Earthly Joys Read online

  ‘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 mantle 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 kindliness 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 hea