Earthly Joys

1636

In January, during the most difficult time for a gardener who lives off his plants, and the most frustrating time for a man who is only happy with his hands in the loam, the Tradescant luck turned. They were offered the work of the Oxford physic garden, a wonderful compact garden lying alongside the Isis, to grow herbs for the faculty of medicine at the university.

“You go and see what is needed,” John said, watching his son’s face, which had grown leaner and harder in the long cold months of winter. “They’re paying us fifty pounds a year and we have made next to nothing on the Ark this season. Go and see what work needs doing and take it in hand, J. I cannot go to Oxford in midwinter; the cold will get into my bones.”

John had hoped that the notorious rich hospitality of the town would divert J from the deep silence of his grief. But he came back within a month saying that there was only careful planting and thorough weeding needed. Lord Danby, who had gifted the garden to Magdalen College, had ordered a wall and a gatehouse built, and protection from the winter-flooding river.

“Nothing needs doing,” J said when he was home again. “I’ll grow some extra herbs to stock it in the spring, and I’ve appointed a couple of weeding girls.”

“Pretty ones?” John asked carelessly.

J looked grim. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

In February a man came to the door bearing an earthenware pot with the tips of green bulbs showing.

“What’s this?” J asked, hiding his weariness.

“I need to see John Tradescant,” the man said eagerly. “Himself and no other.”

“I am John Tradescant the younger,” J told him, only too well aware that that would not be enough.

“Yes,” the man said. “So it’s your father I want.”

“Wait here,” J said shortly and went to find his father. John was in the rarities room, enjoying the warmth from the fire, moving from cabinet to cabinet, admiring the precious things.

“There’s a man at the door with a bulb in a pot,” J reported. “Will only speak to you. I s’pose it’s a tulip.”

John turned at the word “tulip.” “I’ll come at once.”

The man was waiting in the hall. John drew him into the front room, J following, and they closed the door.

“What d’you have for me?”

“A Semper Augustus,” the man said softly. From the depths of his pocket he produced a letter. “This attests to it.”

“D’you think we’re fools?” J demanded. “Where would you get a Semper Augustus from? How would they ever let it out of the country?”

The man looked shifty. “This attests to it,” he repeated. “A letter for you alone, signed Van Meer.”

John broke the seal and read. He nodded at J. “It does,” he said. “He swears to me that there is a bulb in that pot from the original Semper Augustus. How did it come to your hands?”

“I’m merely the courier, master,” the man said uncomfortably. “There was a bankruptcy in a house. Whose house need not concern you. The bailiffs took goods, but there was a man who did not know his job and did not spot the bulbs.” He gave a sly smile. “I heard the mistress bundled them into a crock with a string of onions. So here they are, available for sale. The bankrupt gentleman, whose name we don’t mention, wanted them offered out of Holland. He thought of you and commissioned me to bring them to you. Cash,” he added.

“We’ll pay when we see the blooms and not before,” J said.

“The letter certifies them,” the man said. “And I have orders to give you only a day to decide and then take them elsewhere. There are other great gardeners in England, gentlemen.”

“They are all friends of ours,” J growled. “And if I think this is an onion, they will think so too.”

The man smiled. He was completely confident. “It is no onion. But if you spread it on your bread it will be the most expensive dinner you have ever eaten.”

“May I take it from the pot?” John asked.

The man flinched a little, and it was that which convinced J as much as anything that the bulb was indeed the priceless Semper.

“Very well,” he said. “But have a care… I’d let no other man disturb it.”

John upturned the pot and tapped it hard. Earth, wiry tangled white roots and bulb slid out into his hand, scattering the soft soil on the floor. It was unquestionably a tulip bulb. John’s rough hand caressed the smooth nut-brown papery skin, admired the perfect roundness of the bulb. The shoots at the top were strong and green, the bulb was growing away. There would be good leaves and no reason not to hope for good blooms. Of course he could not tell the color of the flower from the skin of the bulb, but the letter attested the bulb as a Semper Augustus, Van Meer was a trustworthy trader and the story of the bankruptcy and the bailiffs coming in was a not uncommon one in Holland now, where bulbs were changing hands a dozen times in a day, and where prices were soaring again.

Best of all, there was a little bump on the side of the bulb. It could be a little misshape, or it could be the start of a bulblet which would grow through the summer and by autumn would be a new bulb of its own – a profit of one hundred percent from the labor of leaving a bulb in the earth.

John showed it to J, his finger smoothing over the lump, and then carefully repotted it.

J drew him to the window bay, out of earshot of the waiting man.

“It could be anything,” he warned. “It could be one of a dozen we already grow.”

“Yes. But the letter looks genuine, that is Van Meer’s seal, and the story is likely. If it is indeed a Semper then there is a fortune sitting in that pot, J. Did you see the lump on the side? We could double our money on the mother bulb in a year and then quadruple it with two where we once had one.”

“Or we could grow a red tulip and we have fifty already.”

“I think we should risk it,” John said. “There’s a fortune to be gained here, J.”

John turned toward the man. “How much do you want for it?”

The man did not hesitate. “I have orders to take a thousand English pounds.”

J choked but John nodded. “Do your orders permit you to take some now and some when the bulb has bloomed? Any buyer would want to see the flower.”

“I can take eight hundred now and a note of hand to be redeemed in May.”

J drew close to his father. “We cannot. We cannot lay our hands on such a sum.”

