Virgin Earth

Spring 1648

John was in his garden, planting out his tender rarities which had wintered in the orangery. The great tufted American daisy was putting out fresh shoots from its rosette of leaves, and the Virginian woodbine was throwing out scarlet snaky shoots with little unfurling green leaves from its dry, dead-looking trunk. John thought for a moment of Suckahanna with the scarlet honeysuckle flowers in her dark hair, and the nighttime scent of honeysuckle on their sleeping platform when he kissed her neck and crushed the flowers beneath his cheek. He patted the earth gently around the roots, saw that the climber could extend and find footholds on the strings hammered in to the rough wall and then turned his back on them to admire his tulip beds.

“There is nothing, nothing to compare with them,” he remarked to Hester as she came down the path toward him. Then he broke off abruptly at the sight of her face. “What’s wrong?”

He glanced toward the lane as if he feared a troop of horse there. Even with the king imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle no man could be certain that the nation would stay at peace. There were too many nations that might wish to meddle, there were too many armies that the queen or Prince Charles might prevail upon to muster.

“I don’t know,” Hester said, producing a letter from her apron pocket. “A letter. For you. From the Parliamentary commissioners.”

John scowled and held out his hand. He broke the seal, spread the paper, read it, and then read it again. He chuckled incredulously.

“What is it?” Hester demanded, trying to read upside down.

“I am to go to Oatlands and make good,” John said. “Who would have thought it? They want me to mend the walks in the vineyard garden and mow the bowling green, and make good.” He paused and looked up at her. “How times change and yet change not at all,” he observed. “I am gardener to Oatlands Palace still it seems, though there is no king and no court to see my work.”

“You’ll go-” she suggested, looking at him warily.

He folded the letter, very businesslike. “Of course. Why not?”

“I thought you might have some feeling that you wouldn’t garden for them, where you had gardened for the king, and for her.”

John shook his head. Unconsciously he put out a hand and tucked a stray shoot of the Virginian woodbine beneath a guiding piece of twine nailed into the wall. “I’ve been torn all my life, Hester. I’m growing quite resigned to divided loyalties.”

“Johnnie’ll take it hard,” she said. “He’s held to being one of the king’s gardeners through all this time.”

“We’re gardeners to the best gardens in the kingdom,” John said firmly. “And Oatlands has always been one of the best. I’d stay faithful to my garden before I stayed faithful to any master, you know that. Especially a master as faithless and as changeable as the king. The garden comes first, Hester. If someone will pay me to plant it and tend to it I’ll go at once and I’ll take Johnnie to help me. He has to learn. King or no king, we have to work for our living. And our living is the gardens. Our great duty is to the gardens.”

“But why would Parliament care for the gardens?” Hester mused. “With so much else to do? And they were the queen’s own gardens. Unless they’re putting them in order for her return? And there’s been some secret agreement?”

John shook his head. “Could be. Or maybe they’re just men of sense. If the king never returns and Parliament owns Oatlands and all the other royal palaces, then they will sell it at a better profit if it is set in a handsome garden and not in a wilderness. But if the king comes back to his own again and finds it overgrown, then he will only make them pay to set it right.”

“Will you be gone long?” she asked.

“A month at least,” he replied. “I have duties now, Hester. I am gardener to the Parliamentary commissioners! I am a Parliament man!”

She laughed with him. “But Johnnie may not find it so easy to change masters,” she warned.

“Johnnie will have to learn,” he ruled. “It is one thing to be a boy and love stories of Prince Rupert. It is another thing to be a man and to know that if you serve a master who changes as often as the weather then you had better not cleave too tight to him. The king is spinning like a weathercock. The rest of us must look to our own lives.”