Virgin Earth. Philippa Gregory
think you need one such as her.
Of course it is your decision. But if I had lived long enough to see your return I would have introduced her to you with my earnest recommendation.
Farewell my son, my dear son,
John Tradescant.
J sat very still and watched the kindling twigs in the fire flicker and turn to knotted skeletal lace of dry ash. He thought of his father’s determination and his care, which showed itself in the meticulous nursery and seed bed, in pruning and weeding and in the unending twisting and training of his beloved climbing plants, and showed itself here too, in providing a wife for his adult son. He felt his irritated sense of thwarted independence melt before his affection for his father. And at the thought of the gardens being left to him in trust for another John Tradescant coming behind them both he felt the anger inside him dissolve, and he slipped to the floor and rested his head in his father’s chair and wept for him.
Frances, coming in a little later, found her father composed and seated in the window where he could look out at the cold horse chestnut avenue and the swirls of fog in the early-morning darkness.
‘Father?’ she said tentatively.
He turned and held out his arms to her and she ran into his embrace. He brought her close to him and felt the light tiny bones of her body and smelled the warm clean smell of her skin and hair. For a moment he thought vividly and poignantly of Suckahanna, who was no heavier but whose every muscle was like whipcord.
‘You’ve grown,’ he said. ‘I swear you are nearly up to my chest.’
She smiled up at him. ‘I am nine,’ she said seriously. ‘And Baby John is bigger than when you left. And heavier. I can’t lift him now he’s five. Hester has to.’
‘Hester does, does she? D’you like Hester?’
He thought she looked at him as if she needed help in saying something, as if there were something she could not say. ‘Yes.’
‘Your grandfather thought she might marry me, he thought she might be a mother to you.’
A look of relief crossed her face. ‘We need a mother,’ she said. ‘I can’t lift Baby John now he’s so big, and I don’t always know what to do when he cries. If he were to be sick, like Mama was sick, I wouldn’t know how to care for him and he might die …’ She broke off and gulped on a sob. ‘We need a mother,’ she said earnestly. ‘A cook isn’t the same.’
‘I’m sorry,’ J said. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘I thought you would bring us one home from Virginia, with other things in the cart,’ she said childishly.
J thought for a moment of the girl, only a few years older than this one, thanked his luck that he had not been so misled as to bring her back here and burden himself with her care as well as that of his children. ‘There’s no-one in that country who could be a mother to you,’ he said shortly. ‘No-one who could be a wife to me here.’
Frances blinked back her tears and looked up at him. ‘But we need one. A mother who knows what to do when Baby John is naughty, and teaches him his letters.’
‘Yes,’ J said. ‘I see we do.’
‘Hester says breakfast is ready,’ she said.
‘Is Baby John at breakfast?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Come.’
J took her hand and led her from the room. Her hand was cool and soft, her fingers were long and her palm had lost its baby fatness. It was the hand of an adult in miniature, not the soft plumpness of a little child.
‘You’ve grown,’ he observed.
She peeped up a little smile at him. ‘My uncle Alexander Norman says that I will soon be a proper young lady,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘But I tell him that I shall be the king’s gardener.’
‘You still want that?’ J asked. She nodded and opened the door to the kitchen.
They were all waiting for him at their places around the dark wooden table: the gardener and the two lads, the cook and the maid and the boy who worked in the house and the stables. Hester was at the foot of the table with Baby John beside her, still half-asleep, his drowsy eyes barely showing above the table top. J drank in the sight of him: the beloved boy, the Tradescant heir.
‘Oh, Father!’ Baby John said, mildly surprised.
J lifted him up, held him close, inhaled the sweet warm smell of sleepy child, hugged him tight and felt his heart turn over with tenderness for his boy, for Jane’s boy.
They waited for him to sit before they took their own places on the benches around the table and then Hester bowed her head and said grace in the simple words approved by the church of Archbishop Laud. For a moment it struck a discord with J – who had spent his married life in the fierce independent certainties of his wife and listening to her powerful extempore prayers – but then he bowed his head and heard the rhythm and the simple comfort of the language.
He looked up before Hester said ‘Amen’. The household was around the table in neat order, his two children were either side of Hester, their faces washed, their clothes tidy. A solid meal was laid on the table but there was nothing rich or ostentatious or wasteful. And – it was this which decided him – on the windowsill there was a bowl of indigo and white bluebells which someone had taken the trouble to uproot and transplant from the orchard for the pleasure of their bright colour and their sweet, light smell.
No-one but J’s father, John Tradescant, had ever brought flowers into the kitchen or the house for pleasure. Flowers were part of the work of the house: reared in the orangery, blooming in the garden, shown in the rarities room, preserved in sugar or painted and sketched. But Hester had a love of flowers that reminded him of his father, and made him think, as he saw her seated between his children, and with flowers on the windowsill, that the great aching gaps in his life where his wife and his father had once been might be resolved if this woman would live here and work alongside him.
J could not take his young children from their home to Virginia, he could not imagine that he might be able to go back there himself. His time in the forest seemed like a dream, like something which had happened to another man, a free man, a new man in the new land. In the months that followed, busy anxious months, in which John the Younger had to become John Tradescant, the only John Tradescant, he hardly thought of Suckahanna and his promise to return. It seemed like a game he had played, a fancy, not a real plan at all. Back in Lambeth, in the old world, the old life closed around him and he thought that his father was probably right – as he generally was – and that he would need Hester to run the business and the house.
He decided that he would ask her to stay. He knew that he would never ask her to love him.
J did not formally propose marriage to Hester until the end of the summer. For the first months he could think of nothing but clearing the debts caused by the crash of the tulip market. The Tradescants, father and son, had invested the family fortune in buying rare tulip bulbs, certain that the market was on the rise. But by the time the tulips had flowered and spawned more bulbs under their perfect soil in their porcelain pots the market had crashed. J and his father were left with nearly a thousand pounds owed to their shareholders, and bound by their sense of honour to repay. By selling the new Virginia plants at a handsome profit and by ensuring that everyone knew of his new maidenhair fern, an exquisite variety which everyone desired on sight, J doubled and re-doubled the business for the nursery garden, and started to drag the family back into profit.
The maidenhair fern was not the only booty that visitors to the garden sought. John offered them new jasmine, the like of which no-one had ever seen before, which would climb and twist itself round a pole as rampant as a honeysuckle, smelling as sweet, but flowering in a bright primrose yellow. A new columbine, an American columbine, and best of all of the surviving saplings: a plane tree, an American plane tree, which John thought might grow as big as an oak in the temperate climate of