Earthly Joys

August 1607

He did not come until late in the summer, nor did he send for her to go to Theobalds. He did not send her so much as a note to tell her that he was delayed – absorbed in the work of replanting and maintaining the most beautiful garden in England. First it was the newly designed knot gardens which took his attention. The continuous twist of hedging was much harder to keep cut than the old straight lines, and inside the box hedges the lavender had flourished too strongly. Now it needed cutting back so that it did not thrust wands of navy blue out of their place; but at least Cecil agreed that the softness of their shape and the spiky azure flowers had added beauty to the geometric precision of the garden and that Tradescant should plant other shrubs inside the hedging.

Then the bathing pools in the marble temple turned green in the hot weather, and he had them drained and scrubbed with salt and rinsed clean and refilled. Then the kitchen gardens started fruiting, first strawberries, then raspberries, gooseberries, peaches and apricots. It was not until the currants came into season that John took time from his work to borrow a horse and ride down the dusty lanes to his home in Kent.

He took two of the new chestnuts in his pocket, still shining from the polishing he continually gave them. Of the six in the merchant’s box he had planted two in large pots and left them in a shady place in the garden, watering them gently every day from the dish placed underneath the pot to encourage their roots to grow down. Two he had kept in a net hung high out of the way of rats in his shed, planning that they should feel the heat of the summer on their glossy backs before he planted them in autumn, when the weeds died back and before the first frosts came, hoping to mimic the trees’ natural time for growth. Two he carried in the safe darkness of his pocket, planning to plant them in spring in case they needed to be hidden from frost and to feel the warmth of a new season and the damp richness of the spring earth to make them flourish. He thought he should have left them in a stone box in the darkness and coldness of the floor of the marble bath house but he could not resist their smooth round shapes, tucked in his waistcoat. A dozen times a day his fingers found their way into the little pocket to caress them like a broody hen turning over two precious eggs.

He buttoned down the flaps with care when he mounted his horse.

“I shall stay some weeks with my wife,” he said to the gardener’s lad who held the horse. “You can send for me, if I am needed. Otherwise I shall come home at the end of September.” He did not notice he had called Theobalds “home.” “And have a care that you keep the gates shut,” he reminded the boy, “and weed the grass every day. But do not touch the roses; I shall be back in time to see to them myself. You may take the heads off when they are finished flowering, and take the petals to the still room, but that is all.”

It was a two-day journey to Meopham. John enjoyed traveling through the Surrey countryside where the hayfields were showing green again after the rain, and where the wheat stooks stood high in the field. Horsemen cantered past him, covering him in blinding clouds of dust; he sometimes rode alongside great wagons and could hitch his horse behind, taking a seat with the driver for a rest from the saddle and a sup of the driver’s ale. There were many people walking the roads: artisans on the tramp looking for work, harvesting gangs at the end of their season, apple-pickers making their way to Kent like John, gypsies, a traveling fair, a wandering preacher ready to set up at any crossroads and preach a gospel which needed neither church nor bishops, peddlers waddling beneath the weight of their packs, goose girls driving their flocks to the London markets, beggars, paupers and sturdy vagrants forced away from parish to parish, bullocks being driven to Smithfield by swearing, anxious cattle drovers.

In the inn at night John ate at an “ordinary,” the daily dinner with a set price which humble traveling men preferred, but he paid extra to sleep alone. He did not want to appear before Elizabeth scratching with another man’s fleas.

At the long dining table in the inn’s front room the talk was of the new king, who could not agree with Parliament although he had been in the kingdom only four years. The men dining at table were mostly on the side of the king. He had the charm of novelty and the glamour of royalty. So what if Parliament complained of the Scots nobles who hung around the court, and so what if the king was extravagant? The king of England could afford a little luxury, surely to God! And besides, the man had a family to support, a brace of princes and princesses; how else should he live but well? One man at the table had suffered at the hands of the Court of Wards and claimed that no man’s fortune was safe from a king who would take orphans into his keeping and farm out their fortunes among his friends, but he gained little sympathy. The complaint was an old one, and the king was new and novelty was a pleasure.

