the court and I understand that it was not possible for you to come and say farewell before you rode away. I have hidden the finest of the rarities where we agreed, and sent others into store at the Hurtes’ warehouse where they have armed guards.

The city is much disturbed. Every day there is drilling and marching and preparations for war. All the apprentice boys in Lambeth have given up their rioting around the streets and are now formed into trained bands and drilled every evening.

Great ditches are dug outside London against the coming of a French or Spanish army and all of our gardeners have to go and take their turn with the digging whether they will or no.

Food is scarce because the markets are closed as country people will not travel from their homes, and carters are afraid of meeting armies on the roads. I am feeding vagrants at the door with what we can afford but we are all doing very poorly. All the dried and bottled fruit is finished and I cannot get hold of hams to salt down for love nor money.

These are strange and difficult times and I wish you could be with us. I am keeping up my courage and I am caring for your children as if they were mine own, and your rarities and gardens also are safe.

I trust you will come home as soon as you are released from service.

God be with you,

Your wife,

Hester Tradescant.

John turned Hester’s letter over in his hands. He had an odd, foolish thought that if she were not his wife already, he would admire and like this woman more than any other he knew. She cared for the things that mattered most to him as if they were her own. It was a great comfort to him to know that she was in his house, in his father’s house, and that his children and his rarities and his garden were under her protection. He felt an unexpected tenderness towards the woman who could write of the difficulty of the times and yet assure him that she was keeping up her courage. He knew he would never love her as he had loved Jane. He thought he would never love another woman again. But he could not help but like and admire a woman who could take control of a household as she had done, and confront the times that they lived in as she did.

John rose to his feet, picked hay off his doublet, and went to his dinner in the great hall of York castle.

The king and his noble friends, splendidly dressed, were already in their place at the top table as John slipped into the hall. They were dining off gold plate but there were only a dozen dishes. The county was finding it hard to feed the appetite of the court, the provincial cooks could not devise the dishes that Charles expected, and the farms and markets were drained by the hunger of the enlarging, idle, greedy court.

‘What news?’ John asked, seating himself beside a captain of the guard and helping himself from the shared dish placed in the middle of the table.

The man looked at him sourly. ‘None,’ he said. ‘His Majesty writes letters to all who should be here, but the men who are loyal are already here, and the traitors merely gain the time to make themselves ready. We should march on London now! Why give them more time to prepare? We should put them to the sword and cut out this canker from the country.’

John nodded, saying nothing, and bent over his meat and bread. It was venison in a rich, dark sauce, very good. But the bread was coarse and brown with gritty seeds. The rich wheat stores of Yorkshire were slowly emptying.

‘While he is waiting I might go to my home,’ John said thoughtfully.

‘Lambeth?’ the captain asked.

John nodded.

‘You’d be seen as a traitor,’ the man said. ‘London is solid against the king, you’d be seen as a turncoat. You’d never plant another bulb for him.’

John grimaced. ‘I’m doing next to nothing here.’

The man spat a piece of gristle on the rushes of the floor and one of the dogs squirmed forwards on its belly to lick it up. ‘We’re all doing next to nothing here,’ he said. ‘Nothing but waiting. It is war. All that is undecided is when and where.’

July 1642

All that spring and summer the country was waiting, like the captain, to see when and where. Every gentleman who could command men to follow him armed them, drilled them, and trained them, and then wrestled with his conscience night and day as to which side he should join. Brothers from the same great house might take opposite sides and divide the tenants and servants amongst them. The men of one village might come out as passionate royalists, the men of the village next door might side with Parliament. Local loyalties set their own traditions: villagers in the shadow of a great courtier’s house that had felt the benefits of royal visits might sharpen their pikes and put a feather in their hat for the king. But villagers along roads from London where the news was easily spread, knew of the king’s evasions and lies before the demands of Parliament. Those who prized their freedom of conscience, or those who were prosperous, free-thinking men, said that they would leave their work and their homes and take up the sword and fight against papacy, superstition and a king who was driven to sin by his bad advisors. Those whose habits of loyalty had gone deep with Elizabeth and deeper with James, and were far from the news of London, would turn out for the king.

In early July, as the court at York started to complain of the smell of drains and to fear the plague in the overcrowded town, the king announced that they were to march to Hull once again. This time the plan was better laid. The royalist George Digby was inside the garrison and he had forged a plan with Hotham the governor that the town would open its gates to a besieging force from the king, as long as the force was sufficiently impressive to justify a surrender.

