Earthly Joys

Spring 1638

John did not neglect the garden at Oatlands while J was away. He had planted a new consignment of daffodils in the autumn and that spring he was in the king’s court every day, watching the green spears break through the soil. For the queen he had planted tulips in great china bowls, and forced them to bloom early. They might be worth a fraction of their original value but John would not throw good bulbs on the midden because they had once been worth a fortune and were now sold for shillings. He had bought them for love of their color and shape and he loved them still. He put them in the orangery by the windows for the light and kept them warm. Their Majesties were due at the palace in late February and John wanted the bulbs in flower for their private apartments.

He was lucky; the royal party were delayed at Richmond and did not come to Oatlands until early March, and the tulip buds were fat and green and striped with the promise of color when they arrived.

They were accompanied by a troop of new designers and decorators. It was the queen’s desire that her apartments should be remodeled and repainted. “What colors shall I have on the walls?” she asked John. “Here is Monsieur de Critz, who will paint me cherubs or angels or saints, or whatever I will.”

John looked at the tulips on her table, which were slowly going a deep glossy red. “Scarlet,” he said.

She rounded on him, spitting with anger. “D’you think to insult me?” she demanded.

He realized at once that she was smarting from the bawdy songs they were shouting in the streets of London about the two scarlet whores – the Pope and the Queen of England, who was shamefully in his toils.

“No!” John stammered. “No! I was looking at your flowers!”

She turned and caught sight of the tulips. “Oh.” Her charm had quite deserted her. “Well, anyway. Cream and pink and blue, the ascension of Mary,” she said shortly to the painter, and left the room.

The painter raised a cautious eyebrow at John.

“I’d best have a care,” John said.

“Both she and the king are quick-tempered these days,” the man said in a quiet undertone. “The news from the country gets worse every day. It is not always easy, serving at court.”

John nodded and extended his hand. “Good to see you again, Monsieur de Critz.”

“It’s been a long time,” the man said. “I last saw you years ago, when I was commissioned by my lord Cecil.”

“I remember,” John said. “You did the portrait of my lord which was made into a mosaic for the fireplace at Hatfield.”

They heard the queen’s voice raised in temper in the inner room.

“I’m off to my garden,” John said hastily.

“Will you show me around before you go? I am halfway to being lost here.”

John nodded and led the way from the rooms. “These are the queen’s apartments; the king’s rooms match them but lie the opposite side. Down below is the king’s court. On the other side, the queen’s.”

The painter looked down from the window to where John’s intricate knot garden was green and white and yellow. The outside border was the bright green of fresh growing bay, clipped tight and neat, and inside the square, as the queen had first commissioned, was a love-knot made of bay with H M and C monograms at each corner made with the brilliant iridescent blue of violets and the bright white-gold of the new daffodils.

“If they had been a month later, it would all have had to be redug with pansies,” John said.

“Did you design it?” John de Critz asked, impressed.

“My son designed it,” John told him. “But we both worked on the planting scheme. It is harder with Their Majesties than with a lord who is at home most of the time. When they come on a visit they expect it to be perfect, but you never know when the visit will be. We have to grow everything in pots or nursery beds, and only put the plants in when we know they are coming. We can’t wait to let the plants grow fine and strong in the beds and succeed each other. Their Majesties need it perfect at each visit.”

“You are a painter yourself,” the man remarked. “What patterns and color! This is even better than Hatfield.”

“I have no sense of smell,” John explained. “My son prizes flowers for their scent, and loves working with herbs for their perfume. But, since I can smell nothing, I love bright colors and shapes.”

The two men turned from the window and John led the way down to the great hall where the king and the household would dine, and then out into the court before the hall.

“Do you sleep in the hall?” John asked.

“My niece is with me; we have rooms in the old wing,” the man replied.

“Does she always accompany you?” John asked, surprised. The aristocratic members of the court might confine themselves to platonic love or to delicate trysts, but the rest of the royal household could be a rough place for a young woman when the fanciful romantic behavior of the royal parade had passed by.

“Her father died of the plague and her mother cannot support her,” the man said. “And, to tell you the truth, she has a fine eye and can work as well as any draftsman. I often let her draw for me and block the designs out on paper, and then I transfer them to the walls.”

“I will see you both at dinner then,” John said. The spring sun-shine was warm on his face and he could hear the birds singing. “I must get out and see how they are digging in the kitchen garden.”

De Critz raised his hand and went back into the palace to start his drawings for the queen.