John kept his head down over his mutton and kept his own counsel. When someone shouted for a toast to His Majesty, John rose to his feet as swiftly as any man. He was not disposed to gossip about the painted women and painted boys of court, and besides, no man who had worked for Robert Cecil would ever voice a dangerous political opinion in a public place.

“I care nothing if we have no parliament!” a man exclaimed. “What have they ever done for me? If King James, God bless him, can do without a parliament – why! then so can I!”

John thought of his master, who believed that a monarch could only rule by a combination of bluff and seduction to gain the consent of the people, and whose watchword was practice not principle, kept silent, touched the chestnuts in his waistcoat pocket for luck, took up his hat and went from the room to his solitary bed.

He arrived at Meopham at noon and nearly turned into the courtyard of the Days’ family farmhouse, before he recalled that he should find Elizabeth in her new cottage – in their new cottage. He rode back down the mud track of the village street and then skirted around to the back of the little house where there was a lean-to shed and a patch of ground for his horse. He took off its saddle and bridle and turned the animal into the field. It raised its head and whinnied at the strangeness of the place and he saw Elizabeth’s face at an upstairs window, looking out at the noise.

As he walked toward the little cottage’s back gate he heard her running down the wooden stairs and then the back door burst open and she was racing toward him. As she suddenly recollected her dignity, she skidded to an abrupt halt. “Oh! Mr. Tradescant!” she said. “I should have killed a chicken if I had known you were coming today.”

John stepped forward and took her hands and kissed her, formal as ever, on her forehead. “I did not know what time I should arrive,” he said. “The roads were better than I thought they would be.”

“Have you come from Theobalds?”

“I left the day before yesterday.”

“And is everything well?”

“It is.” He glanced down at her and saw that her usually pale face was rosy and smiling. “You look very well… wife.”

She peeped up at him from under her severe white cap. “I am well,” she said. “And very happy to see you. The days are rather long here.”

“Why?” John asked. “I should have thought you would have much to do in a house of your own at last?”

“Because I am used to running a farmhouse,” she said. “With care for the still room, and the laundry, and the mending, and the feeding of the family and all the farm workers, and the health of the staff, the herb garden and the kitchen garden too! Here all I have to look after is two bedrooms and a kitchen and parlor. I have not enough to do.”

“Oh.” John was genuinely surprised. “I had not thought.”

“But I have started on a garden,” she said shyly. “I thought you might like it.”

She pointed to a level area of ground outside the back door. The ground was marked out with pegs and twines into a square shape containing the serpentine twists of a maze. “I was going to make it with chalk stones and flints in patterns of black and white,” she said. “I don’t think anything tender will thrive because of the chickens.”

“You can’t have chickens in a knot garden,” John said decidedly.

She chuckled and John looked down and saw with surprise that rosy happy face again. “Well, we have to have chickens for their eggs and for your dinner,” she said. “So you must think of a way that chickens can be kept out.”

John laughed. “At Theobalds I am plagued with deer!” he said. “It seems very hard that in my own garden I shall still have pests to come and spoil my plants.”

“Perhaps we could get another plot of land for the chickens,” she suggested. “And fence this off so that you might grow whatever you wish.”

John glanced down at the overworked light brown soil and the nearby midden. “It is hardly the ideal place,” he said.

At once he saw the color and the happiness drain from her face. She looked weary. “Not after Theobalds Palace, I suppose.”

“Elizabeth!” he exclaimed. “I did not mean…”

She turned away from him and was leading the way into the cottage.

He stepped after her and was about to take her hand but some stupid shyness checked the movement. “Elizabeth!” he said more gently.

