Читать книгу Earthly Joys - Philippa Gregory - Страница 9

After the king’s first successful visit to Theobalds it was as if he could not keep away. Every summer brought the court hungry as locusts out of London and into the country, to stay at Theobalds and then to move on in a constant circle of all the wealthy houses. The courtiers braced themselves for the unimaginable expense of entertaining the king, and sighed with relief when he moved on. He might shower the host with honours or with favours, or with some of the new farmed-out taxes, so that a favourite might grow rich collecting a newly invented duty from some struggling industry; or the king might merely smile and pass on. Whether he paid for his board in privileges or took it with nothing more than a word of thanks, his courtiers had to provide him with the best of food, the best of drink, the best hunting they could manage, and the best entertainment.

They had learned their skills with Queen Elizabeth; no-one could teach them anything about lavish hospitality, extravagant gifts, and outright sycophancy. But King James demanded all this and more. His favourites too must be honoured, and his days filled with unending sport, hunting hunting hunting, until gamekeepers were at a premium and no man dared cut down a tree in a forest which the king knew and loved. His evenings must be filled with a parade of pretty men and pretty women. No-one refused him. No-one even thought to refuse him. Anything the new king wanted he must have.

Even when he wanted Theobalds Palace itself.

‘I shall have to give it to him.’ Sir Robert had left his palace as he often did to find Tradescant. The gardener was directing the garden lads at the entrance to the maze. A team of boys was being supplied with blunt knives and sent into the maze on their hands and knees to root up weeds in the gravel. A team of older men would go with them with little hatchets and knives to trim the yew hedging; they had already been lectured with passion and energy by John as to the care they must take to keep the top of the hedge even, and on no account, on pain of instant dismissal, were they to cut an unruly bough in such a way that it might leave a hole which would make a peephole from one path to another and spoil the game.

John took one look at his master’s dark expression, abandoned the pruning gang and came to him. ‘My lord?’

‘He wants it. My house, and the gardens too. He wants it, and he’s promised me Hatfield House in return. I’ll have to give it to him, I suppose. I can’t refuse the king, can I?’

John gave a little gasp of horror at the thought of losing Theobalds Palace. ‘The king wants this house? Our house?’

Robert Cecil gave an unhappy shrug, beckoned to Tradescant and leaned on his shoulder as they walked. ‘Aye, I knew that you would feel it almost as much as me. I came to tell you before I told anyone else. I don’t know how I can bear to lose it. Built for me by my own father – the little islands and the rivers, and the fountains, and the bathing house … all this to be given away in exchange for that drab little place at Hatfield! A hard taskmaster, the new king, don’t you think, Tradescant?’

John paused. ‘I don’t doubt you will get a better price than you might have had from any other monarch,’ he said cautiously.

The earl’s cunning courtier face crinkled into laughter. ‘Better than from the old queen, you mean? Good God! I should think so! There never was a woman like her for taking half your wealth and giving you nothing but a smile in return. King James has a freer hand for his favourites …’ He broke off and turned back towards the house. ‘With all the favourites,’ he muttered. ‘Especially if they’re Scots. Especially if they’re handsome young men.’

They walked side by side together, the earl leaning heavily on John’s shoulder.

‘Are you in pain?’ John asked.

‘I’m always in pain,’ his master snapped. ‘I don’t think about it if I can help it.’

John felt a sympathetic twinge in his own knees at the thought of his master’s twisted bones. ‘Doesn’t seem right,’ he said with gruff sympathy. ‘That with all the striving and worry you have to suffer pain as well.’

‘I don’t look for justice,’ said England’s foremost law maker. ‘Not in this world.’

John nodded and kept his sympathy to himself. ‘When do we have to leave?’

‘When I have made Hatfield ready for us. You’ll come with me, won’t you, John? You’ll leave our maze and the fountain court and the great garden for me?’

‘Your Grace … of course …’

The earl heard at once the hesitation in his voice. ‘The king would keep you on here if I told him you would stay and mind the gardens,’ he said a little coldly. ‘If you don’t wish to come with me to Hatfield.’

