Earthly Joys Read online

  J gazed around Lord Wootton’s graceful garden, at the grey walls and the high tower of Canterbury Cathedral behind. ‘Why not? It would look well enough.’

  John shook his head. ‘Because it’s your mother’s,’ he said gently. ‘Given from me to her the first time I loved her. She rarely comes in here, she’d never see it. It’s her keepsake. We must buy her a bigger house with a bigger garden so she can sit underneath it and rock your babies on her knee.’

  J flushed with the quick embarrassment of a young man still too innocent for bawdy talk. ‘There won’t be babies from me for a while,’ he said gruffly. ‘So don’t count on it.’

  ‘You put your roots down first,’ John advised. ‘Like your mother’s chestnut sapling. Shall we take a break for our dinner now?’

  ‘I’ll go on,’ J said. ‘I want to take a look at those Spanish onions of yours. They should be fit to taste soon.’

  ‘They’ll be very sweet if they’ve grown as well as they do at their home,’ John said. ‘They eat them like fruit in Gibraltar. And take a look at the melon glasses when you’re in the kitchen garden. They should be ripening. Bank up some straw around and under them to keep the slugs off.’

  J nodded and trudged off to the kitchen garden. John spread a napkin on the grass and opened his little knapsack. Elizabeth had given him a new-baked loaf, a slice of cheese, and a flask of small ale. The crust was grey, the flour was poor this year, and the cheese was watery. Not even good money could buy good provisions. The country was feeling the pinch of bad finances and bad harvests. John made a small grimace and bit into his bread.

  ‘John Tradescant?’ John looked up but did not rise to his feet though the man standing above him was splendidly dressed in the livery of the Duke of Buckingham.

  ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘The Duke of Buckingham himself.’

  John put his loaf of grey bread to one side and stood up, brushing off crumbs.

  ‘I am John Tradescant,’ he said. ‘What does His Grace want?’

  ‘You’re to go and see him,’ the man said abruptly. ‘You’re summoned. He’s at New Hall at Chelmsford. You’re to go at once.’

  ‘My master is Lord Wootton …’ John started.

  The man laughed abruptly. ‘Your master can be Lord Jesus Christ for all that my master cares,’ he said softly.

  John recoiled. ‘No need for blasphemy.’

  ‘Every need,’ the man insisted. ‘For you do not seem to understand who commands you. Above my master there is only the king. If my master wants something he has only to ask for it. And if he asks for it, he gets it. D’you understand?’

  John thought of the painted youth at Theobalds who sat in King James’s lap, and the jewels around the young man’s neck and the purse at his waist.

  ‘I understand well enough,’ he said dryly. ‘Though I’ve been away from court for some years.’

  ‘Then know this,’ the man said. ‘There is only one person in the world for King James, and that is my master – the beautiful duke.’ He stepped forward and lowered his voice. ‘The duke’s friends can do anything they wish – poison, treachery, divorce! All this they have done and escaped scot-free! Had you not heard?’

  John carefully shook his head. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Lord Rochester took the wife of another man, no less than the Earl of Essex’s wife. They declared him impotent! How would you like that?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Then Rochester and his new wife poisoned Sir Thomas Overbury who would have betrayed them. She is a declared witch and poisoner. How d’you like that?’

  ‘No better.’

  ‘Found guilty, imprisoned in the tower, and then what d’you think?’

  John shook his head, maintaining his ignorance.

  ‘Forgiven overnight!’ the manservant said with satisfaction. ‘If you have the king’s ear you can do no wrong.’

  ‘The king knows best,’ John said staunchly, thinking of his lost lord and his advice to be blind and deaf when other men are talking treason.

  ‘And Rochester was as nothing to my lord.’ The man lowered his voice still further. ‘Rochester is the old favourite, but my lord is the new. Rochester may have had the king’s ear, but my lord has all his parts. D’you understand me? He has all his parts!’

  John kept his face very still, he did not smile at the bawdy humour.

  ‘My master is supreme under the king,’ the man declared. ‘There is no-one in England more beloved than my master, George Villiers. And he has decided that you are to serve him.’ The man looked down at John’s plain dinner. ‘Chosen you from every other man in the kingdom!’

  ‘I am honoured. But I do not think I can be released from my work here.’

  The man flapped a letter in John’s face. ‘Villiers’s orders,’ he said. ‘And the king’s seal. You’re to do as you are told.’

  John resigned himself to the inevitable, and rolled up his half-eaten dinner in his napkin.

  ‘And remember this,’ the man continued in the same boastful tone. ‘That what the duke thinks today, the king thinks tomorrow, and the prince thinks the next. When the king goes, the duke and the prince succeed. When you hitch your cart to the star of my master you have a long brilliant future.’

  John smiled. ‘I have worked for a great man before,’ he said gently. ‘And in great gardens.’

  ‘You have never worked for one like this,’ the servant declared. ‘You have never even seen a man such as this.’

  John thought that Elizabeth would dislike the move to His Grace’s house at New Hall, Chelmsford, and he was right. She was passionately opposed to leaving Lord Wootton’s service and going near to the hazardous glamour of the royal court. But the little family had no choice. J took his mother’s worries to his father and gained no satisfaction. ‘Mother does not want to move house, and she doesn’t want you to work for a great lord again,’ he said in his halting shy way. ‘Mother wants us to live quietly, she likes it here.’

  ‘Won’t she speak to me herself?’

  ‘She didn’t ask me to tell you,’ J said, embarrassed. ‘I thought perhaps you didn’t know. I was trying to help.’

  John dropped a gentle hand on his son’s narrow shoulder. ‘I know what she fears, but I am no more free to choose where to live than your mother is free,’ he explained. ‘She is bound by God to follow me, and I am bound by God to go where I am commanded by my lord and by the king above him. And lord and king and therefore God say we must go to the Duke of Buckingham in Essex.’ He shrugged. ‘So we go.’

  ‘I don’t believe that God wants us to go near to vanity and idleness,’ J protested.

  John turned a stern gaze on him. ‘What God wants or does not want no man can say, only a priest or the king,’ he said firmly. ‘If the king tells the duke who tells my Lord Wootton that I am wanted in Essex, then that is enough for me; as if God had leaned down from heaven and told me himself.’ He paused. ‘And it should be enough for you too, J.’

  J, avoiding the challenge his father’s gaze, looked away. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  The little family had been expecting something impressive of New Hall. The duke had bought it as a palace near to London where he could entertain the king in a style befitting the royal favourite. It had been a summer palace for Henry VIII and had passed around the courtiers as a prize plum of patronage. Buckingham was said to have paid a fortune for it, and was now pulling the place apart to enrich it still further, under the direction of Inigo Jones, who was laying a great sweeping staircase of marble and noble stone gateways.

  The Tradescants arrived, as the king himself would arrive on his frequent visits, up the great drive which turned in a full circle before the house. The house fronted the drive full-square, with great turrets on either side and a huge wooden doorway, wide and high enough for two coaches to be driven abreast into the inner courtyard. It was built of handsome stone, every inch carved and crenellated like marchpane on a cake, with three storeys of bay win