Virgin Earth

Autumn 1645, England

Hester received John’s letter asking for his fare home in the second week of September. The sailor who brought it was given a penny for his trouble and some thin soup at the kitchen door. Hester took the letter into the rarities room – the tiny fire was burning in there and the light from the tall Venetian windows was good. But she also had a superstitious sense that this was the rarest thing of all – a letter from her husband.

It was crumpled from its resting place inside someone’s jacket and grubby as if it had been dropped somewhere and forgotten for a little while. Hester looked at the folded outside of the paper and the tiny splash of wax which sealed it, as if she would read every inch of the paper as well as the message inside. Then she sat at the desk that was set in the window for the convenience of artists who might come to draw the specimens in the collection, and broke the seal.

Dear Wife,

I hope this reaches you in good health and fortune. I am on my way to Jamestown after many months living in the forest.

Hester paused. She had thought John was living in a planter’s house, such as were illustrated in the books about Virginia. A little house made of half-sawn timbers with wood shingles for a roof. What could he mean about living in the forest?

I have no money. Please send a note of credit for me to draw twenty pounds for my board and lodging and journey home. I shall come home as soon as I receive the money.

Hester raised her head from the smudged words. The Virginia venture had ended then, as she had said it would, in bankruptcy and disaster. There was no profitable crop of tobacco. There was no refuge from the uncertainty of a country at war. John had failed completely, failed so badly that he could not even come home unless she sent him his passage money.

I trust you, Hester, and when I come home I shall thank you for your care of me and mine.

Hester pressed her finger to her lips and then put it down, as if making a fingerprint in sealing wax on the J at the end of the letter. John was coming home to her. She found she cared not at all that he was coming home penniless, without plantation, or tobacco, or pride. She cared not at all that he was trapped in a foreign land and could not even earn his passage home. All that mattered was that John was coming home, at last.

She sat only for a few minutes in the light of the window and then she set to raising the money to send him at once. Twenty pounds was a substantial sum. Fortunately the letter had come in September, the very time for the sale of tulip bulbs, and the order for John Lambert had been despatched only a week before. Any day now she expected his payment.

Hester threw a shawl over her head and went out to the terrace. Johnnie was working with Joseph, lifting and labeling the tulip bulbs from their beds. When she called him and he looked up she saw his face was still dark with sorrow.

Johnnie’s hero Prince Rupert had failed to keep Bristol for the royalists, though he had promised his king he would hold it for months. The wildest rumor was circulating: that Rupert had played the king false on purpose. They were saying that he and his brother, the Elector Palatine, now eating his dinner in London at the expense of Parliament, having stolidly changed his coat and abandoned his uncle, had conspired all along to have one brother on each side so they would profit whichever side won. Some people even said that Rupert hoped for the throne of England himself.

Ever since the news had come in of the fall of Bristol Johnnie had come down to breakfast with red eyes, and he had been quiet and moody all the day. When Hester wanted him for work in the garden she had to find him first, and half the time he would be down at the little lake, sitting in the rowing boat, adrift in the middle, slumped in despair over the dripping oars.

“How are the tulips?” she asked.

He nodded, as if he could not take joy even in them. “They’ve done well. For every bulb that went in, we are raising three. It’s been a good year for tulips, if for nothing else.”

Joseph nodded. “I’ve never seen such a crop,” he said. “Something’s going right at least.”

“More than one thing,” Hester said. She tied the ends of the shawl crosswise around her waist and thought it felt like a tight and loving embrace. “I have a letter here from Virginia.”

The shadow left Johnnie’s face and he jumped to his feet from the bed of tulips. “He’s coming home?”

“He’s coming home,” she assented. “At last.”

The waiting was the hardest time of all. She had the money from John Lambert for his order of tulips, and then she took some old Roman coins from the rarities room and offered them for sale to a London goldsmith. The price he gave her was little more than theft but Hester realized that portable treasures were flooding onto the market as one grand family after another tried to survive the war years. She went to Alexander Norman to borrow the rest of the money and took the whole amount to the goldsmith who was known to give and receive credit for Virginia. He signed a note of credit for twenty pounds to John Tradescant by name and then Hester had to take it down to the London docks and find a ship sailing to Virginia.

A vessel was waiting to go, almost ready to cast off: the Makepeace, going to Virginia by the southern route and stopping at the Sugar Islands.

“I have to see the captain,” Hester said to one of the sailors. She was jostled by a family throwing their bundles on board and pushing their way toward the gangplank. “Or a trustworthy gentleman.”

“We’ve got a brace of vicars,” the man said rudely. “And half a dozen cavaliers. Take your pick.”

“I need a gentleman to assist me,” Hester said stoutly. “I shall see one of the clerical gentlemen.”

The sailor laughed, turned his head and shouted below. Hester smoothed her cape and wished that she had brought Johnnie with her, or even allowed Alexander Norman to come too. Eventually a white-haired man looked down from the ship’s side and said quietly, as if he would not raise his voice over the din of the ship, “I am the Reverend Walter de Carey. May I help you, madam?”

Hester stepped quickly up the swaying gangplank and held out her hand. “How do you do, I am Mrs. Tradescant, wife of John Tradescant of the Ark, Lambeth.”

He bowed over her hand. “I am honored,” he said.

“I am sorry to ask a favor of a stranger but my husband has been-” Hester paused for a moment. “Plant collecting in Virginia and finds himself without money. I have a note of credit for him but I need to find a trustworthy gentleman to take it to Virginia and give it to him.”

The man smiled wearily. “I am so little trusted that I have been expelled from my church and the blacksmith stands in my pulpit and tells my congregation what revelation he has gleaned that week from his forge fire,” he said. “I was twenty years in my vicarage and I baptized every single one of those young men and women who now tell me that I am in league with the Antichrist and a worshipper of the whore of Babylon. They would not call me a trustworthy man.”

Mutely, Hester held out the sealed and folded paper. “If you were twenty years in the vicarage and a good parish priest then you are the man for me,” she said. “These are hard times of change for us all. Will you help me try to bring my family back together? This is my husband’s passage money home.”

He hesitated for only a moment and then he took the paper. “Forgive me, I am too absorbed in my own sorrows. I will take the paper; but how will I find your husband?”

“He’ll find you,” Hester said with certainty. “He’ll be waiting for this. All you have to do is to tell people in Jamestown that you are looking for him and he will find you. Whereabouts are you going in Virginia?”

“I hope to settle there and found a school,” the vicar said. “The times are against men who believe in the king and God in this country. I trust that the new world will be a refuge for men of steady faith. Half this ship is filled with men like me, who cannot bear the new rule of Parliament and the wild heresies of madmen and self-taught preachers and the like in our own churches.”

“My husband left at the outbreak of the war,” Hester said. “He could not bear to watch the country being torn apart, and it was tearing him apart too.”

“He will come home to difficult times,” the vicar remarked. “The fighting may be nearly over, but the bitterness of these years will not be easily restored. And what is to become of the king in the hands of such a crew?”

There was a shout from the bridge and an answering shout from the shore.

“I must go,” Hester said hurriedly. “I do thank you for accepting the letter for John. He will do all he can to help you when he meets you, I know he will. He will be grateful.”

The vicar bowed. Hester turned for the gangplank and went down it as the lumpers on the dockside shouted to the sailors on the ship and finally cast off from shore.

“God speed,” Hester called to the ship. “Tell him I am waiting.”

The vicar put his hand to his ear, so Hester waved with a smile on her face and said more quietly, so he would be certain not to hear, “Tell him I love him.”