Earthly Joys Read online

  ‘I think he just loves to travel,’ J said resentfully. ‘And he doesn’t care that he leaves me behind.’

  Elizabeth put her arm around her son’s unyielding shoulders. ‘When you are older you shall travel too. He will take you with him. Perhaps you will grow to be a great man like your father and be sent by lords on travels overseas.’

  Baby J – her baby no longer – disengaged himself from her arm. ‘I shall go on my own account,’ he said stiffly. ‘I shall not wait for someone to send me.’

  The ship was in mid-river now, the sails which had been slack when sheltered in the dock flapped like sheets on washing day. Elizabeth gripped her son’s arm.

  ‘He is old to go venturing,’ she said anxiously. ‘So far, and into such regions. What if he is taken ill? What if they get lost?’

  ‘Not he,’ J said with scorn. ‘But when I travel I shall go to the Americas. A boy at school has an uncle there and he has killed hundreds of savages and is planting a crop of tobacco. He says that a man who wants land can just cut it from the forests. And we have our land there. Father is going in the wrong direction, he should be going to our lands.’

  Elizabeth’s eyes were still on the ship which was picking up speed and moving smoothly downriver. ‘It’s never been owning land for him,’ she said. ‘Never building a house or putting up a fence. It has always been discovering new things and making them grow. It has always been serving his lord.’

  J pulled at her arm. ‘Can we have some dinner before I have to go back?’

  Elizabeth patted his hand absently. ‘When he’s gone,’ she said. ‘I want to see the ship out of port.’

  J pulled away and went to the waterside. The river was sucking gently at the green stones. In the middle of the water, unseen by the boy, a beggar’s corpse rolled and turned over. The harvest had failed again and there was starvation in the streets of London.

  In a moment Elizabeth joined him. Her eyelids were red but her smile was cheerful.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘And now your father gave me half a crown to buy you an enormous dinner before we take the wagon home.’

  John watched from the deck of the ship as his wife and son grew smaller and smaller, and then he could no longer pick them out at all. The sense of loss he felt as the land fell away was mingled with a leaping sense of freedom and excitement as the ship moved easily and faster and the waves grew greater. The voyage was to take them northwards, hugging the coast of England, and then eastwards, across the North Sea to the high ice-bound coast of Norway, and then onwards to Russia.

  Tradescant was as much on deck as any of the ship’s watch, and it was he who first spotted a great fleet of Dutch fishing ships taking cod and summer herring just south of Newcastle.

  They weighed anchor at Newcastle and Tradescant went ashore to buy provisions for the journey. ‘Take my purse,’ Sir Dudley offered. ‘And see if you can get some meat and some fish, John. My belly is as empty as a Jew’s charity box. I’ve been as sick every day since we left London.’

  John nodded and went ashore and marketed as carefully as Elizabeth might do. He bought fresh salmon and fresh and salted meats, and by noising Sir Dudley’s name and mission much around Newcastle he was able to lead the Lord Mayor himself on a visit to the ship. And the Lord Mayor brought a barrel of salted salmon as a timely present for his lordship. When the ship was provisioned again they set out to cross the North Sea but the wind veered to the north west and started to rise before they were more than a day out of port, skimming the white tops off the grey waves which grew steeper and more frequent.

  Sir Dudley Digges was sick as a dog from the moment the wind veered, and many of his companions stayed below too, groaning and vomiting and calling on the captain to return to shore before they died of seasickness. John, rocking easily to the movement of the boat, stood in the prow and watched the waves come rolling from the horizon and the ship rise up and then fall down, rise up and fall down, again and again. One night, when Sir Dudley’s own manservant was ill, John sat at his bedside, and held his head as he vomited helplessly into the bowl.

  ‘There,’ said John gently.

  ‘Good God,’ Sir Dudley groaned. ‘I feel sick unto death. I have never felt worse in all my life.’

  ‘You’ll survive,’ John said with rough kindliness. ‘It never lasts longer than a few days.’

  ‘Hold me,’ Sir Dudley commanded. ‘I could weep like a girl for misery.’

  Gently John raised the nobleman off the narrow bunk and let his head rest on John’s shoulder. Sir Dudley turned his face to John’s neck and drew in his warmth and strength. John tightened his grip and felt the racked body in his arms relax and slide into sleep. For an hour and more he knelt beside the bunk holding the man in his arms, trying to cushion him from the ceaseless rolling and crashing of the ship. Only when Sir Dudley was deeply, fast asleep, did John draw his numbed arm away and lay the man back down on his bed. For a moment he hesitated, looking down into that pale face, then he bent low and kissed him gently on the forehead, as if he were kissing Baby J and blessing his sleep, and then he went out.

  As they drew further north the wind wheeled around and became more steady but Sir Dudley could keep down no food. The little ship was halfway between Scotland and Norway when the captain came to Sir Dudley, who was wrapped in a thick cloak and seated on the deck for the air.

  ‘We can go back or forward as you wish,’ the captain said. ‘I don’t want your death on my conscience, my lord. You’re no seafarer. Perhaps we’d best head for home.’

  Sir Dudley glanced at Tradescant, one arm slung casually around the bowsprit, looking out to sea.

  ‘What d’you think, John?’ he asked. His voice was still faint.

  Tradescant glanced back and then drew closer.

  ‘Shall we go back or press on?’

  John hesitated. ‘You can hardly be sicker than you were,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I fear!’ the captain interrupted.

  John smiled. ‘You must be seasoned now, my lord. And the weather is fair. I say we should press on.’

  ‘Tradescant says press on,’ Sir Dudley remarked to the captain.

  ‘But what d’you say, my lord?’ the captain asked. ‘It was you who was begging me to turn back at the height of the storm.’

  Sir Dudley laughed, a thin thread of sound. ‘Don’t remind me! I say press on, too. Tradescant is right. We have our sea legs now, we might as well go forward as back.’

  The captain shook his head but went back to the wheel and held the ship’s course.

  Their luck was in. The weather turned surprisingly fair, the men became accustomed to the motion of the ship and even Sir Dudley came out of his cabin and strode about the deck, his pace rocking. They had been nearly three weeks at sea and slowly, the skies around them changed. It was like entering another world, where the laws of day and night had been destroyed. John could read a page of writing at midnight, and the sun never sank down but only rested on the horizon in a perpetual sunset which never led to dusk. A school of grampus whales came alongside and a flock of tiny birds rested in the rigging, exhausted by their long flight over the icy waters. John walked up and down the length of the boat all day and most of the bright night, feeling oddly unemployed with hours of daylight and nothing to grow.

  Then a thick fog came rolling over the sea, and the daylight counted for nothing. The sun disappeared behind it and there was neither night nor day but a perpetual pale greyness. Sir Dudley took to his chamber again and summoned one man after another to play at dice with him. John found himself curiously lost in the half-light. He could sleep or wake as he wished, but he never knew when he woke whether it was day or night.

  Despite Tradescant’s watching, it was a sailor who first called ‘land ahoy!’, spotting through the rolling fog the dark outline of the coast of the North Cape of Lapland.

  Sir Dudley came up on deck, huddled in his thick cape. ‘What can you see, John?’

  John pointed to t