Earthly Joys Read online

  He heard the noise of Felton’s capture, and the dreadful scream from Buckingham’s wife, Kate. He heard the running to and fro of men who were suddenly leaderless. He sat quite still, the glass of Hollands in his hand, while the room brightened as men drifted away and the August sunshine poured uncaringly through the window. The little motes of dust danced in the sunshine as if everything was still the same; when everything was different.

  When he thought he could stand, John walked to the door of the house. To his left at the end of the street, the grey wall of the harbour was still there, still crumbling and unfit. Before him the rambling skyline of ramshackle houses and beyond them the tops of the masts of the fleet, still flying Buckingham’s flags. No-one had ordered them to half-mast, people were still running around, denying the news, disbelieving their own denials. It was a beautiful day, the wind still blew steadily offshore. It would have been a good day to set sail. But Buckingham and John would never set sail together again.

  John walked down the High Street like an old man, his boots unsteady on the cobbles, his limp pronounced. He felt that he was stepping into a new world, governed by new rules, and he could not honestly say that he was ready for it. He pulled his hat down over his eyes to shield him from the sun’s hard dazzle, and when a lad ran up and skidded to a halt before him, he shrank back, as if he too feared a blow, a fatal blow, to the heart.

  ‘Is it true?’ the boy yelled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That the duke is dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tradescant said, his voice low.

  ‘Praise God!’ the boy sang out, and there was no doubting the relief and joy in his voice. ‘It’s true!’ he yelled to another boy, a few yards away. ‘He’s dead! The Devil is dead!’

  Tradescant put out his hand for the comfort of the sun-warmed wall and followed it, fingers trailing along the crumbling sandstone, like a blind man, to his lodging house. His landlord flung open the door.

  ‘You’ll know – I’ve heard nothing but wild rumours – is he dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man beamed as if he had been given a priceless gift. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Now the king will see reason.’

  John felt his way to his room. ‘I am sick,’ he said. ‘I shall rest.’

  ‘You’ll not get much rest, I’m afraid!’ his landlord said cheerfully. From the town they could hear the crackle of fireworks and a roar of cheering which was growing louder. ‘The whole town is going mad to celebrate. I’m off!’

  He let himself out of his front door and ran down the street to where people were embracing, and dancing on street corners. Soldiers at the quayside were blasting their muskets into the skies and women who had come to kiss their husbands goodbye, expecting never to see them again, were weeping with relief. In a dozen churches the bells tolled as if for a mighty victory.

  In all the world it seemed that only Tradescant grieved, only Tradescant and his lord lay still and silent all the long sunny joyous day.

  It was not until midnight, lying in his bed, still gripping his hat in his hand, that John realised that he was free from his promise. He had been the duke’s man till death, and now death had come, and he was free.

  Free and short of money, with no promise of wages and no job. Buckingham’s widow was sick with grief and the king himself ordered her into hiding in case an assassin struck against her as well.

  It was as if the world had gone suddenly mad and no-one knew what might happen next. There was no Lord High Admiral to command the expedition, there was no Lord Treasurer to keep the treasures of the kingdom, there was no chief adviser to make policy, there was no Favourite to rule everything. There was no king either, for when they gave Charles the news that Buckingham was dead he finished his prayers and went in silence to his room and locked himself away for two days and nights in silence, in darkness, and fasting.

  Tradescant sometimes thought of that long royal vigil and wondered that he and the king had been together in a long night of mourning, both of them driven down into silence and grief at the loss of the most beautiful man that either of them had known; the most beautiful and the most daring and the most reckless, and the most dangerous. Tradescant knew that Buckingham would have led him to his death, and that he had only escaped through his lord’s assassination. He sometimes wondered if the king felt the same, and if, during the two long days and nights of royal mourning, Charles too knew the same secret, shameful relief.

  Tradescant could have left for his home at once, but he felt too frail even to start the journey. He had told Elizabeth that he was strong enough to voyage to France; but in this new life, this life without his master, he could not find the courage even to hire a wagon to go to Essex. He rested at his lodgings, and waited for his power to return. Every day he walked by the sea on the tumbled pebbles of Southsea beach and saw, on the horizon, the slow arc of Felton’s knife and the cry of warning in his own throat which never came.

  He regretted nothing. Somehow in his grief there was no room for regrets. Not for the way he had been loved and rejected. Nor for his oath of duty till death. Nor for the fact that a shout could have saved his lord from Felton’s knife and that shout had never come. It was never a love which would linger and warm an old man. Buckingham was never a man who would age and diminish and decline. Those who loved him would always know passion and uncertainty and despair. He was not a comfortable man to love. Tradescant could think of no other end for Buckingham but one that cut him down like a rare flower in the very fullness of his beauty and which meant that those who loved him could hold him forever in their minds, like petals preserved in sand and sugar: in his perfection.

  It was not until September that Tradescant could bring himself to load his wagon and start the long journey back to Essex, and by then his master’s body had been taken to London and buried in Westminster Abbey followed by only a hundred mourners. Buckingham’s family, his hangers-on, his courtiers, his placemen, all the hundreds and hundreds of men who had begged him for favours and counted on his support, all disappeared, melted away, denying him like a thousand false disciples at cock-crow. They sought new patrons, they tried to spot new rising stars, they tried to forget that they had promised loyalty and devotion to a man who was now everywhere despised.

  The funeral was brief and unceremonious, and, like so much of his life, was a show. They buried an empty coffin and said the sacred words over a hollow box. The duke had been interred in secret, in darkness, the night before his funeral. The king’s new advisers had warned him that there could be no guarantee that a mob would not rise up against the Favourite’s funeral. The people of London were not satisfied with his death, they might tear the coffin open, disembowel his perfect body, and hang it out at Traitors’ Gate, slash off his dead face and spike it up on Tower Bridge. The king had shuddered at the thought of it, hidden his face in his hands and left them to make what arrangements they would.

  There was no money to pay the duke’s servants. John went back to Captain Mason’s house to find the man in charge of the expedition accounts packing his bags in panic before he could be blamed for the empty coffers. Buckingham had been trading on credit and on the promise of a certain victory, for months. The ship’s master for the Triumph had no money either. In the end John had to sell some of Buckingham’s goods to raise the money to hire the wagon to take the remainder home again. But the diamonds he kept safe in a purse on a cord around his neck. He sold the milch cow to his landlord for the rent, and he exchanged the hens for a pair of muskets. He would have to be his own guard and his own driver, he could afford no other.

  He hired an open wagon with two old stubborn carthorses which had to be whipped at every crossroads to make them go ahead, and even then never went faster than an ambling stroll. John did not care how slowly they went. He sat on the driver’s bench, the reins slack in his hands, watching over the hedges the late summer landscape of browning wheat and barley and scrubby hayfields roll slowly past; and knew himself to be alive becau