She hesitated, but she did not turn. “I was afraid you were never coming back,” she whispered. “I was afraid that you had married me to fulfil the agreement, and to get my dowry, and that you would never come back to me at all.”

“Of course! Of course I would come back!” He was astounded at her. “I married you in good faith! Of course I would come back!”

She dipped her head down and then pulled up her apron to rub at her eyes. Still she did not turn around to him. “You did not write,” she said softly. “And it has been two months.”

Now it was he who turned away. He looked away from the house, over the little plot where his horse grazed, and toward the hill where the square-towered church pointed up at the sky. “I know,” he said shortly. “I meant to…”

She raised her head but still she did not turn around. He thought they must look a pair of fools, back to back in their own yard instead of in each other’s arms.

“Why did you not?” she asked softly.

He cleared his throat to hide his embarrassment. “I cannot write very fair,” he said awkwardly. “That is to say, I cannot write at all. I can read a bit, I can reckon very swiftly, but I cannot write. And anyway… I should not know what to say.”

She turned to him; but in his embarrassment, he did not see her. He was digging the heel of his riding boot into the corner of her little square of hen-scratched dust.

“What would you have said, if you had written?” she asked and her voice was very soft and tempting. It was a voice which a man would turn to and rest upon. John resisted the temptation to spin on his heel, snatch her up and bury his face in her neck.

“I would have said I was sorry,” he confessed gruffly. “Sorry to have been ill-tempered on our wedding night, and sorry that I had to leave you that very morning. When I was angry with them for making a noise I had thought that we would have the next day in peace, and that anything troublesome could be mended then. I had thought to wake early in the morning and love you then. But then the message came and I went up to London and there was no way of telling you that I was sorry.”

Hesitantly she stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I am sorry too,” she said simply. “I thought these things were easier for men. I thought that you were doing just exactly what you wished. I thought that you had not bedded me because…” her voice became choked and she ended in a thin whisper “…because you have an aversion to me, and that you went back to Theobalds to avoid me.”

John spun around and snatched his wife to his heart. “I do not!” He felt her whole frame convulse with a deep sob. “I do not have an aversion!”

She was warm in his arms and her skin was soft. He kissed her face and her wet eyelids, and her smooth sweet neck and the dimples of her collarbone at the neck of her gown, and suddenly he felt desire sweep over him as easy and as natural as a spring rainstorm across a field of grass. He scooped her up and carried her into the house and kicked the door shut behind him, and he laid her down on the hearthrug before the little spinster’s fire where she had sat, alone and lonely, for so many evenings, and loved her until it grew dark outside and only the firelight illuminated their enfolded bodies.

“I do not have an aversion to you,” he said.

At suppertime they rose from the floor, chilled and uncomfortable. “I have some bread and cheese and a broth,” Elizabeth said.

“Whatever you have in the larder will do for me,” John replied. “I’ll fetch some wood for the fire.”

“I’ll run up the road to my mother’s house and borrow a jug of beef stock,” she said, pulling her gray gown on over her head. She turned her back to him and offered him the ties on her white apron. “I’ll only be a moment.”

“Give them my good wishes,” John said. “I’ll call up and see them tomorrow.”

“We could go up to the house for supper,” she suggested. “They would be glad to see you tonight.”

“I have other plans for tonight,” John said with a meaning smile. Elizabeth felt herself warm through with the intensity of her blush. “Oh.” She recovered herself. “I’ll get the beef stock then.”

John nodded and listened to her quick step down the brick path and out into the main street. He stacked the fireplace with a liberal supply of logs and then went out through the backyard to the little field to see to his horse. When he came back Elizabeth was stirring a pot hung on a chain from the spit, and there was bread and new cheese on the table and two jugs of small ale.

“I brought my book,” she said carefully. “I thought you might like us to look at it, together.”

“What book?”

“My lesson book,” she said. “My father taught me to read and write and I did my writing in this book. It has clean pages in it still. I thought, if you wished, I might teach you.”

