Earthly Joys Read online

  Buckingham gleamed. ‘And one of those toys which sprinkle people when they approach!’ he exclaimed. ‘And I should like a little mount as well, perhaps in the middle of the lake!’

  ‘A grand mount,’ John suggested. ‘Planted thickly with a winding allee to the summit. Perhaps cherry trees, espaliered into a hedge to make them thick and shady. I have some wonderful new cherry trees. Or even apple trees and pears. They take time to establish but you have a pretty effect with blossom in spring, and at the end of summer it is very rich to walk under boughs heavy with fruit. We could thread them through with roses and eglantine, which would climb and hang their blooms down through the leaves. You could row out to your island and wander among roses and fruit.’

  ‘And where would you put the knot gardens?’ Buckingham demanded. ‘Beyond the lake?’

  John shook his head. ‘Near to the house,’ he said firmly. ‘But you could show me your favourite window-seat and I could plant a garden which leads the eyes outwards, into the garden, a little maze for your eye to follow, in stone and with small pale-leafed plants, and herbs to aid your meditations.’

  ‘And an orchard with a covered walk all around it, and turf benches in every corner. I must have an orchard! Great fruiting trees which bow low to the ground. Where can we get quick-growing fruit trees?’

  ‘We can buy saplings. But it will take time,’ John warned him.

  ‘But I want it now,’ Buckingham insisted. ‘There must surely be trees which will grow swiftly, or trees we can buy full-grown? I want it at once!’

  John shook his head. ‘You may command every man in England,’ he said gently. ‘But you cannot make a garden grow at once, my lord. You will have to learn patience.’

  A shadow crossed Buckingham’s face, a dark flicker of frustration. ‘For God’s sake!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is as bad as the Spanish! Is everything I desire to go so slow that by the time it comes to me I am sick of waiting? Am I to grow old and tired before my desires can be met? Do I have to die before my plans come to fruit?’

  John said nothing, only stood still, like a little oak tree, while the storm of Buckingham’s temper blew itself out. Buckingham paused as he took the measure of John Tradescant, and he threw back his curly dark head and laughed.

  ‘You will be my conscience, John!’ he exclaimed. ‘You will be the keeper of my soul. You gardened for Cecil, didn’t you? And they all say that when you wanted Cecil, you had to go out into the garden and find him; and half the time he would be sitting on a bench in his knot garden and talking to his man.’

  John nodded gravely.

  ‘They say he was the greatest Secretary of State that the country has ever had, and that your gardens were his greatest solace and his joy.’

  Tradescant bowed and looked away, so that his new mercurial master should not see that he was moved.

  ‘When I am tempted to overreach myself in my garden or in the great wild forests which are the courts of Europe, you can remind me that I cannot always have my own way. I cannot command a garden to grow,’ Buckingham said humbly. ‘You can remind me that even the great Cecil had to wait for what he wanted, whether it was a plant or policy.’

  John shook his head in quiet dissent. ‘I can only plant your garden, my lord,’ he said softly. ‘That’s all I did for the earl. I can’t do more than that.’

  For a moment he thought that Buckingham would argue, demand that there must be more. But then the young man smiled at him and dropped an arm around his shoulders and set them both walking back to the house. ‘Do that for me now, and when you trust me more, and know me better, you shall be my friend and adviser as you were Cecil’s,’ he said. ‘You will make it grow for me, won’t you, John? You will do your best for me, even if I am impatient and ignorant?’

  Tradescant found that he was smiling back. ‘I can undertake to do that. And it will grow as fast as it is able. And it will be all that you want.’

  John started work that afternoon, walking to Chelmsford to find labourers to start the work of fencing the cows out, digging the lake and building the walls for the kitchen garden. He took a horse from the stables and rode a wide circle around the great estate to neighbouring farms to see what trees they had in their orchards and what wooded copses he could buy and transplant at once.

  Buckingham was careless about cost. ‘Just order it, John,’ he said. ‘And if they are tenants of mine just tell them to give you whatever you wish and they can take it off their rent at quarter day.’

  John bowed but made a point of visiting the steward of the household, at his desk in an imposing room at the very centre of the grand house.

  ‘His Grace has ordered me to buy trees and plants from his tenants, and command them to take the cost from their rent,’ Tradescant began.

  The steward looked up from the household books, which were spread before him. ‘What?’

  ‘He has ordered me to buy from the tenants,’ John began again.

  ‘I heard you,’ the man said angrily. ‘But how am I to know what is bought or sold? And how am I to run this house if the rents are discounted before they are collected?’

  John hesitated. ‘I was coming to you only to ask you how it should be done, if you have a list of tenants –’

  ‘I have a list of tenants, I have a list of rents, I have a list of expenditure. What no-one will tell me is how to make the one agree with the other.’

  John paused for a moment to take stock of the man. ‘I am new in this post,’ he said cautiously. ‘I don’t seek to make your task any harder. I do need to buy his lordship trees and plants to stock his gardens and he ordered me to buy from his tenants and see that they deduct the cost from their rents.’

  The steward took in Tradescant’s steadiness. ‘Aye,’ he said more quietly. ‘But the rents are already spent, signed away, or promised. They are not free for deductions.’

  There was a brief silence. ‘What am I to do then?’ John asked pleasantly. ‘Shall I return to his lordship and tell him it cannot be done?’

  ‘Would you do that?’ the man enquired.

  John smiled. ‘Surely. What else could I do?’

  ‘You don’t fear taking bad news to a new master, the greatest master in the land?’

  ‘I have worked for a great man before,’ John said. ‘And, good news or bad, I found the best way was to tell him simply what was amiss. If a man is fool enough to punish his messengers he’ll never get his messages.’

  The steward cracked a laugh and held out his hand. ‘I am William Ward. And I am glad to meet you, Mr Tradescant.’

  John took the handshake. ‘Have you been in his lordship’s service for long?’ he asked.

  The steward nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are his affairs in a bad way?’

  ‘He is the wealthiest man in the land,’ William Ward stated. ‘Newly married to an heiress and with the king’s own fortune at his disposal.’

  ‘Then –?’

  ‘And the most spendthrift. And the wildest. D’you know how he did his courting?’

  John glanced at the closed door behind them and shook his head.

  ‘He caught the lady’s fancy – not surprising –’

  John thought of that smile and the way the man threw back his head when he laughed. ‘Not surprising,’ he agreed.

  ‘But when he went to her father, the man declined. Again, not surprising.’

  John thought of the rumours that Buckingham was the king’s man in ways that a sensible man did not question. ‘I don’t know,’ he said stoutly.

  ‘Not surprising to those of us who have seen the king on his visits here,’ the steward said bluntly. ‘So what does my lord do?’

  Tradescant shook his head. ‘I have been away, and in Canterbury, we don’t hear gossip. I rarely listen to it, anyway.’

  The steward laughed shortly. ‘Well, hear this. Buckingham invites Lady Kate to his mother’s house for dinner and when the dinner is ended they don’t let her call for her carriage. They don’t let