Earthly Joys

December 1637

J took ship in the Brave Heart, sailing out of Greenwich, and John came down to the quay to see him off. They ate a last meal together in the Three Choughs while J’s bags were taken on board the ship bobbing at the quayside below the window.

“Make sure you carry enough water to keep any plants in the earth damp all the way home,” John reminded him. “At sea in a storm, even the rain is salty.”

J smiled. “I’ve unpacked enough dying plants to know how to care for them.”

“Get seeds if you can. They travel much better than young plants. Seeds and roots are the best. Make sure you crate them up so they stay dark and dry.”

J nodded and gave his father a glance which warned him that there was nothing more that he could teach his son.

“I want it to go well for you,” John explained. “And there are treasures to be gathered there, I know it.”

J looked out of the little window at the ship at the quayside. “All my childhood I seemed to be watching you sail; it’s odd that it’s my turn now.”

“It’s right that it is your turn now,” John said generously. “I don’t even envy you. My back aches and my knees are stiff; my voyaging days are over. This winter was hard on me, cold weather, sorrow, ill-health and worry altogether. I shall limp from my fireside to my gardens until you return.”

“Write me news of the children,” J said. “That they keep their health.”

“The plague must be less this year,” John said. “It took so many last year. There must be better times coming. I shall keep the children away from the city.”

“They still grieve for their mother.”

“They will learn to feel it less,” John predicted. “Frances is already caring for Baby John, and sometimes he forgets and calls her Mama.”

“I know,” J said. “I should be pleased that he has stopped crying for her; but I can’t bear to hear it.”

John drained his tankard and put it down on the table. “Come on. Let’s get you aboard, and you shall leave this country and your grief together.”

The two men went down the narrow stairs and out to the quayside. “That house is riddled with passages like a rabbit warren,” John remarked. “When the press-gang comes in the front, there are men scattering out of houses up and down the street through a thousand doorways. I saw it when my duke was pressing men for the war against the French.”

J looked toward his ship. The tide was on the turn and she was pulling at the ropes as if testing their strength. He turned and his father took him awkwardly into his arms.

“God bless you,” John said gently.

J had a sudden superstitious dread that he would not see his father again. The loss of his mother and then his wife had shaken his confidence. “Don’t work too hard,” he urged him. “Leave it to me to repair our fortunes. I shall bring back barrels full of plants in time for the spring. I swear it.” He gazed into his father’s face. The old man looked as he had always, dark-eyed, weather-beaten, hardy as a clump of heather.

“God bless,” J whispered and then went up the gangplank of the ship.

John sat on a barrel on the quayside, stretching his tired legs before him, and waited for the ship to sail. He watched them run the gangplank aboard and then throw the mooring ropes. The little barges came out and took her in tow out to the middle of the river, and then John heard the faint shouted order and saw the lovely sight of the sails being flung open to the wind.

John raised his hand to his son as the ship caught the wind, slewed a little in the current, corrected her course, and then slipped away downriver, ploughing through the busy traffic of outbound boats and cross-river wherries, fishermen and rowing boats.

From his place at the railing, J saw the figure of his father grow smaller and smaller as the quay itself shrank and became part of a larger view, an outcrop of stone against the green of the Kent hills behind it; then as they were farther and farther out, the dock was nothing but a darker line on the blur of the shadowy land.

“Good-bye,” he said quietly. “God bless.” It seemed to him that he was leaving not just his father and his children and the memories of his wife and mother, but that he was leaving his own childhood and his long apprenticeship, and going to a new life which he could make his own.