John joined de Critz at the dinner table at midday in the great hall. At the top table were the king and queen and the favored courtiers of the day, with hundreds of rich and elaborate dishes laid before them. The queen held out her white hands for her lady-in-waiting to pull off, one at a time, each of the priceless rings, and pour a stream of warm clean water over her fingertips and then dab them with a napkin of the finest damask.

John noted, with no sign of disapproval showing in his face, that seated on one side of the queen was her confessor, and beside the king was the French ambassador. Grace was said in a quiet mutter in Latin by the queen’s confessor and it was undoubtedly a Roman Catholic grace. There was no sign at all that this was a Protestant court in a Protestant country.

There was no sign, either, of the royal family. Their portrait was there, right enough, all five children as lovely as angels under the painter’s tactful depiction. But the real children were never at their parents’ dinner table. The queen prided herself on the passion of her maternal feelings, but tended to exercise them on her real children only occasionally, and mainly when she was being watched in public.

A young woman in her mid-twenties, dressed simply but elegantly in subdued colors, walked briskly into the hall, bowed low to the top table and dropped a slight curtsey to her uncle.

“This is my niece, Hester Pooks,” John de Critz said. “John Tradescant, the king’s gardener.”

She did not bob a curtsey to John but looked him straight in the face with a smile and held out her hand for a brief firm handshake. “I am glad to meet you,” she said. “I have been walking round and round the gardens and I think I have never seen anything more lovely.”

It was the quickest route to John’s heart. He pulled out a chair for her and helped her to a piece of bread from the platter, and meat from the serving bowl which was before them. He told her about the making and improving of the Oatlands gardens, about the new breeds of tulips just blushing into colors, about the deep digging in the kitchen garden and the enormous asparagus bed.

“I made some sketches of the fruit trees in bud and those little daffodils beneath them,” she said. “I’ve never seen an orchard so pretty.”

“I should like to see your sketches,” John said.

“The grass is like a tapestry or a painting,” she remarked. “The true flowery mead. You can hardly see the green for flowers.”

“Now that’s just what I intended,” John said, his enthusiasm growing. “It has to be balanced all the time, and mown at the right time so that you don’t cut the flowers before they are seeded, and you have to pull the plants which are running away and drowning the rest… but I am so glad you saw it. It is supposed to look artless, and that is the hardest thing to get right!”

“So now I have a drawing based on a garden, which is based on a tapestry, which will have been based on a drawing.”

“And perhaps at the very back of it all, there was a garden.”

She looked at him with quick comprehension in her dark eyes. “The first garden? Of Eden? Do you see that as a flowery mead? I have always thought of it as a French garden, with beautiful walks.”

“Certainly there must have been an orchard.” John had an enjoyable sense of intellectual freedom, being allowed to speculate about the Bible, which, at home, had to be accepted as a revealed truth and read with uncritical devotion. “There must have been at least two apple trees.”

“Two?”

“To pollinate. Otherwise the Devil himself would have had no fruit for tempting poor Adam!”

“But I thought the scholars were now saying that Adam did not eat an apple but an apricot.”

“Really?” John had an alarming sense of the world shifting beyond the limits of his lighthearted skepticism. “But it says apple in the Bible.”

“Our Bible in English is translated from the Greek, which was translated from the Hebrew. There are bound to be errors in the translations.”

“My son would say-” He broke off. He was no longer sure what J would say. “A man of faith would say that there cannot be errors. That since it is the revealed word of God it must be perfect.”

She nodded as if it did not matter very much. “A man of faith would have to have faith,” she said simply. “But a man who questions would be bound to question.”

John looked at her doubtfully. “And are you a woman who questions?”

She smiled at him, a sudden smile illuminating her face and making her suddenly a pretty young woman. “I have a brain in my head to think for myself – but no elevated principles.”

Her uncle was shocked. “Hester!” He turned to John. “Indeed, she does herself an injustice. She is a very principled young woman.”

“I don’t doubt it…”

Hester shook her head. “I am completely respectable, which is what my uncle means; but I am talking about convictions and political principles.”

“You sound as if you are a doubter,” John commented.

“I think for myself but I never neglect the conventions,” she explained. “This is a hard world for all of us, and especially for women. My study has been to avoid giving offense and to advance my own career.”

“As a painter?” John asked.

She gave him her open, honest smile. “As a painter and a maid for now. But I shall want to marry well and care for my family and further my husband’s prosperity.”

