Earthly Joys Read online

  He could not help but admire their labour and their skill, and he could not help but envy the Dutch prosperity. There was no hunger in the Holland Provinces, and basic fare was rich and good. They ate cheese on buttered bread, a double helping of richness and fat, and did not think twice about it. Their cows grazed knee-deep in lush wet pastureland and gave abundant milk. They were a people who saw themselves as divinely rewarded for their struggle against the Papist Spanish, and John, idling down the narrow canals, looking left and right for plants and flowers tucked away in the moist grasses, had to agree that the Protestant God was a generous one to this, His favoured people.

  When they reached The Hague, Tradescant sent the loaded barge back with instructions to ship all the plants directly to England. He stood on the stone wharf and watched the swaying heads of trees glide slowly away. Some of the cherry trees were bearing fruit and he saw, with irritation, that once they were beyond hailing distance the bargee picked a handful and ate them, spitting the stones carelessly into the glassy water of the canal.

  In Flanders he bought vines, and watched them pruned of their yellow leaves and thick black grapes in preparation for their journey. He ordered their roots to be wrapped in damp sacking and plunged into old wine casks for their voyage home. He sent a message ahead of them, in the careful script which Elizabeth had taught him, so that a gardener from Hatfield would meet them with a cart on the dockside, to take them back and heel them in the same day, without fail, making sure to water them religiously at dawn every day until Tradescant came home.

  The Prince of Orange’s gardener admitted Tradescant to the beautiful garden behind the palace of The Hague and showed him around. It was a garden in the grand European style, with large stone colonnades and broad sweeping walks. Tradescant spoke to him of his work at Theobalds, planting between the box hedges and replacing the coloured stones of the knot garden with lavender. The gardener nodded with enthusiasm and showed Tradescant his version of the changing style in a little garden at the side of the palace where he had used tidily pruned lavender for the hedges themselves. They made a softer pattern and had more variation of colour than the usual box hedge. They did not harbour insects and when a woman passed by, her skirts brushed against the leaves and released a cloud of perfume. When he left, Tradescant had a trayful of rooted cuttings and a letter of introduction to the great physic garden at Leiden.

  He travelled overland to Rotterdam, uncomfortable on a big broad-backed horse, all the way seeking out English-speaking farmers who could tell him about the growing of their precious tulips. In the darkened cellars of ale houses, drinking a rich sweet beer which was new to John, called ‘thick beer’, they swore that the new colours entered into the heart of the flowers by slicing into the very heart of the bulb.

  ‘Does it not weaken them?’ John asked.

  The men shook their heads. ‘It helps them to split,’ one of them volunteered. He leaned forward and breathed a blast of raw onion into John’s face. ‘To spawn. And then what do you have?’

  John shook his head.

  ‘Two, where you had one before! If they are of another colour, and the colour often enters at the split, then you have made a fortune a thousand times over. But if they are the same colour but have doubled, then you have doubled your fortune at the least.’

  John nodded. ‘It is like a miracle,’ he said. ‘You cannot help but double your fortune every year.’

  The man sat back in his seat and beamed. ‘And it’s more than double,’ he confirmed. ‘The prices are steadily rising. People are ready to pay more and more each year.’ He scratched his broad belly with quiet satisfaction. ‘I shall have a handsome house in Amsterdam before I retire,’ he predicted. ‘And all from my tulips.’

  ‘I shall buy from you,’ John promised.

  ‘You have to come to the auction,’ the man said firmly. ‘I don’t sell privately. You will have to bid against the others.’

  John hesitated. An auction in a foreign country in a language he did not understand was almost bound to drive up the price. One of the other growers leaned forward.

  ‘You have to,’ he said simply. ‘The market for tulips is all agreed. It has to be done in the colleges, in the appointed way. You cannot buy without posting a bid. That way we all know how much is being made on each colour.’

  ‘I just want to buy some flowers,’ John protested. ‘I don’t want to post a bid in the colleges, I don’t understand how it is done. I just want some flowers.’

  The first grower shook his head. ‘It may be just flowers to you, but it’s trade to us. We are traders and we have formed a college and we buy and sell in each other’s view. That way we know what prices are being charged, that way we can watch the prices rise. And not be left behind.’

  ‘Prices are rising so fast?’ John asked.

  The grower beamed and dipped his face into his great mug of ale. ‘No-one knows how high it can go,’ he said. ‘No-one knows. If I were you I would swallow my English pride and go to the college and post my bid and buy now. It will be dearer next season, and dearer the year after that.’

  John glanced around the ale house. The growers were all nodding, not with a salesman’s desire for a deal but with the quiet confidence of men who are in an irresistibly rising market.

  ‘I’ll take a dozen sacks of plain reds and yellows,’ John decided. ‘Where is this college?’

  The grower smiled. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘We don’t leave our dinner table for anything.’ He took a clean dinner plate, and scribbled a price on it and pushed the plate across to John. The man at John’s elbow dug him in the ribs and whispered, ‘That’s high. Knock off a dozen guilders at least.’

  John amended the price and pushed it back, the man rubbed the number off and wrote his own total. John agreed and the plate was posted on a hook on the wall of the room. The grower extended a callused hand.

  ‘That’s all?’ John queried, shaking it.

  ‘That’s all,’ the man said. ‘Business done in the open where everyone can see the posted price. Fairly done and well done, and no harm to either bidder or seller.’

  John nodded.

  ‘A pleasure to do business with you, Mr Tradescant,’ said the grower.

  The tulips were delivered to John’s inn the next day and he sent them off with a courier under strict orders that they were not to be out of his sight until he had put them into the Hatfield wagon at London dock. He also sent a letter to Meopham with his love and a kiss for Baby J, and news that he was going on to Paris.

  It was as he sealed the letter and put it into the hands of the courier that John knew that he was a traveller indeed. He did not fear the strangeness of Europe, he had a deep intoxicating sense that he might hire a horse here and then exchange it for another, and then another, and then another, and ride all the way across Europe, through the heart of Papist Spain and even on to Africa. He was an islander no more, he had become a traveller.

  He watched the barge carrying his precious tulips slip away down the canal and turned back to the inn. The horse was waiting, saddled for him, he had paid his slate, his travelling pack was ready. John swung his thick cape around his shoulders, heaved himself into the saddle and set the horse’s head for the west gate.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ one of the tulip growers called to him, seeing a good customer departing.

  ‘To Paris,’ John called back and nearly laughed at his own sense of excitement. ‘I’m to visit the gardens of the French king. And I am buying more plants. I need even more. I think I shall buy up half of Europe.’

  The man laughed and waved him on and John’s horse, its metal shoes ringing on the cobblestones, stepped delicately out on to the highway.

  The roads were good to the frontier and then they deteriorated into a mud track riddled with potholes. John kept a sharp look out for great forests with a chateau set among the trees and when he saw newly planted drives he turned off the road and went to find the French gardener to discover where he got hi