Earthly Joys Read online

  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.

  The very next day the earl himself came down to visit the Tradescants in their new cottage. Elizabeth was flustered and overawed by the grandness of the pony carriage with one footman driving, and another hanging on the back. She came to the gate and curtseyed and stammered her thanks. But John opened the gate and went out to stand at the carriage door as to an intimate friend.

  ‘Are you ill?’ he asked Cecil quietly.

  Cecil’s face was yellow and the lines of pain were deeper than ever. ‘No worse than usual,’ he replied.

  ‘Is it your bones?’

  ‘My belly this time,’ he said. ‘I am sick as a dog, John. But I can’t stop work yet. I have a plan to reform the king’s finances despite himself. If I can get him to agree then I can sell the whole scheme to Parliament, and hand over to them the farming of benefits in return for a proper wage for the king.’

  John blinked. ‘You want the king to be paid by Parliament? To be its servant?’

  Cecil nodded. ‘Better than this endless haggling, year after year, when they demand that he change his favourites and he demands more money. Anything is better than that. You have to be a king rich in charm to survive holding out an annual begging bowl, and this king is not as the old queen.’

  ‘Can you not rest and come back to it later?’ John asked urgently.

  The heavy-lidded eyes looked at him. ‘Setting up as apothecary, John?’

  ‘Can you not rest?’

  Cecil flinched as he stretched out his hand to his man, and John saw that even that small gesture cost him pain. He took the hand as gently as he would hold Baby J’s while he slept. Unconsciously, he put his other hand on top of it and felt how cool were the fingers and how sluggish the pulse.

  ‘Do I look so sick?’

  John hesitated.

  There was a gleam of a smile on Cecil’s face. ‘Come, John,’ he said in a half-whisper. ‘You always prided yourself on telling me the truth, don’t turn courtier now.’

  ‘You do look very very sick,’ John said, his voice very low.

  ‘Sick to death?’

  John snatched a quick glance at his master’s heavy-lidded eyes and saw that he wanted a true answer to his question.

  ‘I have no skills, my lord, but I would think so.’

  Cecil frowned slightly and John tightened his grip on the thin cold hand.

  ‘I’ve so much more to do,’ the Secretary of State said.

  ‘Look to yourself first,’ John urged him, and then heard himself whisper, ‘please, my lord. Look to yourself first.’

  Cecil leaned forward and laid his cheek against John’s warm face. ‘Ah, John,’ he said softly. ‘I wish I had some of your strength.’

  ‘I wish to God I could give it to you,’ John whispered.

  ‘Drive with me,’ the earl commanded. ‘Drive round with me and tell me what is planted and how it will be, even though neither of us will be here to see it. Tell me how it will be in a hundred years when we will both be dead and gone. Hale or sick, John, this garden will outlive us both.’

  Tradescant clambered into the carriage and sat beside his master, one arm along the back of the seat as if he would protect him from the jolting movement. Elizabeth, forgotten at the gate of her new house, watched them both go.

  ‘You have made me a velvet setting for my jewel,’ Cecil said with quiet pleasure as the carriage moved slowly down the avenue of new-planted trees. ‘We have done well together, John, for a pair of youngsters learning our trades.’

  May 1612

  Cecil was dying in the great curtained bed in the master chamber of his new fine house. Outside his door, the household staff pretended to go about their work in a hushed silence, hoping to hear the muttered colloquy of the doctors. Some wanted to send him to Bath to take the waters – his last chance of health. Some were for leaving him in his bed to rest. Sometimes, when his door opened, the servants could hear the harsh labouring of his breath and see him propped up on the rich embroidered pillows, the brightness of their spring colours a mockery of his yellowing skin.

  John Tradescant, weeping like a woman, was deep digging in the vegetable garden, digging without much purpose, in a frenzy of activity as if his energy and effort could put heart in the earth, could put the heart back into his master.

  At midday he abruptly left his vegetable bed and marched determinedly through the three courts on the west of the house, up the allee, past the mount where the paths were rimmed with yellow primroses, out into the woodland side of the garden. The ground was a sea of blue as if the whole wood was deep in flood. John kneeled and picked bluebells with steady concentration and did not stop until he had an armful. Then he went to the house, careless of the mud dropping off his boots, up the stairs where his likeness in wood still stepped blithely out of the newel post, up to the master bedroom. A housemaid stopped him at the door to the anteroom. He would not be allowed further in.

  ‘Take these, and show them to him,’ he said.

  She hesitated. Flowers in the house were for strewing on the floor, or for a posy to wear at the belt or hatband. ‘What would he want with them?’ she demanded. ‘What would a dying man want with bluebells?’

  ‘He’d like to see them,’ John urged her. ‘I know he would. He likes bluebells.’

  ‘I’ll have to give them to Thomas,’ she said. ‘I’m not allowed in, anyway.’

  ‘Then give them to Thomas,’ John pressed her. ‘What harm can it do? And I know it would please him.’

  She was stubborn. ‘I don’t see why.’

  John gestured helplessly. ‘Because when a man is going into darkness it helps him to know that he leaves some light behind!’ he exclaimed. ‘Because when a man is facing his own winter it is good to know that there will still be springs and summers. Because he is dying … and when he sees the bluebells he will know that I am still here, outside, and that I picked him some flowers. He will know that I am still here, just outside, digging in his garden. He will know that I am here, still digging for him.’

  The look she turned on him was pure incomprehension. ‘But Mr Tradescant! Why should that help him?’

  John grabbed her in his frustration and pushed her towards the anteroom. ‘A man would understand,’ he growled. ‘Women are too flighty. A man would understand that he will be comforted to know that I am still out there. That even when he is gone, his garden will still be there. That his mulberry tree will flower this year, that his chestnut saplings are growing straight, that the new velvet double anemone is thriving, that his bluebells are blowing under the trees of his woods. Go! And get those bluebells into his hands, or I shall have words to say to you!’

  He thrust her with such force that she went at a little run to Thomas, who was standing outside the bedroom door, waiting for the orders from his master that never came.

  ‘Mr Tradescant wants these taken in to his lordship,’ she said, thrusting her armful of blossoms at him. Their slim whippy green stems oozed sap like the very juice of life. She wiped her hand on her apron. ‘He says they’re important.’

  Thomas hesitated at the eccentric request.

  ‘D’you know what he said? He said that women are too flighty to understand,’ she sniffed resentfully. ‘Impertinence!’

  Thomas’s sense of male importance was immediately stimulated. He took the flowers from her, turned at once to open the door and crept inside.

  A doctor was at the foot of the bed, another at the window, and an old woman, part nurse, part layer-out, was at the fireside where a small fire of scented pine cones was crackling, pouring heat into the stuffy room.

  Thomas came quietly forward. ‘Beg pardon,’ he said hoarsely. ‘But his lordship’s gardener insisted he had these.’

  The doctor turned irritably. ‘What? What? Oh, nonsense! Nonsense!’

  ‘Not