Virgin Earth

Spring 1646, London

It was a homecoming as ordinary as any man might wish. John hired a carter at London dock to carry his barrels of seeds and roots, the two barrels of saplings, the chest of Barbados goods, and sat up on the wooden seat at the front of the cart as they jolted up the frozen lanes to Lambeth.

“What’s the news of the war?” John asked.

“You’ll have heard that Chester surrendered?”

“No?”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Virginia,” John said. “Is the king truly defeated?”

“Humbled to dust,” the carter said feelingly. “And now pray God we can see some peace and order in this land and that crew of parasites run back to Rome where they came from.”

John tried to say “Amen,” but found the word did not come out. “I’ll pray for peace,” he said. “I’ve had enough of war for a lifetime.”

“And so have we all. And for some the war lasted longer than their lifetimes. How many Englishmen d’you think have died to persuade the king that we want to be governed by Englishmen and pray to God and not to bishops?”

John shook his head.

“Thousands,” the man said glumly. “Hundreds of thousands. How many more died of plague and hardship because of this damned struggle?”

John shook his head again.

“Thousands more. And how many families d’you think have lost a son or a brother or a father?”

John shook his head in silence.

“Every single family in the land,” the carter said solemnly. “This has been a wicked, wicked war, a war without an enemy because we were fighting and killing ourselves.”

Hester was in the stable yard, tossing hay over the door to the horse, when she heard the rumble of the wheels and saw the cart rock as it rounded the corner into the yard. For a moment she saw only the barrels at the back and thought that John had sent some goods ahead, and then she dropped the pitchfork with a clatter on the cobbles as she recognized the man who got down from the carter’s seat and turned to face her.

He looked older than she remembered, and weary. The bear-grease stain had faded from his skin but he was still deeply tanned from the hard sun and wind. He had lost a couple of teeth during his time of near-starvation, and he had grown a brown mustache and beard which were flecked with gray. His eyes were sad, an unmistakable sadness, which made Hester want to hold him and comfort him without even asking what had grieved him so. He looked as if he had lost something very dear to him and Hester wondered what blade in the new world had cut him so deep.

“John?” she said quietly.

He stepped forward a little. “Hester?”

She realized that she was wearing her oldest working clothes, men’s thick boots and a brown scarf over her hair, which was pinned carelessly on the back of her head. She could not have looked more functional if she had tried. She whisked her scarf off her head and tried not to seem embarrassed. She had always tried to be above vanity, especially with this man who had married his first wife for love and lost her while she was still in her youth and beauty.

Hester brushed the hay from her coat. “You are welcome home,” she said.

He took two steps toward her and opened his arms to her and she went toward him and felt the intense relief of a man’s embrace after more than three years of loneliness.

“Do you forgive me?” he said urgently into her hair. She smelled of hay from the stable and the clean, familiar smell of soap from her skin, and lavender from her linen. “Can you forgive me for leaving you so unkindly and then disappearing like that?”

“It’s you that should forgive me for refusing to go with you,” she said quickly. “And I regretted it, John.”

He tightened his grip around her. “I have been unfaithful,” he said quickly, to get the confession over and done with before he was tempted to lie. “I am sorry.”

She rested her head against his shoulder. “That’s the past,” she said. “And in another country. You have come home to me, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

She craned her neck to look up into his sad, weary face and realized that he was wearing the same bewildered expression of pain as when they had first met and he had not recovered from the loss of his first wife. “What happened, John?”

For a moment he was about to answer her, then they were interrupted by the carter. “I can’t unload these on my own,” he said flatly. “And I can’t afford to wait here all day while you two kiss.”

Hester turned with a laugh. “I’ll find Joseph to help you.” She rang the bell which hung at the corner of the yard. “You go in, John, you must be frozen, and Johnnie will be longing to see you. He’ll be in the kitchen eating his breakfast.”

John hesitated at the kitchen door, suddenly shy and hardly knowing how to approach his son who had been a boy of nine when he left and was now a youth of twelve. He opened the door slowly and put his head around it.