John turned and looked down into his master’s wretched face. ‘Of course I come with you,’ he said tenderly. ‘Wherever you are sent. I would garden for you in Scotland, if I had to. I would garden for you in Virginia, if I had to. I am your man. Whether you rise or fall, I am your man.’

The earl turned and gripped John’s arms above the elbows in a brief half-embrace. ‘I know it,’ he said gruffly. ‘Forgive my ill humour. I am sick to my belly with the loss of my house.’

‘And the garden.’

‘Mmm.’

‘I have spent my life on this garden,’ John said thoughtfully. ‘I learned my trade here. There’s not a corner of it that I don’t know. There’s not a change that it makes from season to season that I cannot predict. And there are times, especially in early summer, like now, when I think it is perfect. That we have made it perfect here.’

‘An Eden,’ the earl agreed. ‘An Eden before the Fall. Is that what gardeners do all the time, John? Try to make Eden again?’

‘Gardeners and earls and kings too,’ John said astutely. ‘We all want to make paradise on earth. But a gardener can try afresh every spring.’

‘Come and try at Hatfield,’ the earl urged him. ‘You shall be head gardener in a garden which shall be all your own, you will follow in no man’s footsteps. You can make the garden at Hatfield, my John, not just maintain and amend, like here. You shall order the planting and buy the plants. You shall choose every one. And I will pay you more, and give you a cottage of your own. You need not live in hall.’ He looked at his gardener. ‘You could marry,’ he suggested. ‘Breed us little babes for Eden.’

John nodded. ‘I will.’

‘You are betrothed, aren’t you?’

‘I have been promised these past six years, but my father made me swear on his deathbed never to marry until I could support a wife and family. But if I can have a cottage at Hatfield, I will marry.’

The earl laughed shortly and slapped him on the back. ‘From great men do great favours flow like the water in my fountains,’ he said. ‘King James wants Theobalds for a royal palace and so Tradescant can marry. Go and tie the knot, Tradescant! I will pay you forty pounds a year.’

He hesitated for a moment. ‘But you should marry for love, you know,’ he said. He swallowed down his grief, his continual grief for the wife he had married for love, who had taken him despite his hunched body and loved him for himself. He had given her two healthy children and one as crooked as himself, and it was the birth of that baby which had killed her. They had been together only eight years. ‘To have a wife you can love is a precious thing, John. You’re not gentry, or noble, you don’t have to make dynasties and fortunes, you can marry where your heart takes you.’

John hesitated. ‘I’m not gentry, my lord, but my heart cannot take me to a maid without a portion.’ Irresistibly the thought of the kitchen maid from the first dinner for King James came into his head. ‘My father left me with a debt to a man which is cleared by this betrothal to his daughter, and she is a steady woman with a good dowry. I have been waiting until I could earn enough for us to marry, until I had savings which might take us through difficult years, savings to buy a house and a little garden for her to tend. I have plans, my lord — oh, never to leave your service, but I have plans to take my fortune upwards.’

The earl nodded. ‘Buy land,’ he advised.

‘To farm?’

‘To sell.’

John blinked; it was unusual advice. Most men thought of buying land and keeping it, nothing was more secure than a smallholding.

The earl shook his head. ‘The way to make money, my John, is to move fast, even recklessly. You see an opportunity, you take it quickly, you move before other men have seen it too. Then when they see it, you pass it on to them and they crow at having spotted their chance, when you have already skimmed the cream of the profit. And move fast,’ he advised. ‘When you see an opening, when a place comes open, when you see a chance, when a master dies, take what you’re owed and move on.’

He glanced up into John’s frowning face. ‘Practice,’ he reminded him. ‘Not principles. When Walsingham died, who was the best man to take his place? Who had the correspondence at his fingertips, who knew almost as much as Walsingham himself?’

‘You, my lord,’ Tradescant stammered.

‘And who had Walsingham’s papers which told everything a man who wanted to be Secretary of State would need to know?’

John shrugged. ‘I don’t know, my lord. They were stolen, and the thief never found.’

‘Me,’ Cecil admitted cheerfully. ‘The moment I knew he would not recover, I broke into his cabinet and took everything he had written and received over the previous two years. So when they were casting around for who could do the work there was no-one but me. No-one could read the papers and learn what needed doing, for the papers were missing. No-one could know Walsingham’s mind, nor what he had agreed, because the papers were missing. Only one man in England of the dozen who had worked for Walsingham was ready to take his place. And that was me.’

