Virgin Earth

Autumn 1652

The boy was home, the country was at peace. Oliver Cromwell was ruling Parliament with such power and dominance that he might as well have been king himself. Scotland was no longer an independent kingdom but was annexed by England and General George Monck was driving roads through Highland pride and through Highland courage which might never be healed. Charles Stuart was far away in France, or the Low Countries, or wherever he might scrape a living for doing nothing but being his charming self.

The peace brought gardeners back to the orchards and flower beds, and men of inquiring minds into the rarities collection. Takings at the door grew every day, and the order book for Tradescant flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetables grew full. John’s reputation for strange, beautiful and exotic plants was established and he was gaining increasing respect for his experiments with new vegetables and fruit. He grew potatoes and Indian corn and peaches, nectarines, cherries, grapes for eating and for wine and for drying as raisins; and the scientists and philosophers who dined at the Ark would ask to try the new vegetables and fruits for their dinner.

In the autumn John Lambert came home from Scotland and visited the garden at the Ark and admired John’s new collection of cyclamen which he had in a new bed under the chestnut trees. Lambert kneeled down in the dirt of the avenue to look at them, their delicate little petals folded back like a nun’s coif. He greeted Johnnie without remarking on the scar beneath his eye, and kissed Hester’s hand without mentioning the package of tulips or the hidden note.

“I’m glad to see your boy is home” was all he said to her.

“Thank you,” she replied. “And I was glad to see you are now Lord Lambert.”

“Aren’t I grand?” he asked her with a smile, and then turned to walk around the flower beds with John.

“You gardened for the queen at Wimbledon House, did you not?” he asked when they were seated on the terrace, looking out over the chrysanthemums planted thickly in the beds before the house to give the garden some early autumn color.

“I did,” John said. “We planned it and I even planted the beds by the house, a knot garden, and a watercourse; but they had very little time there. She wanted it as a retreat, I was going to make a flowery mead down by the river, I should think it’s a hay meadow now.”

“What d’you think of the soil and the situation? There are some good plants still growing.”

“It would have been a most pretty garden,” John said. “I still have the plans for planting. Johnnie goes up there every summer.”

“I have bought it for my own use. I want a country house not too far from London. I should like to see what you had planned for it.”

“You have it? Well that’s-” John broke off.

“A surprise,” John Lambert finished diplomatically for him. “I think so too. I certainly didn’t ever think to find myself in a queen’s house, but I think it will suit me very well. I was especially interested to know if any of your plantings have survived. I’d be sorry to spoil a bed of rarities through my own ignorance.”

“Johnnie told me that some things are still there. I know the trees have done well, and Johnnie told me that the horse chestnuts are growing and the fruit trees in the orchards.”

“Horse chestnuts?” John Lambert asked with a gleam.

“Yes.”

“Mature?”

John thought for a moment. “They’d be, oh, fifteen years old now.” He laughed. “They’ll be flowering and coming into their full beauty. I think you’ll find you have a bargain in the garden. And I had planted plum and medlar and quince apples and pears; also the Tradescant great black cherry, and espaliered peaches.”

Hester came out onto the terrace with a bottle of wine and two glasses, Johnnie washed and tidy behind her. “Will you stay for dinner, Lord Lambert?” she asked. “Elias Ashmole and his wife are staying with us at the moment, and we expect some other guests too.”

“Thank you, I would like to,” he said.

“His lordship has bought Wimbledon House,” John told her. “Johnnie, would you go and see if you can find the garden plans for me? They were in the documents in the rarities room.” He looked directly at his son and spoke with emphasis. “We must be glad that one of our gardens has been bought by a man who will love it,” he said firmly.

It was as if the boy had not heard him.

“That’s the queen’s house,” Johnnie said bluntly.

Lambert heard the repressed passion behind the words and replied very calmly. “It was confiscated, as are all the royal houses and palaces. And now I have bought it. I paid good money for it, Johnnie. It was a proper transaction, not booty. I didn’t steal it.”

“It wasn’t the king’s house, it was the queen’s,” Johnnie insisted. “She’s never been tried for treason, her estates have never been sequestrated. How can anyone have her house? It has nothing to do with the royal palaces. It’s her own house.”

Hester glanced at John.

“Her fortunes go with her husband,” Lambert answered. “That’s the law, Johnnie. And all royalists have lost their houses.”

“Fetch the plans for me.” John tried to stem the rise of his son’s temper.