John, accustomed to Jane’s high morality, was torn between shock at her frankness and a sense of freedom at her honesty. “Nothing more than that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think there is anything more than that.”

“And she can certainly draw.” Her uncle moved the conversation into safer areas. “I thought I would use her sketches of your flowery mead as a background in some of the pictures for the queen’s walls.”

The young woman flushed with pleasure. “I will block them out for you,” she promised.

“Can you draw and color tulips?” John asked. “There are some in the queen’s apartment which are just coming into flower and I should like to have a picture to show my son. He chose them, bought them and planted them. He will want to know how they have done. We have had our disappointments with tulips-”

“Money?” she guessed acutely. “Were you caught in the tulip crash?”

John nodded. “But I should like him to know that they are still beautiful, even if they are not profitable.”

“I would be pleased to try,” she said. “I have not had the chance of seeing many tulips in flower. I know the Dutch tulip paintings, of course.”

“Come to my house this evening,” John suggested. “I live adjoining the silkworm house. I’ll bring a little bowl of them.”

Hester did not curtsey as she left them but dipped her head, like a boy, and went away. Her stride was like a boy’s as well, firm and matter-of-fact.

“It is all right that she comes?” John asked, suddenly remembering his manners. “I had thought I was speaking to a young draftsman. I forgot she was a young woman.”

“If she were a boy I would have had her as my apprentice,” her uncle said, watching her go. “She can come to your house, Mr. Tradescant, but I have to guard her around the court. It is a nuisance. Some of these gentlemen write sonnets to the queen all day and then go wenching like lechers at night.”

“I have a lass like her at home,” John said, thinking of Frances and her desire to be gardener to the king. “She’s been told that she will have to marry a gardener, that is the closest she can get to the work; but she wants to be one herself.”

“What does her mother say?”

“She has none now. Plague.”

The man nodded in sympathy. “It’s hard for a maid to grow up without a mother. Who cares for her?”

“We have a cook who has been with us for many years,” John said. “And housemaids. But when my son comes home from Virginia he will have to remarry. There’s my grandson as well. They cannot be left in the care of servants.”

De Critz slid a thoughtful sideways glance at him. “Hester has a good dowry,” he said casually. “Her parents left her with two hundred pounds.”

“Oh,” said John, thinking of that straightforward nod of the head and the confident walk. “Did they, indeed?”

Hester Pooks sat at the table in John’s little sitting room and drew the queen’s bowl of tulips, squinting against the candlelight and the last rays of the evening sunshine.

“I’ve seen the tulip books,” she said. “My uncle borrowed one to copy once. They show the bulb, don’t they? And the roots?”

“You can’t show these bulbs,” John said hastily. “They must be left undisturbed. Please God they are spawning underneath the soil and I will soon have two or three tulips everywhere I once had one.”

“And what do you do with the extra tulips?” she asked, never taking her eyes from the flower except to look down at her page. John watched her; he liked her direct, searching gaze.

“Some I replant in new pots here and keep them for the king and queen next year, and some I take home and plant in my own garden and keep them as stock for my nursery.”

“So who owns them?” she persisted.

“The king and queen own the parent plants,” John said. “For they commissioned my son to buy them, and paid for them. And the little bulblets we share. My son and I take half and the king and queen take half.”

She nodded. “You double your stock every year? That’s a good business,” she observed.

John thought that she was surprisingly astute for the niece of an artist. “But it does not show the profits anymore,” he said ruefully. “The market smashed in February. The best of the tulip bulbs were going for prices that would buy you a house. Passed from trader to trader as a paper bond, getting more expensive each time.”

“So what happened? What stopped the market?”

John spread his hands. “I don’t know,” he said. “I saw it happen; but I still don’t understand it. It was like magic. One moment they were bulbs, rare and rather precious, but priced within the reach of a gardener who might grow them. Next moment they were priced like pearls and everyone wanted them. All of a sudden it’s as if the Bourse woke up to the fact that they were going mad over flowers, and they were priced like bulbs again. In truth, less than bulbs, because nobody wanted to be a tulip trader anymore; to be a tulip gardener was like standing up in public and saying you were a greedy fool.”

“Did you lose much money?”

“Enough.” John was not going to tell her that all of their savings had been in tulip bulbs. That their wealth had crashed as the bulb market had crashed and that he and J had sworn a solemn oath, a peasant’s oath, never to trust anything but the value of land ever again.