‘Theft?’ John asked.

‘That’s principle,’ Cecil said swiftly. ‘I’m advising you to look to practice. Think what you want, my John, and make sure that you get it, for be very certain that no-one will give it to you.’

John could not help but glance up at the great palace of Theobalds, a place so grand that a king could envy it and insist on owning it, knowing that he could never build better.

‘Aye,’ said the earl, following his gaze. ‘And if a more powerful man can do it, he will take it from you. He will be guided by practice and not principles too. Buy land and take risks is my advice. Steal if you need to and if you will not be detected. When your master dies – even if it is me – have your next place secure. And also – marry your woman with a dowry, she sounds the very one for a rising man like you. And bid her be careful with her housekeeping.’

John Tradescant rode down the Kentish lanes to his old village of Meopham, where he had been expected every day for the last six years. The hedges were white with hawthorn and may blossoms, the air warm and sweet-scented. The rich green pastureland of Kent glowed lush where cattle were knee-deep in water meadows. These were prosperous times and rich fields. John rode in a daze of pleasure, the lushness of the fields and the greening of the trees and the hedges acting on him as strong wine might turn another man’s head. In the hedgerows were the white floss of gypsy lace and the little white stars of meadowsweet. Through gaps in the hedge where trees had been coppiced was a sea of blue where bluebells had sprung up to carpet the floor of the forest. Ahead of him the road was drifted with the tiny petals of the hawthorn flower like spring snow, and at every verge the lemon-yellow flowers of primroses were stuffed into roots and nooks like nosegays in a belt. When the road wound through meadowlands, John could see the light yellow of cowslips nodding as the breeze ran across the grasses; they put a veil of gold over the green as a woman might toss a shawl of gold net over a green silk gown.

The oak trees were clench-fisted with flowers, the small delicate catkins which looked like lumpy little buds at the end of the tough contorted branches. The silver birches shivered with new pale leaves amid the dancing catkins, and the beeches on the uplands were wet with spring leaves, vibrant with growth.

John was not deliberately plant-collecting but his awareness of every small budding orchid, every flowering netttle, every thick clump of violets in purple, white and even pale blue, was not something that he could ever ignore. By the time he had ridden into Kent his hat band and his pockets were stuffed with shoots and soft damp trailing roots, and he felt himself wealthier than his own lord because he had ridden for days through a treasure chest of colour and freshness and life, and come home with his pockets stuffed with booty.

Meopham High Street wound up the little hill to the grey-stoned church set like a cherry on the top of a bun. To the right of it was the small farmhouse of the Day family, built near the church where Elizabeth’s father had been vicar. There were fat hens in the yard, and the pleasing smell of roasted hops which always hung around the storeyards and the little oast house.

Elizabeth Day came out of the front door. ‘I thought I heard a horse,’ she said. She was dressed in sober grey and white, and had a plain cap on her head. ‘Mr Tradescant, you are very welcome.’

John dismounted and led his horse to a stall.

‘William will take his tack off if you wish,’ she offered calmly.

It was a loaded question. ‘If I may, I’ll stay the night,’ John said. ‘William can take his saddle and bridle and turn him out to graze.’

She looked away to hide her pleasure. ‘I’ll tell William,’ she said simply. ‘Will you take a glass of ale? Were the roads bad?’

She led the way into the house. The wainscoted parlour was dark and cool after the bright sunshine. She left him for a moment while she fetched a tankard from the brew house. John looked out of the tiny thickly leaded window at the orchard.

The pink and white blossoms of the apple trees were bobbing above the white and pink daisies starring the cropped grass of the orchard. The family had neither the time nor the inclination to make a good garden before the house, though Elizabeth had the care of the kitchen and herb garden in the walled area outside the back door. Six years ago, when John had visited and confirmed his engagement, he had planted a little square of lavender with a bush of rue at each corner in the area before the window; but this was a working farm and no-one had the time to plan or weed an elaborate knot garden. He saw that the rue had gone straggly as if remembrance itself was wearing thin; but the lavender was looking well.