Johnnie was seated at the scrubbed kitchen table, his bowl of porridge before him, absently spooning it into his mouth, his eyes on his book propped on his mug of small ale. John took in the sight of his son, the fair head with the cropped golden hair, the light hazel eyes, the long nose in the long face and the sweet innocent mouth. You could see his mother in his coloring and the joy in his face, but he was every inch a Tradescant.

He glanced up as the draft from the half-open door blew into the kitchen and put down his book as if he was about to greet his stepmother. Then he saw it was a man looking in at him, and he hesitated.

Very slowly he rose to his feet, very cautiously he looked. John opened the door fully and stepped into the doorway.

“Father?” Johnnie asked uncertainly. “Is it really you?”

John took two swift steps across the kitchen floor and wrapped his boy in a tight hug and inhaled, half-weeping, half-kissing the top of his silky head. “It’s me. Praise God I am home with you, Johnnie, and you safe and well.”

Hester came in behind him and hung her cape on the hook. “Did you recognize him?” she demanded.

Father and son answered “No!” together and then laughed together. John made himself release his son, forced himself to let the boy go.

“He is grown,” Hester said proudly. “And as much help to me in the garden as any man could be. And he is a scholar; he keeps the rarities and garden accounts now, and the planting records.”

“And school?” John demanded.

A shadow crossed Hester’s face. “The school has been closed this last year. The teacher was dismissed, some quarrel about theology. So we do the best we can at home.”

“And where is Frances?” John asked, looking around for her.

Something in Hester’s silence made him stop, fear gripping him. “Where is Frances? Hester, tell me. Please God, tell me that she is not lost.”

“No! No!” She rushed to reassure him. “She is well, in great beauty and well. It’s just… you were not here and I did not know you would return. I didn’t know what I should do for the best and I was at my wits’ end to keep her safe…”

“Where is she?” John shouted.

“She’s married!” Johnnie interrupted. “Safe at the Tower with Alexander Norman.”

“She married Alexander Norman?” John demanded.

Hester nodded, her eyes on his face.

“Not my father’s executor? Not my uncle? Not that Alexander Norman?”

Hester gave the smallest confirming nod.

“You married my daughter off to a man old enough to be her father? A friend of her grandfather?”

“I did.”

“It was her choice,” Johnnie said stoutly. “And she is happy.”

“By God, this is most ill-done!” John swore. “I can’t believe it! When did this happen?”

“A year ago,” Hester said quietly.

“Why?” he asked blankly. “Why did you let it happen? Why did you not write to ask for my permission?”

She turned away from him and tied her house apron around her waist as if she was weary of the whole conversation. “I could not be sure of keeping her safe,” she said. “Before Cromwell had the ruling of the army no woman was safe on the streets. I never knew whether the king would retake London or no and then there would have been the cavaliers to face as well. The apprentices rioted every other night, I could not let her step out of the front door.”

“You could have taken her to Oatlands!” he flung at her.

She turned at that. “Oatlands!” she exclaimed bitterly. “What do you think the palaces are like now? Oatlands was Prince Rupert’s headquarters! D’you think I could keep a pretty girl safe in a barracks? She was as much at risk there as in the stews of the City.”

“You could have put her on a ship to me!”

She blazed up at that. “And where were you? I had two letters from you in three years, one parcel of Indian goods and one consignment of plants. What was I to imagine? I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead. I had to take all the decisions on my own and I did what I thought was the best. Alexander offered her a home and promised me that he would love her and keep her safe. And she wanted to marry him. She accepted him on her own account. And they are happy, anyone can see that.”

“I shall get her home,” John swore. “I shall have the marriage annulled. She is not to be his wife.”

“She is expecting his baby.” Hester spoke calmly as her heart hammered in her ears. “She will come home for the confinement, and she visits us often. But she will not leave her husband, even at your bidding, John.”

He flung out of the room at that and she heard him stride across the hall. Johnnie shot one scared look at her and she put her hand on his shoulder. There was a great bellow from the rarities room: “Mother of God! Where are the rarities? What have you done?”

Hester turned Johnnie on his heel and pushed him gently toward the kitchen door. “Wrap up warmly and go and sweep the snow off the trees,” she said.

“What will you do?”

“I shall have to explain to him how we live now. It will be hard for him to understand.”

“Then he should never have gone away,” Johnnie said.

