Virgin Earth Read online

  Specimen after specimen he brought back to the little farmhouse and heeled in the growing plants into his nursery beds and laid the seeds in sand or rice to keep them dry. Plant after plant he brought in to add to the Lambeth collection. And as he added a new tree, the Virginian maple, or a new flower, the yellow willow herb, or a new herb, Virginian parsley, he realised that he would bring back to England an explosion of strangeness. If the country had been at peace and ready to attend to its gardens he would have been hailed as a worker of miracles, a greater plantsman and botanist even than his father.

  He believed that he thought of nothing but his plants on these long expeditions when he was gone from dawn to dusk and sometimes from dawn till dawn, when he slept in the woods despite the cold winds which warned of the change of season. But somewhere in his heart and in his mind he was saying farewell: to Suckahanna the girl, whose innocence he had prized so highly, to Suckahanna the young woman he had loved, and to Suckahanna the proud, beautiful woman who had taken him into her heart and into her bed and in the end sent him away.

  John said goodbye to her, and goodbye to the forest that she had loved and shared with him, and by the time the Makepeace sailed by the end of the pier and went upriver to dock at Jamestown, John had said his farewells and was ready to leave.

  He had half a dozen barrels of seeds and roots packed in sand. He had two barrels of saplings planted in shallow earth and watered by hand every day. He left them on the end of the pier ready for collection and paddled the canoe upriver to Jamestown to see if this latest ship had brought him a message and the money from Hester.

  He hardly expected it. It could be this ship or a later one. But it was part of John’s ritual of saying farewell to Suckahanna and making a new troth with Hester that he should be on the quayside to greet every ship, to show his trust that Hester would work as fast as she could to get the money to him. Their plan should not miscarry through his fault.

  There was the usual crowd, shouting greetings and offering goods and rooms for hire. There was the usual anarchy of arrival: goods thrown on the quayside, children squealing with excitement, friends greeting each other, deals being struck. John stood up on a capstan and shouted over the heads of the crowd: ‘Anyone with a message for John Tradescant?’

  No-one replied at first so he shouted again and again like a costermonger bawling out his wares. Then a white-haired man, looking frail and sick, came down the gangplank with one eye on his sea chest of belongings and lifted his head and said:

  ‘I!’

  ‘Praise God,’ John said and jumped down from his vantage point, and knew at the same time the plummet of disappointment that now there was nothing more to stay for, and he must leave Suckahanna’s land, just as he had left her.

  He pushed through the crowd with a smile of greeting on his face. ‘I am John Tradescant.’

  ‘I am the Reverend Walter de Carey. Your wife trusted me with a letter for you.’

  ‘Was she well?’

  The older man nodded. ‘She looked well. A woman of some courage, I should imagine.’

  John thought of Hester’s stubborn determination. ‘Above rubies,’ he said shortly. He opened the letter and saw at once that she had done as he asked. He had only to go to the Virginia Company offices and claim his twenty pounds, Hester had paid the money for him to a London goldsmith and the deed attested to it.

  ‘I thank you,’ he said. ‘Now, is there any service I can do for you? Do you have somewhere to stay? Can I help you with your bags?’

  ‘If you could help me carry this sea chest,’ the man said hesitantly. ‘I had thought there would be some porters or servants …’

  ‘This is Virginia,’ John warned him. ‘They’re all freeholders here.’

  Winter 1645, England

  In October Frances and Alexander Norman came upriver to Lambeth to stay for two nights. Hester urged them to stay longer but Alexander said he dared not leave his business for too long, the war must be coming to an end, every day he was sending out new consignments of gunpowder barrels and there were rumours that Basing House had fallen to Cromwell’s army at last.

  It was not that it was such a strategic point, not like Bristol – the second city of the kingdom – which Prince Rupert had lost only the month before. But it was a place which had captured people’s imagination for its stubborn adherence to the king. When Johnnie knew that Rupert was dismissed from the king’s service, Basing House became his second choice. It was to Basing House where he planned to run and enlist. Even Hester, with memories of a court which were not all of play-acting and folly but which also had moments of great beauty and glamour, longed to know that whatever else changed in the kingdom Basing House still held for King Charles.

  It was owned by the Marquess of Winchester, who had renamed it Loyalty House, and locked the gates when the country around him went Parliamentarian. That defiance seemed to Hester a more glorious way to spend the war than gardening at Lambeth and selling tulips to Parliamentarians. Inigo Jones, who had known Johnnie’s grandfather and worked with him for the Duke of Buckingham, was safe behind the strong defences of his own design at Basing House, the artist Wenceslaus Hollar, a friend of the Tradescants, and dozens of others known to Hester had taken refuge there. There were rumours of twenty Jesuit priests in hiding and a giant of seven feet tall. The marchioness herself and her children were in the siege and she had refused free passage out of the besieged house but decided to stay with her lord. She had engraved every window pane of the house with the troth ‘Aimez Loyauté’ so that as long as the house stood and the panes were unbroken it would carry a record that one place at least was always unwaveringly for Charles.

  ‘I am as bad as Johnnie, for I long to be there,’ Hester confessed to Alexander. They were seated either side of a small fire in the parlour. In the windowseat Frances and Johnnie were playing cards for matchsticks. ‘These are the people I knew from girlhood. It feels wrong to be here in comfort while they are facing the guns.’

  ‘They were freer to choose than you,’ Alexander said comfortingly. ‘You gave your word to John to protect the Ark. And anyway, you have played your part. When the royalist uprising came to your door you lent your horse and did the best you could.’

  Hester snorted. ‘You know how willing that was!’

  ‘Don’t fall in love with the cause just because it is losing,’ Alexander warned her. ‘He was a reckless and foolish king before he was doomed. John went away rather than serve him, and I’ve always admired your determination to survive this war and not to join it. Just because it is coming to an end is no reason to want to enlist. It is a foolish man who loves a lost cause only because it is lost.’

  Hester nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But Basing House is like a fairy story.’

  ‘There will be no romance ending,’ Alexander said grimly. ‘Cromwell has brought up the heavy guns. There can be no ending but defeat. No walls could stand against them forever.’

  Alexander was right, and the news came through the next day, before he and Frances left. Basing House had fallen and a hundred men and women had been killed. Even the engraved window panes were not allowed to survive. Cromwell ordered the house to be destroyed and nothing was left standing.

  It was only one battle in the many which now seemed to go inexorably the way of Parliament. Hester’s greatest buyer of tulips, John Lambert, was praised in all the reports for being a quick and daring cavalry commander, the Parliament horse were unstoppable. The army under Cromwell had learned their business at last and combined soldierly discipline with an absolute dedication to their cause. They believed they were freeing the country of tyranny and bringing in a new rule of law and justice. They fought as men will fight when their hearts are in the fighting, and there were few underpaid, half-hearted, badly led royal armies that could stand against them.

  The king retreated to the hard-drinking, rich-living city of Oxford and the comfort of court life and amused himself as well as he could. His only recognition