Hester nodded and drew a smooth swift line on the page, the tulip’s curving veil-like leaf. “It is an awful thing to lose your money. My father used to have a shop of artists’ supplies; he lost his money when he fell sick. When he died there was nothing left for us at all. The only money we had was on a ship coming from the West Indies. It did not arrive for a year. In that year, as I sold first the carpet and the curtains, and then every stick of furniture we had, and then my dresses too, I swore that I would never be poor again.”

She gave him a quick sideways glance. “I learned that nothing matters as much as holding on to what you have.”

“There is God’s guidance and your faith,” John suggested.

She nodded. “I don’t deny it. But when you have sold your chair and are sitting on a small chest which holds every single thing you own, you gain a good deal of interest in the life here, and less in the life hereafter.”

Jane would have been appalled at such free speech, but John was not. “A hard lesson for a young woman,” he commented.

“It’s a hard world for a young woman, for anyone without a secure place,” she said. Her eyes followed the tulip’s neck and her charcoal drew a swift line on the page. John watched her at work. She made it look absurdly easy. She was a plain girl, he thought, plain-featured and plain-spoken, and he thought that his wife Elizabeth would have liked her enormously. A straightforward girl who could be relied on to run a small business, a sensible girl who would look for reliability and dependability in a husband and not necessarily expect more. A girl who knew the value of money, not a spendthrift woman from court. A good girl who would care for children who needed a mother.

“D’you like children?” he asked abruptly.

She drew another smooth line for the tulip’s sensuous wavy stem. “Yes,” she said. “I hope to have children of my own one day.”

“You might marry a man who has children already,” John said.

She shot him an acute glance over the top of her drawing block. “I’d have no objection.”

“Even if they were up and running around?” John asked incautiously, thinking of Frances and her determined nature. “Another woman’s children, brought up in her ways and not yours?”

“You are thinking of your grandchildren,” she said, cutting through his hedging with one swift slice. “My uncle has told you that I have a good dowry and you are wondering if I would care for your grandchildren.”

John choked slightly on his pipe. “You are a frank speaker,” he exclaimed.

She turned her attention to her drawing. “Something has to happen,” she said quietly. “I cannot travel around with my uncle forever, and I want a home of my own and a husband to settle down with. I should like children, and a good little business to run.”

“My son is grieving for his wife,” John warned her. “There may be no room in his heart for another woman at all. You might marry him and live with him all your life and never hear a word of love from him.”

Hester nodded, her hand steady and skillful as she turned the charcoal on its side and rubbed it gently against the grain of the paper to show the delicate veining on the tulip leaf. “It is an understanding. An agreement; not a love affair.”

“Will that be enough for you?” John asked curiously. “A young woman of your age?”

“I’m not a young maid,” she said steadily. “I am a spinster of the parish of St. Bride’s. A maid is a girl with a life of promise before her. I am a spinster of twenty-five in need of a husband. If your son will have me, and treat me kindly, I will have him. I don’t care that he has loved another woman, even if he loves her still. What I care about is getting a home of my own and children to care for. Somewhere I can hold up my head. And you and he are well-known; he works for the king direct and he has the ear of the queen. With Parliament dissolved and London trade doing badly, there is no other route of advancement other than the court. This would be a very good match for me. It’s nothing more than adequate for him, but I will make it worth his while. I will guard his business and his children.”

John had the delightful sensation that he should not be having this conversation at all, that J was not a lad to have these things arranged for him, he was a man who should make his own choices. But it was a great pleasure to organize things as he wished, and he was afraid for his grandchildren.

“Frances is nine and her brother is four years old. A girl needs a mother, and Johnny is not out of his short coats. You would care for them and give them the love they need?”

Still Hester did not take her eyes from the tulip. “I would. And I would give you more grandchildren, if God is merciful.”

“I won’t be with you for long,” John predicted. “I’m an old man. That’s why I’m in a hurry to see my grandchildren safe and my son married. I want to know that I leave it all in safe hands.”

She put down her paper and for the first time her eyes met his. “Trust me. I will care for all three of them, and for your rarities, for the Ark and for the gardens.”

She thought that a look of immense relief passed over his face as if he now saw the way out of some complex thick-leaved maze.

“Very well, then,” he said. “When Their Majesties leave here, I’ll go home and you can come with me. You should see the children and they see you before we go further. And then J will come home from Virginia and the two of you can see if you like each other enough.”

“What if he doesn’t like me?” Hester asked bluntly. “I’m not a beauty. He might think he could do better.”

