Earthly Joys Read online

  John bowed, and pushed his way to the back of the hall and out into the dusk. He wrapped his borrowed cloak around his shoulders and went outside to the stables. The horses were tired after the day’s journey but he had no intention of riding hard. He chose a steady-looking beast and mounted.

  ‘When are you back with us, Mr Tradescant?’ a groom asked.

  John shook his head. ‘I’m going to my garden,’ he said.

  ‘You look sick,’ the man remarked. ‘Not taken the king’s ague, have you?’

  John thought for a moment of the old king’s long heartsickness for Buckingham, and the net of half-truths and deceptions which were the very heart of court life. ‘Maybe I have a touch of it,’ he said.

  He turned the horse’s head eastward, and rode down to the docks. There was only one cartload of goods waiting to be unloaded. He saw it packed on a wagon and ordered it to follow him down the lanes to New Hall, irritated all the way at the noise and the lumbering slowness of the cart in the muddy lanes. His hat pulled low over his eyes, his coat collar turned up against the light cold spring rain, John sat heavily in the saddle, and kept his thoughts on the seasonal tasks of planting and weeding. He did not want to think about the new king, about his great friend the duke, or the old king who had died, a healthy man aged only fifty-nine years, from a slight fever, under their nursing, after his doctors had been sent away. If evil had been done there were men whose duty it was to make accusations. It was not John’s duty to accuse his master or his king, not even privately in his anxious conscience.

  Besides, John was not a man who could live with a divided loyalty in his heart. If evil had been done Tradescant had to be blind to it, and deaf to it. He could not love and follow a master and set himself up as judge of that master. He had to give his love and his trust and follow blindly – as he had followed Cecil, as it had been possible to follow Cecil – a master who might bend all the rules but whom you could trust to act only for his country’s gain.

  John reached his home in the cool light of the early evening and found Elizabeth in the kitchen, preparing supper for J. ‘Forgive me,’ John said shortly, coming into the house and taking and kissing her hand. ‘I was called away in haste and I had no time to send you word. Afterwards there were great deeds going on, and I had no time.’

  She looked curiously at him but the usual warmth was missing. ‘J was told that you had gone with the duke to Theobalds at a moment’s notice,’ she said. ‘So I knew you were on another errand for him.’

  Tradescant noted the slight emphasis she placed on ‘him’ and found himself longing for a quarrel. ‘He’s my master,’ he said abruptly. ‘Where else should I be?’

  She shrugged slightly and turned back to the fire. The pot hanging over the flames was simmering with pieces of meat bobbing in a rich gravy. Elizabeth held it steady with one hand shielded by a cloth and stirred with a long spoon.

  ‘I have said I am sorry for not sending you word,’ Tradescant insisted. ‘What more could I have done?’

  ‘Nothing more,’ she said steadily. ‘Since you chose to ride with him and you went far away in the night.’

  ‘I did not choose …’

  ‘You did not refuse –’

  ‘He is my master …’

  ‘I am sure I am aware of it!’

  ‘You are jealous of him!’ Tradescant exclaimed. ‘You think I am too devoted! You think that he treats me like a servant and takes me and uses me when he needs me and then sends me back to the garden when he has had his fill of my service!’

  Elizabeth straightened up and one cheek was flushed on the side near the fire, but the other was pale and cold. ‘I did not say any of that,’ she pointed out. ‘Nor, as it happens, do I think it.’

  ‘You think he involves me in his plotting and his darker deeds,’ Tradescant persisted. ‘I know you suspect him.’

  She took up the hook and drew the hanging chain away from the flames of the fire, unhooked the pot, and placed it carefully on the stone of the hearth. She worked with an absorbed quietness as if she would not let him disturb her tranquillity.

  ‘You do!’ Tradescant insisted. ‘You suspect him and you suspect me with him!’

  Still in silence she fetched three bowls and one trencher. She sliced her home-baked loaf into three equal pieces, bowing her head for a moment over the breaking of the bread. Then she took the long-handled spoon and served broth and meat into each bowl and carried them to the table.

  ‘I have seen things these days which he would trust to no other,’ John said urgently. ‘Things which I would tell no-one, not even you. I have seen things which, if he were a lesser man, would give me grave pause. I have seen things which he trusts only to me. He trusts me. He trusts no-one but me. And if – when he needs me no more – he sends me back to his garden, why, that is part of our understanding. I am at his side when he needs a man he can trust like no other. When he is in safe harbour, any man can serve him.’

  Elizabeth put out three knives and three spoons on the table, and pulled up her little stool and bowed her head. Then she waited for him to sit.

  John threw himself on to the stool, unwashed and without saying his grace, and moodily stirred his broth.

  ‘You are thinking that he is guilty,’ he said suddenly.

  The face that she raised to him was completely serene and clear. ‘Husband, I am thinking nothing. I begged you once that we should leave this place, and when you would not, I took my sorrow to my God, in prayer. I have left it to Him. I am thinking nothing.’

  But John was burning to quarrel, or to confess. ‘That’s a lie. You are thinking that I was present, that I was witness to acts which might ruin him, acts which are a dreadful crime, the worst crime in the world, and that he leads me on to love him so that I am ensnared in love, and then I am incriminated myself!’

  She shook her head and spooned her broth.

  Tradescant pushed his bowl away, unable to eat for the anger and the darkness on his conscience. ‘You are thinking that I have been an assistant to a murder!’ he hissed. ‘To assassination. And that it is plaguing my conscience and making me sick with worry! You are thinking that I come home with guilt in my face! You are thinking I come home to you with a stain on my soul! And that even after all I have done for him, in closing my ears and my eyes to what I can see and hear, that even then he will not keep me by his side but vaults on my shoulders to go upwards and upwards and tonight he sleeps beside the new king and dismisses me with no more than a word!’

  Elizabeth put her hands over her eyes, shielding her face from his anguish, incapable of disentangling the mortal sins at which her husband was hinting: murder, treason, and forbidden desire.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

  ‘How can I stop?’ John yelled in terror for his mortal soul. ‘How can I go forward? How can I go back? How can I stop?’

  There was a shocked silence. Elizabeth took her hands from her face and looked up at her husband.

  ‘Leave him,’ she whispered.

  ‘I cannot’

  She rose from the table and went towards the fireplace. John watched her go, as if she might have the key for them to escape from this knot of sin. But when she turned back to him her face was stony.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he whispered.

  ‘All that I think is that I have given you the wrong spoon,’ she said with sudden clarity. She took off her apron, hung it on the hook and went out of the room.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ John shouted at her back as she went through the doorway.

  ‘You need that one.’

  He recoiled as her meaning struck him.

  She was pointing to the spoon she used for cooking, the long spoon.

  The news that King James was dead and his son was to be crowned the first King Charles arrived at Chorley the next day. Elizabeth was told in the marketplace at her small stall selling herbs. She nodded and said nothing. Her neighbour asked her if her husband was home and if he had brought any news of t