Virgin Earth

April 1645, England

Hester felt that the Ark, Tradescant’s Ark, was adrift in the spring of 1645. The promise that she had made to John Tradescant – to care for his grandchildren and his rarities – seemed to be slipping away from her; though she had always thought that whatever else slipped away, that promise at least could hold firm.

But Frances was a woman, with a house and a new life of her own, and Johnnie was growing and would be off to war within four, perhaps five, years. Every young man in England knew that he would see fighting before he was old, and Johnnie, even precious Johnnie, could be no exception. The rarities were well hidden and she could only hope that neither the cold nor the damp would spoil them. The ice house was safely locked and bolted, and Joseph had planted a cherry tree, one of Tradescant’s great black cherry trees, before it. The sapling had taken well and was spreading its boughs as if it would deny that there had ever been a door there at all. The springing leaves blurred the outline of the wall, and when the blossoms came there would be nothing to see but bobbing flowers.

“We’ll have to cut that tree down when we want to get the door open and the treasures out,” Joseph observed to Hester in a quiet voice as she was walking around the garden.

“The way things are going, we’ll never be safe to have them out,” she replied, and went on.

The garden was looking as lovely as it did every spring, as if war was not the nation’s chief occupation, as if hunger and plague were not a certainty in the coming summer. The daffodils were bobbing in the orchard and in the tulip beds the spears of buds were thickening and blushing with light stripes of color. If in the autumn there was anyone left alive who cared to buy tulips there would be a fortune in the rich earth of the Tradescant garden.

But nobody was buying, they were not taking money at the door of the rarities room, they were not selling plants. The Ark was slowly sinking under debt. Joseph was working for half wages and his keep, the lads had left, run away to war, the maids had been dismissed and only Cook stayed on and shared the work of the house with Hester.

The trees were in their first green leaves, Hester could almost smell their freshness in the air. The grass was growing long; as soon as the daffodils had died back then Joseph would scythe it and rake the clippings away. The branches in the orchards were bobbing with their twigs bursting into leaf and the buds thickening with the promise of flowers to come. It should have been a joyous place; but Hester walked among the fertility and overbrimming life of it like a woman chilled to the bone and weary nearly to death.

She walked to the end of the garden and looked out across the pond. It was years since she had brought Johnnie here to feed the ducks, years since they had sat in the little waterlogged boat and he had rowed her backward and forward and told her that he would undoubtedly be a great sailor as his grandfather had been – chasing pirates in the Mediterranean, sailing to the very icy doors of Russia. And now she was the wife of another traveling Tradescant and she thought that this would be the year that she would have to find the courage to face the fact that John was never coming home.

Since he had left she had received only one letter, to say that he was leaving Jamestown and going to build his house farther up the river and that she should not expect to hear from him again for some time. Then she had received a consignment of Indian rarities and a couple of barrels of plants, badly packed, and badly shipped, which told her that it was not John who had seen them loaded on board. Since then – nothing. And now there was news of an Indian uprising and Jamestown attacked, and all the planters all along the river scalped and skinned and butchered.

She thought she must learn to stop looking for John, learn to stop waiting for him. She thought she would wait till the summer and then, if there was still no news, find a way to tell Johnnie, who was sometimes still her little boy, and sometimes now a young man, that his father was not coming home, and that he was the only Gardener Tradescant left.

“Excuse me,” a voice behind her said politely. “I am looking for John Tradescant.”

“He’s not here,” Hester said wearily and turned around. “I am his wife. Can I help you?”

The man before her was one of the handsomest she had ever seen in her life. He swept off his hat to her and the plumes brushed the ground as he bowed, one long brown suede boot stretched forward. He was dressed in gray – a sober enough color, which might indicate he was a Parliament man and one of the dreary Presbyterian sort at that; but his thick, curly head of hair, his rich lace collar, and that laughing confidence in his smile was that of a cavalier.