They had a bitter row in the half-empty room. John in his horror at the changes could not even hear that the finest of the rarities were safely in hiding. Every confession that Hester had to make, that she had sold one or other of the treasures for food, merely heightened his anger by a further notch.

“You have betrayed me!” he yelled at her. “You have betrayed my trust, my sacred trust in you. You have sold my treasures, you have sold my daughter!”

“What was I to do?” Hester shouted back, as angry as him. “You were gone. This summer I was going to tell your son that I feared you must be dead. I had to survive without you. I had to manage somehow. We had one true friend in the whole world and Frances loves and trusts him. She wasn’t sold. He took her without a dowry.”

“Sweet God! Am I supposed to be grateful for this charity? He was a friend of her grandfather! A man in his dotage!”

“And where have you been?” Hester turned from the window and suddenly rounded on John. “For all that you are full of what I have done and failed to do, what do you have to show for three years away? What treasures did you bring back? A barrel of plants and a handful of feathers! The last coins I sold were to buy your passage home when Johnnie and I had not tasted meat for weeks! How dare you accuse me of failing you! It is you who has failed me!”

“You have no idea! You have no idea how I have lived and what I have been trying to do.”

“With some woman? Some Jamestown drab in an inn? Have you been bunked up all these years, spending our money and doing nothing?”

“I’ve been in the woods, I’ve been searching to understand what I should do-”

“And the woman?”

“What of her?”

“Her name. Tell me her name.”

“Suckahanna,” he said unwillingly.

Hester screamed in shock and clapped her hand over her mouth. “You have bedded an Indian? A savage?”

His hand flew out before he knew it, he slapped her face hard. She jerked back and her head banged against the knob of the shutter with a horrible thud. She dropped without another sound, knocked unconscious. For a moment he thought he had killed her and knew a fierce, terrible joy that the woman who had abused Suckahanna should be silenced at once, a feeling instantly succeeded by complete remorse. He dropped to his knees beside her and lifted her up from the floor.

“Hester, wife, forgive me…”

Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. “Take your hands from me,” she spat. “You are a foul adulterer. I won’t have you touch me.”

Hester made up her bed in Frances’s old room and moved her clothes out of the master bedroom that night. She cooked a modest dinner for John, she produced a beautifully pressed suit of clothes and set about sewing him a new shirt. She behaved in every way like an obedient and dutiful wife. But he had knocked the love out of her with one impulsive blow, and he did not know how to get it back.

It was as if the heart had gone out of her and out of the house altogether. The garden was neglected, the topiary and the knot garden hedges were growing out and losing their shape. The gravel on the paths was no defense against the constantly springing weeds. The warm nursery beds by the house had not been prepared with sieved earth for the coming of the new season as they should have been. The fruit trees had not been properly pruned in the autumn. Even the chestnuts had not all been planted and grown on ready for sale in the early summer.

“I couldn’t do it all,” Hester said stubbornly as she saw John look critically over the garden from the terrace. “I had no boys, I had no money. We all did what we could but this garden takes a dozen men to keep. Joseph and Johnnie and Frances and I couldn’t do it.”

“Of course not, I understand,” John said and he turned away to brood in the half-empty rarities room, and walk with his limping stride around the frozen garden.

Johnnie unpacked the Virginian saplings and left them in their barrels by the house wall. The ground was too hard to dig them in. One of them had died from the salt winds of the voyage but the other four looked strong and likely to put out green leaves when the weather improved.

“What are they?” Johnnie asked.

His father’s face lit up. “Tulip trees, they call them. They grow as round and shapely as a horse chestnut but they have great flowers, white, waxy flowers, as big as your head. I have seen them grow to such a height and breadth-” He broke off. Suckahanna had showed it to him. “And these are maple trees.”

Johnnie rolled the big barrels of seeds and roots into the orangery and set to work unpacking them and planting them up in pots of sieved earth ready to be set outside and watered when the spring frosts ended. John watched him, disinclined to work himself, horribly quick to criticize when his son dropped a seed or was clumsy with a root.

“Have you never been taught how to do this properly?” he demanded irritably.

His son looked up at him, his resentment veiled. “I am sorry, sir,” he said formally.