The door behind him opened and George Lance, her stepfather, came in.

‘Good to see you, Tradescant,’ he said.

Elizabeth brought them two mugs of ale and went quietly out of the room.

‘I’m come to ask for the marriage to take place,’ John announced abruptly. ‘I’ve delayed too long.’

‘You’ve not delayed too long for her,’ George said defensively. ‘She’s a virgin still.’

‘Too long for me,’ John said. ‘I’m impatient to start a family. I’ve waited long enough.’

‘Still working for Sir Robert?’

John nodded. ‘He’s an earl now.’

‘Still in favour?’

John nodded again. ‘Never better.’

‘Have you seen the new king?’ George demanded. ‘Is he a great man? I had heard that he is a fine man – a huntsman and a man of God, an educated man and a father of fine children. Just what the kingdom needs!’

John thought for a moment of the slack-mouthed lecher and the parade of pretty men who had come to Theobalds Palace a dozen times, the loud tempestuous Scots followers and the wanton drunken lechery of the new court.

‘He is all kingly virtues, thank God,’ he said carefully. ‘And now the earl is secure in his place, and I in mine. There’s a chance that the earl will have a new house, and I will have the ordering of the garden. I will be paid more, and I will be head gardener in a new garden to make all my own. At last I can offer Elizabeth a proper home.’

‘Your pay?’ George asked directly. ‘Forty pounds a year, and a cottage to live in.’ ‘Well, she’s been ready and waiting for six years,’ George said. ‘And she’ll have what her father promised. A dowry of a fifty pounds, and her clothes and some household goods. She’ll be glad to go, I don’t doubt. She and her mother don’t always agree.’ ‘They quarrel?’

‘Oh, no! Nothing to disturb a man’s quiet,’ George replied hastily. ‘She’ll make an obedient wife, I don’t doubt. But two grown women and only one kitchen to order …’ He broke off. ‘It’s sometimes hard to keep the peace. Shall you call the banns at the church here?’

John nodded. ‘And I’ll take a cottage for us in the village. I shall be between Theobalds and my lord’s new house for some time. Elizabeth will like to be near her family when I am away. I shall have to travel abroad to seek trees and plants, as soon as Hatfield is ready. I am to go to the Low Countries and buy their bulbs, I am to go to France and buy their trees. I am planning an orangery where the tender trees can be reared in winter.’

‘Yes, yes. Well, Elizabeth will want to know all about it.’

John was reminded that his new kindred had little interest in gardening. ‘And I shall be paid a good wage,’ he repeated.

George hesitated for a moment, looking at his future son-in-law. ‘By God, you’re a cool fish, Tradescant,’ he said critically. ‘Or have you been banging the ladies of the court all this time and only now thought of Elizabeth?’

John found himself flushing. ‘No. You misunderstand me. I have always been intending to come for Elizabeth. It was always agreed that when I had enough money to buy a house, and a little land, then we would marry; and not before. I was not able to offer her a house before now.’

‘Didn’t you think you might chance it?’ George asked curiously.

‘And you and your wife?’ John demanded, stung. ‘How much of a chance did you take?’

It was a shrewd blow. The whole of Kent knew that his wife had come to him with a farm and a handsome fortune from her husband, Elizabeth’s father, and a widow’s jointure from the husband before that. George nodded abruptly and went to the door.

‘Elizabeth!’ George shouted into the hall, and then turned back to John. ‘Shall you want to be on your own with her?’

John found himself suddenly embarrassed. ‘I think so … perhaps … or you could stay?’

‘Speak for yourself, man,’ George said. ‘It’ll hardly come as a surprise!’

They heard her quick footsteps coming across the wooden floor of the hall. George went to meet her.

‘Never fear!’ he whispered. ‘He has come for you at last. He has a good wage, and his future is secured. He’s to buy a cottage here, in the village. He’ll tell you himself. But you’re to be a wife, Elizabeth.’

The colour rushed into her face and then drained away again. She nodded gravely, and stood for a moment in thought, her eyes downcast. She was saying a silent prayer of thanksgiving. There had been times in the long years of waiting that she had thought he had broken faith with her, and would not come. Then her head went up and she went with her quick steady steps to the parlour.