“Then I’ll bring you back to your uncle and you’re no worse off,” John said. He thought he had never met a woman so frank. The lack of vanity and the plain speaking suited him; he wondered if J would like her for it, or if she would embarrass him. “Of course, you might not like him.”

She shook her head. “I’m not a princess in a romance pining for love,” she said. “If he can give me a house and business and a couple of children, that’s all I want. I could shake on the deal today.”

John reminded himself that to put out his hand and shake on the deal now would be to trap her as well as to trap his son. He heard Cecil’s wise cynicism in his head urging him to do it and turned away. “I won’t let you be too hasty,” he said, resisting the temptation. “Come with me to the Ark at Lambeth, meet the children, see the house and see if it suits you before we say more.”

Hester nodded, her eyes back on the tulips again. “Good,” she said.

John was weary to the very marrow of his bones on the journey home from Oatlands to Lambeth. The road seemed longer than usual and the river crossing was cold, with a bitter wind that swept down the river and cut through his leather waistcoat and his woolen cloak. The ague that he had brought home from Rhé, which descended on him whenever he was tired, made him ache in every bone of his body. He was glad that Hester was there to pay the ferryman and to commandeer a wagon for them to ride down the South Lambeth Road. She had an eye to his comfort all the way but not even her care could stop the wind blowing chill or the wagon jolting down the road in the winter ruts.

When they halted outside the house she had to help him over the little bridge and into the house, and as soon as she was in the door she was giving orders for his comfort as if she were mistress already.

The servants obeyed her willingly – lighting a fire in John’s room, bringing a chair for him to sit in, bringing him a glass of hot wine. She knelt before him, her cloak still tied around her neck, her muff pushed to one side, and rubbed his cold hands until they lost their blueness and tingled.

“Thank you,” John said. “I feel a fool, bringing you here and then needing your help.”

Hester rose to her feet with a slight smile which made little of her care of him, and set him at his ease. “It’s nothing,” she said easily.

She was a woman who could set a house to rights in moments. In a very short time she had clean sheets on John’s bed, and a bowl of hot soup and a loaf of white wheaten bread sent up to him so that he could dine in his bedroom. Then she turned her attention to the children and sat with them in the kitchen while they ate their supper.

She heard them say grace after the meal, both heads bowed obediently over their hands. Baby John still had the golden silky curls of infancy falling over his white lace collar. Frances’s brown sleek hair was hidden under her white cap. Hester had to stop herself from reaching out and gathering the two of them onto her lap.

“The mistress used to say prayers every morning and evening,” the cook volunteered from the fireside. “D’you remember, Frances?”

The girl nodded and looked away.

“Would you like us to pray, as your mother used to pray?” Hester asked her gently.

Again Frances nodded wordlessly, turning her head away so that no one could see the pain in her face. Hester put her hands together and closed her eyes and prayed, from the prayer book issued by Cranmer, as if there were no other way to address your maker. Hester had never been inside a church where prayers were spoken from the heart; she would have thought such behavior unsettling, perhaps illegal. She said the words the archbishop had ruled, and prayed by rote.

And Frances, slowly, without turning her head or indicating in any way that she wanted an embrace, stepped backward, toward Hester, closer and closer and then finally leaned back against her, still not looking around. Gently, carefully, Hester dropped her hands from where they were clasped in prayer and rested one hand on Frances’s thin shoulder, and then the other on Johnny’s silky curls. Johnny was comfortable under the caress and leaned at once toward her, but she felt the little girl’s shoulder tense for a moment, and then relax as if the child were relinquishing a burden which she had been carrying alone. While the others said “Amen” out loud to the familiar prayer, Hester added a private silent wish that she might take these children who belonged to another woman, and bring them up as their mother would have wanted, and that in time they would come to love her.

She did not move away when the prayers ceased but stood still, her hand on each child. Johnny turned his little round face up to her and lifted up his arms, mutely asking to be picked up. She stooped and lifted him and settled him on her hip, and felt the deep satisfaction of a child’s weight at her side and his arms around her neck. Still without looking, and with no word of appeal, the girl Frances turned toward Hester and Hester folded her into the crook of her arm and pressed the sad little face into her apron.

John recovered after a few days at home, and was soon setting seeds in pots and sending Frances out in the frosty garden to gather up, without fail, every single one of the last chestnuts as they fell from the trees down the avenue.

The nuts were so precious that the household linen was spread beneath the wide branches of the trees from autumn to springtime to ensure that not a single prickly casing or warm brown nut was lost in the grass. Hester mentioned the risk of staining or tearing the sheets, but John said firmly that one nut was worth a dozen sheets and that the garden must always come before the house.

