Virgin Earth

April 1642

When they got back to York John found a letter waiting for him from Hester. It had taken nearly a month to reach him instead of the usual few days. John, looking at the dirt-stained paper, realized that, along with loyalty and peace, everything else was breaking down too: the passage of letters, the enforcement of laws, the safety of the roads. He went to his pallet bed in the hayloft and sat where a crack in the shingles of the roof let in the cold spring light and he could see to read.

Dear Husband,

I am sorry that you have gone away with the court and I understand that it was not possible for you to come and say farewell before you rode away. I have hidden the finest of the rarities where we agreed, and sent others into store at the Hurtes’ warehouse where they have armed guards.

The city is much disturbed. Every day there is drilling and marching and preparations for war. All the apprentice boys in Lambeth have given up their rioting around the streets and are now formed into trained bands and drilled every evening.

Great ditches are dug outside London against the coming of a French or Spanish army and all of our gardeners have to go and take their turn with the digging whether they will or no.

Food is scarce because the markets are closed as country people will not travel from their homes, and carters are afraid of meeting armies on the roads. I am feeding vagrants at the door with what we can afford but we are all doing very poorly. All the dried and bottled fruit is finished and I cannot get hold of hams to salt down for love nor money.

These are strange and difficult times and I wish you could be with us. I am keeping up my courage and I am caring for your children as if they were mine own, and your rarities and gardens also are safe.

I trust you will come home as soon as you are released from service.

God be with you,

Your wife,

Hester Tradescant

John turned Hester’s letter over in his hands. He had an odd, foolish thought that if she were not his wife already, he would admire and like this woman more than any other he knew. She cared for the things that mattered most to him as if they were her own. It was a great comfort to him to know that she was in his house, in his father’s house, and that his children and his rarities and his garden were under her protection. He felt an unexpected tenderness toward the woman who could write of the difficulty of the times and yet assure him that she was keeping up her courage. He knew he would never love her as he had loved Jane. He thought he would never love another woman again. But he could not help but like and admire a woman who could take control of a household as she had done, and confront the times that they lived in as she did.

John rose to his feet, picked hay off his doublet, and went to his dinner in the great hall of York castle.

The king and his noble friends, splendidly dressed, were already in their place at the top table as John slipped into the hall. They were dining off gold plate but there were only a dozen dishes. The county was finding it hard to feed the appetite of the court, the provincial cooks could not devise the dishes that Charles expected, and the farms and markets were drained by the hunger of the enlarging, idle, greedy court.

“What news?” John asked, seating himself beside a captain of the guard and helping himself from the shared dish placed in the middle of the table.

The man looked at him sourly. “None,” he said. “His Majesty writes letters to all who should be here, but the men who are loyal are already here, and the traitors merely gain the time to make themselves ready. We should march on London now! Why give them more time to prepare? We should put them to the sword and cut out this canker from the country.”

John nodded, saying nothing, and bent over his meat and bread. It was venison in a rich, dark sauce, very good. But the bread was coarse and brown with gritty seeds. The rich wheat stores of Yorkshire were slowly emptying.

“While he is waiting I might go to my home,” John said thoughtfully.

“Lambeth?” the captain asked.

John nodded.

“You’d be seen as a traitor,” the man said. “London is solid against the king, you’d be seen as a turncoat. You’d never plant another bulb for him.”

John grimaced. “I’m doing next to nothing here.”

The man spat a piece of gristle on the rushes of the floor and one of the dogs squirmed forward on its belly to lick it up. “We’re all doing next to nothing here,” he said. “Nothing but waiting. It is war. All that is undecided is when and where.”