Hester appeared in the doorway and took in the scene in one quick glance. “Can I have a word with you, husband?” she asked, her voice very even.

John walked toward her and she drew him out of earshot, into the garden.

“Please don’t correct Johnnie so harshly,” she said. “He’s not used to it, and indeed he is a good boy and a very hard worker.”

“He is my son,” John pointed out. “I shall teach him what is right.”

She bowed her head. “Of course,” she said coldly. “You must do as you wish.”

John waited in case she should say any more and then he flung himself away from her and stamped into the house, his feet hurting in his boots, knowing himself to be in the wrong, not knowing how to make things right.

“I shall go to London,” he said. “I shall complete my commissions for Sir Henry. It’s clear that we have to make our fortune some other way than by the garden and the rarities since the rarities are gone and the garden half-ruined.”

Hester went back into the orangery. Johnnie raised his eyebrows at her.

“We all have to become acquainted with each other again,” she said as equably as she could. “Let me help you with that.”

For days John walked around the grounds, trying to accustom himself to the smaller scale of England, trying to accept a horizon which seemed so very close, trying to enjoy his continuing ownership of twenty acres when he had been free to run in a forest which went on forever, trying to be glad of a plain, forthright wife and a bright, fair son and not to think of the dark beauty of Suckahanna and the animal grace of her boy. He arranged the Indian goods in the half-empty rarities room, feeling the arrowhead come so easily into his hand, rubbing the buckskin shirt between his finger as if something of the warmth of Suckahanna’s skin might still linger.

He made a little money on his commission for Sir Henry and he bought a couple of fine paintings, crated them up and sent them out to him. When the ship came back, in four months’ time or so, it would bring him another note of credit and perhaps some more barrels of sugar for John to sell. He drew some satisfaction from being able to make some money, even in these difficult times, but he thought he might never feel a sense of freedom or joy ever again.

Hester did the only thing she knew how to do, and tackled the practical problems of the situation. She asked him to walk with her to Lambeth and took him straight to the best bootmaker still working in the village. He measured John’s feet and then looked at the bare soles with horror. “You have feet like a Highlander, if you’ll excuse me saying so.”

“I had to go barefoot. I was in Virginia,” John said shortly.

“No wonder all your boots pinch,” the cobbler said. “You have no need of boots at all.”

“Yes he does,” Hester remarked. “He’s a gentleman in England and he’ll have a pair of boots of best leather, a pair of working boots and a pair of shoes. And they’d better not pinch.”

“I haven’t the leather,” the man said. “They don’t drive the cattle to Smithfield, the tanners can’t get the hides, I can’t get the leather. You’ve been in Virginia too long if you think you can order shoes like the old days.”

Hester took the cobbler by the elbow and there was a brief exchange of words and the clink of a coin.

“What did you offer him?” John asked as they emerged from the dark shop into the bright March sunlight.

Hester grimaced and prepared for a quarrel. “You won’t like it, John, but I promised to supply the leather from your father’s rarities. It was only some leather painted with a scene of the Madonna and Child. Not very well done, and completely heretical. We would invite the troops upon us if we ever showed it. And the man is right, he can’t get leather for your shoes otherwise.”

For a moment she thought he was going to flare up at her again.

“So am I to strut around London with Papistical images painted on my boots?” he asked. “Won’t they hang me for a Jesuit in hiding?”

“Not much of a disguise if you’re going around with the Virgin Mary on your feet,” Hester pointed out cheerfully. “No, the painting is almost worn off, and he’ll use it on the inside.”

“We are using rare treasures as household goods? What kind of stewardship is this?”

“We are surviving,” Hester said grimly. “Do you want boots that you can walk in or no?”

He paused. “Do you swear that nothing else of any merit is missing from the collection?” he demanded. “That it is safe in hiding as you say?”

“On my honor, and you can see it all for yourself if you cut down the tree and open the door. But John, you had best wait. It’s not safe yet. They all say the king is defeated but they have said that before. He has his wife working against us in France, and the Irish to call on, and who knows what the Pope might order if the queen promises to hand over the country to Popery? The king cannot be defeated in battle, for all that they fight and fight. Even when he is down to his last man he is not defeated. He is still the king. They cannot defeat him. He has to decide to surrender.”