He took Hester on long cold walks down to the bottom of the orchard, showed her every single tree and named it for her. In the blustery wet days of March he stayed in the orangery before a potting table with a barrel of sieved earth at his side and taught Hester how to set seeds. He showed her the tender plants which lived in the orangery from autumn to spring to protect them from winter frosts, and he showed her the winter jobs: the cleaning of the big tub planters, the washing of the pots and airing them, ready for the fever of spring planting. One lad spent all the winter sieving earth for the seed beds and for the pots. Another brewed up a fearful barrel of water fortified with horse and cow manure and a nettle soup of John’s own devising, which would be sprinkled on every precious seedling.

They passed a quiet few weeks. A sailor, fresh into port, had a sealed parcel of seeds for John and a letter from Virginia.

“He says he will be home by April,” John read. “He says he is writing this before going out into the woods for a week. He has an Indian guide who leads him around and shows him plants and brings him safe in.” He paused and looked into the embers of the fire. “I wish he would come home,” he said fretfully. “I am impatient for him to be here and everything settled.”

“He will come in good time,” Hester said soothingly. There was a single disloyal thought in her head that they were managing very well without him, John busy and contented, the museum taking a small but steady flow of money and the children taught by her every morning and kissed good night by her every night.

“He should be already on his way,” John said. “This letter is eight weeks old. He may be at sea now.”

“God keep him safe,” Hester said, glancing out of the window at the dark March skies.

“Amen,” John said.

Toward the end of the month John fell ill again. He ached in every bone and complained of the cold. But he was adamant that nothing ailed him, he was well enough. “Just tired,” he said, smiling at Hester. “Just old bones.” She did not press him to rise from his bed, nor to eat. She thought he looked as if he had reached the end of a long and arduous road.

“I think I should write a letter for J,” he announced quietly one morning as she sat at the foot of his bed, sewing an apron for Frances.

At once she put her sewing to one side. “He will not get it if he left the colony as he planned. He should be at sea now.”

“Not a letter to send. A letter for him to read here. If I am not here to speak to him.”

She nodded gravely; she did not rush to reassure him. “Are you feeling worse?”

“I am feeling old,” he said gently. “I don’t imagine that I will live forever, and I want to make sure that it is all settled here. Will you write it for me?”

She hesitated. “If you wish. Or I could send for a clerk to write it. It might be better if it were not written by me.”

He nodded. “You are a sensible woman, Hester. That’s sound advice. Get a clerk for me from Lambeth and I will dictate my letter to J and finish my will.”

“Of course,” she said and went quietly from the room. At the doorway she paused. “I hope you will make it clear to your son that he is not bound to have me. Your son will have to make his own decision when he comes home. I am not part of his inheritance.”

There was a small gleam of mischief in John’s pale face. “It never occurred to me,” he said unconvincingly. He took a difficult breath. “But it shall be as you wish. Send for a clerk from Lambeth, and also send for the executors of my will. I want to leave everything straight.”

The clerk came and the executors with him – Elizabeth’s brother, Alexander Norman, and William Ward, Buckingham’s steward, who had served with John all those years ago.

“I shall be your executor with the greatest of pleasure,” Alexander assured him, taking a seat at the bedside. “But I expect that you shall be mine. This is just a winter rheum. We’ll see you in the garden again this spring.”

John managed a weary smile, leaning back against his pillows. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m a good age now.”

Alexander Norman glanced over the will and set his name to it. He reached toward John and shook his hand. “God keep you, John Tradescant,” he said quietly.

The Duke of Buckingham’s old steward, William Ward, stepped forward, and signed the will which the clerk showed him. He took John’s hand. “I shall pray for you,” he said quietly. “You shall be in my prayers every day, along with our lord.”

John turned his head at that. “D’you pray for him still?”

The steward nodded. “Of course,” he said gently. “They can say what they like about him but we who were in his service remember a master to worship, don’t we, John? He wasn’t a tyrant to us. He paid us freely, he gave us gifts, he laughed at mistakes and he would flare into a rage and then it was all forgotten. They spoke ill of him then and they speak worse of him now; but those of us who knew him have never served a better master.”

John nodded. “I loved him,” he whispered.

The steward nodded. “When you get to heaven you will see him there,” he said with simple faith. “Outshining the angels.”

