Earthly Joys Read online

  John laughed, and then checked himself at the strangeness of the noise. He had not laughed in months. His time with his lord had been a time of passion driving out grief in the darkness. But now he was home, on English soil again, under an English sun and here was this woman with her green thorny strawberry.

  ‘I will find it,’ he promised her. ‘And I will see if I can grow it in my garden, and if it proves to be a curiosity, or to have some quality, then I will send you a shoot.’

  She shook her head at his folly. ‘Are you from London?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, he did not want to name New Hall. He did not want to be known as the Duke of Buckingham’s man.

  She nodded as if that would account for it. ‘Here we like our strawberries red and fit to eat,’ she said gently. ‘Do not send me a shoot, I do not want it. You can give me a penny for your dinner and for the thorny strawberry, and be on your way. In Hampshire we like our strawberries red.’

  Winter 1627

  Elizabeth was in the garden before their cottage at New Hall when John came in at the gate. She was cutting herbs in the cool of the evening light, and the basket on the ground before her was bobbing with the seed-heavy heads of camomile flowers. When she heard his uneven step she looked up and started to run towards him but then she suddenly checked. Something in the slowness of his pace and his bowed shoulders warned her that this was not a happy homecoming.

  Slowly she came towards him, noting the new lines of pain and disappointment in his face. His limp, which he thought she did not see, was more pronounced than ever.

  She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Husband?’ she said softly. ‘You are welcome home.’

  He looked up from the ground before him and when she met his dark eyes she recoiled. ‘John?’ she whispered. ‘Oh my John, what has he done to you?’

  It was the worst thing she could have said. He reared up, his face hard. ‘Nothing. What d’you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Come and sit down.’ She led him to the stone bench before the house, and felt his hand tremble in her own. ‘Sit,’ she said tenderly. ‘I will get you a cup of ale, or would you like something hot?’

  ‘Anything,’ he said.

  She hesitated. J was still at work, cutting back and weeding in the fruit garden, at the other side of the great house. She did not send for him yet, she feared a quarrel between father and son, and when she looked at John’s weary face she feared that his son would be the victor. John had come home an old man. She whisked into the house and brought out a mug of ale and a slice of her home-made bread. She put them on the bench beside him and said nothing while he drank. He did not eat.

  ‘We heard that it was a defeat,’ she said at last. ‘I was afraid that you were hurt.’ She shot a sideways look at him, wondering if there were some physical injury that he was keeping from her.

  ‘I took not a scratch,’ he said simply.

  The pain was in his soul, then. ‘And his lordship?’

  There was a flash across his face, instantly hidden, like lightning on a dark night. ‘He is well, praise God. He is with the king who has rejoiced in his return, with his wife at his side, thank God.’

  She bowed her head briefly but found she could not say ‘Amen’.

  ‘And you …’ she prompted him gently. ‘I can see that all is not well with you, John. I can see that there is no rejoicing for you.’

  He met her eyes and she thought that never before in their life together had she seen him look as if the light had gone out for him.

  ‘I will not burden you with my sorrows, Elizabeth,’ he said gently. ‘I will mend. I am not a boy in springtime. I will mend.’

  Her grave look never wavered. ‘Perhaps you should tell me, John. Or tell your Saviour. A hidden secret is like a hidden pain, it can only grow worse.’

  He nodded as if he knew all about hidden pain now. ‘I shall try to pray. But I am afraid that my faith was never very strong, and I seem to have lost it.’

  She would have been shocked if she had believed him. ‘How can you lose your faith?’ she asked simply.

  He looked away, over his garden. Was it on the island? Did his faith fall sick like the soldiers who had to sleep on the wet ground? Or did it drown in the sea where the causeway was treacherous and they lost the last standard? Or did it bleed to death on the voyage home when the injured men cried out so loud that he heard them, even over the noise of the creaking ship? Was it always a chain that had linked John to his lord, the lord to the king and the king to God, and the loss of one meant the loss of all? Or had he forgotten his faith just as he had forgotten everything, even the gillyflower and the wormwood plants, because he had fallen deep into love and deep into joy and made a god of another man?

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps God has lost me.’

  Elizabeth bowed her head and made a quick silent prayer that she might have guidance as to how she might help him.

  ‘You are right, and you have been right all along,’ he said at last. ‘We are ruled by a fool who is in the hands of a knave. I have seen men die for the folly of those two, for all my life: in the plague in London, in the villages up and down the land where people are driven out of their homes and out of their gardens for the landlords to make sheep runs, and on that cursed island where we set a siege with less food in our stores than the besieged, where we marched with ploughboys and criminals, where we had scaling ladders which were yards too short, and where the commander was playing at soldiers, and the king forgot to reinforce us.’

  His bitterness was like an explosion in that quiet garden, even worse than his blasphemy. She had thought she would never hear such words from him, who had been Cecil’s man, who had served the old queen. This was a stranger to her – a bitter man carrying the scars of fatal betrayal, who finally spoke treason aloud.

  ‘John –’

  He bared his teeth in a hard smile at her surprise. ‘You should be pleased,’ he said cruelly. ‘You warned me enough. Now see: I have heeded your teachings and lost my faith in my lord, in my king, and in my God. Wasn’t that what you wanted?’

  Dumbly she shook her head.

  ‘Didn’t you warn me and warn me that he was a sodomite and a puppet master? Didn’t you beg me to leave his service on the very day we came here? Didn’t you give me a long spoon to sup with the Devil when I started keeping his secrets safe?’

  Her hands were over her mouth, her shocked eyes looked at him in silence.

  John hawked and spat like a soldier, as if the taste of bile was too bitter for him.

  Without thinking, Elizabeth scuffed dirt over the spittle. ‘John,’ she whispered. ‘I never meant that you should lose your faith. I meant only to caution you –’

  ‘I am cautioned now,’ he said. ‘I am checked. I am stopped short.’

  There was a silence. Somewhere in the fine woods of the duke’s estate the pigeons were cooing, warmly, easily. John looked up at the sky and saw a flock of rooks heading for home in the tall trees.

  ‘What shall we do?’ Elizabeth asked, as if she was in a wilderness with wreckage all around them.

  He looked around, at the fine house and the garden, as if they gave him no pleasure at all. ‘I am his servant,’ he said slowly. ‘He has paid me all he is going to pay me, he told me that. He will use me as he wishes. When he needs me – I am to be there. I am the duke’s man, I have sworn a solemn oath to be his man till death.’

  She took a sharp breath at that. ‘An oath?’

  ‘He asked it of me and I gave it,’ John said grimly. ‘I gave him everything he asked and I swore a solemn oath that I am his man. I will have to learn to live with that. I am a servant, I am lower than a servant, for he has commanded me to be his dog and I have licked his foot.’

  ‘You think he is a fool and a betrayer and you have sworn to be his man?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘Just so.’

  They were silent for long moments. She thought that some dark compact must have taken place b