Earthly Joys Read online

John paid his landlord for the month of August and began to wonder if he might be spared. On the hot summer mornings he awoke with such a desire to live that he could taste it on his tongue, like lust. He walked on the harbour walls and looked out to sea. He felt the light touch of linen on his sun-warmed skin and the warm air on his face and felt like a youth, faint with awareness of his own beauty, of his own health. He walked on the pebbles of the seashore, sending flocks of grey- and brown-backed dunlin scattering before him, and felt the life pulsing through his body from his boots to his fingertips. On a fine day he could see the Isle of Wight in its green loveliness, and John thought he might take a little ferry boat over to the island and hunt for new plants folded in the secret hollows of its chalk downs.

  He walked inland north of the city, where there were great forests. John walked under the branches and remembered his hunt for Sir Robert Cecil’s trees and the long journeys with the heavily laden carts. Sometimes he saw red deer and roe deer, always he watched his feet for a new fern, a new flower.

  He did not walk to the east – there was a foul ill-drained marsh on that side of the city, lonely with the cry of wading birds and treacherous with tracks and deceptive paths. It stank of mud and decay under the hot summer sunshine, and when the heat haze shimmered above it he could not tell where the water began and the land melted unreliably away. In the drier fields the red poppies nodded their heads. It reminded John too much of their destination. He hated the flicker of sunlight on mud and water now, it was the light of death, he thought. After he had walked once to Farlington marshes he never went that way again.

  Buckingham did not come until the end of August, just as the captains and officers were talking of having to disband for the winter rather than throw bad money after good on an expedition which was clearly not going to depart. Another month and the weather would break, it could take days to get out of harbour in the autumn, and no fleet could risk being separated running before a storm. It would be too late, it was too late, surely the Lord Admiral would be bound to see that it was too late – and then he came, sunny, smiling, delightful, in his best coach from London, and took breakfast at Captain Mason’s house in the High Street, as blithe and merry as if that had not been the very house where he had washed his hands of the blood of his soldiers the last time he came back from Rhé.

  The rumour that Buckingham had arrived in the city reached Tradescant as he fed the last of his hay to the cows. For a moment he shuddered as if someone had walked on his grave. It was both a premonition of death, and a flicker of desire. John shook his head at his own folly, brushed down his suit of clothes, put on his hat, and walked around to the High Street.

  The house was crowded, the outer courtyard filled with officers waiting for news and the usual hangers-on and favour-seekers. One man put his hand on Tradescant’s sleeve as he pushed through.

  ‘He’s come to cancel the sailing, hasn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have not spoken with him.’

  ‘The captain of the Triumph says that they’ll need to re-victual and re-water before they sail. And there’s no money to pay the chandlers. We’ll have to delay until the spring.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tradescant replied. ‘I don’t know any more than you do.’

  The man slipped away in the crowd, and Tradescant pushed further in. A man ahead of him turned at the tap on his shoulder and Tradescant recognised him.

  ‘Mr Tradescant!’

  ‘It’s Felton, isn’t it? That was made captain?’

  At once John saw that something was terribly wrong. The man’s face was pale, and two deep lines grooved either side of his mouth. ‘What’s the matter? Are you ill?’

  He shook his head. ‘I prayed that I might take it, but I did not. She died in my arms.’

  John edged slightly back. ‘Who died?’

  ‘My wife. Oh! you need not fear I carry it. They put us out of the village, both of us, and did not let me back into my house until I had buried her on the cold ground where she lay and stripped myself naked and burned my clothes. Then they let me into my home, walking as naked as a sinner. But when I got back into the house, d’you know what I found?’

  John shook his head.

  ‘My little daughter, dead of hunger, behind the locked door. No-one had gone in to feed her, they were all afraid of catching the plague, and besides, there was no food in the whole village.’

  John was silent, facing the horror of the man’s story.

  ‘I was never paid, you see,’ Felton said, his voice a dull monotone. ‘Not the captain’s pay that was promised me, not the lieutenant’s pay that I had earned. Not my campaign money, not my discharge money. Not a penny. When I came home to my wife and daughter I had nothing but my Lord Admiral’s promise, and we could not eat that. When she sickened, I could not buy physic for her, I could not even buy food. When she died I had to bury her in the ground where she lay.’

  He laughed shortly. ‘And they’ve enclosed it now. I cannot even get in to put up a cross at her head. It was common land. I thought I would plant a rose bush beside her grave, but now it is a sheep run, and my lord’s beasts patter over her sleeping face.’

  John found he was scowling. ‘Before God I am sorry for you,’ he said.

  ‘And now we are to sail again,’ Felton went on, his eyes burning in his white face. ‘Back to that damned island. It is all to be as it was before. More death, more pain, more folly. We will have to do it all again, and again and again until he has his fill of it.’

  ‘Are you serving?’ John asked.

  ‘Who would go willingly who had been there once before? Would you?’

  John shook his head. ‘I am bound by a promise to go,’ he said.

  ‘And I am bound by a promise too,’ Felton said. ‘A different promise from you, I should think. A sacred promise to God.’

  John nodded. ‘I will speak with him, when I can get near him,’ he said. ‘I will not forget you, Felton. You shall have your pay and perhaps you can start again somewhere …’

  ‘He has forgot me,’ Felton cried passionately. ‘But I will remind him. I will tell him what he has cost me, I will give him pain for pain.’

  ‘That’s not the way. Be still, Felton, he is the duke, you cannot fight him any more than you can fight the king. He is untouchable.’

  Felton shook his head in brief disagreement and turned away. Tradescant looked after him, saw the hunched shoulders and the way his hand strayed to his pocket and saw the outline, through the ragged clothes, of a knife. He glanced around. The place was packed with the duke’s retainers. When he saw one of the officers he could trust, he would warn him that Felton should be watched, and gently hustled out of the house. Then, when he had the duke’s ear, he would tell him that the man must be paid, must be compensated. That men who had followed the duke to certain death, and who had seen their comrades die beside them, could not be cast off as lightly as a mistress forgets an old lover who has fallen from favour.

  There was a roar of laughter from the inner room and then a bellowing of a toast. Tradescant knew that his lord must be inside, at the heart of the party. Now he was near to seeing him again he found that his palms were wet with sweat and his throat dry. He rubbed his hands on his breeches, swallowed, and then pushed through the crowd, through the open double door and into the room.

  The duke was seated at a table, a map spread before him, his green jacket ablaze with diamonds, his dark hair tumbled about his perfect face, laughing like a boy.

  John fell back at the sight and a man behind him swore as he bumped into him, but John heard nothing. He had thought that he knew every line, every plane, of that face, from the untroubled forehead to the smooth cheekbones, but when he saw Buckingham again, in his vitality, in the brilliance of his beauty, he realised he had remembered nothing, only a shadow.

  John felt himself smiling, then beaming, at the very sight of the man, and felt a blaze through his body which was not fear or resentment or hatred, but was joy, a wild