The will was signed and sealed and posted with the clerk, the executors in agreement, but Hester thought that John would not go until he could see his tulips one last time. There is no gardener in the world who does not worship spring like a pagan. Every day John would take a seat at the window of his bedroom and peer outward and down to try to see the tiny spears of green springtime bulbs piercing the cold earth.

Every day Frances came to his room with her hands filled with new buds. “Look, Grandfather, the lenten lilies are out, and the little white daffodils.”

She would spread them on the coverlet wrapped around his knees, both of them careless of the sticky juice from the cut stems. “A feast,” John said, his eyes on them. “And they smell?”

“Like heaven,” Frances replied ecstatically. “Yellow, they smell like sunshine and lemons and honey.”

John chuckled. “Tulips coming?”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said. “They’re still in bud.”

The old man smiled at her. “I should have learned patience by now, my Frances,” he said gently, his breath coming short. “But don’t forget to look tomorrow.”

Hester thought that John’s stubborn will would not let him die in early spring. He wanted to see his tulips before he died; he wanted to see the blossom on his cherry trees. She thought his soul could not leave his weary body until he had some warm summer flowers in his arms once more. As the cold winds died down and the light at the window of his bedroom grew brighter and warmer, his breath slowly slipped away, but still he hung on – waiting for the summer, waiting for the return of his son.

At the end of March he turned his head to her as she sat at his bedside. “Tell the gardener to send me in some flowers,” he said softly. He was breathless. “Everything we have. I may not be able to wait for them to bloom. Tell him to pot me up some tulips. I want to see them. They must be nearly showing by now.”

Hester nodded and went out to find the gardener. He was weeding in the seed beds, preparing them for the great rush of planting out which would come when the danger of night frosts was over.

“He wants his tulips,” she told him. “You’re to pot them up and take them in. And cut some daffodils, armfuls of them. But I want us to do more for him. What are the best plants he has made? The rarest, most special plants? Can we not put them all in a pot and take them in so that he can see them from his bed?”

The gardener smiled at her ignorance. “It’d be a big pot.”

“Several pots then,” Hester persisted. “What are his other plants?”

The gardener’s gesture took in the whole garden, and the orchards beyond. “This is not a man who gardens in pots,” he said grandly. “There’s his orchard: d’you know how many cherry trees alone? Forty! And some of his fruit trees were never grown before, like the diapered plum he got from Malta.

“And he found wonderful trees for the park or garden. See those beauties so fresh and green with those pale needles? He grew them from seed. They are Archangel larches, from Russia itself. He brought the pine cones back and managed to make them grow.”

“They’re dead,” Hester objected, looking at the spiky yellowing needles clinging to the brown twigs.

The gardener smiled at her and took one of the swooping bare branches. There was a tiny rosette of green needles at the tip of the rusty brown branches.

“In the autumn they turn as golden as a beech tree and shed their needles like yellow rain. Come the spring they burst out, all fresh and green like grass. He reared them from seed and now look at the height of them!

“In the orchards he grows the service tree, and his favorites are the great horse chestnuts. Look at that avenue down the garden! And every one of them flowers like a rose and makes leaves like a fan. It’s the greatest tree that has ever been seen, and he grew the first from a nut. On the lawn before the house? That’s an Asian plane. And nobody can say how big it will grow because nobody has ever seen one before.”

Hester looked down the avenue at the arching swooping branches. “I didn’t know,” she said. “He showed me all around the garden and the orchard but he never told me they were all his own, discovered by him and grown here in Lambeth for the very first time. He only told me they were rare and beautiful.”

“And there’s the herbs and vegetables,” the gardener reminded her. “He’s got seven sorts of garlic alone, a red lettuce which can make seventeen ounces of good leaves, allspick lavender, Jamaican pepper. His flowers come from all over the world, and we send them all over the country. Spiderwort – he gave his name to it. Tradescant’s spiderwort, a three-petaled flower the color of the sky. On a wet day it closes up so you think it’s dead; on a sunny day it is as blue as your gown. A flower to lift your heart, grow for you anywhere. Mountain valerian, lady’s smock, large-flowered gentians, silver knapweed, dozens of geraniums, ranunculus – a flower like a springtime rose, anemones from Paris, five different types of rock rose, dozens of different clematis, the moon trefoil, the shrubby germander, erigeron – as pretty as daisies but as light and airy as snowdrops, his great rose daffodil with hundreds of petals. In the tulip beds alone we have a fortune. D’you know how many varieties? Fifty! And a Semper Augustus among them. The finest tulip ever grown!”