“Fetch the damned things yourself!” Johnnie burst out. “I’ll have no part in robbing the queen of her own. I won’t pretend that it’s not thievery to live in a queen’s palace and steal her fruits! It’s nothing better than looting! It’s a dead king’s goods!”

He flung out of the house and ran down the shallow steps into the garden, they saw him tear down the avenue and through the gate toward the lake. There was an appalled silence.

“I apologize,” John said. “He will be disciplined, your lordship. He will apologize to you himself. He doesn’t realize the gravity of what he is saying.” John shot a swift look at Hester, asking for help. At the very least Johnnie was guilty of appalling rudeness; at the worst, treason.

“I’m so sorry,” Hester said in a whisper. “He’s still very young, you understand. And distressed. I would not have had him speak so to anyone, you least of all. He does realize that the war is over. He is not an active royalist. We are all of us loyal to Parliament here.”

Lambert leaned back against his chair and took up his glass of wine. “Oh, there’s no need to apologize,” he said gently. “There are many who feel as he does up and down the country, it’s bound to take some time for feelings to die down. And there have been enough trials for treason. The lad has strong feelings and it’s hard to lose two battles by – what is he? – twenty? Did he get that scar at Worcester?”

“Yes. A scratch from a pike,” Hester said. “Thank God it missed his eye. It was all but healed up by the time he came home. And he’s only eighteen. I am sorry, your lordship. He spent his youth in the shadow of the war.”

“He’s at an age when you see things in black and white,” Lambert said easily. “Things are not so simple in real life. If Charles Stuart would make half the promises to us that he made to the Scots then he could have come home to his throne. But we can’t trust him. Those of us who dealt with his father remember that the Stuarts find it easier to promise than to deliver. And the son is even worse than the father for reneging on his debts and word. He’s not much of a model for Johnnie to set his heart on.”

“I know,” Hester said sadly. “But I can’t seem to persuade him.”

Johnnie did not reappear for dinner and Hester laid the table, served the gentlemen, and dined on her own in the kitchen before she went out to look for him.

She knew where to go. He was lying in the little rowing boat, his long legs over the back of the boat, gazing up at the sky where a few silver stars were showing against the pale blue.

Hester sat at the foot of the tree where she used to bring him to feed the ducks when he had been such a happy little boy. She observed the gently moving boat for a few moments before she spoke.

“That was ill-done, Johnnie. You will have to apologize to Lord Lambert. He is a good man and he has been kind to me.”

The boat rocked a little as he leaned forward, saw her, and then reclined again. “I know I was in the wrong. I will beg his pardon for speaking out.”

“It’s foolish to fly out like that. You said enough to be tried for treason tonight.”

“No more than thousands of others.”

“Even so.”

The rocking of the little craft steadied and slowed.

“I know,” Johnnie said. “I am sorry. I will say I am sorry to father and to his lordship. And I won’t do it again.”

She waited for a moment. In the garden somewhere an owl cried hauntingly.

“Are you not cold?”

“No.”

“Hungry?”

“No.”

“Will you come in now?”

“In a little while.”

Hester paused for a moment. “You know, Johnnie, I doubt that even Charles Stuart grieves more than you do. From what I hear of him he is a lighthearted man who goes from plotting to dancing; and would rather be dancing. He gambles away the money that people risk their lives to raise for him. His friends have given their livelihoods and even their lives for him and yet he dresses in the best clothes and goes to balls, and chases women shamelessly. He’s a drunkard and a gambler and a lecher. He’s a young man, as you are a young man. But he takes his cause very lightheartedly. Why should you grieve for him? Why grieve more than he does himself?”

“It’s not that.” Johnnie’s voice came over the still water, she could barely see the boat now in the twilight. “All that you say about him is true. I was with him at Worcester long enough to see that he is light, as you say. Lighthearted and lightweight. But I don’t grieve for the loss of him as a man, I grieve for the loss of everything that kingship means. The loss of the court, the loss of a nation under one ruler, the loss of the beauty of the Church and music and color, the loss of certainty of every man having a master. The loss of the gardens, the loss of the palaces. The loss of our gardens.”

“We still have the Ark,” she said.

“One little garden, more like a farm than a garden,” he said dismissively. “We’re getting a grand reputation for growing onions. This is nothing to a family which had Oatlands, or Hatfield, or Theobalds. Even Wimbledon. All we have now is a tiny patch of ground and no one plants great gardens anymore.”

“They will do again,” she said. “The country is at peace once more, they will plant gardens again.”

