Virgin Earth

August 1642

For the king it was the beginning. The second humiliation outside the walls of Hull had decided him. The queen’s continual demands that he confront and defeat his parliament drove him on. He issued a proclamation that every able-bodied man in the country should rally to his army, and on Eastcroft Common outside Nottingham he paraded three cavalry troops and a battalion of infantry while the herald read the proclamation of war. John, standing behind his master in the pouring rain, thought that never in the history of warfare did any campaign look less promising.

The rain dripped in a steady stream from his hat. No one had thought to bring a spade and they could not get the royal standard to stand properly in the stony ground. John thought of his father and his last service to the Duke of Buckingham when he had followed him to Portsmouth and waited to take ship to the Ile de Rhé, knowing that the battle would be lost and that it was, in any case, a cause not worth fighting for. John thought of his father’s face when he had met him, riding home on the Duke’s cart, of the half-hidden look of relief in his eyes. And he understood at last what it was to follow a master unwillingly, when that master will lead you to death from pure folly.

John looked at the king, the feather in his hat drooping in the pouring rain, as he listened, nodding approval, to the herald shouting the proclamation into the wind which whipped his words away. John thought that his family had served the kings and their favorites for long enough, and that any debt owed, had surely by now been paid – by his father’s heartbreak in the Ile de Rhé, and now, a generation later, by his own fear and despair before the walls of Hull.

In the rain outside Nottingham John found his determination to leave the king, whatever might be the outcome of his desertion. When they turned away from Eastcroft Common and went back to their billets in Nottingham, John turned southward and rode alone to London without asking permission, without giving notice.

The royal standard blew down that night.

Hester, roused from sleep by the sound of a tap on the back door, ran downstairs, pulling on her nightgown, her heart pounding with fear. She peered out of the kitchen window into the pale grayness of the summer dawn and saw the familiar outline of John’s head.

She threw open the door. “John!”

He opened his arms to her, as if they were husband and wife in their hearts as well as by name, and Hester ran toward him and felt his arms come around her and hold her close.

He smelled of sweat and fatigue and the warm erotic male smell which lingered around his clothes when she brushed them. Hester felt herself long for his touch, and she tightened her grip around his back and held him close. He did not move away from her, he did not unclasp her hands. He held her as if he wanted her as she wanted him, and made no move to put her aside.

They stumbled together over the threshold, not releasing each other until they were at the fireside and the embers of the fire cast a warm glow. Then she leaned back, her arms still tightly around him, so that she could see his face.

She was shocked. The eight months of his absence had put gray into his hair at the temples and bags beneath his eyes. His beard was still a true dark brown, but matted and dirty, his face was smudged with dirt, his forehead carried new lines. He looked desperately weary. He looked like a man on the run.

“Was there a battle?” she asked, trying to understand what this mute look of suffering might mean.

He shook his head, released her, and dropped into the chair by the fireside. “Not one that is worth mentioning,” he said bitterly. “When they come to write the history of these days it will not have more than a line. We rode out like fools, thinking that we would win without having to fight. We went out like the chorus in one of his masques – all show and pretense. For all the good we were, we might as well have had swords of wood and helmets of painted paper.”

Hester was silent, shocked by his vehemence, and by the bitterness in his tone. “Were you hurt?”

He shook his head. “No – only in my pride.” He paused. “Yes. Deep in my pride,” he corrected himself.

She did not know how to question him. She turned and threw some kindling on the fire and then some small twigs and broken branches of applewood. Coal was short in London, the Tradescants were living off their land.

He leaned forward to the blaze as if he were chilled to the heart. “All along it has been like a masque,” he said, as if he was gripping some truth about the king at last. “As if it were some pretty play with a script which everyone was to follow. The threat of Parliament, the flight from London, his parting with the queen when he rode along the cliffs waving to her ship and wept, the ride north to victory. It has all been a masque – beautifully costumed. But when the time came for the king to defeat his enemies-” He broke off.

“What happened?” Hester kneeled at the fire and kept her eyes on the flames, afraid to interrupt him.

“The chorus didn’t arrive,” John said sourly. “The engines which should show Jove descending or Neptune rising up from the sea failed to work. Instead of the gates of Hull opening and the governor coming out with the golden key on a velvet cushion and some poetry from Ben Jonson, it all went wrong. The gates opened and the soldiers came out and just went fire… reload… fire… reload… like dancers – but they weren’t doing our dance. They were following another script. And… and…” He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know what the end of this play will be.”

“The king?” she asked in a little whisper.