Charles himself, dressed in green as for a picnic, rode out at the head of a handsome army on a warm summer day in early July. Tradescant rode at the tail end of the courtiers, and felt that he was the only man in the chattering, singing, light-hearted band who wished that he was elsewhere, and who doubted what they were about to do.

The city’s defenders were bolstered by soldiers sent by the Scots. ‘It makes no difference, we have an agreement,’ Charles said contentedly.

The foot soldiers laid aside their pikes and got out spades. The royal army started to dig a ring of trenches around the city. ‘They will surrender before we are more than a foot deep,’ Charles assured his commanders. ‘No need to dig the lines t … too straight or too well. If they do not surrender t … tonight, we will attack at dawn tomorrow. As long as we make a sh … show.’

As the soldiers dug their trenches, and as Charles broke his fast with some red wine and bread and cheese, a simple meal, as if he were out on a hunting trip, the great gates of Hull slowly opened.

‘Already?’ Charles laughed. ‘Well, this is gracious!’ He shaded his eyes with his hand, and then shook his head and stared harder. The bread fell from his hand, unregarded. Slowly, his laughter died.

A regular well-drilled army marched steadily out from the gates of the town towards them. The front flank kneeled down and the musketmen, steadying their weapons on the shoulders of the front rank, took aim and fired straight at the royalist army.

‘Good G … God! What are they doing?’ Charles cried.

‘To horse!’ one of the quicker courtiers shouted. ‘Get the men saddled up! We’ve been betrayed!’

‘It can’t b … be …’

‘Save the king!’ Tradescant shouted. The royal guard, recalled to their duties, dropped their dinner in the dust and threw themselves on their horses.

‘Mount! Your Highness!’

There was a dreadful scream as another volley of shots pocked the dry ground around them, and some of the musket balls found a target.

‘Retreat! Retreat!’ someone yelled.

All the orders of command were broken, as the men scattered, running like panicked sheep across the stubbly hayfields, pushing through hedges and trampling down the ripening corn. Still the defenders of Hull came forward, the first rank dropping to their knees and reloading as the second rank fired over their shoulders and then marched on. Then they too dropped down and reloaded as the men behind them fired.

It was an unstoppable progress, John thought. The king’s soldiers did not even have fire lit ready for their muskets. They had no cannon ready, they did not even have their pikes. All they had were their trenching spades, and the men who had been digging had been the first to fall, toppling down into their shallow ditches, and screaming and crawling in the dirt.

At last someone found a trumpeter and ordered him to sound the retreat, but the foot soldiers were already up and running, running from the well-disciplined lethal ranks that were pouring, like little toy soldiers, out of the gates of Hull, firing and reloading, firing and reloading, like a monstrous toy which could not be stopped or escaped.

The king’s guards surrounded his horse and galloped him away from the battle. Tradescant, his own horse snorting and pulling, looked wildly around him and then followed the king. His last view of the battlefield was a horse, its stomach blown open by a cannon shot from the walls of the city, and a lad, not much more than fourteen, trying to shelter behind the body.

‘This is the end,’ John found he was saying as his horse wearily found the road to York and followed in the train of the ragged retreat. ‘This is the end. This is the end. This is the end.’

August 1642

For the king it was the beginning. The second humiliation outside the walls of Hull had decided him. The queen’s continual demands that he confront and defeat his parliament drove him on. He issued a proclamation that every able-bodied man in the country should rally to his army, and on Eastcroft Common outside Nottingham he paraded three cavalry troops and a battalion of infantry while the herald read the proclamation of war. John, standing behind his master in the pouring rain, thought that never in the history of warfare did any campaign look less promising.

The rain dripped in a steady stream from his hat. No-one had thought to bring a spade and they could not get the royal standard to stand properly in the stony ground. John thought of his father and his last service to the Duke of Buckingham when he had followed him to Portsmouth and waited to take ship to the He de Rhé, knowing that the battle would be lost and that it was, in any case, a cause not worth fighting for. John thought of his father’s face when he had met him, riding home on the Duke’s cart, of the half-hidden look of relief in his eyes. And he understood at last what it was to follow a master unwillingly, when that master will lead you to death from pure folly.