“They’ll plant turnips,” Johnnie predicted. “And marrows. Like father is growing for them. I saw Oatlands Palace and I saw them uproot it, rose by rose. And now the building is pulled down and they made a canal bed with the stone. They didn’t even try to make another building of beauty. There’s nothing for me to do with my life, there’s nothing to do in this country anymore. I am a gardener, a gardener who needs great palaces. A physic garden and a vegetable patch is not enough for me.”

“You’ll find something,” Hester urged him. “You’ll find your own way, even if it is not our garden, nor a garden fit for a king. You’re young, you will find your way.”

“I’ll never be a king’s gardener in England,” he said slowly. “That was my inheritance and now I can’t have it. There is nothing left for me.”

The boat was drifting away a little to the other side of the lake. Hester paused, taking in the tranquility of the scene: the sky slowly turning from blue to indigo, the color of Tradescant spiderwort. The stars were like silver pinheads against navy cloth. The evening air was cool against her cheek, sweet with the scent of windfall apples, and late-flowering wallflowers.

“We spent hours and hours here together when you were a little boy,” she said tenderly. “You used to beg to come down here to feed the ducks. D’you remember?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “I remember feeding the ducks.”

She waited, and when he did not say any more, she rose to her feet. “Shall I stay with you?” she asked him tenderly. “Would you like some company?”

“No,” he said and his voice seemed to come from a long way over the still water. “I’ll spend a little time on my own, Mother. I’ll come home when I can be merry again.”

Johnnie was not at breakfast.

“Where is he?” John demanded. “I would have expected him to apologize to Lord Lambert last night.”

“He may have gone into Lambeth and had a late night,” Hester replied diplomatically and she spoke over her shoulder to Cook. “Would you call Johnnie, Cook?”

Mary Ashmole, a paying guest for the season, helped herself to a slice of ham. “Young men,” she remarked indulgently.

They could hear Cook laboring up the stairs and then the creak of the floorboards over their heads as she opened Johnnie’s door, and then her coming down the stairs again. Her face when she came into the dining room was bright with mischief. “He’s not there!” she announced, smiling. “And his bed’s not been slept in.”

Hester’s first thought was not of the ale houses of Lambeth, but that he had run away to join Charles Stuart’s court, ridden to the docks and taken a ship to Europe to be with the prince. “Is his horse in the stable?” she asked urgently.

John took one look at her white face and went quickly from the room. Mary Ashmole rose, hesitated.

“Please don’t disturb yourself, Mrs. Ashmole,” Hester said, recovering. “Do finish your breakfast. I expect my son stayed with friends and forgot to send a message.”

She followed John to the stable yard. Caesar’s head was nodding over the stable door. John was questioning the stable lad.

“He didn’t take his horse out last night,” he said to Hester. “No one has seen him since yesterday.”

“Send the boy down to Lambeth and see if he went there,” Hester said.

“This could be much ado for nothing,” John warned her. “If he is drunk under an ale-house table he won’t thank us for sending a search party out.”

She hesitated.

“If he’s not back by midday I’ll go down to Lambeth myself,” John decided.

At midday John took Caesar and rode down to the village but soon came home again. Johnnie had not been in the ale house, and was not staying with any of his friends in the village.

“Perhaps he was walking to Lambeth and had some accident on the road,” Hester suggested.

“He’s not a baby,” John said. “He knows how to fight. And run. Besides, you know Johnnie: he’d always ride rather than walk. If he was going any distance he’d take his horse.”

“If there was a gang of thieves?” Hester suggested. “Or a press gang?”

“The press gang wouldn’t take him, he’s obviously a gentleman,” John said.

“Then where can he be?” Hester demanded.

“You saw him after dinner,” John said. “Did he say anything?”

“He was in his boat,” she said. “He always goes there when he wants to be alone and to think. He knew he was wrong to speak out to Lord Lambert, he promised he would apologize to you and to his lordship. I asked him if he wanted me to stay with him and he said he would come home later.”

She paused. “He said he would come home,” she said. Her voice sounded less and less certain. “He said he would come home when he was merry again.”

John suddenly scowled as if he had been struck by a pang of pain. He crossed the yard and took her hand. “Go and sit with Mary Ashmole,” he ordered.

“Why?”

“I’m just going to have a look round, that’s all.”

“You’re going to the lake,” she said flatly.

“Yes, I am. I’m going to check that the boat is tied up and the oars stowed and then we will know that he rowed ashore and met with some mischance, or changed his mind about coming home.”

“I’ll come too,” she said.

