Earthly Joys

Late Summer 1628

He was dead within moments, and it was John who leaped forward to catch him, and lowered the long slim body to the ground. Even dying in pain he still had the face of the saint that King James had called him. His skin had flushed as scarlet as an embarrassed maid with the shock of the wound, and then drained white as Italian marble. John cradled his heavy lolling head and felt the smooth tumbling black curls against his cheek for the last time. There was a loud sound of hoarse dry sobbing and John realized it was his own voice; then someone pulled him away from his lord and pressed a glass of spirits into his hand and left him.

He heard the noise of Felton’s capture, and the dreadful scream from Buckingham’s wife, Kate. He heard the running to and fro of men who were suddenly leaderless. He sat quite still, the glass of Hollands in his hand, while the room brightened as men drifted away and the August sunshine poured uncaringly through the window. The little motes of dust danced in the sunshine as if everything was still the same, when everything was different.

When he thought he could stand, John walked to the door of the house. To his left at the end of the street, the gray wall of the harbor was still there, still crumbling and unfit. Before him the rambling skyline of ramshackle houses and beyond them the tops of the masts of the fleet, still flying Buckingham’s flags. No one had ordered them to half-mast; people were still running around, denying the news, disbelieving their own denials. It was a beautiful day; the wind still blew steadily offshore. It would have been a good day to set sail. But Buckingham and John would never set sail together again.

John walked down the High Street like an old man, his boots unsteady on the cobbles, his limp pronounced. He felt that he was stepping into a new world, governed by new rules, and he could not honestly say that he was ready for it. He pulled his hat down over his eyes to shield him from the sun’s hard dazzle, and when a lad ran up and skidded to a halt before him, he shrank back, as if he too feared a blow, a fatal blow, to the heart.

“Is it true?” the boy yelled.

“What?”

“That the duke is dead?”

“Yes,” Tradescant said, his voice low.

“Praise God!” the boy sang out, and there was no doubting the relief and joy in his voice. “It’s true!” he yelled to another boy, a few yards away. “He’s dead! The Devil is dead!”

Tradescant put out his hand for the comfort of the sun-warmed wall and followed it, fingers trailing along the crumbling sandstone, like a blind man, to his lodging house. His landlord flung open the door.

“You’ll know – I’ve heard nothing but wild rumors – is he dead?”

“Yes.”

The man beamed as if he had been given a priceless gift. “Thank God,” he said. “Now the king will see reason.”

John felt his way to his room. “I am sick,” he said. “I shall rest.”

“You’ll not get much rest, I’m afraid!” his landlord said cheerfully. From the town they could hear the crackle of fireworks and a roar of cheering which was growing louder. “The whole town is going mad to celebrate. I’m off!”

He let himself out of his front door and ran down the street to where people were embracing, and dancing on street corners. Soldiers at the quayside were blasting their muskets into the skies and women who had come to kiss their husbands good-bye, expecting never to see them again, were weeping with relief. In a dozen churches the bells tolled as if for a mighty victory.

In all the world it seemed that only Tradescant grieved; only Tradescant and his lord lay still and silent all the long sunny joyous day.

It was not until midnight, lying in his bed, still gripping his hat in his hand, that John realized that he was free from his promise. He had been the duke’s man till death, and now death had come, and he was free.

Free and short of money, with no promise of wages and no job. Buckingham’s widow was sick with grief and the king himself ordered her into hiding in case an assassin struck against her as well.

It was as if the world had gone suddenly mad and no one knew what might happen next. There was no Lord High Admiral to command the expedition, there was no Lord Treasurer to keep the treasures of the kingdom, there was no chief adviser to make policy, there was no Favorite to rule everything. There was no king either, for when they gave Charles the news that Buckingham was dead he finished his prayers and went in silence to his room and locked himself away for two days and nights in silence, in darkness and fasting.

Tradescant sometimes thought of that long royal vigil and wondered that he and the king had been together in a long night of mourning, both of them driven down into silence and grief at the loss of the most beautiful man that either of them had known; the most beautiful and the most daring and the most reckless, and the most dangerous. Tradescant knew that Buckingham would have led him to his death, and that he had only escaped through his lord’s assassination. He sometimes wondered if the king felt the same, and if, during the two long days and nights of royal mourning, Charles too knew the same secret, shameful relief.

Tradescant could have left for his home at once, but he felt too frail even to start the journey. He had told Elizabeth that he was strong enough to voyage to France; but in this new life, this life without his master, he could not find the courage even to hire a wagon to go to Essex. He rested at his lodgings, and waited for his power to return. Every day he walked by the sea on the tumbled pebbles of Southsea beach and saw, on the horizon, the slow arc of Felton’s knife and the cry of warning in his own throat which never came.

