Earthly Joys. Philippa Gregory
can stray all he likes in my lord’s gardens,’ John said with satisfaction. ‘He’ll come to no harm there.’
‘And we’ll eat our dinner in hall or at our home as we wish?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘As we wish when the lord is away from home. But when he is at the palace he likes his men to dine in the hall. And I like to see him.’
‘Well enough when you had no-one to cook your dinner at home,’ Elizabeth remarked. ‘But now I shall be there-’
John put a hand gently on hers. ‘If he looks down the hall to see me, I must be there,’ he reminded her. ‘It’s not a question of a dinner cooked by you or a dinner cooked by the cooks. It’s not even a question of whose company I would rather keep. It is just that if he looks down the hall for me, I must be there. You must know that by now, Elizabeth. You must know that now that we are going to live on his land, in a cottage owned by him and given to us free. You must know that he comes first.’
For a moment he thought she would fly out at him and then there would be a quarrel and a sulk – for they were both terrible sulkers – which could easily last for the whole two days of the journey. But then he saw her recognise the simple truth of it.
‘I know,’ she agreed. ‘But it is hard for me. The people I come from, my family, are freeholders on their own land. They dine where they please.’
‘Sometimes only on bread and bacon,’ John pointed out. ‘Even so. It’s their own bread and bacon and they fear no-one’s favour.’
John nodded. ‘And if I had been content to be a farmer or perhaps a gardener on my own account in a small way with a little market garden for bulbs or flowers or fruit, then I should be a man like that too. But I wanted something more, Elizabeth. I wanted the chance to make the greatest garden in England. And he gave me that when I was a young man, so young that most masters would have made me work an apprenticeship under another man for another year or three before they even considered me. He trusted me, he took a risk with me. He gave me Theobalds when I was little more than a lad.’
‘And don’t you see what you’ve paid for that?’ she asked him. ‘You can’t even choose where to eat your dinner. You can’t choose where to live. Sometimes I think you can’t even choose what to feel in your heart. It’s his feelings that matter. Not your own.’
‘It’s the way it is,’ he stated. ‘The way of the world.’
She shook her head. ‘Not in Meopham. Not in my family. Not in the country. It’s the way of the court where everyone has to have a great man’s favour and protection to rise, where every great man has to have his followers to show his importance. But there are men and women all over the country who live according to their own lights and call no man master.’
‘You think that’s a better life?’
‘Of course,’ she said, but she could see that what seemed to her to be a freedom from an onerous duty was to him a loss, an emptiness which he could not have borne.
‘I would have been a smaller man without my lord,’ he said. ‘And what you think of as freedom is a small price to pay for belonging heart and soul to a great man. It’s the price I pay gladly.’
‘But I pay it too,’ she said quietly.
For a moment he glanced down at her as if something in her voice had made him feel tender for her, regretful, as if they should have been more to each other. She thought that he would put his arm around her and cuddle her against his side and drive one-handed like a lover and his lass on the way to the fair. ‘Yes, you pay too,’ he admitted, keeping both hands on the driving reins. ‘You knew you were marrying a man who had a duty already promised. I was Cecil’s man before we were even betrothed, let alone married. You knew that, Elizabeth.’
She nodded and kept her eyes on the unwinding road ahead of them. ‘I knew that,’ she agreed a little grimly. ‘I don’t complain.’
He left it at that, with her acquiescence, and trusted to the house that his lord had provided for them to persuade her, as he could not, that it was better to be the follower of a great man than a small man on your own account. He saw her face as he drew up outside the cottage and knew that there would be no complaints for a while about the earl.
It was not a cottage he had given them at all – not two cramped rooms on the ground floor and a rickety stair to a hayloft bedroom – but a proper house with a fence all around it and a path of handsome brick chippings leading up to the front door set flush in the middle with two windows, proper glazed windows with panes set diamond-wise in thick lead, on each side of it
‘Oh! oh!’ Elizabeth slid down from the hard driving seat, lost for words.
A thick blond thatch sat weightily on the low roof. The beams in the walls were so new that they were still golden against the pale pink of the limewashed plaster.
‘New built!’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘New built for us?’
‘For us and no other. Step inside,’ John invited her.
With J at her heels, looking around at everything with eyes as wide as a hunting owl, Elizabeth stepped over the threshold of her new home and found herself inside a stone-flagged hall with a fire already lit in the fireplace to welcome her. To the right was the kitchen, with a big stone sink and a broad fireplace. To the left was a small room she could use as she pleased: a still room, or a drawing room; and immediately before her was a genuine solid flight of stairs with well-made wooden treads and risers which led to two more rooms above. Each one of them was big enough for a full-size bed, never mind the cramped little bed and Baby J’s truckle that they had brought with them on the wagon from Meopham.
‘And a garden,’ John said exultantly.
‘A garden!’ Elizabeth laughed at the predictability of her man; but let him lead her back down the stairs and through the kitchen to the back door.
Cecil had bidden John take what he wanted from the saplings and plants of the palace gardens and make his own little Eden. John had created in the small walled plot a little orchard, a walk of trellised apple and plum trees, a pottager by the back door with herbs for cooking and salad vegetables, a bed of strawberries, and a kitchen garden bed of beans and peas and onions and greens.
‘It looks so – rooted!’ Elizabeth found the word at last. ‘As if it had been here forever.’
A brief gleam of pride crossed John’s face. ‘That is what I have learned this year at least,’ he said. ‘I have learned how to make a garden new-made look as if it was there when Eden was planted. The trick of it is to put things too close, and bear the work of moving them before they get overcrowded. Also you have to take a risk of moving things which are really too big to be disturbed. Digging a wide trench around the roots. Those trees now -’ He broke off. His wife was smiling at him but she was not listening. ‘I have found a way of moving trees so they don’t wither,’ he finished. ‘But it’s of little interest except to another gardener.’
‘It means that you have given me a beautiful garden which I will treasure,’ she said. She came into his arms and held him close. ‘And I thank you for it. I see now why the little patch at Meopham was not enough. I never thought of you making a cottage garden like you make grand gardens, my John, but you have given me a little beauty here.’
He smiled at her pleasure and bent his head and kissed her. Her lips were still soft and warm and he thought with rising desire that tonight they would bed in a new room and tomorrow wake to look out on the great parkland of Hatfield, and their new life would begin.
‘We’ll see these trees grow strong,’ he said. ‘And we’ll plant the chestnut sapling at the bottom of the garden and sit in its shade when we are old.’
She nestled a little closer. ‘And we’ll bide at home,’ she said firmly.
John rested his cheek against her warm cap. ‘When we’re old,’ he promised, disarmingly.
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