John recognized the impossibility of ordering Hester indoors, started to walk toward the avenue, Hester at his side.

Even in autumn the orchard was too lush for the lake to be seen from the main avenue. Hester and John had to turn away from the chestnut trees to the path that ran westward before they could see the unruffled pewter surface of the water.

It was very quiet. The birds were singing. At the sound of their footsteps a heron rose up from the water’s edge and flapped away with its ungainly legs trailing and its long neck working like a pump handle with each arduous wingbeat. The surface was like a mirror, reflecting the blue sky, untroubled by any movement except the speckling of flies and the occasional plop of a rising fish. The boat floated in the middle of the lake, the oars shipped, its painter trailing in the water tying it to the reflected boat bobbing below.

For a moment Hester thought that Johnnie had fallen asleep in the bottom of the boat, had curled his long legs up inside the little rowing boat and that when they called out his name he would sit up, rub his eyes, and laugh at his folly. But the boat was empty.

John paused for a moment and walked out along the little landing stage and looked down into the water. He could see green weed and the gleam of a brown trout but nothing else. He turned and walked steadily back to the house.

“What are you thinking? What are you doing?” Hester tore her gaze away from the still boat and the peaceful water and went after him. “Where are you going, John?”

“I’m going to get a boat hook and pull the boat in,” he said, without slackening his trudge. “Then I’m going to get a pole and feel for the bottom of the lake. Then I may have to get a net, and then I may have to drain the lake.”

“But why?” she exclaimed. “Why? What are you saying?”

He did not slow, nor turn his head. “Hester, you know why.”

“I don’t,” she insisted.

“Wait for me at the house,” he said. “Go and sit with Mary Ashmole. I will come and tell you as soon as I know.”

“Know what?” she insisted. “Tell me what?”

They had reached the terrace. Mary Ashmole was waiting for them. John looked up at her and she recoiled from the grimness of his face. “Take Hester indoors,” he said firmly. “I will come to her as soon as we know where Johnnie is.”

“You are never going to look for him in the lake,” Hester said. She laughed, an odd, mirthless noise. “You cannot think he fell out of his boat!”

He did not answer her but walked with that same bent-headed trudge round to the stable yard. Hester and Mary heard him shout for the lad and they waited in absolute silence as the two of them walked back down the avenue. John was carrying a long pole, his pruning hook. The lad was carrying a net which they usually used for securing pots in the cart, and a coil of rope.

Mary Ashmole reached out and took Hester’s icy hand. “Be brave, my dear,” she said inadequately.

John marched to the lake as if he were about to undertake a disagreeable but essential garden chore, like hedging or ditching. The garden lad stole one swift glance at his stern profile and said nothing.

John walked to the edge of the landing stage and stretched out with the pruning hook. The blade just reached the painter as it trailed in the water and on the second try he could draw it in toward him.

“Wait here,” he said to the lad, and stepped into the boat. He rowed out toward the middle of the lake and then shipped the oars and peered downward. Gently, with meticulous care, he reversed the pruning hook and lowered it into the water, probing with the handle. When he found nothing he rowed one stroke to the side and repeated the whole process in a widening circle.

The lad, who had been gripped by the horror of this task, found that he was getting bored and started to fidget, but nothing could break John’s intense concentration. He was not thinking of what he might find. He was not even thinking of what he was doing. He just completed each circle and then went a little wider as if it were some kind of spiritual exercise, like a Papist telling her beads, as if it had to be done to ward off some evil. As if it were meaningless in itself, but should be done as a prevention.

Again and again he rowed another stroke and then probed gently into the dark water. In the back of his mind was a thought of how Johnnie was probably already home after a night’s roistering in the City, or a message would soon come from his sister’s house saying that he had decided to make a sudden visit, or he would reappear with an old comrade from the defeated Worcester army. There were so many other explanations more likely than this one that John worked the water of the lake without allowing himself to think what he was doing, divorced from worry, almost enjoying the paddle with the oars and the movement of the wet-handled pole in the water.

When he felt something under the gentle probe of the pole he had a moment of mild regret that now he had to interrupt himself, that now he had a different task to do. Gently, with infinite care, he probed again and felt the object roll and move.

“Bundle of rags,” he whispered to himself, trying to guess at the dimension and weight. “Hidden household goods,” he assured himself.

He turned to look for the stable lad. “Throw me the rope,” he said, his voice steady and unshaken.