Hester’s first response was to smile in reply, he was not a man that any woman would find easy to resist. But then she remembered the times they lived in and she glanced toward the house as if she feared a guard of soldiery at his call and a warrant for arrest in his pocket.

“Can I help you?” she asked again.

“I’m looking for tulips,” he said. “Everyone knows that John Tradescant’s is the only garden worth visiting in England, and also these are troubled times to go flower hunting in the Low Countries.”

“We have tulips,” Hester said gravely, not taking advantage of the conversational opening to deplore the badness of the times. “Was it a special variety you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said. “What do you have?”

Hester smiled. The verbal fencing was a typical approach to naming a plant which had, in its heyday, cost the value of a house. “We have everything,” she said with the simple arrogance of a professional at the very top of her profession. “You had much better tell me simply what you want. We only ever charge a fair price, Mr.-?”

He stepped back slightly as if to reasses her, as if his view of a plain woman plainly dressed had hidden the strength of her character, and her pride. “I’m John Lambert,” he said. “And last year I grew half a dozen tulips at my home, and this year I must have more. I simply must. Do you know what I mean, Mrs. Tradescant? Or are they nothing more than a crop to you, like wheat to a farmer?”

“They’re not my passion,” Hester said. “But nobody could live in this household and not come to love tulips. They are one of the finest flowers.”

“None finer,” he said quickly.

“Roses?”

He hesitated. “But the thing about tulips is the shortness of the season, and the way you can buy them in the bulb and hold the bulb in your hand and know that inside it is a thing of such beauty. And you know that if you care for it you will see that thing of beauty, whereas a rose – a rose grows itself.”

Hester laughed. “If you were a working gardener, Mr. Lambert, you would value plants that grow themselves. But let me show you our tulip beds.”

She led the way back through the garden and then paused. The path ran alongside the wall, which kept the west wind off the plants. Along the wall, espaliered in regular lines, were apple and pear trees; the south wall was lined with the peaches and apricots. They were Tradescant walls: a double skin of brick with three fireplaces set one on top of each other and a flue running from each fire along the length of the wall to keep the bricks at a steady warmth by night and day. But Hester had not been able to afford the charcoal for the fires for two seasons.

Hester saw Mr. Lambert take in the neat planning and the solidity of the building, and the immaculate pruning of the branches, and felt her familiar stir of pride. Then he turned to the garden beds and she heard his sharp intake of breath.

There was bed after bed of tulips. They grew at least twenty of each specimen, and they had more than a hundred different varieties. Each new variety was labeled with a lead spike stuck in the ground at the head of the row and on each spike, in Johnnie’s meticulous printing, was the name of each variety. Behind each label, like a row of well-drilled infantry, grew the tulips, with their leaves clasped close to their stalks and their growing heads like multicolored soldiers shouldering their pikes.

Hester enjoyed the expression on the cavalier’s face. “We keep the rare ones potted up,” she said. “These are only garden tulips. I can show you the rarities, we keep them in our orangery.”

“I had no idea,” he said softly. He was walking between the tulip beds, scanning them, bending to read the labels and then going on. “I had heard you were great gardeners, but I thought you worked on the palace gardens.”

“We do,” Hester said. “We did,” she corrected herself. “But we had to have our own garden to stock the palace gardens, and we have always sold our stock.”

He nodded, paced the length of the bed, kneeled down and then got up again. Hester noted the dirt on the knees of his gray suit and that he did not trouble to brush it off. She recognized at once the signs of a besotted tulip enthusiast and a man accustomed to employing others to keep his clothes smart.

“And what rarities do you have?” he asked.

“We have a Lack tulip, a Duck tulip, Agatha tulips, Violetten.” She broke off at the eagerness in his face.

“I’ve never seen them,” he said. “D’you have them here?”

“This way,” Hester said pleasantly, and led him toward the house. Johnnie came running out and checked at the sight of the stranger. He gave a neat bow and the man smiled at him.

“My stepson,” Hester said. “John Tradescant.”