He regretted nothing. Somehow in his grief there was no room for regrets. Not for the way he had been loved and rejected. Nor for his oath of duty till death. Nor for the fact that a shout could have saved his lord from Felton’s knife and that shout had never come. It was never a love which would linger and warm an old man. Buckingham was never a man who would age and diminish and decline. Those who loved him would always know passion and uncertainty and despair. He was not a comfortable man to love. Tradescant could think of no other end for Buckingham but one that cut him down like a rare flower in the very fullness of his beauty and which meant that those who loved him could hold him forever in their minds, like petals preserved in sand and sugar: in his perfection.

It was not until September that Tradescant could bring himself to load his wagon and start the long journey back to Essex, and by then his master’s body had been taken to London and buried in Westminster Abbey followed by only a hundred mourners. Buckingham’s family, his hangers-on, his courtiers, his placemen, all the hundreds and hundreds of men who had begged him for favors and counted on his support, all disappeared, melted away, denying him like a thousand false disciples at cock-crow. They sought new patrons, they tried to spot new rising stars, they tried to forget that they had promised loyalty and devotion to a man who was now everywhere despised.

The funeral was brief and unceremonious, and, like so much of his life, was a show. They buried an empty coffin and said the sacred words over a hollow box. The duke had been interred in secret, in darkness, the night before his funeral. The king’s new advisers had warned him that there could be no guarantee that a mob would not rise up against the Favorite’s funeral. The people of London were not satisfied with his death; they might tear the coffin open, disembowel his perfect body and hang it out at Traitors’ Gate, slash off his dead face and spike it up on Tower Bridge. The king had shuddered at the thought of it, hidden his face in his hands and left them to make what arrangements they would.

There was no money to pay the duke’s servants. John went back to Captain Mason’s house to find the man in charge of the expedition accounts packing his bags in panic before he could be blamed for the empty coffers. Buckingham had been trading on credit and on the promise of a certain victory, for months. The ship’s master for the Triumph had no money either. In the end John had to sell some of Buckingham’s goods to raise the money to hire the wagon to take the remainder home again. But the diamonds he kept safe in a purse on a cord around his neck. He sold the milch cow to his landlord for the rent, and he exchanged the hens for a pair of muskets. He would have to be his own guard and his own driver; he could afford no other.

He hired an open wagon with two old stubborn carthorses which had to be whipped at every crossroads to make them go ahead, and even then never went faster than an ambling stroll. John did not care how slowly they went. He sat on the driver’s bench, the reins slack in his hands, watching over the hedges the late summer landscape of browning wheat and barley and scrubby hayfields roll slowly past, and knew himself to be alive because the man he had loved more than anyone in the world was dead.

J was waiting for him on the south side of Westminster Bridge, where John always changed his horses. He stepped out of the doorway of the inn when he heard the rumble of the wagon and came to the driving box. He had expected to find a broken man, but was surprised. John Tradescant looked relieved, as if some burden had been lifted from him.

“J,” John said with quiet pleasure.

“Mother said to meet you and bring you to the Hurtes’.”

“Is she well?”

“Worried about you, but well enough.”

“And Jane?”

“Grown very stout around the middle.” J flushed with embarrassment and pride. “When I put my hand on her belly the little lad kicks back at me.”

John found that he was smiling at the thought of J’s baby.

“And are you well, Father? We heard the news at New Hall. Were you with the duke?”

John nodded. “I am well,” he said shortly.

“Did you see him?” J asked, curiosity overcoming him. “Were you there when he died?”

John nodded. He thought he would remember forever that timeless long moment when he could have cried out a warning, but instead he gave the word for the blow. “I was there.”

“Was it very dreadful?”

John thought of the beauty of the duke, of the smooth slow arc of the knife, of the exclamation of surprise, of the duke’s one word, “villain,” and then his sinking down, his limp weight in Tradescant’s arms.

“No,” he said simply. “He fell in all his beauty and his pride.”

J was silent for a moment, comparing his father’s loss with the country’s joy. “I’ll never work for a master again,” he vowed.

John looked down at him from the box, and J suddenly had a sense that there was more to the death of Buckingham than he would ever know, that there was more between the two men, master and vassal, than had ever been clear.

“Nor will I,” said John.

J nodded and swung up onto the box seat beside his father. “There’s another cart stored at the Hurtes’,” he said. “Goods from India and from the west coast of Africa, sent for my lord Buckingham. He won’t want them now.”