The lad, who had slumped on the landing stage, got to his feet and inexpertly tried to throw the rope to John. The first attempt fell in the water and splashed John, and the second attempt slapped him with a wet coil.

“Dolt,” John said and enjoyed the normality of the incompetence of the lad. “Fool.”

He fastened the rope to the ring at the front of the boat. “When I give the word, you gently pull me in,” he ordered.

The lad nodded, and took a grip on the line.

John pulled the pole out of the water and brought up the pruning hook. He took his leather gauntlet from the big pocket of his coat and pulled it over the sharp blade. Then he plunged the pole back into the water with the shielded hook first. It snagged against the object, lost its grip, and then caught.

“Now,” John called to the lad. “But steady.”

The lad was so afraid of doing wrong that he started to pull too lightly. For a moment nothing happened at all, then the little boat started to glide back to the landing stage and John felt the weight of the drowned object on the end of his pole. Gently, smoothly, the boat bobbed toward the landing stage, John gripping the pole and waiting to see the object revealed in the shallow water.

He saw first a coat, rendered uniformly black by waterlogging, then Johnnie’s white shirt and then his pale, pale face, his open dark eyes, and the swirl and eddy of his fair hair.

“Stop,” John said hoarsely.

At once the lad halted.

The boat rocked, the current of movement which had washed Johnnie up to the surface slipped away and his face sunk out of sight again. For a moment John thought that he could order the world to stop, right there; just as he could command the gardener’s lad and then nothing that must follow would need to take place. He could say “stop” and there would be no drowned child, no heartbreak, no end to the Tradescant line, no silence where Johnnie should have been singing, no terrible gulf where the young man should have been.

John waited for a long moment, trying to understand the reality and then the awful yawning enormity of his loss. The first step in his grief was the realization that he could not measure it. His loss was too great for him to imagine.

The lad holding the rope stood like a statue, a dragonfly whirred noisily over the surface of the water and settled for a moment.

“Go on then,” John whispered as if this were not his work but he was obeying someone else. “All right. Go on.”

The lad put his weight on the rope and once again the boat glided toward the landing stage, towing its dreadful freight behind it. At the landing stage when it stopped with a bump, John said gently, “Tie it fast,” and waited until the lad had done as he was told.

“Take the pole,” John said, proffering it, and when the lad had gripped one end of it, John stepped from the boat into the waist-deep water, felt his way along to the other end and gathered the body of his only son into his arms.

“Step aside and wait,” he said softly to the stable lad. The boy dragged his horrified stare from the waterlogged body and then obediently fled to the shelter of the apple tree where the wasps were feeding drunkenly on fallen fruit.

John waded for the shore, the weight of Johnnie making him stagger as they got clear of the water. He fell to his knees and cradled the white face in his arms and looked down into the sightless eyes and the pale lips.

“My Johnnie,” he whispered. “My boy.”

They sat together for a long time before John remembered that Hester would be waiting in painful anxiety and that there was much work for him to do.

He laid out the body and draped his jacket over his son’s face.

“Watch by him,” he said simply to the stable lad. “I’ll come back with the cart.”

Slowly he walked along the grassy ride and then turned up the main avenue to the house. He could see Hester pacing on the terrace, but when she saw him and took in the slump of his shoulders and his wet clothing, and his missing jacket, she froze very still.

John walked toward her, his face numb, his voice lost, then he cleared his throat and said quietly, conversationally, “I found him. He’s drowned. I’m fetching the cart now.”

She nodded, as calm as he, and Mary Ashmole, watching the two of them, thought them completely insensible, thought that they could not have loved their son at all to be so indifferent to his death.

“I thought so,” Hester said gently. “I knew as soon as I saw the boat, just as you did. I’ll ready the parlor for him.” She paused. “No. He should lie in the rarities room. He was the most precious thing this house ever had.”

John nodded and went with that strange, slow plod round to the stables where, for a fancy, he did not harness the workhorse, but he took Caesar out of his stable and put him between the shafts of the cart to bring his master home.

They buried him beside his grandfather and his mother at St. Mary’s, Lambeth. The new vicar was kind enough not to ask how a fit young man came to drown while boating on his own lake. It was assumed that Johnnie had been drunk, or had hit his head as he fell from the boat. Only John knew that the boat had not been overturned but had been floating peacefully with the oars shipped. Only John knew that his son’s pockets had been filled with broken pieces of flowerpots. Only Hester knew that Johnnie had believed that there was no place for the king’s gardeners in England anymore. But they neither of them told the other these insights. They both thought that the other had pain enough.