For a moment John was going to rebuff her; the idea of a wife teaching her husband anything was contrary to the laws of nature and of God; but she looked very sweet and very young. Her hair was tumbled and her cap was slightly askew. Lying on his cape on the floor of the little cottage she had been tender and ready to be pleased, and at the end, openly passionate. He found he did not feel much like supporting the laws of God and nature; instead he found that he was rather disposed to oblige her. Besides, it would be good to know how to read and write.

“D’you know how to write in French?” he asked. “And Latin words?”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you want to learn French?”

“I can speak French, and a bit of Italian, and enough German to see that my lord is not cheated when I am buying plants for him from a sea captain. And I know some plant names in Latin. But I never learned to write any of it down.”

Her face was illuminated with her smile. “I can teach you.”

“All right,” he said. “But you must tell no one.”

Her gaze was open and honest. “Of course not. It shall be between the two of us, as everything else will be.”

That night they made love again in the warmth and comfort of the big bed. Elizabeth, free from her fear that he did not love her, and discovering a sensuality which she had not imagined, clung to him and wrapped her arms and legs around him and sobbed for pleasure. Then they wrapped their blankets around their shoulders and sat side by side on the bed and looked out at the deep blue of the night sky and the sharp whiteness of the thousands of stars.

The village was all quiet; not one light showed. The road away from the village, north to Gravesend and London, was empty and silent, ghostly in the starlight. An owl hooted, quartering the fields on silent wings. John reached for his waistcoat folded on the chest at the foot of the bed.

“I have something I should like to give you,” he said quietly. “I think it is perhaps the most valuable thing I own. Perhaps you will think it foolish; but if you would like it, I should like to give it to you.”

His hand closed over one of the precious chestnuts. “If you do not like it I will keep it, by your leave,” he said. “It is not really mine to give away; it is entrusted to me.”

Elizabeth lay back on the pillow, her hair spread as brown and as glossy as his chestnut. “What is it?” she asked, smiling. “You sound like a child in the schoolyard.”

“It is precious to me…”

“Then it is precious to me too, whatever it may be,” she said.

He brought his clenched fist out of his waistcoat pocket and she put her hand out flat, waiting for him to open his fingers.

“There are only six of these in the country,” he said. “Perhaps only six in the whole of Europe. I have five in my keeping and, if you like, you may have the sixth.”

He dropped the heavy nut like a round smooth marble into her hand.

“What is it?”

“It is a chestnut.”

“It is too big and too round!”

“A new chestnut. The man who sold it to me told me that it grows into a great tree, like our chestnut tree, but it flowers like a rose, the color of apple blossom. And this great nut comes only one to a pod, not two nuts to a pod like ours, and the pod is not prickly like our chestnuts but waxy and green with a few sharp spines. He sold it to my lord for nine pounds down, and another eighteen pounds if it grows. And I shall give this one to you.”

Elizabeth turned the nut over in her hand. It nestled heavily in her palm, its brown glossy color dark against her callused hand.

“Shall I plant it in the garden?”

John instantly flinched, thinking of the voracious chickens. “Put it in a pot, somewhere that you can easily watch it,” he said. “In soil with some muck well stirred in. Water it from the base of the pot with a little water every day. Perhaps it will grow for you.”

“Shall you not regret giving me this precious nut, if it fails for me?”

John closed her fingers around the nut. “It is yours,” he said gently. “Do with it as you will. Perhaps you will be lucky. Perhaps together, now that we are married, we shall be lucky together.”

John stayed a full month at Meopham with his wife, and when the time came for him to go back to Theobalds a number of innovations had been made. She had a pretty little miniature knot garden outside the back door, incongruously planted with leeks, beets, carrots and onions and fenced with rooted willow twigs woven into a dwarf living fence against the marauding chickens. He could both read and write a fair-enough script; the chestnut was in a pot on the windowsill showing a pale snout above the earth; and Elizabeth was expecting their child.