John looked at the king, the feather in his hat drooping in the pouring rain, as he listened, nodding approval, to the herald shouting the proclamation into the wind which whipped his words away. John thought that his family had served the kings and their favourites for long enough, and that any debt owed, had surely by now been paid – by his father’s heartbreak in the Ile de Rhé, and now, a generation later, by his own fear and despair before the walls of Hull.

In the rain outside Nottingham John found his determination to leave the king, whatever might be the outcome of his desertion. When they turned away from Eastcroft Common and went back to their billets in Nottingham, John turned southwards and rode alone to London without asking permission, without giving notice.

The royal standard blew down that night.

Hester, roused from sleep by the sound of a tap on the back door, ran downstairs, pulling on her nightgown, her heart pounding with fear. She peered out of the kitchen window into the pale greyness of the summer dawn and saw the familiar outline of John’s head.

She threw open the door. ‘John!’

He opened his arms to her, as if they were husband and wife in their hearts as well as by name, and Hester ran towards him and felt his arms come around her and hold her close.

He smelled of sweat and fatigue and the warm erotic male smell which lingered around his clothes when she brushed them. Hester felt herself long for his touch, and she tightened her grip around his back and held him close. He did not move away from her, he did not unclasp her hands. He held her as if he wanted her as she wanted him, and made no move to put her aside.

They stumbled together over the threshold, not releasing each other until they were at the fireside and the embers of the fire cast a warm glow. Then she leaned back, her arms still tightly around him, so that she could see his face.

She was shocked. The eight months of his absence had put grey into his hair at the temples and bags beneath his eyes. His beard was still a true dark brown, but matted and dirty, his face was smudged with dirt, his forehead carried new lines. He looked desperately weary. He looked like a man on the run.

‘Was there a battle?’ she asked, trying to understand what this mute look of suffering might mean.

He shook his head, released her, and dropped into the chair by the fireside. ‘Not one that is worth mentioning,’ he said bitterly. ‘When they come to write the history of these days it will not have more than a line. We rode out like fools, thinking that we would win without having to fight. We went out like the chorus in one of his masques – all show and pretence. For all the good we were, we might as well have had swords of wood and helmets of painted paper.’

Hester was silent, shocked by his vehemence, and by the bitterness in his tone. ‘Were you hurt?’

He shook his head. ‘No – only in my pride.’ He paused. ‘Yes. Deep in my pride,’ he corrected himself.

She did not know how to question him. She turned and threw some kindling on the fire and then some small twigs and broken branches of applewood. Coal was short in London, the Tradescants were living off their land.

He leaned forward to the blaze as if he were chilled to the heart. ‘All along it has been like a masque,’ he said, as if he was gripping some truth about the king at last. ‘As if it were some pretty play with a script which everyone was to follow. The threat of Parliament, the flight from London, his parting with the queen when he rode along the cliffs waving to her ship and wept, the ride north to victory. It has all been a masque – beautifully costumed. But when the time came for the king to defeat his enemies –’ He broke off.

‘What happened?’ Hester kneeled at the fire and kept her eyes on the flames, afraid to interrupt him.

‘The chorus didn’t arrive,’ John said sourly. ‘The engines which should show Jove descending or Neptune rising up from the sea failed to work. Instead of the gates of Hull opening and the governor coming out with the golden key on a velvet cushion and some poetry from Ben Jonson, it all went wrong. The gates opened and the soldiers came out and just went fire … reload … fire … reload … like dancers – but they weren’t doing our dance. They were following another script. And … and …’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t know what the end of this play will be.’

‘The king?’ she asked in a little whisper.

‘The king is sticking to his masque,’ John said savagely. ‘Act two was raising the royal standard. But the weather was all wrong. It should have been balmy skies or perhaps a bright comet overhead. Instead it poured with rain on him and we looked like sodden fools. But he will not realise that the scenes are going wrong. He thinks it is a rehearsal, he thinks it will be the greater on the night if it all goes wrong now.’

‘And what of you?’ she asked softly.

‘I am finished with him,’ John said. ‘I am finished with his service. I went back into his service to please my father and because I longed to work on the great gardens which are in his gift, and besides, when I was a young man there was almost nowhere else to work but for the king or the court. But I will die in his service if I go on. I am a gardener and he would not give me leave to go and garden. He has to have everyone in the masque, everyone has to carry a standard or a spear. He will never cease with this until we are all dead, or all defeated, or all persuaded that he is the Lord’s Anointed and can do no wrong.’

Hester quickly looked towards the kitchen door, but it was safely closed and all the household was still asleep.