John was at the window again, looking at the apple trees. When she came in he turned. For a moment he saw not the grave Elizabeth in her sober Puritan dress; but little Cathy the serving maid in her mob cap with her gown cut low over her plump breasts, and her inviting smile. Then he put his hands out to Elizabeth, drew her to him and kissed her gently on the forehead.

‘I can marry you,’ he said, as if it were the conclusion to a business arrangement which had been tediously delayed.

‘Thank you,’ she said coolly. She wanted to tell him that she had been waiting for this moment ever since her father had come to her and folded her in his arms and said quietly: ‘I have got you the gardener, my dear. You will be John Tradescant’s wife as soon as he has saved enough to marry.’ She wanted to tell him that in the nightmare summer when her little sister and then her father sickened of plague and then died, she had prayed every night for John Tradescant to come for her, like a hero in a romance, to take her away from the fear of sickness and from the depths of mourning. She wanted to tell him that she had waited and waited, while her mother put off her grief and gleefully remarried. That she waited while the newlyweds kissed before their fireside. That she waited though she thought he might never come, and that, with her father dead and a hard-hearted mother who used her labour and never paid her, there would be no-one to hold John Tradescant to his binding promise to marry.

She waited, in the end, because she was in the habit of waiting, because there was no escape from waiting, because there was nothing else she could do. Elizabeth was twenty-seven years old, no longer a girl in her first looks. She had been waiting for John for six long years.

‘I hope you are glad?’ John retreated to his place at the window. ‘Yes,’ she said carefully from her place at the door.

Three weeks later they were married at the parish church. They walked up the narrow path to the church door hand in hand; John could not stop himself noticing the yew trees, which were extraordinarily fine. One was growing like a castle with pretty pinnacle towers, the branches of the other fell like layers of cloth in a deep green dress. Elizabeth saw the direction of his gaze and smiled and patted his arm.

Her stepfather George Lance and Gertrude her mother were witnesses. Elizabeth wore a new gown of white, instead of her usual grey, and John wore a new suit of brown with white and crimson slashings in the sleeve. The sunlight through the stained-glass windows dappled the tiles on the floor with splashes of additional colour. John stood tall and made his responses in a firm voice, and felt with pleasure Elizabeth’s little hand resting lightly on his arm.

There were those waiting outside the flint-walled church to see the couple who complained that the bridegroom was dressed too fine for a working man. They murmured that he was getting above his station and that the slashings in his sleeve were made of silk as if he thought himself to be a gentleman. But then the wedding ale at the back door of the farmhouse was strong and sweet, and the grumblings gave way to a roar of ribald jokes by mid-afternoon.

Gertrude had laid on a grand wedding dinner with three different sorts of cooked meats and half a dozen puddings. John found himself beside the vicar, the Reverend John Hoare, at the dinner table and took his compliments and accepted a toast and then tried to make stilted conversation.

‘You serve a great lord,’ the vicar commented. John warmed at once. ‘None greater.’

The Reverend Hoare smiled at his loyalty. ‘And he has put you in charge of the gardens of his new palace?’

John nodded. ‘He has done me that honour.’

‘Will you have to live at Hatfield? Or shall you keep a house at Meopham?’

‘I shall keep the house here,’ John said. ‘But I shall be much with my lord. My wife knows that his service must come first. Anyone who has the honour to serve a great man knows that his lord comes before everything.’

The vicar assented. ‘The master comes before the man.’

‘I wonder if you can tell me one thing though, vicar?’ John asked.

The vicar at once looked cautious. These were not the times for theological enquiry. Sensible men confined themselves to the catechism and the commandments and left questions to heretics and papists who would have to pay with their lives if they got their answer wrong. ‘What thing?’ he asked.

‘It puzzles me that God should have made so many things the same, and yet just a little different,’ Tradescant confided. ‘So many things He has made which are the same; but differ only in shape or in colour. And I cannot understand why He should make the difference. Nor how Eden can have looked, crammed with such – ‘ he sought the word for a moment ‘- such diversity.’

‘Surely every rose is the same,’ the vicar replied. ‘It differs only in colour. And a daisy is a daisy wherever it grows.’

John shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you had looked as closely as I. To be sure they have their families, a rose is still a rose, but there are hundreds of different kinds of roses,’ he explained. ‘Every county has a different sport. They have different shapes of petals, they have different numbers of petals, they have different preferences as to light and shade. Some are scented, they tell me, and some are not. And sometimes I think I see them being made. Making themselves while I watch, almost.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘When they throw a sport, when from one main stem you can see another grow different, and if you take the different one you

can breed another from it – God. didn’t make that, surely? I made it.’

The vicar shook his head but John went on. ‘And daisies are not the same wherever they grow. I have seen a Kent daisy different from a Sussex daisy and a French daisy which was bigger and tipped with pink. I don’t know how many daisies there are. A man would have to travel the whole world over with his eyes on his boots all the way to be sure. Why should such a thing be? Why should God make hundreds of the same thing?’

The vicar glanced around for rescue but nobody was looking his way. ‘God in His wisdom gave us a world filled with variety,’ he began.

He was relieved to see that Tradescant was not arguing. This was not a man who was quarrelsome in his cups. This was a man urgently in quest of a truth. The vicar had an odd sense of a man in search of his destiny. Tradescant was concentrating, passionately concentrating, with a deep line engraved between his brows as he listened to the vicar’s answer. ‘It was God’s great wisdom to give us many things of great beauty. We cannot question His choice to give us many things which are only a little different, one from another, if you tell me that is how they are.’

Slowly John shook his head. ‘I don’t mean to question my God,’ he said humbly. ‘Any more than I would question my lord. It just seems odd to me. And God did not make all things at once in Eden, and give them to us. I know that cannot be, though I read it in the Bible, because I see them changing from season to season.’

The vicar nodded, quick to move on. ‘That is no more than a craftsman making a table, I suppose. It is using the skills which God has given you and the materials which He has provided to make something new.’

John hesitated. ‘But if I made a new daisy, say, or a new tulip, and a man came along and saw it growing in a garden, he would think it was the work of God and praise Him. But he would be wrong. It would have been my work.’

‘Yours and God’s,’ the vicar said smoothly. ‘For God made the parent tulip from which you made one of another colour. Undoubtedly it is God’s purpose to give us many things of beauty, many things which are rare and different and strange. And it is our duty to thank Him and praise Him for them.’

John nodded at the mention of duty. ‘It would be a man’s duty to gather the varieties?’ he asked.

The vicar drank a little wedding ale. ‘It could be,’ he said judiciously. ‘Why would a man want to collect varieties?’

‘To the glory of God,’ John said simply. ‘If it is God’s purpose that we should know His greatness by the many varieties of plants that are in the world now, and that can be made, then it is to the glory of God to make sure that men know of His abundancy.’

The vicar thought for a moment, fearful of heresy. ‘Yes,’ he said cautiously. ‘It must be God’s will that we know of His abundancy, to help us to praise Him.’

‘So a man making a garden, a fine garden, is like a man making a church,’ John said earnestly. ‘Showing men the glory of God as a stonemason might carve the glory of God into his pillars and gargoyles.’

The vicar smiled. ‘Is that what you want to do, Tradescant?’ he asked, seeing his way at last to the heart of it. ‘Being a gardener and digging up weeds is not enough for you – it has to be something more?’

For a moment John might have disclaimed the idea, but the strong wedding ale was working on him and his pride in his work was powerful. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘It is what I want to do. My Lord Cecil’s gardens are to his glory, to be a setting to his fine house, to show the world that he is a great lord. But the gardens are also a glory to God. To show every visitor that God has made abundant life, life in such variety that a man could spend all his days finding it and collecting it and still not see it all.’

‘You have your life’s task then!’ the vicar said lightly, hoping to end the conversation. But John did not smile in return.

‘I have indeed,’ he said seriously.

At the end of the dinner Gertrude rose from the table and the ladies followed her lead. The serving girls stayed behind with the poorer neighbours and drank themselves into a satisfying stupor. Elizabeth completed the last of the tasks in her old family home and waited for John in his turn to leave the dinner. At dusk he came away from the hall and the trestle tables and found her sitting at the kitchen table with the other women, waiting for him. He took his bride by the hand and they went down the hill a little way to their new cottage followed by a shouting, singing train of family and villagers.