John nodded and said nothing as J steered the cart carefully through the swarm of pedestrians, barrow boys, sellers, loiterers, idling militia men, to the Hurtes’ door. At the rear of the house was a small yard for unloading and a couple of stables. The cart, loaded with treasures for Buckingham, was standing on the cobbles with a lad beside it to keep watch. J drew up alongside and helped his father down. John had to lean heavily on him when his feet touched the cobbles.

“I’m stiff from sitting too long,” John said defensively.

“Oh, aye,” J said skeptically. “But how ever would you have managed a long sea voyage and then sleeping on the ground with winter coming? It would have been the death of you! It’s a blessing you didn’t go.”

John closed his eyes for a moment. “I know it,” he said shortly.

J led the way through the storeroom at the back of the shop and up the stairs to the living quarters. As they came into the parlor Elizabeth started forward and flung herself into her husband’s arms. “Praise God you are safe,” she cried, her voice choked with tears. “I never thought to see you again, John.”

He rested his cheek against the smoothness of her hair and the crisp laundered edge of her cap, and thought, but only for a moment, of a warm perfumed riot of dark curls and the erotic scratch of stubble. “Praise God,” he said.

“It was a blessing,” she said.

John met Josiah Hurte’s gaze over the top of his wife’s head. “No, it was an ill business,” he said firmly.

Josiah Hurte shrugged. “There are many that are calling it a divine deliverance. They are saying that Felton was the saviour of his country.”

“They are praising a murderer then.” Inside John’s head he could see Felton’s pale determined face at the moment when John could have called out, and did not. “It was a sin, and any that stood by and failed to prevent it are sinners too.”

Elizabeth, skilled with years of experience in reading John’s moods, pulled back a little so that she could see his grim expression. “But you could not have stopped it,” she suggested. “You were not the duke’s bodyguard.”

John did not want to lie to her. “I could have stopped it,” he said slowly. “I should have been closer to him, I should have warned him about Felton. He should have been better guarded.”

“No point in blaming yourself,” Josiah Hurte said briskly. “Better thank God instead that this country is spared a war and that you are spared the danger.”

Elizabeth said nothing; she looked into her husband’s face. “Anyway, you are free now,” she said quietly. “Free from your service to him, at last.”

“I am free at last,” John confirmed.

Mrs. Hurte gestured that he should take a place at the table. “We have dined because we did not know when to expect you, but if you will take a bowl of broth and a slice of pie, I can have it before you at once.”

John sat at the table and the Hurtes’ maid brought him small ale and food. Josiah Hurte sat opposite him and took a pint of ale to keep him company.

“No one knows what will happen to the duke’s estate,” Josiah said. “The family is still in hiding, and the London house is quite shut up. The servants have been turned away, and there’s no money to pay the tradesmen.”

“There never was any,” John remarked wryly.

“It may be that the family decide to sell up to cover their debts,” Josiah said. “If they decide to honor their debts at all.”

Mrs. Hurte was shocked. “They’ll never refuse to pay!” she exclaimed. “Good merchants will go bankrupt if they renege. His lordship had run bills for years; it would have been called treason to refuse him credit. What of the honest men who depend on his widow paying them?”

“They say that there is no money,” J said simply. “I have had no wages. Have you?”

John shook his head.

“What will we do?” Jane asked. She had one hand resting on the curve of her belly, as if she would protect the baby from even hearing of such troubles.

“You can stay here,” her father offered instantly. “If there’s nowhere else you can always stay here.”

“I promised to provide for her and I will,” J said, stung. “I can get a place at any house in the land.”

“But you swore you’d never work for a great lord again,” Jane reminded him. “Such work leads us into vanity and no man in the king’s service is to be trusted.”

John raised his head at such radical thoughts but Jane met his gaze without shrinking. “I am only saying what everyone knows,” she said steadily. “There are no good courtiers. There is none whom my John would happily call master.”

“I have a little land,” Tradescant said slowly. “Some woodland at Hatfield and some fields at New Hall. We could perhaps build a house near New Hall, near my fields, and set up on our own account…”

Elizabeth shook her head. “And do what, John? We have to find a business that will give us a living at once.”

There was a brief silence. “I know a man who has a house for sale on the south side of the river; it has an established garden and some fruit trees already planted,” Josiah said quietly. “There are fields around it that you could buy or rent as well. It was a little farm and now the farmer has died and his heirs are ready to sell. You might raise rare plants and trade as a plantsman and gardener.”

“How would we afford it?” John asked them. The purse containing the diamonds was heavy around his neck.

Elizabeth shot a quick collusive glance at her son, and then moved from the chair at the window and sat opposite her husband at the table. Her face was pale and determined. “There is a cart full of goods in the yard below,” she pointed out. “And another ship docked this morning with plants and curiosities for his lordship. If we sell the goods we can buy the house and the land. The rare plants and seeds you can nurse up and sell to gardeners. You’ve always said how difficult it is to get good stock for a garden. Remember how you traveled all around England for your trees? You could grow your stock and sell it.”