“The king is sticking to his masque,” John said savagely. “Act two was raising the royal standard. But the weather was all wrong. It should have been balmy skies or perhaps a bright comet overhead. Instead it poured with rain on him and we looked like sodden fools. But he will not realize that the scenes are going wrong. He thinks it is a rehearsal, he thinks it will be the greater on the night if it all goes wrong now.”

“And what of you?” she asked softly.

“I am finished with him,” John said. “I am finished with his service. I went back into his service to please my father and because I longed to work on the great gardens which are in his gift, and besides, when I was a young man there was almost nowhere else to work but for the king or the court. But I will die in his service if I go on. I am a gardener and he would not give me leave to go and garden. He has to have everyone in the masque, everyone has to carry a standard or a spear. He will never cease with this until we are all dead, or all defeated, or all persuaded that he is the Lord’s Anointed and can do no wrong.”

Hester quickly looked toward the kitchen door, but it was safely closed and all the household was still asleep.

“I saw my father go out to certain death in the service of the Duke of Buckingham, and I saw him ride home, spared only by the death of his master,” John continued. “I saw his eyes on that day. He never recovered from the death of the Duke. He was never his own man again. The loss of the Duke lay like a shadow over our family, and my father was torn between relief that he had survived and grief that the Duke was dead.

“I swore then that I would never be like that, I swore I would never pledge myself to follow a man until death, and I meant it. I will never be a servant like that. Not even for the king. Especially not for this king, who cannot reward service and never says that he has had enough. He will not stop until every one of his servants is lying dead before him, and then he will expect a miracle from God himself to raise up more foot soldiers for his insatiable theater. I will have no more of it. I can bear no more of it.”

“You won’t join with Parliament?” Hester asked, aghast. “Oh, John, you won’t fight against the king?”

He shook his head. “I’m not a turncoat. I won’t fight against him. I’ve eaten his bread and he has called me his friend. I’ve seen him weep and I’ve kissed his hand. I won’t betray him. But I won’t play that part in this damned mockery.”

“Will you stay here, quiet at home with us?” she asked. She had a low sinking feeling in the pit of her belly. She knew that he would not.

“How can I?” he demanded of her. “People know who I am. They will ask me who I serve. I won’t deny him – I’m not a Judas. And he will send for me.” He nodded. “Sooner or later he will realize that I am not at court and he will send for me again.”

“Then what shall we do?”

“We’ll go to Virginia,” John said with decision. “All of us. We’ll take ship as soon as we can get a passage. We’ll take what we can carry and leave the rest. Leave the house and the garden and even the rarities. We’ll get out of this country and leave it to tear itself to pieces. I won’t see it. I won’t be here. I can’t bear it.”

Hester sat very still and measured the despair in her husband’s voice against her love for him, and her love for their home.

“Will you have a glass of ale?” she asked.

He lifted his gaze from the fire, as if he suddenly remembered where he was. “Yes,” he said. “And then let’s go to bed. I have wanted you in my bed for night after long night, Hester. I have missed you, and thought of you here, missing me. I have wanted you and cursed the miles that were between us. And in the morning I shall see my children and we’ll tell them that we are leaving.”

“You have wanted me?” she asked, very low.

He put his hand out and turned her face up to him, one gentle finger under her chin. “Knowing that you are here has kept me going through one dark night after another,” he said. “Knowing that you are here and that I have someone to come home to. Knowing that you will open your bed to me, and open your arms to me, and that whatever is going wrong all around me, I have somewhere that I can call my home.”

She could have moved forward, she could have kneeled before him as he sat in his chair, he would have drawn her to him and on to his lap and he would have kissed her, as he had never yet kissed her, and they could have gone to bed as he wanted to do, and as she had wanted to do from the moment she had first seen him.

But Hester caught hold of her determination, forced herself to wait, and drew back from him, drew back and sat on her seat on the other side of the fireplace.

“Now wait a minute,” she said. “Not so fast, husband. I cannot leave here.”

For a moment John did not hear her. He was so conscious of the fall of her nightgown, and of her dark hair only half hidden by her cap, of the play of the firelight on her neck and the glimpse of her shoulder. “What?”

“I cannot leave here,” she said steadily. “This is my home.”

“You don’t understand,” he said abruptly. “I have made up my mind. I have to go. I cannot stay here, I will be torn apart by the two of them – king and Parliament. Parliament will have me out entrenching and drilling for their defense, and the king will summon me to court. I cannot be faithless to them both. I cannot watch the king ride into war as if it were a masqued ball. I cannot stay in England and see him die!”

“And I cannot leave.” She spoke steadfastly, as if nothing would ever move her.

“You are my wife,” John reminded her.

She bowed her head.

“You owe me absolute obedience,” he said. “I am your master before God.”

“As the king is yours,” she said gently. “Isn’t that what this war is all about?”

