Earthly Joys Read online

  Elizabeth saw at once that something had happened when John came home at dusk for his dinner and stared into his broth without eating. As soon as J had eaten she sent him from the room with a nod of her head, and then seated herself beside John on the settle which stood at the fireside, and put her hand on his. ‘What’s the matter?’

  He shook his head. ‘I cannot tell you.’ He glanced down into her worried face. ‘Nothing wrong with me, my dear. Nothing wrong with J, and nothing wrong with the garden. But I cannot tell you. It is a secret and not my secret. I cannot tell anybody.’

  ‘Then it’s the duke,’ she said simply. ‘He’s done something bad.’

  John’s stricken look told her that her guess had struck home.

  ‘What’s he done?’ she pressed.

  He shook his head again. ‘Please God, it won’t be too bad. Please God there will be a happy outcome.’

  ‘Is he at home?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Gone to London? Gone to the king?’

  ‘Gone to Spain,’ he whispered very low.

  Elizabeth recoiled from him as if he had pinched her. ‘Spain?’

  John gave her a swift unhappy glance and put his finger to his lips. ‘I cannot say more,’ he said firmly.

  Elizabeth rose and went to the fire, bent and stirred the poker under the glowing logs. He saw her lips moving in a silent prayer. Elizabeth was a devout woman, a trip to Spain was like a trip to the underworld to her. Spain was the heart of Catholicism, the home of the anti-Christ against whom all good Protestants must struggle and fight from birth till death. Buckingham’s choice of destination at once condemned him in her eyes. He must be a bad man if he chose to go to Spain.

  John closed his eyes briefly. He could not imagine what condemnation would be released on his master if Elizabeth, and all the many hundreds, thousands, of devout men and women like Elizabeth, knew that he was planning to bring a Spanish princess home to be queen of England.

  Elizabeth straightened up and hooked the poker on to the bracket at the side of the fire. ‘We should leave,’ she announced abruptly.

  ‘What?’ John opened his eyes again and blinked.

  ‘We should leave now.’

  ‘What are you saying? We’ve only just got here.’

  She came back beside him, took his hand in hers and pressed it to her lips and then held it to her heart, like a pledge. He could feel her heartbeat, steady and reassuring, as her earnest face looked into his. ‘John, this duke is not a good man. I have spoken with the people of the house and half of them worship him and will hear nothing against him, and the other half say that he is a sinner of dreadful vices. There is no balance in this household. There is no steadiness. This is a whirlwind of worldly desires and we have strayed into the very heart of it.’

  John wanted to speak but she gently pressed his hand and he let her finish.

  ‘I did not want to leave Canterbury but you prevailed and it was my duty to obey you,’ she said softly. ‘But please now, husband, hear this. We can go to any household in the world that you choose as long as we do not stay here. I will pack our goods and our clothes and go tomorrow, wherever you say, as long as we do not stay here. I will follow you overseas even, Virginia even, as long as we do not stay here.’

  John waited until she was silent then he spoke cautiously, feeling his way. ‘I never thought to hear you speak so. Why do you dislike him so much? As a man? As my master?’

  She shrugged and looked towards the fire where the flames were leaping over the wood and casting a flickering light on her face. ‘I don’t know him as a man, and it’s too early to say how he will be as your master. All I have seen of him is worldly show. The diamonds in his hat, the horses in his coach. What man in England has ever had a coach before? No-one but the old queen and King James, and now this man has one, with rare horses to go before it. All I have seen of him would make me suspect that he is not a true Christian. And all that I have heard of him, and all that I know of him, tells me that he is very deep in sin.’ She dropped her voice. ‘Have you not thought that he may even be in league with the devil himself?’

  John tried to laugh but Elizabeth’s sincerity was too much for him. ‘Oh, Elizabeth!’

  ‘Where did he come from?’

  ‘Not from hell! From Leicestershire!’

  She frowned at the flippancy of his tone. ‘The son of a servant and a mere knight of the shires,’ she said. ‘Look at his rise, John. D’you think a man can get such fortune honestly?’

  ‘He has enjoyed the favour of the king,’ John insisted. ‘He was a cup-bearer and then a groom of the bedchamber and the favourite of many great men. They helped him to the post of Master of the Horse and he has brought the king such horses as no prince ever had before. Of course he enjoys great favour, he has earned it. He brought the king an Arab horse, the only one in England. The finest horse that ever was seen in England.’

  She shook her head. ‘So they make him Lord High Admiral – for trading in a horse?’

  ‘Elizabeth –’ John said warningly.

  ‘Bear with me,’ she said swiftly. ‘Hear me out, this once.’

  He nodded. ‘But I will not hear treason.’

  ‘I will speak nothing but the truth.’

  They looked at each other for a moment and she saw in the sliding away of his glance that he knew that the truth was treasonous. That you could speak the truth about Buckingham and the truth was that the king was mad for the man and unfit to rule through his madness. That Buckingham was higher than his ability, higher than any single man’s ability could ever take him, because the king was mad to please him.

  ‘What hold is it that he has over the king?’ she asked, her voice very low.

  ‘The king loves him,’ Tradescant said firmly. ‘And he is his faithful servant.’

  ‘He calls himself the king’s dog,’ she said, naming the unthinkable.

  ‘In play. The king calls him Steenie after St Stephen – he admires his beauty, Elizabeth. Nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘He calls himself his dog and there are those who say that the king mounts him like a dog mounts a bitch.’

  ‘Silence!’ Tradescant leaped to his feet and away from his wife. ‘That you should speak such words, Elizabeth! At your own hearthside! That you should listen to such things! Bawdy talk! Dirty tavern talk! And repeat them to me! What would your father say if he heard his daughter speaking of such things like a whore!’

  She did not even flinch from her father’s name. ‘I say what must be said, what must be clear between the two of us. And God knows that my heart is pure though my mouth is filled with filth.’

  ‘A pure heart and a dirty mouth?’ Tradescant exclaimed.

  ‘Better than a sweet mouth and dirty heart,’ she retorted. He checked, they were both thinking of Buckingham and the sweetness of his singing voice.

  ‘Finish what you have to say,’ John said sullenly. ‘Finish this, Elizabeth.’

  ‘I say to you that his mother who was born a serving maid is now a countess, and is said by many to be a witch –’

  John gasped, but she went on.

  ‘A witch. And others say that she is a Papist, a heretic, who would have been burned at the stake only a few years ago. I say to you that he is a man who has earned his place by sodomy under the king, and by pandering for the king, who won his wife by kidnap and by rape, who has seduced the king and seduced the prince. Who has been a sodomite with a man and with his son. For all I know he is leagued with the Devil himself. Certain, he is deep, deep in sin. And I ask you, John, I beg you, John, to let us go now. To let us leave him now. He has gone to Spain, to the enemy of our country, so he is a traitor even to the king who sins with him. So let us go, John. Let you and me and J get away from here to somewhere where the air is not rank as sulphur with sin and debauchery.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘You are intemperate,’ John said weakly.

  She shook her head. ‘Never mind about t