“And will you be a gardener too?” the man asked.

“I am a gardener already,” Johnnie replied. “I am going to be a cavalry officer.”

Hester scowled a warning at him but the man nodded pleasantly enough. “I’m in that line of work myself,” he said. “I’m in the cavalry for the Parliament army.”

“That John Lambert!” Hester exclaimed and then flushed and wished she had the sense to be silent. She had read about the talents of the cavalry leader who was said to be the equal of Prince Rupert, but she had not pictured him as a young man, smiling in spring sunshine, and devoted to tulips.

He grinned at her. “Shall I keep a place among my officers for you, Master Tradescant?”

Johnnie flushed and looked awkward. “The thing is-”

“He is too young to be thinking of such things,” Hester intervened. “Now… the tulips-”

John Lambert did not move. “What is the thing?” he asked Johnnie gently.

“The thing is that I am in the king’s service,” Johnnie said seriously. “My family have always been gardeners to the royal palaces, and we have not yet been dismissed. So I suppose I am in the king’s service, and I can’t, in honor, join you. But I thank you for the invitation, sir.”

Lambert smiled. “Perhaps by the time you are old enough to ride with me there will be a country united, and only one army and one cavalry and all you will have to choose is your horse and the color of the feather in your hat,” he suggested diplomatically. “And both Prince Rupert and I will be proud to serve under the same colors.”

He straightened up and looked over Johnnie’s head at Hester’s concerned expression. “Please don’t fear, Mrs. Tradescant,” he said. “I am here to buy tulips, not to cause you a moment’s uneasiness. Loyalty is a difficult path to tread and these are difficult times. You may well garden in a royal palace once more and I may yet dance off a royal scaffold. Or I might be the new chief justice and you mayor of London. Let’s just look at some tulips, shall we?”

The warmth of his smile was irresistible. Hester smiled in reply and directed him to the terrace where the tulips stood in their beautiful ceramic pots. Warmed by the sunshine and sheltered in the orangery at night, these were more developed than those in the bed and they were showing the colors in their petals.

“Now these are our rarities,” she said. “These are green parrot tulips, very special.” Hester indicated the ragged fringe on the green petals. “And these are Paragon Liefkens, they have a wonderful broken color – red and white or red and yellow. The Semper Augustus comes from this family but excels them in shape, it has the true tulip shape and the best broken color. Here are the Violetten, they come in a different color in every bulb, very unpredictable and difficult to grow a consistent strain: they can be as pale as a bough of lilac or a true, deep purple-blue like violets. If you were interested in developing your own strain-” She glanced at him and saw the avidity in his face.

“Oh, yes!”

“Then these are the ones I would choose. To get a consistent deep purple would be a wonderful thing to do. Gardeners would thank you forever. And here,” she led the way to the shelter of the terrace and the tulips standing proudly in the precious pots, “these are our Semper Augustus. We believe them to be the only Sempers in England. My father-in-law bought them and gave one to the queen. When she left the palace my husband brought it back here. As far as I know, no one else has a Semper.”

Lambert’s attention was all that she could have desired. He squatted down so his dark head was on a level with the scarlet and white flower. “May I touch?”

“Gently,” Hester assented.

He put out a fingertip, the ruby on his hand winked at the scarlet of the petal and he noticed the match of the color at once. The red of the petal was as shiny as silk shot through with white. One flower, a little more mature than the others, was open and he peered into the cup to see the exotic darkness of the stamens and the sooty black of the pollen.

“Exquisite,” he breathed. “This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

Hester smiled. Johnnie glanced up at her and winked. They both knew what would come next.

“How much?” John Lambert asked.

“Johnnie, go and ask Cook for some shortbread and a glass of wine for our guest,” Hester commanded. “And bring me some notepaper and a pen. You will want to place a large order, Mr. Lambert?”

He looked up at her and grinned, the confident smile of a handsome man whose life is going well for him. “You may command my fortune, Mrs. Tradescant.”