In the cottage the women went upstairs first, and Elizabeth’s cousins and half-sisters helped her out of her new white dress and into a nightdress of fine lawn. They brushed her dark hair and combed it into a fat plait. They pinned her cap on her head, and sprayed her with a little water of roses behind each ear. Then they waited with her in the little low-ceilinged bedroom until the shouts and snatches of song from the stair told them that the bridegroom had been made ready too and was come to his bride.

The door burst open and John was half-flung into the room by the joyous enthusiasm of the wedding party. He turned on them at once and pushed them out over the threshold. The women around Elizabeth’s bed made false little cries of alarm and excitement.

‘We’ll warm the bed! We’ll kiss the bride!’ the men shouted as John barred their way at the door.

‘I’ll warm your backsides!’ he threatened and turned to the women. ‘Ladies?’

They fluttered like hens in a coop around Elizabeth, straightening her cap and kissing her cheek, but she brushed them off and they pattered to the door, ducking under John’s arm as he held the door firmly. More than one woman shot a quick look at the gardener and the strength of his outstretched arm and thought that Elizabeth had done better than she could possibly have hoped for. John closed the door and shot the bolt on them all. The rowdiest hammered on the door in reply. ‘Let us in! We want to drink your healths! We want to see Elizabeth to bed!’

‘Go away! We’ll drink our own healths!’ he shouted back. ‘And I shall bed my own wife!’ He turned, laughing, from the door but the smile died from his face.

Elizabeth had risen from her bed and was kneeling at the foot, her head in her hands, praying.

Someone hammered on the door again. ‘What are you going to plant, Gardener John?’ they shouted. ‘What seeds do you have in your sacks?’

John swore under his breath at their bawdy humour, and wondered that Elizabeth could stay so still and so quiet.

‘Go away!’ he shouted again. ‘Your sport is over! Go and get drunk and leave us in peace!’

With relief he heard the clatter of their feet going downstairs.

‘We’ll be back in the morning to see the sheets!’ he heard a voice shout. ‘We expect stains, glorious red and white stains!’

‘Roses and lilies!’ shouted one wit. ‘Red roses and white lilies in John Tradescant’s flower bed!’ There was a great guffaw at this sally, and then the front door of the cottage banged, and they were in the streets.

‘Dig deep, Gardener John!’ came the shout from the darkness outside. ‘Plant well!’

John waited until he could hear the staggering footsteps go up the lane to the village’s only ale house. Still Elizabeth kneeled at the foot of the bed, her eyes closed, her face serene.

Hesitantly John kneeled down beside her, closed his eyes and composed himself for prayer. He thought first of the king — not the man he saw and knew, but the man he thought of when he said the word ‘king’ – a being halfway between earth and heaven, the fount of law, the source of justice, the father to his people. A man like the Lord Jesus, sent from God, directly from God, for the guidance and good ruling of his people. A man whose touch could heal, who could perform miracles, whose mande covered the nation. ‘God save the king,’ Tradescant whispered devoutly.

Then he thought of his master, another man half-touched with divinity, a step lower than the king but so high in power that he must be, surely, especially favoured by God, and was in any case John’s lord, a role of unique potency. John thought of the word ‘lord’ and had a sense of the holiness of it – Lord Jesus, Lord Cecil, both lords. But Cecil with his special trust in John, Cecil with his engaging child-size body and his cunning wise mind, was easy for John to bless in his prayers. John’s lord, John’s great love. Then his mind slipped at once to the old royal palace of Hatfield. Cecil would build a new house there, undoubtedly it would be a great house, and he would want a beautiful garden set around it. Perhaps an avenue … John had never planted an avenue. He lost the thread of his prayers altogether at the thought of the work of planting an avenue, and his great desire to see a double row of fine trees, limes, he thought longingly. They must be limes, there was nothing like lime for an avenue. ‘God give me the skill to do it,’ John whispered. ‘And grant me, in Your mercy, enough saplings.’