John nodded and they fell into stride together for the short walk home. “I keep thinking. I keep wondering – perhaps I should go to him,” he said.

She stumbled at the thought of him returning to the court and to danger. “Why? Why on earth would you go?”

“I feel almost that I owe him some service,” he said.

“You left the country to escape serving,” she reminded him.

He grimaced at her bluntness. “It wasn’t that simple,” he said. “I didn’t want to die for a cause I can’t believe in. I didn’t want to kill a man because like me he had halfheartedly joined, but on the other side. But if the king is ready for peace then I could serve him with a clear conscience. And I don’t like to think of him alone at Oxford, without the queen and with the prince fled to Jersey, and no one with him.”

“There’s a whole crowd with him,” Hester said. “Drinking themselves senseless every night and shaming Oxford with their behavior. He is in the thick of company. And if he sees you he will only remember you and ask where you have been. If he wanted you he would have sent for you by now.”

“And has there been no word?”

She shook her head. “Since they wanted us to serve under the Commission of Array there has been nothing,” she said. “And they risked our lives for a lost cause then. There is nothing you can do for the king unless you can persuade him to come to terms with his people. Can you do that?”

“No.”

As soon as John’s new boots were ready he put them on, dressed in his best suit and announced his intention of formally visiting his daughter in her new home. Hester and Johnnie, also dressed in their best, went with him in the boat downriver.

“Will he be angry?” Johnnie asked under the noise of the oars in the water.

“No,” Hester said. “The moment he sees her she’ll have him wrapped around her finger like always.”

Johnnie chuckled. “Can we shoot the bridge?” he asked.

Hester hesitated. Timorous passengers would make the ferrymen leave them on the west side of Tower Bridge and walk round to rejoin their boat at the other side. The currents around the pillars of the bridge were terrifyingly swift and when the tide was on the ebb and the river was full, boats could overturn and people could drown. It was Johnnie’s great passion to shoot the rapids and generally Hester would stay in the boat with him, her hands gripping the side, her knuckles white, and a smile firmly fixed on her face.

“Do what?” John asked and turned around.

“Shoot the bridge,” Johnnie replied. “Mother lets me.”

John looked in surprise at his wife. “You can’t enjoy it?” he asked.

One glance at her face told him that she was terrified. “Oh, I don’t mind,” she said. “Johnnie loves it.”

John gave a short bark of laughter. “Then Johnnie can do it,” he said firmly. “You and I will land at the Swan Stairs like Christians and Johnnie can meet us on the other side.”

“But I like Mother coming too!” Johnnie protested.

“That’s as may be,” John said firmly. “But I’m home now, and you’re not going to drown my wife to keep you company. You can shoot the bridge on your own, my boy.”

The ferryman set them ashore at the steps. John put his hand under Hester’s elbow as they climbed to the top and turned to wave to Johnnie as he sat in the prow of the boat to gain full pleasure from the terrifying ride.

“Look at his face!” Hester exclaimed lovingly.

“You are too indulgent to him,” John said.

She hesitated. John was his father and the head of the household. Restoring the power to him was hard for her, just as regaining his position was for him. “He’s still only a boy,” she remarked. “Not yet thirteen.”

“If he was in Virginia-” John started and then bit back the rest.

“Yes,” she said softly. “But he isn’t. He’s a good boy and he has been courageous and faithful through these difficult years. If he was a planter’s son, living in the wilds, then I dare say he would be a quite different boy. But he is not. He is a boy who has had to have his childhood in the middle of a war and he has seen all of the adults around him most terribly afraid. You are right to restore the rules, John, but I won’t have him blamed for not being something he has no business to be.”

He turned and faced her but she did not drop her gaze. She stared at him fiercely as if she did not care whether he beat her or sent her home in disgrace. Not for the first time John was reminded that he had married a redoubtable woman and, despite his temper, he remembered also that she was fiercely defending his son, just as she had fiercely defended the garden and the rarities.

“You’re right,” he said, with the smile she loved. “And I will be restored to my place at the head of the household. But I won’t be a tyrant.”

She nodded at that, and when they strolled together to the other side of the bridge where the boat was waiting she slid her hand in the crook of his arm and John kept it there.