There was a tense silence in the little room. John absorbed the evidence that this was a plan, formed among the Hurtes and his family and now presented to him for his consent. He looked from Elizabeth’s determined face to J’s stoical blankness.

“You mean that we should take my lord’s goods,” John said flatly.

Elizabeth drew in a breath and nodded.

“That I steal from him?”

She nodded again.

“I cannot believe that this is your wish,” John said. “My lord has been dead and buried for a month and I am to steal from him like a dishonest pageboy?”

“There are the tulips,” J said in a sudden rush. His face was scarlet with embarrassment, but he faced his father as one man to another. “What would you have had me do? The tulips were ready for lifting, they were in their bowls in our garden, the place was in uproar, men were running out of the house with wall-hangings and linen trailing behind them. I did not know what to do with the tulips. Nobody there would have nursed them up. Nobody there knew what to do with them. Nobody would advise me.”

“So what did you do?” John asked.

“I brought them with me. And more than half of them have spawned. We have nigh on two thousand pounds’ worth of tulip bulbs.”

“Prices holding?” John’s acumen flared briefly, penetrating his grief.

“Yes,” J said simply. “Still rising. And we have the only Lack tulips in England.”

“How much are you owed?” Elizabeth suddenly demanded. “In back wages? Did he pay you for the last expedition to Rhé? Did he advance you wages for this one? Did he give you money for the cost of the journey to Portsmouth? Or for your stay in Portsmouth, or this journey home? Because if he gave you nothing you will never have more from the duchess. She is in hiding and the king himself is refusing to tell anyone where she is. They say she is afraid of assassins, but we all know she is more terrified of creditors. How much are you owed, John?”

“I was not paid at midsummer,” J reminded him. “They said they had no coin and gave me a note of promise, and I will not be paid this Michaelmas. That’s twenty-five pounds I am owed. And while you were away I had to buy some plants and some saplings and they could not repay me.”

Unconsciously John put his hand to his throat where the bag of diamonds nestled warm against his skin.

“You cannot agree to this?” He turned to Josiah. “It is theft.”

The merchant shook his head. “I no longer know what is right and wrong in this country,” he said. “The king takes money from the people without law or tradition, Parliament denies that he has the right, and so he closes Parliament and imposes the fines anyway. If the king himself can steal honest men’s money then what are we to do? Your lord stole your service from you for years, and now he is dead and no one will repay you. They will not even acknowledge the debt.”

“Stealing is still a sin,” John said doggedly.

“These are times when a man’s own conscience should be his guide,” Josiah replied. “If you think that he treated you fairly then deliver the goods to his house, pile riches upon riches and let the king take them to pay for his masques and vanities, as you know he will. If you think that the duke died owing you for your service, owing J, if you think these are times when a man does well to buy himself a little house and be his own master, then I think you would be justified in taking what you are owed and leaving his service. You should take only what you are owed. But you have a right to that. A good servant is worthy of his hire.”

“If you return the tulips to New Hall they will die of neglect,” J said quietly. “There is no one there to care for them, and then we will have killed the only Lack tulips in England.”

The thought of the waste of the tulips was as powerful as anything else for John. He shook his head like a bull does after a long baiting when it is so wearied that it longs for the dogs to close and make an end. “I am too tired to think,” he said. He rose to his feet but Elizabeth’s gaze held him.

“He hurt you,” she said. “On that last voyage to Rhé. He did something to you then that broke your heart.”

John made a gesture to stop her but she went on. “He sent you home with that pain in your heart, and then he recalled you, and he was going to take you to your death.”

John nodded. “That’s true,” he said as if it did not much matter.

“Then let him pay,” she said gently. “Let him repay us for the grief and terror he has caused us, and I will consider the matter settled, and I will remember him in my prayers.”

John put his hand on the little purse of diamonds at his throat. “He was my lord,” he said and they could all hear the deep pain in the back of his voice. “I was his man.”

“Let him go in peace,” she said. “All debts to us paid, all grievances finished. He is dead. Let him pay his debts and let us start a new life.”

“You will pray for him? And mean it in your heart?”

Elizabeth nodded.

Silently John took the purse from his neck and handed it to his wife. “Go and see the farm,” he said. “You decide. If you and J and Jane like it, then buy it and we will make our home there. And in return for that you must go and pray for his soul, Elizabeth. For he needs your prayers, and there are few enough praying for him, God knows.”

“And the tulips?” J asked.

John met his son’s questioning look. “Of course we keep the tulips,” he said.