Elizabeth was very close, kneeling beside him, he could feel the warmth of her body, he could hear the soft rhythm of her indrawn and exhaled breath. ‘God bless us both,’ John thought. ‘And let us live in friendship and kindness together.’

He did not expect more than friendship from Elizabeth, friendship and a lifelong partnership of indissoluble shared interest. Unbidden, the picture of Catherine with her dark eyes and low-cut bodice rose behind his eyelids. A man newly wedded to a girl like Catherine would not spend his bridal night on his knees praying.

John opened his eyes and got into bed. Still Elizabeth kneeled at the bedside, her head bowed, her lips moving. In sudden irritation, John leaned over and blew out his bedside candle. Darkness invaded the room. In the darkness and the quietness he felt, rather than saw, Elizabeth rise from her knees, pull her nightdress over her head, lift the sheets and slip in beside him, naked.

For a moment he was stunned at the frank sensuality of the gesture. That a woman could arise from prayer and strip herself naked confounded his simple division of women into good or bad, saintly or sexual. But she was his newly married wife and she had a right to lie beside him. John’s desire rose at the glimpse of the moonlit body and he was sorry he had no light for the candle that he had blown out in a moment of temper and left himself in the dark.

They lay side by side on their backs.

‘Like effigies on a tomb,’ John thought, awkwardly.

It was for him to make the first move, but anxiety locked him into place. After years of avoiding sin and living in mortal terror of sexual temptation which would lead to pregnancy and disgrace, John was unprepared for the free embrace of a willing partner.

His hand strayed towards her side of the bed and encountered the unmistakable solidity of her thigh. The skin was as smooth as the fruit of an apple, but yielding, like a ripe plum. Elizabeth said nothing. John stroked her thigh with the back of his hand like a man brushing the soft foliage of a scented plant. He rather feared she might be praying again.

Cautiously he moved his hand up her thigh to the round warm mound of her belly, the navel set in the flesh like a little duckpond in a hill. Up these new mysterious byways John’s hand slowly went, one breast – and he heard her little indrawn breath as his hand moved across the soft rolling crest of her breast and took into its keeping the tender warm nipple which immediately hardened under his touch. He moved towards her, and heard that little gasp once more which was not quite alarm, and yet not quite welcoming. He raised himself up so that he was above her. In the moonlight he could see her face, her eyes resolutely shut, her mouth expressionless, as she had looked when she was praying. He bent his head and kissed her on the lips. She was warm and soft; but she lay completely still, as if she were asleep.

John stroked gently down her belly and beyond and found the downy softness of the hair between her legs. As he touched her she turned her head to one side, but still she did not open her eyes or stir. Gently he pressed his knee against her thigh and slowly, she opened her legs to him. Feeling like a king coming in to his kingdom, John moved across in the bed and lay between the legs of his wife, started to ease forward, started to know the power of his desire.

There was a sudden rush and a clatter of mud and stones against the window.

‘God’s wounds! What’s that?’ John exclaimed in alarm. ‘Fire?’

In one swift sinuous movement Elizabeth was out of bed, her gown clutched to her heavy swinging breasts, peering out of the window into the darkness of the village street.

‘Are you done, John?’ came a jovial beery yell. ‘Sowed your seeds, have you?’

‘God’s blood, I shall murder them!’ John exclaimed, dashing his nightcap to the floor.

Slowly Elizabeth put her nightgown to one side and came back to bed beside him. At last she spoke to him, the first words she spoke in their bedroom, the first words she said naked before him: ‘Never take the Lord’s name in vain, husband. It is His own commandment. I want our house to walk in His ways.’

John flung himself back on the bed, deserted by desire, as soft as a gelding. ‘I shall sleep,’ he declared sulkily. ‘And then I shall avoid offending you.’ He humped all the bedclothes around him, turned his back on her and closed his eyes. ‘You can pray again if you like,’ he added spitefully.

Elizabeth, robbed of the blankets, lay in silence on the cool sheet, humiliatingly naked, her new nightgown spread across her breasts and belly. Only when she heard his breathing deepen and she was certain that he was asleep did she move close to his broad back and wind her arms around his sleeping body, pressing her cold nakedness against him. She wept a little before she finally fell asleep. But she did not wish her words unsaid.