Virgin Earth

Spring 1647

Johnnie sat in his rowing boat on the little lake at the bottom of the garden, a news-sheet spread before him, his coat turned up around his ears against the sharp frost. He was reading one of the many royalist papers that spread a mixture of good cheer and open lies in an effort to keep the king’s cause alive, even while he squabbled with his Scots hosts at Newcastle. This edition assured the reader that the king in his wisdom was forging an agreement which would convert the Scots from their stubborn determination never to accept the English prayer book or the English system of bishops. As soon as the Scots had agreed they would then sweep down through England, return the king to his throne and all would be well again.

Johnnie looked up and saw his father coming through the orchard. John waved and walked to the bank where a little pier stretched into the water.

“You must be freezing,” John remarked.

“A bit,” Johnnie said. “This can’t be right. The Scots aren’t likely to surrender all they believe in when they have all but won the war. They aren’t likely to start fighting for the king against Parliament when they’ve been allies with Parliament for the last few years.”

“No,” John said briefly. “You bought the paper. What did you think it would tell you: the truth?”

“I just want to know!” Johnnie sat up abruptly and the boat rocked. “He has no chance, has he?”

John shook his head. “What your paper doesn’t tell you is that they’ve refused to take him to Edinburgh unless he too signs their covenant, against Laud’s prayer book and against the bishops. Of course he can’t sign. He’s just turned the kingdom upside down to try and make us do it his way. But the Scots are going back to Scotland, and they don’t know what to do with him. Nobody knows why he went to them in the first place. There was never any chance of an agreement. They’ll send him to Parliament.”

Johnnie went pale. “Betray him to his enemies?”

“He’s with his enemies already but he wouldn’t see it,” John said bluntly. “The Scots and Parliament have been allies since the war started. Of course they would work on him to try and make a peace. Of course if he won’t bend they have to hand him over.”

“What will he do?” Johnnie asked, anguished.

John shook his head. “He must surrender and accept the terms Parliament imposes. Parliament and the army have defeated him. He has to give up.”

John was wrong. The king did not give up. He attempted to escape, an ill-planned, unlikely attempt which was as successful as it deserved to be. The guard around him was doubled, he was warned that he should know that he was a prisoner of the English Parliament, and taken to Holdenby House in Northamptonshire.

Hester found John at the bottom of the orchard, scowling at the cherry tree. “I think I killed it,” he said. “And I watched my father moving trees twice the size of this when I was a boy and never learned the knack of it.”

“It looks no worse than the others,” Hester said, looking around the orchard where the whippy bare boughs of the trees flailed against a white sky.

“I’ve killed it,” John said. “For all the care I took. I don’t have my father’s talent. I worked at his side all my life and still I’m not half the gardener he was. He knew where he belonged, he knew who he served, and he knew his trade and I-” He broke off and put his hand on the bough of the tree as if for support.

“What’s the news?” Hester asked, guessing at once the source of John’s discomfort.

John gave her a quick look from under his lowered brows. “Just some lads at the back door, begging for bread on their way home,” he said. “Discharged from the army and heading homeward.”

Hester waited. John put his hand out and held the trunk of the dead cherry tree. “They said that the army would rule Parliament and they would have their revenge on the king,” he said. “They said they would make him pay because a new day is coming when all men will have land and all men will have a vote to choose their rulers and all men will be equal with one another.”

“These are young men’s thoughts,” Hester said quickly. “You were a young man wild for change yourself once, John.”

He nodded. “But these were not young men, they were men of my age. And they said that many think as they do. They are Levelers and they say the best men of the army are with them. They want to finish what Parliament started. They want to exile the king and turn the country into a new land of freedom and equality.”

Hester looked around the security of the walled orchard. “Parliament would not give away land?” she asked.

John shook his head. “I don’t think they’ll wait for Parliament,” he said. “These are men of action and determination. They’ve been fighting to make a better country for workingmen. They have little patience for the gentlemen in Parliament. They want to see the land given to workingmen. They want the royal estates, the church estates, the commons, and the wastes.”

“And every man would have his own little piece of land and grow things?”

“So they say.” John smiled grimly. “It’s what I always wanted. It’s how I always thought things should be. And now it looks as if the army might destroy Parliament and do it.”

“Turn on their masters?”

“Why not? Didn’t Parliament turn on the king?”

“Would they take from landowners like us? Tax us?”

John shrugged. “How would I know what they might do? They might think that these walls should be pulled down as any other.”

Hester nodded and turned back toward the house. He could tell by her slow stride that she was thinking. Halfway to the house she turned and came back to him.

“I think we should be growing vegetables,” she said. “That’s what they’ll be wanting now.”

The whole family helped in the restoration of the rarities to the room with the high Venetian windows and the smooth, polished floor. They wanted to return it to its previous state, they wanted it restored, without loss of beauty, without loss of richness, without loss of the glamour that hung around it: the scent of the skins, the delight of the multiplicity of things, the joy of the ordered jumble; the big things hanging from the ceiling, the tiny things in their cabinets, the exotic next to the mundane, the historic next to the inventions.

There were some terrible gaps in the collection. The coins had fared the worst and the items made of precious metals. Hester had made inroads into anything which had held its value during the war years and she could not conceal from John that there were trays of Roman and medieval coins which would never be stocked again.

Some things had suffered from damp. A triptych altar screen had been leaned against the ice-house wall and its bright colors had been leached away by the moisture of the brick. Many rare skins had rotted and decayed, and some of the woolen clothes were pitted with mothholes. Vellum pages of illuminated manuscripts had been eaten by ants and the foul dirt of rats and mice was all over the cases which held the flowers dried in sugar.

“I am sorry, I am sorry,” Hester cried as one parcel after another was brought out into the light. “If I had only known that we would be safe I would never have hidden the things away.”

“You didn’t know,” John said generously. “And if the soldiers had suddenly swept through we could have lost everything in one night.”

Frances, her hair tied in a kerchief, and Johnnie in his gardening clothes gently beat the dust and the moths from the clothes, rugs and skins outside and then carried them in for Hester and John to rearrange and hang.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, drawer by drawer, object after object, the rarities room was reassembled, and when they stepped back and looked around after a full fortnight of work they saw an impressive collection of wealth and novelty. Only someone who had grown up in the room, as the Tradescant children had done, rocked in the light of those great windows, would have known that anything was missing. The visitors, who would surely come again now that peace was here, could not fail to be amazed.