“We’ll borrow,” John said softly. “It’s half the price we’d have to pay in Amsterdam.”

“But we’re not in Amsterdam,” J argued urgently. “We don’t speculate in bulbs.”

But John was glowing with excitement, his eyes alight. “Think what the king will pay for a Semper!” he said. “If it makes two bulbs instead of the one, think what profit we will make. We’ll take it back to Amsterdam and sell it, and we’ll make a fortune and our name as bulb growers. To sell a Semper grown in England on the Bourse itself!”

“I don’t believe this,” J muttered to himself. “We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel to meet the new tax, we missed two months of visitors in the summer because of the plague, and now we are staking eight years’ wages on one bulb?”

John turned to the man. “Here’s my hand on it,” he said grandly. “I shall have the money for you tomorrow. Come back at noon.”

For the rest of the day the Tradescants, father and son, called in their debts all around the city, then moved on to favors owed them, and went frankly to the great men in the trading houses and borrowed money, offering the bulb as security and finally selling shares in it outright. Their name was so good and the desire to cash in on the Dutch speculation was so strong that they could have borrowed money against the bulb’s profits twice over. The hysteria in Holland had spread to the whole of Europe. Everyone wanted shares in tulips, the market for which had been rising for years and was rising in great leaps every day. John did not have to struggle to find shareholders in his bulb; he could have sold it outright by midday. By the time they met back at the Ark at dusk they had covered the loan.

John was triumphant. “I could have sold it over and over!” he crowed. “This will make our fortune. I shall buy us a knighthood with this profit, J. Your son will be Sir Johnny on the wealth that we have made today!”

He broke off, seeing J’s solemn face and the heaviness of his eyelids. “Is it just that you have no zest for anything?” John asked his son tenderly.

The young man’s face was bleak. “She has not been in her grave a year and we are speculating and gambling.”

“We are trading,” John said. “Jane had no objection to honest trade. She was a merchant’s daughter. She knew the value of profit. Her own father has taken a share in this venture.”

“I think she would have called it gambling,” J said. “But you are right – I have no zest for anything. It is the heaviness of my heart which makes me think this too great a risk for us, I suppose. Nothing more than that.”

“Nothing more than that!” John clapped his son on the back. “The profit from it will make your heart light,” he promised.

They kept the bulb in the orangery, warm in the pale spring sunshine as it poured through the windows, but shaded from the midday sun so the leaves should not scorch. Every morning John watered it himself with tepid water spiced with his own mixture of stewed nettles and horse dung. The bulb put out fresh green leaves and then finally, from its secret heart, the pointed precious snout of a flower.

The whole household held its breath. Frances was in and out of the orangery every day watching for the green of the flower to blush into color. John never passed the door without glancing in. Only J remained wrapped in his own darkness. He could not see the orangery as a place where their fortune was slowly blooming; he could not forget that Jane had lain there, and it seemed to him that nothing good could come out of that room, in the wake of her small lead-heavy coffin.

“It’s white! It’s red and white!” Frances exploded into her grandfather’s bedroom one morning while he was dressing.

“The tulip?”

“Yes! Yes! It’s red and white!”

“A Semper Augustus!” he crowed and, still half-dressed, grabbed her hand and ran down the stairs with her. At the door to the orangery they stopped, afraid to run toward the plant as if the very pounding of their feet on the bare boards could shake the color from the petals.

The exquisite rounded perfect petals had blushed into color in the dawn light, though they were still tightly closed together. They were clearly a deep blood-colored crimson slashed like a silk doublet with white.

“I have made my fortune,” John said simply, looking at the miracle-flower on its slender wax-green stem. “This day I have made my fortune, Baby John will be a baronet and none of us will ever work for another man again.”

They showed it in the rarities room, of course, as the most valuable tulip in the world. When the courier came for the rest of his money they had borrowed only two-thirds of it. The rest they had taken from visitors, flocking to see the priceless tulip.

When the queen at Oatlands heard of it she said she would buy it as it stood, in the pot, and J was about to name a figure which would cover their purchase price and give them a Christian profit of two percent. But John was there to forestall him.

“When the bulb is lifted, Your Majesty, we will be honored to give it to you,” he said grandly.

She beamed; she loved presents. John pulled J away before he could argue. “Trust me, J. We will plant up one of the bulblets for her and still have the mother bulb. And she will reward us later for our generosity. Don’t fear. She knows as well as I how these matters are gracefully done.”

They watched the flower open in its glorious blaze of color and then become full-blown. “Can’t we keep the petals?” Frances asked.

“You can have the petals,” John said. “Perhaps they will keep in sugar and sand in one of the rarities cases.”

Then in November, leaving it as late as possible to give the bulb the greatest chance to grow well, John, watched by J and Frances, tipped the pot and waited for their new wealth to spill out into his hands.

The priceless bulb had not one, not two, but three bulblets growing around the mother plant. “Praise God,” John said devoutly.

With infinite care he took a sharp knife and cut them gently away from the mother bulb and placed them in their own little pots. “Four where there was one before,” he said to J. “How can you call it usury when it is the richness of God himself who doubles and quadruples our wealth for us?”

One pot was assigned to the queen. John would keep one. And the remaining two he would send back to Holland in triumph, to Amsterdam in February in bulb-buying time, to make them the richest gardeners the world had ever known, to make them as rich as nabobs.