They paid the boatman and retraced their steps to the Tower. Alexander Norman’s timber yard was beside the walls of the Tower on the grounds of a former convent. His house was built alongside, one of the long, thin town houses pressed against the narrow street. Hester had feared that Frances would be unhappy without a garden, with little more than a dozen pots in the cobbled yard at the back, which was overshadowed half the day from the stacks of wood in the timber yard next door. But already the house was draped in climbing roses and honeysuckle was growing up to the very windows, and every window had a bracket fixed outside and a square planting box nailed to the wall with a row of tulips waiting to bloom.

“I’d have no trouble guessing which house was hers,” John said grimly, glancing down the street at the other bare-fronted, barefaced houses.

“That’s nothing,” Johnnie said with pleasure. “She has an herb garden out the back and an apple tree squashed against the back wall. She says she’ll prune it to keep it small enough. She says she’ll repot it every year and prune the roots too.”

John shook his head. “She needs a dwarf apple tree,” he said. “Perhaps if one could graft an apple sapling onto a shrub root it might grow small…”

Hester stepped forward and knocked on the door. At once Frances opened it. “Father!” she said, and slipped down the step, threw her arms around him and laid her head against his shoulder.

John almost recoiled from her touch. In the three years he had been away she had grown from a girl to a woman of nearly eighteen years, and now, with her slight body pressed against him, he could feel the hard swelling of her baby.

He stepped back to see her and his face softened. “You’re so like your mother,” he exclaimed. “What a beauty you’ve become, Frances.”

“She’s the very picture of my Jane.” Mrs. Hurte emerged from the house and shook John and then Hester by the hand. She enveloped Johnnie in a breathtaking embrace but never stopped talking. “The very picture of her. Every time I see her I think she has come back to us again.”

“Come inside,” Frances urged. “You must be frozen. Did you shoot the bridge?”

“Father wouldn’t let Mother come.”

Frances shot a brief approving look at her father. “Quite right. Why should Mother risk drowning because you like it?”

“She likes it!” Johnnie protested.

“I swear I never said so,” Hester remarked.

Mrs. Hurte surged outward rather than into the house, took John by the arm and drew him aside. Hester silently admired the tactical skill of her stepdaughter. This was generalship as gifted as Oliver Cromwell’s with his New Model Army. Mrs. Hurte would change John’s mind in favor of the match in two sentences of complaints. Both Hester and Frances strained their ears to hear her do it.

“You’re home too late,” Mrs. Hurte said reproachfully to John. “This is a bad business, and you too late to prevent it.”

“I don’t see that it is bad,” John remarked.

“A man of fifty-six and a girl of seventeen?” Mrs. Hurte demanded. “What life can they have together?”

“A good one.” John gestured to the pretty house and the tracery of carefully pruned rose branches. “A boy of her own age could not hope to give her so much.”

“She should have been kept at her home.”

“In these times?” John asked. “Where safer than beside the Tower?”

“And now expecting a baby?”

“The older the bridegroom, the sooner the better,” John rejoined swiftly. “Why should you be so against it, Mother? It was a marriage for love. Your own daughter Jane had nothing less.”

She bit her lip at that. “Jane brought a good dowry and you two were well matched,” she said.

“I will see that Frances is properly dowered when peace is restored and I can sell the Virginia plants and restore the rarities to their proper place,” John said firmly. “I am trading in a small way with the West Indies and I expect to see a profit on that very soon. And Frances is well-matched. Alexander is a good and faithful friend to this family and she loves him. Why should she not marry the man of her choice in these times when men and women are making their own choices every day? When this whole war has been fought for men and women to be free?”

Mrs. Hurte smoothed her somber gown. “I don’t know what Mr. Hurte would have said.”

John smiled. “He would have liked the house, and the business. Cooper for the ordinance in the middle of a war? Don’t tell me that he wouldn’t have loved that! Alexander is earning twelve pounds a year and that’s before he draws his allowances! It’s a fine match for the daughter of a man who has little to sell and most of his stock in hiding.”

Hester and Frances exchanged a hidden smile, turned and went into the house.

“That was clever,” Hester said approvingly to her stepdaughter.

Frances gave her a most unladylike wink. “I know,” she said smugly.