“I didn’t know,” Hester said. “I just thought he was a gardener…”

The gardener smiled at her. “He is a gardener, and an adventurer, and a man who was always there when history was being made,” he said simply. “He’s the greatest man of this age for all that he’s always been someone’s servant. Fifty tulip varieties alone!”

Hester was gazing along the avenue of the horse chestnut saplings. Their buds were green, breaking out of the bud casings which were fat and shiny, wet and brown like molasses.

“When will they bloom?”

The gardener followed her glance. “Not for another few weeks.”

She thought for a moment. “If we cut some branches and took them indoors and kept them warm?”

He nodded. “They might dry up and die. But they might open early.”

“Pot up the tulips then,” she decided, “all of them, every one of his fifty varieties. And anything that is ready to bloom in the rarities room or the orangery. Let’s make his bedroom a little forest; let’s make it a flowery mead, with branches and flowers and plants, everything he loves.”

“To help him get better?” the gardener asked.

Hester turned away. “So that he can say good-bye.”

Tradescant lay propped high on thick pillows to help him to breathe, his nightcap on his head, his hair combed. The fire was burning in the grate and the window was slightly opened. The room was filled with the perfume of a thousand flowers. Over his bed arched boughs of chestnuts, the leaves broken out of the sticky buds. Higher again were beech branches, the buds like dried icicles on the thin twigs, but every plumper bud was splitting and showing the startling sweetmeat-pink and white lining, where the leaves were pushing to come through. In great banks around the side of the room were the tulips, fat and round, showing every color that had ever come out of the Low Countries: the blaze of scarlet, the magnificent stripes and broken colors in red and white and yellow, the shining purity of the Lack tulip, the wonderful spiky profile of the bizarre tulip and the flower that was still John’s joy, the white and scarlet Semper Augustus. There were boughs of roses, their tight buds promising the beauty of their flower if John could stay just another month, or another month after that. There were clumps of bluebells like spilled ink on the carpet, and white and navy violets in pots. There were late daffodils, their little heads nodding, and everywhere threaded through the riot of color and shape was Tradescant’s own lavender, springing fresh green shoots from the pale spines and putting out violet blue spikes.

He lay back on his pillows and looked from one perfect shape to another. The colors were so bright and joyous that he closed his eyes to rest them, and still saw, on the inside of his eyelids, the blazing red of his tulips, the shining yellow of his daffodils, the sky-blue of his lavender.

Hester had left a little pathway from his bed to the door so that she could come and go to him, but the rest of the room was banked with his flowers. He lay like a miser in a gold vault, half-drowned in treasure.

“I have left a letter for you to give to John when he returns,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “You need not worry for me. If he will have me then I will stay, but whatever happens I will be a friend to the children. You can trust me to stand their friend.”

He nodded and closed his eyes for a moment.

“Why did you not name the plants for yourself?” she asked softly. “There are so many. You could have had your name remembered with thanks a dozen times a day in every garden in the country.”

Tradescant smiled. “Because they are not mine to name. I did not make them, like a carpenter makes a newel post. God made them. All I did was find them and bring them into the gardens. They belong to everyone. To everyone who loves to grow them.”

He dozed for a few moments.

In the silence Hester could hear the household going about its business, the noise of the lad sweeping the yard and the continual murmur from the rarities room where visitors came and stayed to study and to marvel. The bright yellow spring sun poured into the room.

“Shall I close the shutters?” Hester asked. “Is it too bright?”

John was looking at the Semper Augustus, with its radiant white petals and the glossy red dappled stripe. “It’s never too bright,” he said.

He lay very still for a while and Hester thought he had gone to sleep. Quietly, she rose from her chair and tiptoed to the door. She looked back at the bed embedded in flowers. Above Tradescant’s sleeping head his chestnut tree was bursting into leaf.

The creak of the wooden door disturbed his sleep. He was awake, looking toward the door; but he did not see Hester. His gaze went a little higher than her head, and his entranced look of delight was that of a man who has seen the love of his life coming, smiling, toward him. He raised himself up, as if he would move lightly forward, like a young man greeting his love. His smile of recognition was unmistakable, his face was filled with joy.

“Ah! You at last!” he said softly.

Hester went quickly to the bed, her skirts brushing the banks of flowers, pollen and perfume swirling like ground mist as she ran to him, but by the time she touched his hand the pulse had stopped and John Tradescant had died in a bed of his flowers, greeting the person he loved most in all the world.