‘I saw my father go out to certain death in the service of the Duke of Buckingham, and I saw him ride home, spared only by the death of his master,’ John continued. ‘I saw his eyes on that day. He never recovered from the death of the Duke. He was never his own man again. The loss of the Duke lay like a shadow over our family, and my father was torn between relief that he had survived and grief that the Duke was dead.

‘I swore then that I would never be like that, I swore I would never pledge myself to follow a man until death, and I meant it. I will never be a servant like that. Not even for the king. Especially not for this king, who cannot reward service and never says that he has had enough. He will not stop until every one of his servants is lying dead before him, and then he will expect a miracle from God himself to raise up more foot soldiers for his insatiable theatre. I will have no more of it. I can bear no more of it.’

‘You won’t join with Parliament?’ Hester asked, aghast. ‘Oh, John, you won’t fight against the king?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not a turncoat. I won’t fight against him. I’ve eaten his bread and he has called me his friend. I’ve seen him weep and I’ve kissed his hand. I won’t betray him. But I won’t play that part in this damned mockery.’

‘Will you stay here, quiet at home with us?’ she asked. She had a low sinking feeling in the pit of her belly. She knew that he would not.

‘How can I?’ he demanded of her. ‘People know who I am. They will ask me who I serve. I won’t deny him – I’m not a Judas. And he will send for me.’ He nodded. ‘Sooner or later he will realise that I am not at court and he will send for me again.’

‘Then what shall we do?’

‘We’ll go to Virginia,’ John said with decision. ‘All of us. We’ll take ship as soon as we can get a passage. We’ll take what we can carry and leave the rest. Leave the house and the garden and even the rarities. We’ll get out of this country and leave it to tear itself to pieces. I won’t see it. I won’t be here. I can’t bear it.’

Hester sat very still and measured the despair in her husband’s voice against her love for him, and her love for their home.

‘Will you have a glass of ale?’ she asked.

He lifted his gaze from the fire, as if he suddenly remembered where he was. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And then let’s go to bed. I have wanted you in my bed for night after long night, Hester. I have missed you, and thought of you here, missing me. I have wanted you and cursed the miles that were between us. And in the morning I shall see my children and we’ll tell them that we are leaving.’

‘You have wanted me?’ she asked, very low.

He put his hand out and turned her face up to him, one gentle finger under her chin. ‘Knowing that you are here has kept me going through one dark night after another,’ he said. ‘Knowing that you are here and that I have someone to come home to. Knowing that you will open your bed to me, and open your arms to me, and that whatever is going wrong all around me, I have somewhere that I can call my home.’

She could have moved forwards, she could have kneeled before him as he sat in his chair, he would have drawn her to him and on to his lap and he would have kissed her, as he had never yet kissed her, and they could have gone to bed as he wanted to do, and as she had wanted to do from the moment she had first seen him.

But Hester caught hold of her determination, forced herself to wait, and drew back from him, drew back and sat on her seat on the other side of the fireplace.

‘Now wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Not so fast, husband. I cannot leave here.’

For a moment John did not hear her. He was so conscious of the fall of her nightgown, and of her dark hair only half-hidden by her cap, of the play of the firelight on her neck and the glimpse of her shoulder. ‘What?’

‘I cannot leave here,’ she said steadily. ‘This is my home.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said abruptly. ‘I have made up my mind. I have to go. I cannot stay here, I will be torn apart by the two of them – king and Parliament. Parliament will have me out entrenching and drilling for their defence, and the king will summon me to court. I cannot be faithless to them both. I cannot watch the king ride into war as if it were a masqued ball. I cannot stay in England and see him die!’

‘And I cannot leave.’ She spoke steadfastly, as if nothing would ever move her.

‘You are my wife,’ John reminded her.

She bowed her head.

‘You owe me absolute obedience,’ he said. ‘I am your master before God.’

‘As the king is yours,’ she said gently. ‘Isn’t that what this war is all about?’

He hesitated. ‘I thought you wanted to be my wife?’

‘I do. I agreed to be your wife, and to rear your children, and to care for the rarities and the garden and the Ark. How can I do these things in Virginia?’

‘You can care for me and the children.’

Hester shook her head. ‘I won’t take the children there. You know yourself how dangerous it is there. There are wild Indians, and hunger, dreadful disease. I won’t take the children into danger.’ She paused for a moment. ‘And I won’t leave here.’

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