He hesitated. “I thought you wanted to be my wife?”

“I do. I agreed to be your wife, and to rear your children, and to care for the rarities and the garden and the Ark. How can I do these things in Virginia?”

“You can care for me and the children.”

Hester shook her head. “I won’t take the children there. You know yourself how dangerous it is there. There are wild Indians, and hunger, dreadful disease. I won’t take the children into danger.” She paused for a moment. “And I won’t leave here.”

“This is my home,” John reminded her. “And I am prepared to leave it.”

“It is my home too.”

They locked gazes like enemies. John remembered his first impression of her as a plain-faced managing woman who had been put in his house without his consent. “Hester, I am going to Virginia,” he said coldly. “And it is my wish that you come with me and the children.”

Her straight gaze never wavered. “I am sorry,” she said evenly. “I cannot do that. I will not take the children into danger and I have no wish to leave my home. If you go then I will keep everything safe for your return, and I will welcome you when you return.”

“My father…” he started.

“Your father trusted me with the care of this house and with the care of the children while you were away,” she said. “I promised him on his deathbed that I would keep it all safe: plants, rarities, and children. I will not leave this house for any wandering battalion to take it over and to chop down his trees for firewood. I won’t leave his chestnut avenue for them to spoil. I won’t leave it unprotected for any vagrants to steal the fruit or pick the flowers. I won’t leave the rarities stored in a warehouse with no idea of when I can return. And I will not take Jane’s children to a country far away where I know they cling to survival against all the odds.”

“Jane’s children!” he shouted. “Jane was my wife! They are my children! She is nothing to you! They are nothing to you!”

John saw her flinch as if he had slapped her face. But it did not shake her steadiness. “You are wrong,” she said simply. “I have long thought of myself as caring for Jane’s children and trying to care for them as she would wish. And sometimes I think that she looks down from heaven and sees them, growing strong and beautiful, and that she is happy for them. But they are my children too, I have loved them without fail for four years and I will not take them from their home because you have decided to leave your master and leave your country and leave your home.”

“I’m not faithless!” he said, stung.

Hester gave him a long, level look. “You and your father are the king’s gardeners,” she said. “You are in his service.”

“He doesn’t own my soul!” John shouted. “I am his servant, not his slave! I can withdraw my service. I can work for myself, I can leave. I have just left.”

She nodded. “Then a man has a right to choose where he lives and who he calls master?”

“Yes,” John said firmly.

“A woman too?”

“Yes,” he said begrudgingly.

“Then I choose to live here, and you will not take the children without me to care for them.”

“You want to stay here and face who knows what dangers?”

“I shall face the dangers when they come,” she said. “I am not such a fool as to think that we are safe here. We’re too near to the city – if the king brings in a Papist army we will be in the worst place. But if that happens I shall take them to Oatlands, or away into the country. We will have a warning of the dangers. I can prepare for them. And Jane’s parents will warn us and protect them, and Alexander Norman knows to the minute where the king’s army can be found, he makes the barrels for the gunpowder. My own family have refuges planned. I shall have advisers, I shall have protectors.

“But in Virginia there would be no one to keep us safe but you; and you don’t know the country, and you are not a farmer or a laborer, and I think only a farmer or a laborer can get a living there.”

John got to his feet and spoke bitterly. “I won’t argue with you,” he said spitefully. “Because I don’t care enough to take the trouble. It doesn’t matter to me if you will come with me to Virginia as my wife or if you prefer to stay at home like a housekeeper. It is your choice. I shall go to Virginia a single man, if that is your wish.”

She felt a pain inside her which was worse than anything she had suffered from him so far. She heard the threat of infidelity in his words but she would not let him frighten her into abandoning her home. “I am sorry to stand against you,” she said steadily. “But I promised your father I would guard his trees and his grandchildren, and I cannot escape that promise.”

John got to his feet and stalked to the door. “I am tired. I shall sleep. I don’t want to be disturbed. I am used to sleeping alone.”

Hester bowed her head, not commenting on the fact that she was no longer invited into bed with him. “Take your bed,” she said politely. “I shall make up the bed in the spare bedroom.”

“And as soon as possible I shall take ship,” John said. “Don’t doubt me, Hester. I shall leave for the new world. I am sick of this country. I am sick of this house.” He did not say it but the words “and I am sick of you” hung in the air, unspoken, between them.

She bowed her head. “I shall guard the children and the trees for your return.”

“And if I never come back?”

“Then I shall guard them for the next John Tradescant, your son,” she said. “And I shall guard them for the people of England who will want the trees and the plants when they stop making war. And then they will remember and honor the name of Tradescant, even if you are no longer here.”